Dirt

I want you to talk to me about death.
Let me run my fingers
through the cobwebs on your clavicles,
as you recite the drawn-out histories of all
the tiny little tragedies
you have had to endure, alone, in secret,
and all the larger ones,
catastrophic enough to merit
the division of sorrows.

But tell me more about the quiet ones,
the ones nobody ever asks about,
like pieces of shattered glass tangled
in the soft fabric of your hair,
always mistaken for diamonds.
I want to know about the things
that make appearances in your dreams,
I want to know what you think this all means.

Undress your logic
in the middle of this night sea,
lay it on a dry rock shaped
like a clenched fist,
and lose yourself in the black water,
your knees buckling in an embrace
of creatures of the deep.

I know you’re scared. I know that you worry
about life after death. But so did you
over that room left unlocked, the one
you later found filled from floor to ceiling
with fresh flowers.

This means there is kindness in strangers.
This means that sometimes the rain falls
at exactly the right moment.

I may not have the answers
but words make me bold
and I daresay heaven will want us,
if only for our laughter,
yours like a trumpet and mine
like a tambourine,
like nets of sugar and gold,
cast over a stony world.

So tell me about the dirt
beneath your nails.
Because even if I don’t see it,
I know it’s there.

Suspense

It’s Friday night and
I know you’re out there, somewhere,
just like I am in here, somehow,
alone in a diner facing the street.

Do you think of me sometimes?
Or are you still too busy
kissing a body
only good enough to keep you warm?

People say the best couples
are those headed in the same direction

but I never liked the word couple,
which means two, which means nothing

cause you and I don’t lead parallel lives,
entirely compatible but destined
to never meet

nor are we perpendicular
forming a cross
touching once
before pursuing the opposite ends of all space.

Baby you and I are not lines on a plane,
but circles like planets made of stars
circles that neither begin nor end
circles that pull together like magnets
groping blindly in the large darkness
of the world.

Do you think of me sometimes?
Do you wonder about the length of my fingers?
The sound of my laugh?

Because I can hear yours from across this avenue
wider than a million little streets
filled with the voices of an entire population
where yours stands out like a bell
like the face of a missing child in a Sunday crowd.

You and I will never be a couple
only good enough to keep you warm

You and I will be lovers
with bodies like wood,
our friction, a fire,
the only light in this pitch black forest
keeping us apart,
in this forest we will burn down.

I know you’re out there somewhere,
because I can only write this poem
so many times

before I need a face
to build from the voice

lips to construct
around the laugh

a body to keep me warm.

There is a man out on the street,
watching his favorite movie through the glass,
and I only want to touch
to hold your hand.

There are pools of light
in the puddles on the sidewalk
and maybe where you are,
there is rain.

This is the part in the movie
where the blips on the screen are closing in
hearts racing, action building

and if you could see fate from a satellite
you would see us running, our bodies hurtling forward,
toward the same light.

On Universalities

Tell me where it all starts,
this thing called being human.

With chemistry
In the fusion of gametes
At the development of fingernails
After your first kiss by your parents’ front door
When you lose your virginity
All the nights spent waiting that follow

What is the color
of the sound of our voices
drowning each other out?

And if you could paint the landscape
of collective emotion,
would it be a golden plain,
a mountain range,
or a cold, rocky beach?

Put your fingers here
and show me,
where is the pain?
where is the pressure?
Does your language have enough words
for all the possible permutations of pleasure?

am I
can I be a part of
when I have nothing to offer

except this funny predisposition
to have a heart broken
over and over

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.

You say, don’t take this the wrong way,
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 flecks of 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?