LOVE AND LOSS

ART

People say art is dead, but

as I sit here,

in a thick smoke of humanity

Police cars siren call

Mermaids swim in a public pool

Count the stars ticking down like a clock

30, 29, 28, 27

26 seconds left

It’s 3 am and we stand in the kitchen

I don’t know if it was those god-awful fluorescent lights or the way you spoke to me but this scene

burns in my mind sometimes

22 seconds left – I watch to make sure it doesn’t make a sound

Microwave lasagna and your fuzzy pajamas

Your hair melted into the ground

Like silver stars on the silver screen

I see the earth – dirt, worms, oceans and all

Beneath the tiles of my 4th floor apartment

Stay here with me in this mess between us

Smiling at the sunset, but

We’re already there

I try to trust the sky but I realize I’m still shaking

Fall down and fall asleep

Wake up in the sand

It’s a vicious cycle.

And yet,

I turn away from the vision,

Feeling how it beckons.

The sand sings me a lullaby.

DRINKING ALONE

It’s past midnight

Surely almost time to go to bed

But I sip on my old fashioned

Slowly, with purpose

Like I know what I’m planning here.

Really, I’m falling asleep.

My mind a buzzing fly but

My eyelids, heavy, reflect visions

Your god-awful voice that one night in my room

I walked away years ago

Now containing only vague traces of you

Nobody has to know

The persistence of memory

Everything melting away into

Dewdrops on a piece of paper

After the museum, we wrote in our notebooks

Staring at the infinite for hours

There’s some boxes of yours locked in my closet

I don’t know why

I opened one tonight

Poured myself a drink and took a gander

I couldn’t read a goddamn thing you wrote

Funny how this is now my new last memory of you

Maybe I’ll see you from my window one day.

35 MILLIMETERS

I decided to dress up today. Put on my finest Italian suit (and sunglasses). I must’ve looked so fly because I haven’t felt that many eyes on me since purgatory – that day we ran for hours after I blew off jury duty. We ended up in that white room (where the eyes come in). We paid no mind to anything but each other, those mere 35 milliliters of air between us. Our names shouted from above (slightly mispronounced), and we descended into a fountain. The man with the fake British accent he thought we wouldn’t notice (we did, and laughed about it for ages) screamed his little heart at us – so we ran, and gladly.

This was the time I went blond (to see if I’d have more fun – the answer yes resounds). I don’t know if you’d remember this. You forget, and so I do too.

A kiss goodbye. I went into a store and dropped a rack on this goddamn suit.

Sister, the things you hide don’t mean a thing. It’s what below that holds us. Swallowed up by work, words, and novelty everywhere you look. I’ve learned to rest on the go. All I’m swallowed by is this suit – excited by its first outing, sweating in the heat. If you look, those same 35 millimeters remain.

LANGUAGE INTERROGATION

PRAYER IN THE COLD

I press my hands together

to feel another hand against my hand,

The warmth of skin on skin

The chills chanted by the wind

Pervading all my senses

There are, of course, times when the wind gives you blessings

Light, soft, like wings of a butterfly.

Butterfly kisses under the sun, on my blanket. The sandwiches you made. The grass clear and soft.

There are times I wonder if to kiss another body means to be kissed by the body of the world

As if, with the gesture, you invite the gesture:

the love of every flower, fish, bird that flies through our senseless senses.

In this chill:

My bleak, restless mind finds solace in my hands—

The symbols sifting through my fingers as I blow

I feel the coldness of a sharp, shoulder of snow

Uninvited

To process: to be in a boat, on a lake, moving slow

Understanding the way things come and go

Letting your body learn to know

The ebb and flow that swells below

oh-so light

oh-so bright

Chaos melts clear out of our sight

Or conquers the night, without a fight

– for chaos is deemed so only by the struggle against it –

This wild disorder is a primordial force

I have no voice. My throat is hoarse.

I have no will to fight the force. So it holds me in its coarse, warm arms.

We dance a samba, in the snow. I feel myself filled straight from the source.

Suddenly, the snow becomes a fire. It lights my lungs with thick, molten lava.

I expire the fire, and it floats up

A star in the sky

A sight to behold, there for all to watch, glowing in awe.

The fireflies give me kisses. Blessings received.

Thanks be, thanks be.

SO

I’m Afraid to be seen

So?

Afraid is a word like any other

It works like a parasite, holding onto that which gives it power

False power, disappearing soon as you

Look at it

a lake fading

Fading into the dirt quickly

Fake, long hair running slickly through your fingers

Then gone

They say to be the wave and the ocean underneath

Afraid to be the secrets that hide in my teeth

It’s hard to imagine a dagger with no sheath

Find solace in the waves, for they will bequeath

More knowledge than paper,

Than principles, rules

More truth than worries, doubts told by fools

A mirror reflecting unto you as you are

A picture from a foreign, heavenly star

Time is a cyclone

Balancing ferociously

With a sharp grasp,

Grabbing precociously

But imagine, for one minute, you can be held. Trust that you can be held.

And carried back to the stars.

ONCE

Walking along, I roll up my sleeves

And let the rest fall away.

I am a ship captain, flying blind

And “time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore”

(said my first-mate, once).

These are my wings, fluttering like the golden specks of god that billow and fall — a symphony — catching

bits of heaven on the way down.

My converse too beat up to be anything but happy to still be here

A UPS driver smiles and winks at me as he drives by

A dog chasing after, stuck in the now, with nowhere else to fly

One day, this will all be contained inside a single tear, shed at a song played on the radio (if we’ve fixed the world enough to keep such things around. Sadly, when I look around, I’m not so sure anymore).

But maybe you’ll sit on the top of your car, let the radio blare, the tear falling down to the same ground I once sailed on.

Let the sky swallow you whole like the sea I walk upon.