Category: Uncategorized

Of course,
I sometimes wonder
whether you’re walking
these same streets,
I heard you moved to London,
but you’re neither here,
nor there,
because this city is vast,
and we were small.

But on a Thursday,
after work,
an evening in October,
I saw you,
in Shoreditch by a bus stop,
I was a little drunk,
you didn’t see me,
and that’s okay,
I’m glad you didn’t.

You walked past,
same walk and all,
and I knew just from the back of you,
that it was you,
of course.

How do you forgive someone who is dead?
TW:Suicide

I thought I had. That I had taken the time and walked in your shoes.
And opened my hand to the idea that you were tired.
Tired of fighting.
Tired of all the judgment- it had to be hard to be judged and found wanting for 55 years.
Mene, mene, tekel, parsin.

I’m so sorry you had to live with that scarlet letter.
But I didn’t give it to you. All I saw was strength and grit.
I needed you and you chose a handful of pills. I needed you and it wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t enough to make you stay.
We could have come up with another way.
Mene, mene, tekel, parsin.

That shame that dogged you didn’t die with you. It’s now up to me and mine to send it
back to the pit it crawled out of.
A letter of a different color.
On the other side of time – you and I are going to have some words.
I miss you to my core
and

I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t spit in your face if I was able to see you again.
Mene, mene, tekel, parsin.

“Yes”, my girlfriend replies.

I know it. We want representation, which is often an expression of our own becoming. And your story, and my story needs to be told, but I wish for all of us we didn’t have a story like this to tell. That this hadn’t happened to us. I was bullied for being gay before I knew what gay mean’t. It used to mean happy, they love to say that. Why can’t it be both? Why do I have to be gay and sad? Gay and suppressed. Gay and that’s not her girlfriend, that’s her friend. Gay and she’s too pretty to be gay. Gay and are you sure it’s not a phase? Gay and which one of you is the man? Gay and you just haven’t found the right guy yet. Gay and isn’t everyone nowadays? Why can’t I be gay and nothing, or if anything- be gay and myself? I am not a soup can, yet you continue to label me and try to define my contents. Humans are not meant to be sorted, and simplified. I am more than who I love, but you are not able to see past that. You’ll only love thy neighbor, until we move in next door.

I am an immigrant, nomadic desperate for home,
to hammer myself into existence
out of pain in depths of yearning—
for what it’s too immense to bookend in language,
perhaps only indicted by silence inserting itself
into the form,
the only self-portrait I still trust.

I am a book without pages,
textured with continents of feeling,
narratives adrift,
unlatched from each other,
passersby that do not
even graze gazes.

I a solitude of friction between
antagonist, protagonist.
I am a nest rigged,
unsettled high in the
chokehold of branches.

I am three:
tiny, frosted fingers caked with unbaked dough,
marble blue eyes glinting in flashes of exposures.
My mother’s ear just beyond the camera,
my jean jumper, chilled kitchen tiles
redeeming me back into a body,
inside the thought that I am one at all.

All I am: an isthmus of thick froth, melting chocolate chips
nurturing the sensorium of decadence against tongue,
summer falling like a painting through the back door,
foregrounding my living lore,
the high volume of aliveness.

I am nine in ballet shoes and leotard
inner legs skirting a horse’s mythic rib cage
cantering through campgrounds after dance,
hair flossing the periphery of eyelids,
helmet holstering my head,
codifying my mixed media of kinesthetics,
stretching the kite of romantic light filling
the vista enshrining the fence fencing
wild horses, geese in shocks of gold,
a literature of self-reliance in enacted experience,
hands holding fast to the mane of affirmative hair
roiling in the midday heat.

I am 20 negating my dear affection for the word
to negotiate the sciences,
left hand wedded to pencil,
numbers screeching through lead onto page after page,
consumed by an excess of equations—
how to balance them,
make all of the atoms content,
as though each molecule had a mouth calling its rage up
from the page—
my upper lip bitten into by lower teeth.
I am my own muzzle,
as though the numbers trapped me there in ember, the pencil erasing me,
the accumulation of the solvable aggregating at the base of the throat,
ghosting me out of being a being
in need of regular snack, bathroom breaks.

I am an experiment
breaking all the rules of
experiments,
the central tenant:
reproducibility.

I take issue with being now, at almost 30, at an impasse
with being those girls,
this one derived from the
ambush of a stroke stoking feeling out of my right interior,
an objectionable experiment running out of control,
out of senses to lose,
out of reproducing any semblance of myself
I know as myself,
out of stock of emotion
dragging me through, into.

I am not even a fiction projected onto a history,
not even a hovering presence.

I am so far away from my nested selves that
I’m outside them now,
an absence vanishing into silences that
generate all of the amplification.

Truth, trust: I need to anchor my weary body,
because I’ve lost my reference, my voice, my rhetoric,
so I’m unzipping structures—
theorems, sonnets, narrative, farewell.

I let myself wane because all I trust now:
these gaps to be my guide, and when they can no longer guide me,
I will step into them so they can swallow me,
so I don’t need to explain the inexplicable,
to remember what I cannot forget.

my bones creak
like newly discovered
basement ruins when
i mount you. we laugh.
you look at me and call
me old. i look at you and think
you’re going to be handsome
as an old man.
after, we fall asleep on
our mess and the room is
silent. i can hear your
ribcage expand and shrink
and my hair twirling
around your fingertips.
you rub my hip creases
and hum in unison
with your touch until
you slowly stop. your
last act of the day
acknowledges me. you’re
laying on your side
of my bed. my head is
resting on your chest
and i never learned
morse code but im sure
the vibrations from
your snores spell out
home.

To climate change deniers

The bees are rarely buzzing, being few,
and though I’m seeing birds, they seldom sing.
Mayflies fed rainbows far from me this spring,
and the only thing that’s bugging me is you.
Butterflies flew elsewhere and I’m blue.
Jewels of the sky, the Ruby Throats aren’t humming,
night’s moths avoid the lights above my swing:
the only thing that’s bugging me is you.

You tell me to control it but you’re the cause,
Yet when you do a good thing you expect applause.
My life is in shambles because my progress you stalled,
When I point out the truth you get appalled.

Maybe if I come out with this the family will fall,
I have dirt on all of you, don’t make me want to make a call.
You made me hit a wall,
Now I’m stuck with withdrawals.

So many excuses of why you can’t pull up,
Yet when I call you out on it you just give up.
Your personality is ok but your brain sucks,
You still owe me for the bowling alley that’s 20 bucks.

If excuses were running you’d get really far,
You screw me over, I’ll do it to you twice as hard.
I trusted you so much the pain just hits like a car,
Next week you’ll probably cheat on your girlfriend at a bar.

If inconsistency was your hops you could fly,
When you were with me how many times were you high?
My car broke down 5 times,
Man that sounds like a lie.

If you were trying to impress you really lowered the bar,
Mess with my livelihood for a year dude I take that to heart.

You made me believe,
Left me in the heat.
I am incomplete,
You just make me weep.

Want government so bad you threw me under the bus,
So you tell me now there’s no rush.
Now I have lost my touch,
Now my mentality is cut.

June 6, 2024

Carson and Katherine
Laid to rest
June 11, 2024
Masses said in churches miles
Apart
Mourners minding
Tears with
Handmaid handkerchiefs
Receiving lines
Embraces
Resounding “I’m so sorry for your loss”s
There is nothing else to say.

Grief is heart-language
Eluding mouth-formed words

Carson’s white casket
Sweet pursed butterfly lips
Bald head just barely covered
In blonde peach fuzz.
A mother’s sobs
Personify a father’s heartbreak
As the coffin lid gently closes.
The final glimpse of a son —
Imprinted innocence.

Katherine’s maple casket
Solid, weighted
Measuring the depth
Of mother’s love.
A son’s sobs,
Echoes of his child-self
Yearning again for mother-love
A final kiss,
A hand lies on her coffin lid

And the time has passed
The brevity of life
3 months.
3 vicinnium.
Does the level of grief
Define the value of a life?

Does time exponentially multiply it?
Or does our value simply lie in our
Momentary
Miniscule
Existence

The winds of change
are private property.
On a large scale
Money weighs the most.
People want to impress
their will on paper to be
printed into the air
everyone breathes.
But they don’t know how.
If you want a rally or
to strike the public
don’t aim for it’s heart,
consumption is how it cares,
aim for its stomach.
That’s how. And anyone can
create lasting change,
outrage gets results.

Isn’t he embarrassed by his newest bride?
His last at the Green Tower, waiting to die
A confidant, a cousin, beheaded for death
Her body laid to rest alongside baby’s breath
Take that as a sign, young Jane Seymour
Take comfort in anything shiny you adore
Your days will be lonely and your nights his
Until the dawn a baby grows and metabolizes
Finally giving this vile man what he wants
Decades of desire, monarchy and its taunts
Someone indebted forever to him, a citizen
Raised on gold, structure, and discipline
You’ve become a vessel for the perfect son
A young heir with two marriages undone
The perfect successor of a man so crass
Stuck in a round room of venetian glass
Lapis lazuli, gold, silk threads, and linen
Dressed in all purple, a Tudor era villain