Being Hungry And Self-Righteous

All night I drove forty-five on the highway.

It was the saddest carnival I ever seen,

with empty bottles rolling around the back

and smelly wrappers lying everywhere.

My scarf sat on the passenger seat,

still lying horizontally as if it were a lazy Sunday.

Lying as if it were just yesterday.

All day I walked oblivious to the snowfall,

worried instead about the head-on collision

between My Dream and My Dream,

both unholy and holey and now numb.

And I worried about my Great Plan to write

five sweet and wholly unromantic sonnets

for every day that you will be away,

while my ill parents lie in bed filing the taxes.

We will not be getting the rest we need to.

I am drinking more caffeine so as to hold my voice hostage.

Which is incredibly self-righteous of me.

But, on a Bad News day there is always a first.

Like a Chipotle burrito, which I had for the first,

which had steak and guac and was very spicy.

I wanted nothing but to eat the whole thing,

every kernel of corn,

every scrap of meat,

until my tongue was sweltering,

ready for a great big thank-you kiss.

Do You As I

Do you as I cherish the gentle goodbye
Between two friends in hushed winter’s air?
Do you then feel content on letting flutter by
The moments that were here and now are there?
If I could only take your hand for a second
Without feeling venomous and uncouth,
Then I would act on visions previously reckoned,
And breathlessly play in the spring of my youth.
Do I as you know what it means to value
Someone sincere over clothes white as snow?
Will I as you find a better way through
The binding loneliness that will someday go?
Do you as myself spindle the most convenient lie,
Or have you as I learned to let something special die.

Don't End The Celebrated Life

Tonight I chew gum to spare my tongue
and breathe the song that feels so wrong,
like a newyear’s kiss, wet and bereft.
There are eight empty cans to my right,
one for every month I lost my sight,
one for every month we have left.
I feel like sleeping in my best suit
and glittering the stage with soot,
dragging myself through busfloor mud
and kicking the 22 yearold stud
for giving up the utmost top
shape of his life to piercings,
coercings and the brunette
that slowly drinks his blood.
And I want to do a pirouette.
And I want to smoke a cigarette.
And I want eight private jets
to take eight private parts of me
to Boston, Equinox, Tangier,
where the pages stretch for miles
and the ink all disappears.
Someplace where there is time
to grieve.
Someplace that we do not have
to leave.
Not even for the future,
which is nothing but a word
that corrals the herd
of the conscious hopeful,
the well-deserving frantic,
the sighing romantic.

You Are My Only

Hips are happy tonight

along with the flowing fingers that feel flesh in a frozen flashback

and I just missed a moment.

Shoulder rolling to shoulder, and count

two three four fuck it

five six sucks and still the music plays great

and loud in the waiting room of my nervousness.

Brief silence and I just missed a moment and I

just stepped on beautiful toes and you are my only

but someone else can always do the dancing...

Scratched floors shine with confidence like a Chilean smile,

and I must have left mine in St. Paul, New Brighton,

on the shadowy overpasses of 35W,

locked in a cologne bag of ineptitude, which I left the house with

so long ago; it seems like so much more than a moment ago.

Finger licking and rapid kicking wearing fish-scale

flowing outfits, unmatched in the wide open

competition of beautification. I haven't spent a single

penny and my pockets are dimeless, I threw them all

at the epileptic parking meter, in the timeless void of

vocal lesson and arm-burrowed weeping and snow-drift

recollections at the Cosmopolitan.

I am unspeakable, which I dare not speak about, neither

in my midday sanity nor full moon toothache, regretful

of the long nights spent wishing it were the past and

future at the same time,

because now it has impregnated my gut with

sullen suspicions and fragranced rejections, which I taste

with chocolate-cupcake intensity.

It is a happy birthday tonight. You are my only

and what this means petrifies all but my swollen

flickering eyes and thrusting unfathomable unconfidence

in the general direction of Winter.

Can't you see the tango twirls tessellating as if it

were my own kaleidoscope nightmare!

And the hand slips, to tucked stomachs, invisible bra straps

and frozen shoulders, shoulders.

And the clock strikes Not Yet so the ball continues to

sputter down the unforeseeable hill of pathetic, which I

am the King Of! King Of Chapped Lips! King of the Failed

New Year's Kiss and King Of Forever Lean and Miss!

Semi-hydrated particles of liberal sweat and teenage tears of

breathless joy crash against the wall of Time, seeping through

all its weary cracks slow and unbearable, slow and no I don't

know what's wrong so quit asking me and quit dancing with your

helpful strangers and quit leaning towards the ever-present possibility

of Moving On, towards a new river-soaked chapter of loving.

So much time passes when the music moves quickly through

glittering salsa halls and explosive shopping malls though every

single store was closed and I just needed to get the hell out of there

get the hell out of here and debate for a very endless birthday

the sincerity of so many glowing moments, until one two three

friends is what we are and I'm sorry for having missed four.

Can you believe in the exhaustion affliction that so desperately

rears its flustered face in the coldest night of the year?

Believe or don't it is becoming my perfectly acceptable reality,

crossing the inhuman void between My Self and My Other, who

so desperately wants to look across the mirrored room and

flash a frozen grin -- dresses fluttering and prisms reflecting

back the intolerable whiteness of strange and stranger smiles.

Pain and swirling prisms and pain of the past dozen lunar

cycles eclipsed by the holy madness of the full moon, marking

the first day of her period and a series of periods I have

maniacally induced into writing, here on the back of Miss

Hurd, which tonight is bare and flawless and ironic.

Erstwhile the after-party oracles consult each other, smoking

stories between each other in valiant attempts to ignore the

trembling pen with glasses and a chipped face. Spare me of

further restlessness and press softly on my temples to relieve

the swelling. Rid the absolute squid of my incompetence for

Eternity, which tonight means tonight, because what else could

matter but the dancing fairies I see in the mirror? Happy

Birthday. And happy birthday to my dad on the day of

my gentle bludgeoning, and happy birthday to the New Year

for being so productively boring and for inciting hollow

excitement into the steam-boat of January. I can't thank

you enough for your consideration of my un-being. That is

what would be best, after all? To be without the muttering

pen and uncertain glances of certainty. I'm sorry for having

ruined nothing. Perhaps if I mattered more (or less) I would resign

to being all (or none) that you think of, and who can think

anyway when lying on salsa/hospital couches, with flutes and

maracas and romantic guitars boring holes into my open

secrets, and I can't even begin to imagine what that looks

like, but all I see are holes and endless cha-cha into the nest of

them, and even that I cannot see, only the gentle wet-sand waves

of bare arms, and flowing foothills of frozen hair, and all the

moments retreating back into my mouth, where they scream with

hoarse voice, YOUAREMYONLYYOUAREMYONLYYOUAREMYONLY

2010 (the year of mornings)

(January)
Walking through winter skyways, searching for vanilla coke, which we drank with wild abandon and damn did we feel fine, having finally solved all our problems of the year before. The fireplace in the basement kept everything warm including the burning carpet and burning promises and everything that tends to burn when two friends are in love.

(February)
Who has time to write when you’re busy buying cards and writing novels in them? Happy late birthday, happy late Valentine’s Day, the kalamari at Krave was delicious. There were no signs of whatever was missing before. That could have been the problem. The snow may have started melting but I was too busy staring into the faces of other people to notice it, or my shoelaces untied, unready for the fall.

(March)
There was a whole lot of Learning To Deal to do, dealing with the wet grass underneath the knoll tree and being unable to do much except write some more. And everything was going to be okay until it wasn’t anymore and then there was nothing much to write except “SPRING IS DEAD, SPRING IS DEAD!” and I wrote it so it must have been true.

(April)
Then I saw myself On The Road where I belonged, far away from the rain and all the people I ever reached out to in it, but things like school and life kept me from going too far. Which was a dreadful kind of fate, because after a full month of trying to get things right I saw two angels on the couch and I walked away knowing that was right, because angels find other angels in the rain during silent April showers.

(May)
The turquoise princess of May Day Morning became evermore present in my mind, which was burning golden fire, waking up to a new series of images and daydreams that propelled me forward and onto the rooftops of suburban Woodbury, where the nightlines glowed purple and orange, ready for the year to begin anew, ready for a new senior class, a new kind of concentration and wonder that would have us reeling for the rest of our lives.

(June)
The sun dries up even wildfire. What started out as slow dances while muttering “shit, uhh, shit” turned into slow walks in circles surrounded by apologies, sorry for the stupid, sorry for the silence! and I couldn’t quite spit the blood from my mouth because up was down and down was I, remembering phoenix cries in the May sunset and wondering what it would be like to have a best friend again.

(July)
On the bed of some hotel in Wisconsin Dells, quite disturbed by my lack of desire, which happens to me during the summer, I’ve come to realize—I will never get married during July, I know this now, because fireworks make me bored and the heat makes me feel alone, so I hid from the day and spent my thoughtful hours in the quiet dark, wishing goodnight to the world, without knowing where it really was.

(August)
It was starting to be clear that this was the worst summer in all my history, that it was festering and none of my confessions or concessions were doing me any good, so there came a time to stop being silly, to find the voice to forgive, and the voice to say “it’s time to go, I have class in the morning,” getting up from the basement couch, in a haze of uncertain excitement that will follow me for as long as I have beautiful friends.

(September)
So much growing up to do, but that could always come later! So many people to meet, names to learn and miraculously remember weeks later. And finally, I am part of a group! Finally, I am a senior at this school of Lovecraft & Artistry, and every moment is to be jumped on, rolled over, and pulled up from the warm ground because THIS is where I was and anyone I missed went away! Fingers never moved so fast. They moved as one, but hey, they were still one.

(October)
It started out so brilliant, and I painted every morning orange and gold, with my hands waving free at the folks at the bus stop, before I drove, to home and more! To where nothing brought me down, no news of new love, no memories of old love, no stacks of smoldering applications. That was, until the week of the rain, when I bitterly wrote that you fucking suck and knew that in actuality I was talking to myself, that Halloween had come early, that I was dressing myself in clothes of spring I knew no longer.

(November)
And at last it all came Full Square, with nothing much changed except thicker textbooks and journals where I have scribbled countless odes, villanelles, ballads and song lyrics that have no melody. It got colder even on the first, and I knew this because my feet started to itch: the irony of having cold feet isn’t lost on me. I paid the dear price for being romantic and spent the month breathing into my scarf, fogging up my glasses, treading lightly on black ice.

(December)
Snow Day and Snow Day II, which we waited up for all night, and Rubius dances in his bowl even when I’m asleep, and we know that there are no good goodbyes, and we know that we will all go dancing barefoot in the skies, and when this long, tangled year is finally over, we wheel around to face those we love most, and celebrate having done all we could, forever complicating the intricate, delicate blessing of friendship.