The Quiet Friendship No One Knows We Have

Don’t take this the wrong way, you say,
as your warm fingers melt
the cold outline of my skin

as the wind blows our laughter
across the same urban sprawl.

Don’t take this the wrong way, you say,
your pregnant silences
are just cracks we fall into

when you let yourself go.

But you are a glorious orange sunset
from the quiet window of the kitchen
in the neighborhood I grew up in

and I am only a smile
caught thinking about itself.

Don’t take this the wrong way,
but I am taking this
the only way
I know how.

Breathing Lessons

When you’re young,
and I mean two seconds old,
no one tells you what to do.
Your gut feel is golden
and your little lungs expand
like cherub’s wings taking flight
against the gustlessness
of city streets,
against the frugality of love,
your shrill yell, your fighting limbs
complex infant machinery
wrapped in the fragility
of a snowflake.

But give or take a few years
and life will beat you
into submission.
Your prayers, your schooling,
your first real heartbreak,
such pretty little frightened things.

You will learn to live
with the stuffiness of the air,
a tightness in your chest,
a hold on your tongue.

“There,” they will say,
“is a good girl. There is a girl
adapted to the world
outside the womb.”

Once you were wild
and intuitive
and covered in blood
but now you know too well
the staleness of the world
and so you hold your storm
inside of you, like rations in a war,
too clever to squander
the endangered
in a laugh.

But somewhere there are still wings,
and the lightest gold,
and you know
you’ll never learn how to breathe
until you fall in love with the drown.

Sequences

You told me in a dream
everything I wanted to hear.

The world was dog-eared, and the soil,
soft beneath blankets strewn across someone else’s lawn.

We weren’t vagrants or trespassers, but invisible guests
overstaying perhaps slightly on the fringes of an estate,
our drunken hostess fast asleep in her canopy bed.

“Your voice is a moonbeam,”
you said late at night over the phone,
and we sat silent for years,
which, in dreams, feels less like time
and more like the bottom of an ocean
or a cathedral echo,
heavy with the absence of sound.

I guess what I’m trying to say is
your hands are strange to me. Your mind,
the way your words form steam engines
instead of trains.

“I wish you were here,” you shouted
from the other side of the lake,
and you looked at me the way people do
when they realize they are in love
with every little thing they have.

But dreams don’t have to make sense
and before I know it, we’re in a little Fiat Uno,
driving across the European continent.
You take a bite from an unpaid-for apple,
and I worry that you’ll leave it half-eaten
on the grocery shelf.
But maybe this time, you don’t,
because in the next scene
you are telling me
I have soft hands.

Magnetic Poetry

Tonight I decided I must write a poem
about love.
There are a few words scrawled
on the roofs of ex-lovers’ mouths,
a few lines etched into the palms
of all the starving hands I’ve ever held.

I know I have something about
dancing naked in the rain,
something about a soldier
crippled in the war;
and I could use these, together,
if only I could remember
the words in their right order.

Did sadness always come only at the end?
How many years before I was loved again?
I’m trying to plot the decline of laughter,
but does sequence even matter
in the selective memory of disaster?

A soldier in the rain,
dancing naked in the war.
A soldier dancing,
the war naked in the rain.

I wanted a poem, but all I have
are words.

Soldier, War. Rain, dancing.

First Day of School

On my first day at work
I ate the sandwich my mother made me
six years ago.

The fluorescent lights made me lonely-
bright whites washing out,
with my teeth falling out

and my youth
burning a pit
in the linoleum floor.

(There should be a word
for wishing you were somewhere else.
We do it all the time.)

In the afternoon, my boss reminded me
of my mother, except I couldn’t
put my head on her lap

and by 5:00 I was hungry again,
wishing I had left half
of the sandwich.

There should be a word for that, too.

Why I Am Going to End Up Alone

I am going to end up alone because I pee in the shower. And no, I won’t stop doing it even if you tell me to. I might lie straight to your face and say I will, but trust that I most probably will not. I am going to end up alone because I am a liar. No, I would never, ever cheat on you, or cultivate a serious gambling addiction under the guise of a late night Book Club, but I might slightly embellish my funny little story about how I talked my way out of a parking ticket earlier that day, for the sole purpose of making you laugh. Also, I will tell our children ridiculous things, like how the roots of all trees hold hands underground, or that the waves in the ocean are ghosts, trying to find their way back home. Sometimes, I may do this just for the hell of it.

I am going to end up alone because I like to take my time. I somehow always end up on the longest possible route to someplace, and to make matters worse, I don’t really mind. I love looking out windows, and into them, and getting lost in foreign cities. I am going to end up alone because I fall in love with the strangest, and most unglamorous, of places. Nothing is more peaceful to me than a giant supermarket at closing time, empty aisles that go on for miles on a rainy Tuesday night, and a sleepy man’s voice on the sound system, relieved to finally be going home.

I am going to end up alone because I am a Procrastinator. I have the attention span of a villainous guard dog distracted by a piece of raw meat in a Disney adventure movie, and am therefore not going to be the greatest adult when time comes knocking on my door. I am going to end up alone because I talk too much. Nobody wants to be around a story-repeater, which I have been called, or someone with an opinion about everything. Do you really want me to pick out The Boot That Most Represents You from the eclectic selection at a vintage shoe store, and then proceed to explain how I think the tassels symbolize the more outgoing aspects of your personality? I didn’t think so. I am going to end up alone because I am tone-deaf, and cannot sing to save my life. We will have no cinematic moments on cruise ships along the Mediterranean coast, holding our arms out before the expanse of summer evening ocean, bursting gloriously into song. Not many people can live with that loss.

I am going to end up alone because I have thunder thighs, and the fashions of the modern day do not suit me. It is anatomically impossible for me to wear Daisy Dukes and look good at the same time. I am going to end up alone because I cannot drink tea, nor do I like it. And we all know that all love stories in this day and age unfold over cups and cups of tea, or in trendy Milk Tea Places, over conversations about organic farming or Emma Stone, whichever end of the spectrum you find yourself on. I am going to end up alone because I do not like jewelry. Or the way it looks on myself, or other people. I will never learn how to be a proper adult, or Woman, and am therefore incapable of growing old with you gracefully, the way they do on Tatler or Lifestyle Asia.

I am going to end up alone because I am a sack of nervous energy, an overthinking mess. I second guess myself too much, and really, unless you are a pedophile (in which case I will not want you), who wants to turn to their lover at night, hold them, and realize that they have committed the rest of their life to a child? I am going to end up alone because I am a creep. I wear my heart on my sleeve no matter how many times people have told me to put it away, or in a bra, or somewhere more appropriate, like the bottom of my sock drawer. I smile to myself often, and write love poems about people I remotely like-like. I am going to end up alone because I have actually told people that I write poems about them. It seemed like a good thing to me, but apparently, we are not supposed to think about strangers too hard, or for very long.

I am going to end up alone because I cannot cook. In my defense, I make a killer sandwich, and am a very good cleaner. Your children could have been sparkly white and thoroughly disinfected. I am going to end up alone because sometimes, I like to do nothing. I like to just lie awake on the couch on Sunday afternoons, not reading Kurt Vonnegut or watching a culturally significant film. I like to just lie there, on my back, with my eyes open like a dead goldfish, thinking, thinking about thinking, thinking that if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

I am going to end up alone because on most days, I feel too eager to be here. And we all know that the ones who get lucky are those who live life on posh, three-minute cigarette breaks, and throw away their pizza crusts. I am going to end up alone because I am a romantic, and learn my life lessons from melodramatic TV shows with bad scripts and good soundtracks. I am going to end up alone because I am riddled with issues, and secrets, and I will want you to have your own, so we can sit together on the edge of a great big lake and skip stones in silence. And when words are uttered, they will mean, and come from a core greater than the sum of all universes.

To the One Who Writes About the Pretty Girl

Do you write better
when you are fixated upon longing,
or loss?
Is it easier for you to imagine,
or remember?
Which one aches like an open sea,
and which
like an empty home at Christmas time?

Will you talk again at length
of the worlds, more lonely yet
more beautiful,
that you swim away to when you close your eyes?
Does she look the same as she did
the night you yelled at each other
at the back of that cab–
the one that smelled like canned lemon,
like all relationships do
as they near their end?
Or does she transform in every dream,
her hair taking a life of its own
and surrounding you like a forest
of soft brown vines?

Is it more difficult to say this word, pregnant,
bursting with all the hope in the world
that you have to your name,
or this word, retired
sounding a little bit like pain?

I guess all I really want to know is,
do you love from a distance, or do you
risk breaking
another one of your hearts?

Red Orange

I do not know the word for the way
I feel about you,
but you are all I can think about
in a sleepy half-empty cabin
30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean,
in the quiet jurisdiction
of the most beautiful
sunset in the world.

Falling in Love with a Scientist

The day I fell in love with a scientist, the clouds were thin veils of smoke strewn across the sky, which was blue and clear and smelled like detergent. “Cirrus,” she said, while grabbing my hips and leaning close. “This is how you use a microscope.” And when we held hands, I was self-conscious, because maybe she could read my mind, my body? She knew what my pheromones were thinking, and the route my fingers would travel down her spine. The day I kissed a scientist, I lost myself in the universe of her mouth, in all the things she did not yet know, in all the things she never would. I told her she knew nothing about me, but I pulled her close anyway, all dry and warm against the pouring rain of the outside afternoon. In bed, it was always morning, bodies tangled up in knots, like anatomical vines growing into each other; all careful words and tiptoeing around terminology, like a cat and mouse chase between logic and beauty. Our minds ran in different directions, but we both wanted to save the world. And so we laughed some nights, hard and loud, setting fire to all the restaurants we could afford, voices ringing up and down the streets of the city we put up with, the city we learned to love like each other. Like the people we knew we had to become. She had a beautiful smile, like the light of God after rolling open the heavy stones of a cave, and touching her was always, always, like unwrapping a present; did you know that scientists had bar codes in between their thighs? Had hands that shook secretly whenever your lips were so close? Were so good at goodbyes, for the grander scheme of things? But we both wanted to save the world, and good people’s hearts break the hardest.

The day my scientist and I left each other, the world was poetic. The sky was black and white, and I found out that there had always been a great shining lake behind one of the city’s ugliest shopping malls. I thought about how she maybe would have wanted to go, or how maybe she wouldn’t, about how I didn’t know. About how maybe she isn’t the type of girl I’m supposed to write poems for. I still love her.

The Revolution

They have changed our standards of beauty
to include all the sharp and shiny things
that have populated our world.
Skyscrapers, jet planes, flying cars,
forests of telephone lines and electric posts.
They have 3D hologram ads
directed at the insecurities of robots.

To live longer, we have had batteries
implanted beneath our hearts,
and have mapped
the remote wildflowered hillsides
of our minds,
which now remember long, automated
pin codes and pass words,
and can instantly forget everything
about the ex-lovers
who have broken our hearts.

We can stand longer
working massive assembly lines,
and have quietly mastered the skill
of doing nothing over and over
again.

Indulgent speaking was banned
for not being a hard science,
and a machine was invented
to take all the warmth from our bodies
to melt the city’s frozen streets.

But there are dreams of heat
and pictures of trees
tacked up inside school lockers
and taped to the backs
of secret notebooks,
and on Sundays,
when the sun is allowed to shine,
there are rivers of gold
in my brown hair. (Run,
your fingers through them.)

It is midday, and we have just taken
our lunch capsules.
The lines are silent
and we have learned to breathe
without taking in air.

(We kiss with our eyes
open.)

The revolution begins
because of a window left open
at the far end of the factory,
and a young boy’s stash
of floral photographs beneath his bed.

We break everything beautiful
into smaller pieces
the way the poor broke their bread
when they still lived around here.

(I have crushed your hands
into the sands
of time.)

Nobody knows we have dynamites
beneath our feet,
that today is the birthday
of the end,
of the world.

You turn to me, and break
our loneliness
into tinier things.
Boy with the dark eyes
and a secret love for trees
(we make love
with our clothes on
the floor)
touch me, and think
as far back as you can.
Do you remember the smell
of wet leaves?