if he followed you 1800 miles, how much longer do you think he'd follow?
you were talking about the most difficult thing while remembering: recognizing that not
every event is as important as another. there are walks through the park, childhood
frustrations, and old jokes that you will never remember except as passing smirks while
waiting in line for a day old donut and stale coffee.
the moments of selfloathing because of whatever offense you committed years before. the
way you felt waiting for the g train - miserable, selfreliant, alive. the smell of the
new york subway underground, how cute the girl going in the opposite direction, the wait
for the train, the taste of gin fresh on your lips, and a man plays guitar quietly on
the bench. you try to bring it to sense, funnel all what you experience and all that you
have and that you will into a singular understanding. a ball, an equation, a fucking word.
how do you bring it to a conclusion. or maybe you do not need to, and there is no puzzle
to solve or reason to find. then, i think there is the comatose glare of the flatbush man
or the stuttering swagger of the grand central coke fiend. the same when you alone stand at
the bar, and see your future before you.
does it get into you? through unwatched places does it slither suddenly and without commotion
into beloved moments? are you tenant of the fall, keeper of forgotten things? these miles
have had their say, sly witnesses of the sometimes in absentia. will a thousand more perform
a wrenching? will it kill truth out of you?
out of the north my body sings, the dreadful chanson from the subway station and grand
central's crushing vibration rings loud even in rock hill, even in enfield. nights, sitting
alone with noir classics and wine in highland park, waiting the new semester and what those
grand arches and what those stately halls attest while i in the warm autumn air to class,
among and before these other acquisitive, these other that strike through learning to
reach the marvelous, the singular, the grand paper. i, to things yet learned. to where my
mind most at heart.
now in the south, and these walls housing smiles, the ratcheting footsteps of vermin,
good soups, and the pondering eyes of my love. we eat breakfast in the morning. we
sometimes cook at night, and there is sometimes the smell of boiled sauce or whiskey
and often the sound of laughter. there are often candles that burn into the night,
extinguished by their wax. she hears me speak in the night, german gibberish,
and in the morning my body is faithful to her touch. bodies twined in another's warmth,
feeding. to her voice attendant and to her body, faithful.
for those, if any, that come upon the boarded windows of this place. the overgrown grass
and the neighbors' tales of fey children that once had haunted this place like ludicrous
devils in love. for those, if any, that feel among these walls the whispers of ghosts that
no longer speak though their hands have moved along its mantles and their shoulders have
leaned against its doorways and their dreams had spoken faint ecstasies and fears in
harried languages in the coital dark. ghosts, then
he doesn't forget the ones he's loved. remember, speaks his hand in transit along
the curves her own clean and touch so unlovingly. he doesn't forget, even when he sang
the teenage anthem of forever to chortling girls after school, writing bad poetry to
their concupiscent hearts. should initiation be so full of amateurs? does it cast maturity
in doubt of its sobriety, sincerity, its power, to know our entry into it was populated
with pimplefaced horndogs, awkwardly vivacious comeons, and clumsy first times in cars?
atlanta. and here is where my heart has led me. tonight, the rain. the sobered meditation
on the road, the only road, i have traveled to arrive in this place. this south atlanta
bungalow, seized in her eyes, the look that calls me to remember something i have no memory
of. i have seen you before, we say, like the reconstitution of dust in the troubled womb.
it's the moment of recognition, at the confluence of past and present, experienced or not
or otherwise. he has never not known her, the edge in her smile or the glint in her
clementine eyes. he looks at her close in dimly lit rooms, with both the wonder of discovery
and the warmth of recollection. he lies in her bed, nights, her exhale tiding his
cheek. his palm reaches for her chest, rests there awhile.
600 miles from the starting line, and are you still a boy? is it even a part of
you that you long to discard? you don't talk of boys when they die. and this
thanksgiving, you gave nothing because you thought it was the season of mourning
for the dead you never knew. who are you to mourn?
onesixth through to the goal, and still the old problems. were you hoping the land
would sift it out of you? were you hoping for the free ride to grace? did you think
that god would marshal his puzzle pieces just because you thought putting one foot
in front of the other a million times would somehow turn the ancient gears of his
theophany? your mind is as slow as your pace.
then of course the dreams. i swear your future self was there, i felt you. in that
crowded cafe i made love to you, right there alone. you told me "kiss me but don't
swallow" and i wasn't sure why. you said it was because you had hodgkinson's and
it was contagious. then, half asleep, i dreamed a creature was trampling my tent.
i called out to roar, hoot, howl. and there was nothing but a squeal, weaker than
silence in the careworn night. where are my fears, outside?
every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. who can quit young lives
after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell
them in their afteryears? for the fragment of a life, however typical,
is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent
outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their
long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.
conclusion. the expectancy of fulfillment. the promise of harmony linking
a vague origin to a coming end. everything in its right place. all variables
assimilated. all vagaries explained. all loves coalesced into whatever
deeply embedded affection spurred this boy’s hands from their timid hovel.
the child is always father of the man.
but of all truths, one. that there is no end, that there is no conclusion.
when the movie ends, you still need to leave the theater. when you die, your
loved ones still pay their taxes. and when he leaves new york, there will
still be the long hill descending from onderdonk to flushing avenue,
the frigid symmetry of manhattan skyscrapers, the ironed grind of subway cars
lurched into waking, the overpacked l train, hipsters and madmen, mothers and
fools, bedford avenue stretch, the a train made ghost after two am except for
the drugged and the drunk, the derelict amusements of coney island and how the
rockaway peninsula looks so much like another continent, the homeless on fifth
ave at four am, the cloisters whose employees still plan to wake at eight to
collect the museum fee all the days that they choose, the wonder in the eyes
of the children who caught the cellist at washington square just before the storm,
the memories of one who arrived chasing what seemed like a new beginning. these
are still here, and will remain here, linked in the transit between the human and
its machine, inextricable by the very fact.
ahead. miles of verdure, notwithstanding the season. men and women and their ways.
what from afar seems desolate, forgotten. this vast and somber continent surging
west like it had the reins of me. contrary to what you might think, i can be found.
the road, and nothing before. south, and now. south.
even schizophrenics create. the city is wet, when you find me
again lapsed into incoherence but the surest babble you hear
is of some silly eternity and its santaclaus god and actionless
christ. my g train jesus with his candy hawkers and sobbing hiv
infection and kissy youngsters and declaration that it isn’t that
god abandoned you. that was never the case at all.
i've been the cold stethoscope following the pulse of violence.
when you put your hand against the whetted flesh of this city, feel
its heaving like some monster of concrete and light, where terror has been.
a lumbering beast of semiotic mastication digesting your crude syllables.
Уничтожение. how all this holds together. where are the links. an insect
squirming in an unconsuming flame in the center of nothing, his juices rippling
to the sear of fire evaporating out of his terrored exoskeleton, muttering something
like words with astounding conviction.
like this city. there is always the same fire and i am a child in this place.
near, the derelict and mad lurching out of walls and sliding like shadows in
a storm of light and birthless babes drowned in gasmasks. and in the center this
unknown and unknowing boy with his classical sadness walking the spine of
leviathan in the bloody hall where the air is like knives yet this is human. on
to the sacred fire, the first and the last.
this city, so uselessly wet, with all its infamous scene and throbbing history,
its rich simplicity, monstrosity, its windy victories, glass hopes, punchmeclown
embitterments, this city so uselessly whetted with desire. sometimes nostalgic,
sometimes heard, sometimes abhorrent. for the fat sagbreasted harridan whose cane
only lightly touches the ground, a dead leg kept out of habit. for the quiet mexican
mechanic in the carshop on the corner of varick and metropolitan. for the darkhaired
girl with tears in her eyes. for the loft apartment rise telling williamsburg to take
no action, a little east river pessimism for the westward eye. for the french guyanese
living out of hostels, his eighth trip to the liquor store for the little banger
shot keeping at bay what pain rests behind his eyes. for the bellicose crustpunk
roundhouse kicking the doors of cement trucks and what rage sits like a ready war on his mind.
for the woman pinned and raped in the stairwell of dekalb avenue. for the gin thrown back in
the center of a northeast hurricane. for the toothless chinatown mongrel. for the dapper village
fag who cannot stand the smell of wet doghair. for the englishless thai whose wife doesn’t know
he’s been cheating because he’s been delivering pizza all day and stinks of sauce and mushrooms.
for the french lascivious, the lady at seventy who made swoon a boy sick of women, with
her wine shop strut and lean, who’s still got it.
so you’ve struck the liminal zone. undoing the past with a
view to reaggregation. saving yourself by disintegrating
the wringed irascibility you’ve let inside like a welcomed
infection. what do you do with yourself once you discover
the handshake’s a hoax? antiquated gesture without meaning,
socially mandated fictions perpetuated for fear of being
what is called rude. what difference can four thousand
miles make, lonely nights when the only thing heard is
the sound of insects in the tepid nocturnal air, or the
hum that thoughts make when all is quiet in your heart.
symmetry she set my compass in motion. it does not point to a
destination. that is a thing that is made, not found. symmetry
she recalled in me the grace in others which exists yet must
be sought out, plucked from a world that is malicious, paranoid,
lonely. symmetry she called out of my body a smile that was
not one of madness or irony, the unfrauded gesture writhing in
lethargy like a languid hangover. symmetry she is the one i remember.
spark the intimacy with the land rolling into infinite like an
echo that dies because not listened for. some of our cries and
laughter still repeat, reiterated in a somber october night or
in the shouting crowd or in the downy angora feathering the
tip of your ear. memory is the keeper, though she is disorganized,
and often, quite forgetful. i will hear these things out there,
in the great confrontation. derelicts wanderers lunatics lovers
tricksters thieves beneficiaries searchers geniuses madmen. and
all along this landscape will be the knowledge of my soul,
the catalysts of what is now dormant. these are the unknown
things, though others know them. these are the outside things
educating those on the inside. hurt by the world, guideless but
for the urge, limerent of god, and ready once more to collide
the boy with everything else, to see how brittle, how hale,
how tender he really is.
little more than a child waiting for an epiphany.
when he looks to himself in the mirror, looks to
something that years before contained someone else’s
purpose, someone else’s smile facing him when out of
the womb he sidled like a furtive thing halfcautious
and halfcontemptuous of the place he had found himself
in, then along the lines of his jaw and of his daring
glare and the arms pinned slightly back as in preparation
for defense he would catch a whisper of the order fabricated
in law or music or literature.
what is the destination when all that you need can fit within
one bag slung on your shoulder, and a violent cello hooked to
your shoulders. have you ever felt the dare of divinity? come
and get me. put your body to its worst, hear every strain of
your shinbone and every heartbeat as perhaps your last, your sorry
heart tassled in your chest like a ready wound, pulsing a strange
electricity til the terrored moments when the ribbed cavity goes
silent for the first time in so long. and though terrored,
nevertheless welcomed.
for madmen only.
all crime is sin. though called crime and remunerated by
wellsuited men and women passing judgment on actions they
neither committed nor were present for, and by the seclusion
of the violent thereby setting the world right again. there
are quieter ways about which our sins run. and whether or
not there is a god patiently awaiting his vengeful day, sin
itself is silently amounting, ravenous for a human wound out
of which it must go. you can see in your mother’s face a story
like this. of the skin once milkwhite in infancy now dried to
a husk as idle and rigid as a thousandyear unvisited thing
whose purpose is no longer worth the record, though telling
some unreadable tale of unknowable tragedies.
too often a drunken day in brooklyn, sick of the reasons i told
myself were solid. this is what getting back looks like. a
lonely night on a bensonhurst balcony with nothing but yourself,
a cigarette, and the cloudless dark, whose moon sits pale against
a sky you looked up to as a child from a lawn in new jersey that
no one no longer mows. those thoughts of better days, which while
irreclaimable are nevertheless touchstones of the future that can be for you.
there are better compasses than fear.
it’s the sound of children that stays with you. from the
other side of the fence. bedford avenue, and multitudinous
tales of the living, the dead, the small jewish boy carrying
crackers whose name i cannot read, the man in eight layers
of cloth and by a force of will plugs the sweat at the pore.
but still these buildings i fear may become a part of me. when i
leave this place, will there still be the exposed brick of park slope
brownstones, the alleyless rows of brownsville, empire state art deco,
ditmas park and its rainbow victorians, manhattan and its attendant
madness. will this be missed or scorned as an aberrance in an otherwise
fixable machine? isn’t it comfortable lounging in the simple fear of death
with a shitsmile on your idiotic face.
when in the summer, i remember myself sitting at the edge of a bed and my
fingers digging into the mattress, looking down at her choking on me and
yet i wanted her lips on mine, even when i came on the back of her throat
there was still something to fulfill. nothing sweet as a kiss, yet after
when she looked at me it was as if in shame and i knew. even when her nails
ripped into my chest leaving these fond scars at my pleading that she would
end me in my accumulate guilt, i remember and though the scar subsides
nevertheless within the body it harbors and broods and fashions ugly prayers
for a moment that unlatches the exit, and condemns some new recipient.
tyler tell me your fall. the quiet air disturbed in the
shape of human falling inevitable the sound of fractured
water inviting unprejudiced and the waves closing over you.
even at the leap what thought plunged you into the
irreturnable void, that unthinkable interval reserved
for those who make the choice. was it bravery conceived
from cowardice? was it something latent in you that knew
soon it would rip its savage way out, into the unabashed
light, throwing you in relief on to the silhouette of our lives?
otherwise. what are the places that pull. and what in you needs it,
to expose yourself to the world. what. soul tends east, west. anywhere but here.
no sanctity nor respite but what is next. untie that rope you carry in your back
pocket. this is not your fall. no key but what of you will unlock. doors into where.
perhaps not home, but what is next. some indiscernible narrative i live
beyond my knowing it. some thing to push me into the next. next. east. over
the ocean. divine, hold me. make me to know mine end and the measure of my days,
what it is, that i may know how frail i am. judged according to my ways, and recompense
upon me all my sins. as it has been written of me. eli, eli, lama sabachthani? god you
must scream it in my face.
the places you'll go. do not regret this.
the mantelpiece and the strident flame licking the roof
of a ridgewood apartment, i in admiration or fear which
are equivalent standing while she unknowing in another
room and when she comes it is art and i with my finger
that has been in more women than i can count trace Да across
the ashes blasted over the fireplace. and when she wakes
there are halfthought hieroglyphics speaking on the wall
where silenced til she swipes them with a hateful palm. i
felt her without sex, without the expectation of tangled
arms or sheveled panties or even a kiss in the unlit room
where the window flashed lightning a thousand years
before the thunder itself rocked the caulking or the
hinges of the bathroom door she closed to smoke a cigarette
and send the butt hissing into her unflushed piss.
these are ghosts, and ghosted letters. they are written to
be unread. there is nothing of sadness, only that boy in
his miniscule flesh lushfully ganymedic til his term. i have
not yet forgotten what it is to fall into a pile of dead leaves,
nor feel dirt stick beneath my fingernails, nor lose myself in
the woods. though i was scared, and no path promised anything,
i was free.
as if fingers could split the skin without fear of
bleeding out, to slit the sight of the body’s silent
machinations, its secret diseases festering beneath
years while smiles above and picnics and tears spent
over things that mean very little once the body has
made itself known. but how abiding and demure the body,
in all its frenzy to live through pseudonutriment and
oceans of alcohol, the greatest challenge to kill,
stubborn to die as if itself can laugh at death.
most of all, illiterate to these wretched letters to
the body, when to communicate to the thing that
is keeping you alive is hardly more than monologue
based in a historically unsound assumption.
so standing, taking your time to find your way back.
new brunswick apartments trudged to in twofoot snow,
the brising chill of the lazy wind keeps you behind
university walls. the awful cold trellised by city
streets and the only thing warm of you is the love,
the vague and undestined adoration flickering
inextinguishable in the place they will have called
your heart. how would you have known years later
after x lovers and x bottles of wine and x resolutions
that you would have turned back to this place as a
locus of origin, as a center that thrives vital within
you, where what is now true of you tumbled awkward out
of the present like an illegible map brightened by
nascent flames. yes, i was there, but this map does not
show you paths without footprints.
how often will you waste your faith in a beautiful world.
half moon suspended in the summer cerulean. at the corner the
shuffling old polish locks his laundromat and the iron shutters
to say that for the day the cleaning is done. the church and
grocery closed long before and now breaks into the night other
forms of sustenance which have as well their own controversy.
now in the night wander forth the forgotten parts of forgotten sons,
to drown out the gasps of air yet breath as if to claim the body
has yet to die despite all evidence to the contrary. i am not dead,
it speaks, and we are not yet through.
there is always more to see in an onderdonk dusk, more to spell
out from the letters discarded and plasticated on a refrigerator
door. they wait, wait to be assembled into either jokes or wisdoms
which seen in the right can shatter the continuity of halfconscious
habits. from smallest things and inconsequential things and even
ridiculous things we are reminded that nothing is so small,
inconsequential, or ridiculous, though the categories are maintained
rigid and unfailing.
half moon calls me guilty and calls me louder than any cross. recalls
the night when my pride was capered into shame and i was made to believe
in mistakes that were neither mine nor true. then i knew that there
was me and everything else and at least for a time to subsist in this
sufficient duality, under the laughable lure of necessary fictions,
the ephemeral promise that turns the most touching of your dramas into
the most strident cackling. witches are patient, but they will burn
like anything else.
to entertain oneself to play the villain, when all else proves
false and hollow. or is it you, boy, lushed in the drear vacuity?
though sunlight sear through summer leaves bobbing in a longedfor
wind, though seasons of lapsed addiction have their moment, though
nostalgia nips pleasurably, it is far from done and what you have
made will come with a face you can’t help but recognize.
yet there’s little else in language itself that can substitute my
hands holding your face pulling gravitous lips eyes hair mind as
to swallow because of the place in me hollowed before i knew you.
the thought comes wordless, pure to its utmost possible, and all,
all is the simulated feel of your fingers tracing oncebony hips,
your laughter in sunlight sailed through gossamer white curtains,
your body supine in waking, abandoned of the night doused in one
another’s dried secretions, the taste of us stuck to our gums as
though now a part, and all that i have not yet let of you in me
is the blood to slip that subtle crevice on my tongue down into
my body where felt is that ancient supernova of your first kiss
placed so awkward on my stupid lips.
is it the old hatred in you seething into the moment.
is it old mistakes and antiquated shames tapping that
dreading pulse in the undertone ringing every second
conscious or no. the lost develop the habit of speaking
to themselves, and those with demons speak the least.
i walk through subways and corridors, through the breath
of others and the unremembered actions of less remembered
men. i move past and among lovers and murderers, those
murdered and those loved, hearts broken and yet to be so,
the unchallenged, the reckless and the bon vivants bored to
death, the spiteful, those souls emptied either by years or
by failure, the finger that skims the accordion of wallet
cash and the hand that shakes a coffee cup like a tambourine
for nickels and dimes, the captious hag sick of her riches
and the disheveled poet who stinks of the streets. there is
an apathy that comes from seeing every shade of humanity in
the same place, for too long; before you know these fears are you.
in the fashion of fallen things. in so many ways i should’ve
been a ghost in your arms, with neither sense nor memory,
merely to lay quiet and discommitted in the silence of your
sleeping body. less than ghost, not even privy to your dreams
but a whisper of lust, a splintered memory of the madness that
knit me to you back before years had a name, a dream in a soul
that has found its peace, and it will hold you like the memory of home.
the truest thing was there on church avenue, her eyelids scrunched
in the light of the sun, the curve of her shoulder there, her lip
perked up not in a smile but in aid to shut out the glare, and he
moves himself to block what his body can of it the more to see her,
and all of his mind is both in this moment and elsewhere, somewhere
without a name – and whether his silhouette on the wall of a queens
apartment or her kiss on his throat while his body lay supine spent
in her sheets on a dutiless monday and nothing but her morning sweat
and her fresh woken body unfurling from his or even the memory of the
taste of her lips when she is gone from him or the scent of rose
petals and incense assailing when he turns the corner of a city he
doesn’t know why he moved to or the sight of a calavera resting in
some shop window because she had a thing for dia de muertos – whether
all, or less or more, in her smile his soul was most at peace.
in the settling light of day, our story having made no great name
on the earth. when heirs to our unknown walk unknowing in the echo of us.
hunts himself, digging that fattening flesh deeper in the grave dug deeper
everyday. that it moves, that it breathes, is both that living joy and that
inexorable clause in the contract signed for you, by those who nursed you,
pushed your delicate pudge with their finger, made you giggle so blithely
and swat your hamfists at hands older than yours in that crib with the
blanket whose color you remember no longer.
such a hand sliding her thigh, breath outrun by heartbeats and a
still smoking cigarette tucked into the crevice of an ashtray and
burning itself to an eventual fall. she smells like ash and caramel
and the night, drowned in whiskey and her invitations, leaving no
desire for next morning’s sun, leaving us with curses in our mouths
for that insensible rotation of manhattan unto the light calling us
to rise.
and songs that come iphone digestible and pains in your chest which
perhaps are echoes of some future you are creating for yourself and
waking up with something of a fever in your ginstained guts and
nothing less than terrific hatred for the body and its imperfections.
is it that you fool yourself with recitations of shakespeare and
paradise lost, henry the fifth and wilfred owens, alexander pope
and henry miller, clinking coffee cups in that endless café in your
mind? are you such a fatuous pundit that your days and years have
become little more than lightbulbs flashed at the keywords spoken
in conversations not your own? little talks not yours, and only
known because the interlocutors were not practitioners in the
containment of sound, its regretful tendency to be heard by ears
that treat it as if it were their own. you were better off telling
the sun to cease its setting, spend your waking exposed to all
the mess you had made, with hands that once playfully swatted
back those of a woman.
you are not yet, boy. you are not yet.
finds himself in the season of no words, where even the
ink falls splatter to the page and exhausts itself even
at the first breath, indiscernible spot on the blank and
full with the what may be.
and his hands they are getting old. these days, when
running fingertip over palm and the trailing red
when the blood follows to fill the unpressured spaces,
when in the dessicate winter air the scars of thoughtless
mishaps with hammers and razors make manifest not only
themselves but the incidence of the past that bore them
deep in the unforgetting body, when these hands which are
of more memory than time has ever told, which have crawled
across hardwood across bodies no longer of the living across
rugs which are no longer in a home which they no longer call
as such, towards, towards.
and of you, any reflection of your beauty. that in all this,
there was, was. that there is only was. never and always again, forever was.
that the sun rises you feel yourself reborn. the slight
sunday morning fog, the newly washed streets, the shutters
rolling for the day’s business, the amber light urging along
the defenouillate branches, cold as absence when light is
hardly better than showing.
there have been too many nights between. not a bushwick
dusk has kept out from me – the smile, the smell, the nights we stole
as lovers. the moments we claimed as ours and shattered as though we
feared they could ever be stolen from us, we who have stolen them. nothing
as sweet as the caper.
when irretrievable the body, to join it in the place
of death. and if not the place, then in the manner.
and if not the manner, then for the utter fact of dying,
and the disemptied vacuity when the final vestige of
sense has ceased its electric line through the brain.
to follow you into the dark, that fearsome wish.
my head turned, where something beautiful walked just
behind me, before me. and eyes, those deviant witnesses.
you have seen nothing, and even if the body and the life
were presented before you that strange and ample and beautiful
subjective would remain the body and the life in which it had
suffered, illegible to whatever cloying motive you’ve entertained til now.
cloying, perhaps. but only as the living can do. resurrection is a selfish thing.
and bringing afresh everyday memories when you were loved, when one across the
universe was felt at your periphery, breaking the physics of distance to close
the primitive aperture between you – well what a childish thing. so if we do, we
are children, and we are selfish, and we will wail even unto ghosts.
she is not here. she, she shames her pronoun. the thought of her, makes every prayer
a noise. every wish the premise of a joke without a punchline. she is not here. she
is a mass of rot. every imagination, granting ever more validity to the impermanence
of what men go mad for. the indefatigable glance, lithe fingers poised as sexual
as yours are impermissible, in the shadows even of photographs. she is not here.
she is rot in the artistry of hackneyed ceremony, in the pine and maple condemned
no less than the body they contain, to the dust. she is not here. rot in a rotting box.
carceral of the body that moved, the brain that thought, the heart that beat,
false home of the soul ascribed and manufactured by topside mourners
and even this, what i am, what i become, as day lapses day, whom i cannot condescend
to define. but there is still your face, never looking out the photo but when you had
taken it. your dark and frazzled hair, your lilted body never shamed yet never satisfied,
your enigmatic glare so evasive of the lens, the shadows let to checker and imbricate
that already represented, that space of proliferated nouns and verbs and adjectives and all
the impotent speech meant to rectify, meant to remind you as close as we can to the flesh
you were, where you lived, where you held us and spoke to us, out of which you loved and were
loved, where you were pained, where we had set our hand, where what we knew for a time
and irretrievable, unmet in the place where termed death, termed forever.
he was, i saw, at the steps of grand central, wheezing
notes of fatigue, dressed little less as a man claiming
his day’s labor, claiming little more his heart and his
only. the living thing only his, contained alive and
silent in the barrier of his faintly heaving body,
beating inebriate, lurching neither back nor towards. a single man, worth
either ire or pity who can tell. there he has sat for
generations, with heavy lids and holes in his pockets and
with pain in his heart leading perhaps the fire whether of
love or resentment, the face glancing and only so up to
you from the clustered subway car, the bruised and
tarspotted hand clutching like death the solid aluminum
or the little paper cup guarding precious the coins rattling
like the pity of others and holding for a time the contorted
body with little left in its voice but supplication, but
solace from what is often monstrous of life.
north. north. into the brising and awful cold. north. into
what is more your heart, whose answers meet closer this world
than those lurched so many times from the voices of guardians
like broken slaves whose name is x. interchangeable the laws
clucked from their listless tongues. north. and now, north.
that somewhere in the center thrives vital, the key,
the turned page, what next waits in sequence to show
from what catastrophes triumphs drama what pale
insignificance have flown their tendrils round the gspots
of memory, where even the sound of spit against a tealiron
girder over the east river could flower the images you had
so mercilessly tried to forget.
in the way station, never to know exactly when your train
will come. and if it doesn’t, if the waiting comes too bearable
even for you, pliant and ever so complacent soul, you know you’ve
no reservations. this is not your prison. and if it is so, there
are no walls and no wardens and there is no population recognizing
itself as such. there is other air outside what you have called,
what you have made into, walls.
even that memory of her, with her williamsburg strut in the presnow
afternoon, and even when i flown with wine to the unpeopled midnight
sat fallow and lethargic in my car at two in the morning when i came
to her in the blizzard morning in the warm café where even now the very
best of my memories of this place rest between the unflushed wood of
cheap coffee tables and in the formulaed scent of cappuccinos shared in
the space between lovers
and came the time when he parts the inimitable glare in her eyes, the look
telling that you are marked, that you have been recognized. from what he has
known – the woman having loved, having lost, having sought revenge, having
found it, having birthed, having my heart – thriving anticlimactic in all
the right spots of me, at every wrenching jar termed nostalgia, in every
fragment living or obsolescent or in the verge of decay – having always my
heart and symboled like nothing else, like nothing that seared so close as
silence. like rosehips in a winter fire.
but there, the moment, what you thought was home. what may be else. what is
home, what is elsewhere. the places outside peripheral and no calmer perhaps
but all the same the places yet to stride your skin or sound your ears with
gibberish eloquence, all the more to turn your step when seems the least
likely success because in that is the most of promise.
then the taste of whiskey, subordinate the taste of you my love. then
the smell of predawn roses lilting towards the sun, urging out of
the hemisphere dark like a tired thing, like a thing ready to extricate.
no joy, no warmth, no fucking goal. the road. the road and nothing before.
in the barlight, but something of you is still watching with a
bitter finality the hobbling legs of the elder, perhaps wise but
nonetheless muttering eternities of nonsense at the paper vendor
or the garbage can. diserect man, knobbed knees still called to
raise the man from his bed despite the violet veins livid at their
deathless traffic, blood a world away from the exhausted heart, the
heart not beating but jerking him from moment to moment, to the sour
inanity spiting the boundaries of bed, of doorway, of love.
in the barlight called. the sure and sleak stream cigarette smoke
blown from your lips like a scoff, with a smirk. though it is
weaponless in the face of its end, its finecut curve anabatic
the unslaked ground, yet knowing itself exposed. i was naked in
the sound of her voice.
there is the image, the man prone in the sheets and silent, his
breathe syncopate by the steady pulse of the machine threatening flatline.
his names were awe and fear to the children that knew him, to the neighborhood
boys with their toothpicks and their cigarettes and their brews, the young
drunkards bad in the absence of the real bad. when boys grow old, or never as
old as their fathers with their stubborn hearts, the heart lounging in that
hospital bed beating mercilessly beneath the cold beat of a screen where once
he gazed listless at wheel of fortune, law and order.
wishful the sons, yet so unready when the mercy comes. you’ll imagine the
moment of your father’s breath, the last breath yet the same you heard in
your beginning, the triumphant exhalation waking the neighbors and followed
with a smile and a sandwich. though it comes, that we precede them or we
watch them die. there is no easy way, the exits are lined with broken glass.
mothers and fathers, beautiful fools.
still, the icon, neighborhood scion. inadvertent father en face his sons,
and though they may not love him nonetheless offer their eyelids sealed
solemn and the silence cupped in their hands to mourn aright their wretched
histories along with you, that things were not put right that there lives
in your brood shame and error and pain and fear, and perhaps in that one
breath out of you can go such things as what have linked father and son,
that you can annul the similarity between us, return if only for a
moment – return, as you were, stoned at the doorstep of that jersey
apartment, return, as you were, the gruff and crude jester but perhaps
a little handsome and mysterious – to life before, for nothing here
created will share your name. flatline.
unfaulted, but not faultless. where he put in a woman the charge
of his redemption, where he put in her aside her beauty better
than babylon and irreceptive of your foregone apocalypse, what he
feels is the long northern winters and the sway of midwestern grass
and the rollick of new orleans and the sunblasted pavement of texan
roads tapering into the horizon forever unyours, to the continental
west where sundrenched beaches at day and coats at night to the
somber fog of the early morning. she is a woman, she is prophet
yelping god’s slang to ready ears, ears but too young to listen
between the syllables where the fine print outlines a far different contract.
unfaulted, yes. a woman, but of some other time. where the boy remembered
in her some other, to whisper lucid promises in her girlish ear, and how
his testimony not only never came to fruition but blew her out of his life
like an exhale to autumn leaves rested quiet in his own hand. they have been
falling in the inverse of forward, coasting the cold air and falling in stasis
as nostalgic as your smile at night or your eyes aching to swallow me or your
rage bristled at my skin at some now ridiculous event. my love my body, that
a part of me cannot be a part of me. that in such a contradiction i must defer
and i must surrender and i must find that means of moving in that paradoxical
forward where memory must belly to what is, where i must learn the fashion of
this contract, first signed when my soul was laid bare to you when naked i came
to you when in this body and even in this soul that lazarus saw something it
recognized and only at the sheerest pain was forced to let you go.
it was this time not a year before now, how an end comes not
by catastrophe but by a tapering to silence, as if to chisel
what was to a sliver flung from the vice to the carpenter’s
floor, swept to a pile heterogeneous, excessive.
it continues because there was no proper ending. all that is
left him is the middest, the irreconcilable interval between
the beginning and the end and though he may have in some cases
the first and in others the last there is lacking that
consonance which while perhaps a historical assumption
is nevertheless needed. while not granted outright, he is
exile. where any of his grievance and any of his love and
any of his closure, the formula of its fitting is not for
him to know. you cannot fault him for falling, for he was born blind.
i cannot speak of what should be. the reek of streetdwelling
and the sweetness of the beds of many hers have lent me no
finer instruction. there is something in the past that begs
erasure, yawning to suss the present into some fashioned ideal.
skin, the fragility fawning the surety between air and the delicate
machinations of the quiet body. why the arteries after all abuse and
why the breath, why the mind after all, all. there is something within
lurching toward permanence, trundling with a fainting breath after the
things in decay and often in unsalvageable demise.
to not become as. to not become a man who is less than such, not cruel in
memory but grateful for its having happened. not forgetting and not forgiving
but understanding, in the fullness of my own as having loved and having
held you to my body, accepting and nothing more. there may be little to live for,
though there is so much yet to live. as such, i have carried you, and i have yet
to learn how to tear you out my skin, pursue what calls but is not a voice, hound
what swears its sweat but does not promise, chase but cannot be captured, hold
close but perhaps will only lay in your arms like a thing long dead and irreciprocate
of your love.
skin, as if it could hide the fire of stars, yet our scars are plainer than we think.
though we cover, though we avert our eyes, though we avoid the words which may implicate
us, we are known.
lesson. how to learn to let you become that stranger
you need to be. how to forget enough for the sun to
at least make its rise unimpeded by stubborn memories,
those that wake with you confused in the same sheets
as your sleeptwisted body, angled by dreams whose images
and whose sounds are the desperate lunge of desires and
of fears from the foundations of what it is you are.
lesson. how to learn what you are. how to learn what you’ve
become. for you are never static, not even for a moment.
we are unfamiliar with the present. we are past, or we are
future, and inflecting this vague present are the memories
or the fears of time past and time future.
lesson. how to learn what we were. how to learn what to become.
how to learn to forget the smell of rose oil, how to forget the
smell of your skin, the taut muscle at my fingertip prone at
the surface of your breast how to forget the turn of your face
in the night waiting for my kiss like a promised thing and how
to forget your receiving it how to annihilate what you have left here to linger.
lesson. how not to linger.
there is the image of that boy, legs bent askance the futon edge,
his head bowed as if in prayer to the book rested in his lap.
whether resignation to the end or to new beginnings, we pray to both.
what hope, all we have when things are granted and we’ve no choice but
to receive, like thoughts lost in the turn of eyes to her clavicle and
what her naked shoulder feels like in the winter in the close white hum
of the moon when all the lights are shut and there is nothing but my
breath guiding her lips and the words that would have been.
more so, out the window promises autumn. leaves fell to each midnight nuance,
to the unwatched slab on the sidewalks of brighton beach and of jamaica and
of morningside and tonight they fall, no more the organ of breath now even
at the word on this page it falls to rest to dessicate curling its palmate
lobes upwards as in reaching, in the ways of fallen things.
and in the tradition of fallen things, come the bitter tense lips and the
benefitsmile for others and the im sorry which somehow finds its way out
of that locus of damage and disappointment and the fabled whatshouldhavebeen
to utter the confirmation of its presence with you in this world, that living
you were together and of the same moment. yet as you fall, there is still the
space to regain. and though every footstep is marked by belief yet by the
countervail of mistrust, at least we know that the latter leads to the pit,
to the bottom which has none but in the sheets of a hospital bed wrenched by
the fists whose years have brought them, deathly futile, here, to the whispers
of what madness once stood recognized. though we know, though in the midway we
are well, is there not that vestige of rage latent in us, ready to howl at the
maker’s hand, ready to gnash its fingers to the eternal bone.
sigh no more, for youth. sigh little less for love, for the pale skin
and the jetblack hair turned aside and never turning for your
benefit to verify though all this city littered with the souls in
liminal and the souls in love and the souls that have had it up to the
neck with concrete and with sound.
these the thoughts attendant on the boy whose cello rests softly
between his legs, the better metaphor for woman singing the bellied
resonance out of the grind of metal to struck wood and sapping of
surge to the very bottom of exhale, the most living nadir reminding
us the pulse to fill ourselves back to the higher, and back again
yet ask no questions of the seesaw of breath.
sigh, for you will recognize the answers when they are given.
ars est celare artem.
shut your mouth. it smells better than it could ever taste even if
your tongue has lapped up miles of it. seal your lips for even a
breath could drown out the sound of a precious whisper imparting
direction leading to some long forgotten thought or to the lipcrusted
face of the mad fresh from his slumber behind some unemptied dumpster
off houston street or to the stern and disbelieving with love in her heart
yet of the kind of distrust that never learns to open or to the man with
his eyes shut against the subway noise and light and his chiseled jawline
and deep forceful eyes echoing some history unknown in this our modern
tongue.
even down flushing her voice. skirting prospect park to cobble hill and
how sings her love in a summer night in a cab across the manhattan. how
her breath, in the dark where i had dreamed in a kensington room perhaps
not but perhaps now a stranger to her boots and to her justhome sigh of
relief, to her child and the heart of her vouchsafed by nothing less
than the surety of a mother's love. that she could ever be a stranger to
me was an outcome i had never prepared for.
that he could ever be stranger to me i could nothing more than wish.
that my mother were ugly that she were barren that he were a faggot
that he was a drunken drug addict long before they met that she saw in
him as if epiphanic the redundancy of children analogous to every cockstroke
that if they had never touched that if that first date were a disaster
amounting to little more than an awkward phone call on the rotary and
the agreement to be nothing more than friends and create nothing more
than laughs at friends' birthdays and give nothing more than simple gifts
at such holidays as were needed. that nothing in your minds resembled us
or the obligation which was your most supreme failure.
that in her life she saw much more, much much more. as if that choice had
never been offered you. as if its consequences were granted not even the
dignity of dust in the wind of a forgotten summer. .
even if at the end of a rope or a cord or whatever it was that
of physics wrung out the life from your neck where once the voice had
spoken things like love and like hunger and like frustration and once
like loneliness at that one and only moment which was yours for
the time it was and now belongs to no one but us. such, the moment we
cannot but know as your last, the sickened celebration we term the
anniversary of not only our fallow dedication but your hollow eyes swelled and
swung and still swinging as do pulseless pendulums into that truncated
infinite at every stroke marked like the end yet turning its aggrieved
face about to learn yet once more, yet once more there is one and one
more round.
i cannot know, i cannot presume to know. if such a thing as honor or
memorial or remembrance i will say nothing. a moment of silence is one
moment too much, for the pained and remembering left to walk these familiar
streets without our familiar companions and with a unilateral fondness
always urging into the dark to find perhaps a fragment of the past.
but to think of you, laughing at a raunchy joke sitting
in subway patience at class with a smirk at a professor's quip or
copying his words in a wellworn notebook or
in a bed of your own with nothing but thoughts to lead
you to sleep and the dreams woven into the whispers of air sometimes
left to hover over bobbed sunflowers or pulled into the lungs of a boy
who swears he's in love or whisped about the lithe fingers of a dancer
tired of her trade and longing for what she doesn't know.
falling, and still falling. to the billowed dust still blown soft over
what city streets still welcomed our unsteady feet. still the sight of
the billowed white flailing from a desperate hand such an impossible
distance above and breached but a single way. falling, and still falling,
to the snap of bone at the crack of that rope or the concrete receiving
like the most gracious and nothing answered to your arched toes out of
that smoked windowsill and your last breath your greatest but the
bitter finality waiting and though, loving and graceful as you cannot
help to be, beautiful in all those inimitiable ways, though still falling
whether to the pavement of this city or to the poised knot at an abdicated
gesture ready to burst out the life in a single moment the moment which is
no longer yours once lived but belonging to these the witnesses, these the
ones who can barely turn their minds to you, who can barely speak for
desecrating you with even the sound of their pitied voices hushed in what
is called memorial, in the pathetic ritual of remembrance and all the candles
and sweet words and foundations and even the very best solemnity cannot stand
to what was and should be here and is now no longer. though monuments,
though memories, even so.
these are letters. whether read or skimmed or discarded back to the
undulate and inconstant tide is no consequence. that they are here
is enough.
still, in that aperture of time when you feel as if you could
never know or be known by someone, when you feel more severed than
space from space yet in it lurks the comfort of being and being seen
though something of you is apart from this world. something to laugh
at science and god alike, something of an absence for you see through
him for though the shallow hues are nothing more than cotton and ghosts
whose art is concealing and whose payment is the restful hour before
the glint of waking sunlight.
how, the hours of a man's life when his hands are little more equipped
to support him against the walker usurping his legs, his skin swinging
off his bones like a wellcooked turkey his eyelids limped exhausted the
shiver in his fingers his forty year hemorrhoid bleeding like clockwork
his memory forgetful his memory as it is and in the body sustaining
for what of the body is as loud as the insult towards skin, the supreme
provinciality for if it is we do not only inhabit this body but that we
die with it we should burst, and burst, and do so loud enough to deafen
generations, for that we are alive and for that we feel, for that we are
bodies louder than we have ever been and our blood has run redder than
that of dying suns and full of more sin than that of men without repentence,
more doubt than the first question that began its tauted route in the
mind of that first, whatever called among his brothers, whatever called
among his enemies, whether fool or genius.
it was the corner of lex and 40th, where that smell draped
over more women than i could count coasted the dying summer
breeze and for that moment i thought, behind me, but no.
because how do you dispel the automatic, what you've left
in me and which i can't remove, closer sewn than the arteries
to my heart and truer than the beat begun even before
memory was born in me.
perhaps it's out of habit. perhaps it's out of my peculiar
disposition to revisit disaster. but on these nights, alone
at the breeze of late summer collapsing to autumn, with nothing
but the smell of rose oil to swallow my present into its fold,
with little more than words with their futile inflections
uttered stagnant into the whatshouldhavehappened, into the
whatdidnot and whatcouldnot happen, what lesson mature or
rational could keep me from you though gutting myself seems
cheap labor to feel even once the night where i held you to
the rumors of town. the runaway. the whore. and what has been
said of us.
still your voice to sing across the couch in kensington, your
crossed legged modesty and smile my selfish eyes after you my
hands cuffed to one another for their fear of going where
they are unable. there are still things left to be said
of us. how does he go with unsaid words. it was never taught him
how to leave, how to return, to tell the difference between the two.
the tired heart beating to nothing. remembrance of the
older days, to look upon what has become the origin
which was to be the one true thing. he cannot call her
by any name. the letter kills.
for the heart taught to beat as if the singular moment
were right there, at the diastolic relief the swearing of
exit from what is so acrimonious in your words. their crust
of disappointment, their tone of dry habit spoken to the
very fissure of their syllable. to listen once is compassion;
twice, obligation; three times, masochism.
though the heart, that stubbornly beating thing pulsing which
above you whirled for those first unremembered months. the
body of the woman out of which you crawled like a lost and
loathsome thing looking for some foreordained teleology
looking at least for the recognition of fingers against your
utmost boundaries. what is called skin, what is dead and has
always been so though they come for it mad as the womb like
the thirst of their own beginning tonguing what they cannot
speak and yearning what has been for years dead and buried
and to show them that i was killed long ago, what is
there to show but the dishumaned matter of man and his staccato
desire shred to the hurt of a woman whose body slid like a
dream into his lap, into his hands which have loved and have
loved nothing.
but, the heart still swung in that chest blotched with the
grief of years and the faces of beloved sons yet perhaps too
close to the man whose voice no longer rides the walls of the
place you both called home. that tired heart, to spite incredible
engines, that tired heart still beating like a stupidly vowed
thing, still beating beneath the bedsore skin, still beating
beneath the smile weighted with what the years have left. that
unimagineable beating, and still beating, the heart of the mother.
history has made so much of fathers and sons, whole nations and
their histories marked with hardly an unaccounted interval. poor
oly's interregnum, that chuck's son took up soon after with quite
an ill temper.
but this is not the culture for kings and their brats and bastards.
wouldn't we like to know better when the moment the father lifts his legs
out of the bed to pack only the things he needs to leave from the door
where his sons and daughters clung to his legs in the joy of his return
where he does not even lock the door for fear of waking the mother whose
morning will imbed itself forever into her, erased never. wouldn't we like
to know how to map those lines in the child's face, his absent and untrusting face
where we may find that most enormous absence felt in the corners of every
commitment and in the breath of every promise.
you feel it, and perhaps guard with a cerberus devotion for that it's
guaranteed you. you can move forward without ever moving on. you are a boy
ten thousand times before you are a man, and even then there is
always the rough hand against your hairless face and the lessons unforgotten
by those men before you. you feel it, how you are of those of absence. you feel
it, what it is to come from nothing, to have learned nothing from no one, to
carry this shapeless weight which is always heavier than god. we can say, though
we may have no power, though it may mean nothing to him, god does not know the
anger of his sons.
the glazed white of the subway car and the platforms,
millisecond people waiting. the rockefeller artwork reminding you of
where you are and the poetry occupying the same space as the promise of
beautiful skin for no credit and no credit at all and the powerless battery
for the powerless you and oh thank you for reminding me that courtesy is
contagious because it would have never occurred to me.
there was a woman under it all. with eyes drawing your own, forearms rested
modest on her thighs, legs to wrap you twice, peeking clavicles out the
vneck, the slight heave when she breathes and not even the motion of lips
that she speaks or even might respond to your eyes which are incapable of
pretending she isn't there.
and there was something to remove, something the whole would have been better
without. yes, a fallacy. or perhaps, better yet, revenge. not the fulfilment
of totality, but its suspension. cutting short design. spotting the errors
before god. best called rebellion, if no other name for what we have left.
to kill the perfection in me before the maggots birth, to know where conflict
dovetails with this culdesac blasted with laughter exhausted to a whimper
whereafter echo things like memory and like a quiet nod against the
nonchalant vacuity, that silhouette opposite our bodies we charge with the
answers. but i cannot question so long. i cannot petition the idea of things
so long. so long, that this has been allowed. this is an old story, older than
many of you, and perhaps it may not end like you know it has, or that it should.
yet there is her east village smile and her hands in hours' wait, and there is
the skyline embroidered with light along tower tops hazing into the low clouds
that in the fog days have skirted her cheek and wrested her hair into waves she
never thought attractive. there is that moment, that point of time perhaps
immeasurable yet nevertheless the crux, that you must move along in that
wretched state of as if. as if you never loved. as if you never were. the
assuming so will save you.
in my mind it isn't the whole, but the length stretching peg to bridge,
where in the string lives the tension we wait as music. where then in
our intervals is there the sound which recalls the strata of us, and where
can i pierce the palimpsest to what in us was so abominable, so
worthless?
but baby in that shadow of your perfection i can't hope to rebuild what
i've known as what i've ever wanted. i might have been happy in the
warmth of your palms and the grip of your fingers, along the bones of
my shoulders and even at the segments themselves of fingers writhing
along ribs wishing to remember even the millimeter between. wishing,
as i've had, what was in transition, what as a body suspects itself
little else, and is afraid, and despite the ideology and despite the
trust in the suffered end and despite the dread of a welltied rope or
the sharpest edge or the surety of two feet ten toes leaping and but
the water to catch you
though, in your end how it so sounds like the wail of infants after the
most trivial of spitsoaked toys, the gumtackled fur of teddy bears
and, at the simplest, a misplaced pacifier. i cannot believe that the
simplest things are left behind us so far that we cannot recognize their
absence.
the pin put in the fissure in the wooden floor, setting the varnished body at the
angle against my inner thigh, aching the bow along strings the distance of sound
through that hollow body allows.
that the same wind ruffles her midnight, in the billows of curtains you almost
mistake as life, that similar winds had crossed the lips of former lovers, that
the shame of sex after you. in brooklyn, through these alleys and over these
highways and under these crosshatched gratings and around these livid corners,
and i never speak of you for the same reason shared by what is abhorrent and
what we know as sacred.
i knew the night i kissed your birthing scars, when we shut the lights and were
silent, and put our mouths to the other's, breathing the quietformed heat of
latent organs, unto ourselves sufficient, each the other's cause and end. i knew
when we were stripped, two unsighted lovers speaking whispered heat into
answerless dark. i knew in the touch of undifferentiated bodies, indesolate and
delicate, sweetly woven in the sinless night. i knew when we put our mouths where
life is made, where i felt with my voice the suffering tissue once swollen with
life whose first word was not, as the wordless moan white as the sun, initiate
of things lingual or no. i knew in the apocalypse of shivered thighs, the shook
lips and the lidlocked eyes and the tongueless yawp in which lay all after it.
after a thing original or no, immaculate and only so.
take the train from 15th and prospect, learn the art of absence in eyes present as
little more than an emptiness the tail end of which you witness merely by being
present. like a symphony you feel it, that ineffable mounting to the cadence rife
with a coming end.
my own, felt in the spine. a lumbering tower of bone threaded with nerves so sensitive
that a pinprick in the most unlucky spot spites life to everything below it. or the liver
fed up. or the thought exhausted mind. or the runned out legs. or the heart that
questions its beatings and every cell is looked on with suspicion, as a circulation
nazi readying to keep alive the body which does not ask the reason why. is it faith,
that i can write and breathe with little to no complaint and continue with my ideas
and my aspirations and my love though i shovel shit into this ridiculous assemblage
of parts which, though perhaps beautiful, is nonetheless owed to the dust? is it
fear, that i can put a foot before the other in the semblance of motion and connect
one idea to another in the semblance of thought? is there some equation, is there
some formula. you drag about the vestiges of greater thinkers, you carry the thoughts
of greater men. know boy, it was never you. few of the things you ever understood to any
degree of entirety were yours alone. leech, what does the blood of a secondhand thought
taste like? have you had your fill, or what is left but consumption? there have been men
who have lived unhistorical lives and made love to unhistorical women who have given birth
to unhistorical sons and unhistorical daughters, made of what they understood as dust, though
such men and women in grainy daguerreotypic, in the grey we call silver and in the decorum
we forget as our beginnings.
as well when fingertips revisit the ribs, as well when a palm against the chest recalls what
lets it feel the strange organ pumping. as by instinct, the millimetered skin answering through
dermis the rhythm and as it is. though these aren't the only words we've spoken, and if in
translation you find some phonetic discrepancy i tell you all my words had their source in
mind, had as their end the slow vibrato of your voice and through the air which sought no edit,
which sought no reprisal.
is it dishonest to believe in something and not live it? is it less than to
believe in nothing and yet live?
over the lit island planes ferrying passengers. roaring lights one after another
towards laguardia. travelers, to distant places. will they know our ways? will
they know our language? i turn, and there past the bricklined streets of forest
hills and floral park, hauppauge and to montauk, and across the reconciling sea,
there, lying something like distraction like vocation like promise, a city made
for travelers, as all cities are. new york, haven of travelers and soupbowl of
freeloaders. watering hole of ambition and mecca of pain. where the weak come to
be strong, where the weaker come to know they are weak.
yet, anticipant of sunrises and unsure of the setting, there are climes
on which to place my feet. rolling hills and ancient stones and vineyards to feel
my step at the same time that unfamiliar phrase becomes otherwise. what is not
and cannot be home, to you, i am coming home. i will not say i can be with you
for as long as you want me, and i will not say i felt anything less than the
enormity abiding every time i utter a word and every time undress to fit body
to body as if by axiom. i will not say this is forgotten.
there are bottles enough to fill a thousand oceans.
what is your story, because i know you have one. you did not get here, to this fourteenth
street church door without touching at least innumerable lives. these shuffling mounds
under the motionsensor light of ourlordjesuschrist, under the gates where believers
seek entry and some to find and some to find otherwise. i don't know what it means when
we find shelter in the arches of doors locked shut.
but there is always the dissatisfactory idea. the dialectic, which it seems even the
wisemen propound, that we should trust our struggles and that we should extract good out
of evil and that we should believe that it follows that because our path is difficult we
should believe there is some grand design favoring us and that because we have scars and
wear that means we have some claim to this arcane category of wisdom. i have been, have
experienced all, of these things, have cast a raised eyebrow at every suspect millisecond
of their speciologies. i tire as fast as they speak.
there are some who find themselves in such a place, under the sunlight skirting the riverside
pillars at fourteenth street. the lightpierce crawling along the concrete during your unwoken
hours to lurch up your cheek and finding the crevice of your closed sleeping eye, you wake to
a cramped leg and bruised right arm, for tomorrow you will sleep on your left and fulfill the
symmetry sworn to you by whatever powers have brought you to this arch, in this city, before
my eyes. and that i have seen you, it is impossible that i will forget you.
when under the vertigo curves of the sky, and the clouds skimming as fast as the wind you
feel. as if some unity chose to reveal itself even for a moment to sturdy the faith you felt
had stumbled at the corner of fifth and lex. the things that have been awakened in me have been
there, have even in the nadir when sleep with the filth and cheap vodka and ciscostained madness
in the streets, mad because beautied, mad because forgotten, was the cadence of my night. stars
do not fall in new york.
friend, there are unscaleable mountains and untreaded plateaus and ricks of unpitchforked hay
and leaning grassblades in me, of all you have known of me. the callous oversexed urbanite, a
cigarette and a bottle of gin to crush out the night from my memory as though life were not
even worth the remembrance. the incumbent disaster known to boil through the day though you
know me full of humor and kindness. i am not humored and i am not kind. i have tasted in the
brimming of midnight the sour future of this. i have tasted my end and it reeks of promise.
you spoke of love. you spoke of love but it's not like the others. not like the kiss that bruises
lips or underwear slipping over kneecaps as by intuition, as by the fact of my touching you. it
was love spoken in the raw, which begins and ends in the same place. it does not grow, it does not
diminish. it is the bare recognition which does not require deliberation or getting to know or
meetingtheparents or dinner at her favorite restaurant or the tallied years or superhuman
patience or even the eternity sworn by rings and witnessed by priests. you spoke of something other
than my cock and balls and the wet quivered cunt and i, i understood.
yet. the road before. though you live on air and dumpster derge, you live. though you move to new
definitions. though it wasn't the dream you thought it would be. though, though it isn't desperate
your love and not even necessary but only so and it never asked anything more and it never gave
anything more than the tinge of lips at the aching syllable knowing not only the end of night
and the ascendent sun nor the end of such things as the pulse echoing across chasms between skin, but
above all the knowledge that there is an end and it has demands beyond the capacity of romantics
and though lovers in future know of us we must make the amendment that love does not conquer but
concedes, to whatever you term as all.
these four fingers at equidistance across the leftside chest with the nipple between. under the
careworn sky knowing not seconds but only the flow of hours the slowest symphony spilling its
guts across your consciousness. along the fingerprint fringe meeting the beat of the heart, more
distant than the thought of a touch in a dream of the dead. i've felt you, beating where you swing
in the vacuous hollow of the body, safe in the cage of my ribs, safe. even from the most severe
of adjectives.
it's the sweetest symmetry to taste, the pull in variant directions as only memory can do. "i was
here." watching the darkness lapse into the blue of morning. watching the paled yellow swoon of the
coming sun. turning away from its glare, as only a man can do.
the i is the fear of absence. and i have no place there, outside your apartment door, curling
fingers to a fist tight as iron punching through the surety of kensington deadbolts.
and the need, the same as the passage of blood in the silent channels of the body, the same which
breathes throughout the night and who can speak to the strange channels between dreams and sense.
our scientists are little more than babes with titanic discourse.
i never seriously asked why it was you. it was always selfevident. as the timid fingertips reaching
across the space of air filled with fear and mazzy star, as ends sought ends themselves. yet there
is always the moment where selfevident isn't evident enough and it becomes the boy to turn the
knob of the door you in the most arcane language forbid him to turn. he is expert in the placement
of boundaries, and will stint little to find the abiding lines. loose him, and let him go.
what thoughts in the space of a cigarette. that the length of paper and pesticided leaf could
be the measure of some unforeseen advance. like the agent in the space of every equation which,
while dormant in our two plus twos, can at some pinpricks in the linear scale of infinite turn
twoplustwo into five.
but isn't that it, the thing that persists even when you were sure you obliterated it somewhere
between the space of the brick wall and your drunk fist. the thing you try to tell in words though
instead of filling in the gaps you fall through them, with the attendant shame and no less the
guilt fit to you like the most perfect clothes. it's so right, therefore. when it was only, at
the first, the motiveless antagony,sourceless and yet so present at the strings, puppeteering
the dull browned light of the cafe and how the cadence of some song would strike unintended
notes to sate the thirsty continuity of an unheard phrase, how so thick the present grew at even
the fraction of a note, at even the figment of a look thrown from the eyes that have gazed on
rice paddies or radiated concrete. such is the living in a city that is no friend to origins.
your pulling down your skirt when you saw my eyes wander to its teasing fringes, for modesty.
seated on that ledge across the train station, the shrugged smile in winter as if you saw in me
things i was not conscious of. the touch of your fingers catching me reading jude the obscure
midsentence, the same book where i thought i might find something of you.
standing before you, in all of what is me and undenying, in that basement hallway, with the
sheer exigency of mere telling at the tip of the tongue and what should i tell you. on that street
corner where i felt your fallow touch because it could not have and where i felt even the breath
after me, wishing me, in some way, in some uncontingent way, to love me. that look, your poised
forearms at their wishful right angles, your eyes locked and downcast to the other side of the
world, and i began to know the difference between wanting and understanding.
here, it isn't the swearing of the moment's death. it's the fear of its becoming. and yet
a fear commensurate with pleasure. i felt it most in the sober night where my body dared
ask what now? though you draw the taut horsehair along that smooth vibrato and though you
recite the tenants of some ideological history and though your body shivers at familiar scents,
because your heart remembers more than your mind, there is that depth in you the same as the
promise of christmas presents and the sight of your parents asleep in their bed and some
suburban picnic where not even the ants trouble you.
even so. ca ne fait rien. in this moment, there was, only was the rain speckling against my arms,
trapping itself in the hairs and as such like pinballs in a poorly made decade old pinball
machine ready to be played and in no way. it's an old machine and though it looks like new
it's got the junkyard antedate and even worse the owner's signoff.
the sound of impatient traffickers, bryant park in the low clouds courted by the fogged bastion
of bank of america, sherry netherlands, plaza hotel, and whathaveyou, and most important how
the cop at suchandsuch directed me to the memory of that winter when you sold hats. i ate at
le pain quotidien. a cheap piece of bread to keep the time. i smoked cigarettes at subway
vents to keep my blood flowing. how would it be known that years later i would have loved nothing
more than to leave.
when you feel the swearing of the moment's death. does it make you grab more closely the
body above you, in the bed that was yours for a moment? the subtle indenture of tattooes
and the curve of the skin which does not love itself and the eyes which give a look which
is not their own but a vacancy asking to be filled.
some of us live in such a moment, and our life becomes reliving its death unto our own.
a single moment, weightless, and crushing us beneath what we don't know. an insult, a look,
the caress of some past hated lover, a scent blown from some innocent bystander of such collision,
a squealing bike tire whose note sounds the same as the bridge of some song played in the
drowsy midnight of a yesterday forgotten, calendrically absurd, his hands lurch broken
toward it like rigor mortised follies.
my woman, in the dawn of her dream's mending and in the grey of such matin songs as we did not
hear and did not play. in the long silent and unawakened night there was a
sun careening its flared way about ancient orbits to risings unseen by lovers such as us.
and so the twilight over the place we would call the dusty windowsill, and over the place we
refused to call by such a name as the end.
the confused reflection of the day. some potpourri aged to scentlessness. edgeworn fragments
teasing their fulfilment, herekittykittying you towards that original unity you somehow
believe is promised you.
fear, and only by habit. what he knows is what he expects is what he looks for is what he creates.
the world is the making of mad men, men who were children once and never loosed their
impetuous desires for overpriced trinkets. a generation of glitterbombed adolescents speaking in
vogue, perfume cannons helming reality. once a child with a cry, unto an unpulsed body buried as
deep as tall as it walked. ceremony never fails to insult its object.
such, thoughts in the arms of others. to be touched, to feel the swearing of death in your body,
in your tissues, scornful as they are. the less beautiful the more skin you take away; you cannot
challenge the intrinsic. what is born is the hardest to overcome. yet, yet the touch. yet the only
thing which had the same name even at the foundation, even in the most obscure etymology did it go
by the name. changeless, unmistakeable, pure. a fingertip, the warm curve at your outermost, the
pulsed body, the heart louder than creation, the voice which does not know its own language, and the
eyes that though they see are laughably illiterate.
pulled out of the typical way, the way which has become what i know as the quotidian, which has
become some simulacrum of life. i rise i piss dress eat move thank you miss have a good day sir
vodka whiskey hit the six on time hit by thoughts in no time and l to home to the confused
reflection of the day the day in its intolerably typical way.
yet. waking to the smell her dreams have left her, the smell of newly woken skin. unwashed
in the ruffled morning sheets, her smile as if she doubted my being there when her eyelids crested
to vision of mine having watched her for hours in the thunderspent dawn. the futile lurch of my
body towards hers, but twenty blocks, but a halfhour walk, but the length of a cigarette in
this unforgiving summer.
it is the impotence of prose, you know. the perennial sterility of words in her inimitable bed,
in the calm apocalypse of her arms. the forestalled tongue lapping up the only discourse it knows
to speak what the body has already perfectly spoken. then, what is left, but the sad glance eliding,
the coital glare funneling into the eyes' infinite, the breath wishing it were last in the interminable
exchange between earth and beast.
the typical impotence of prose. that we speak lovers' volumes recoursing to our century's
cliches or to the sterile safety of silence, content with a look which tells us all is well
when all may not be who are we to make such a judgment? life needs its judgments, and should we
not judge by the cover when everything but the pages is granted us? we aren't partial to
translation. but it isn't possible for me to say that the distant flicker of thunder or the
ear against my heart or the gasp in the uncalendared moment did not knife its way into a part
of me still as dust and purling into the cool air between us, shook with our heat and blessed with
the desperately wordless tongue licking the eternity between it and the inside, of a thing it knows
must be there. a body yet not a body. a spirit, yet nothing so cliche. a mind but not so trivial. a
lover but not what you think. a god, an end, a coffee cup, a cigarette , a sickness, an apocalypse,
a woman, all into one.
remembered things are not as painful as those forgotten. when the day has run its course,
and what's left is the night bloomed with thought of the touch, with a thought that aches
for a word, any word. that some things are unspeakable, that we know them to be so, that we
voice them in the expulsion of breath we knew what it meant. when i felt the suprasternal
notch the quiver of your voice before it became words and how i couldn't slow time to tell
the difference.
i wasn't even granted the disapproval of her face, when it came to it. the guilt of still
loving. her, her eyes shut as if to shun what infection they felt at their door, and that
i've written such things, they can never be taken back. they're part of it.
he was only interested in the beginning. the last word was her favorite.
don't make everything a cemetery. it's tempting, to die, or to give over so easy the imputed
responsibility to the waste subsisting in you by default. those same paths you've walked,
sometimes more than once, even to find what was there in the first place.
but he knows at the first, yet he somehow finds the need to swim as far as he can, fighting
the breaker waves to the fearful and serene. exhausted yet finding the breath to laugh his last.
and in the attenuated consciousness, perhaps then rest things like answers.
his eyes. the taut curves of his arm the bicep leading abrupt to the fore and the thin hair
leaning slant the wind. his lips claiming the office of breath when all it is and has been was
the expansion of lungs not taking but receiving the air which could not stand a vacuum. his hands,
slow and wise for their age. his look in the light from the cafe window the undulate hum of traffic
the smell of his coffee the taste of mocha fresh on my lips the sugar on my teeth, i lick them to
taste the conversation taste his look for as long as he smiles to me.
i want to take him to bed, and i know how that sounds. it sounds like, like a bed. shaking its feet
against wood and waking the neighbors and never did i care so little for others' ears. there i rest,
waylaid in his smile, crushed in his weight. the weight of him, him whom he is. organ, tissue, blood,
the shame of him, the beauty, the end which weighs on him which weighs on me. i feel it all. the piss
and shit and shame and the cum ready to fire into me and the lips flown with the exhale and dripped
with the sourceless sweat and that look those eyes telling me promises telling me secrets which
could undo the world the eyes which have faced it and have not laughed or cried but have accepted.
i've touched him where he has no feeling, which he did not recognize as a place in him. he felt
something, though he could not put a word to it. he put his hands on me to find out and he hasn't
yet understood.
it was something like summer, when i held you close with your lidlocked eyes signifying
what bristling desire clawed at the underside of your skin. though your lips a millennium away,
i heard them, sheer open, the air escaping which otherwise had been the voice speaking something
like words, sweet exhalations for the bare communication adorning the silence is all i've ever
asked of you.
the view on the m. vinyled block rising to the fiat of if you say something spray something, the
miles of trashstrewn alleys slit through this city like the infrequent lanes of secrets the same
as in the body. and though some walk in such narrows, they walk through the echoes of monsters.
later
and there is a storm beating over me, neither question nor answer only mere being so. as i find
i am, only mere being so. as i watch the city of fame swallowed in the katabatic sheets of cooling
rain, as i pull the air which has formed this torrent through the miles of cigarette tobacco into
the lungs which know but do not remember their first breath out of the ninemonth sea they
floated in like buoys. as i watch the edges of buildings through the ashgrey air slowly fading
as it was before men arrived as it was before even then ten thousand centuries plunged into
a past which is so thick with origin it has no name indeed to name is murder.
being, and only so. no question and no answer. they're primitive concepts from some antiquated time,
from an era of my life eliding into this strange contemporary, into the stalled transition the static
aggravation exacerbated by this monopolizing language which has not learned the words necessary to
describe it. the storm, in passing, i have reminded you i have spoken to you if you do not understand
that is because you have taken a path away from me i do not lament your absence i have moved because
that is what storms do i have moved into middle village into rego park and i will move until i dissipate
for these are not my elements and this is not my thunder and this is not mine what you call fury for this
is what storms are we are fearsomely beautiful yet a moment and no longer. we are, we do not ask why.
being, and fiercely so. no mitigation and no respite. like the brevity of a summer storm that
knows its power and knows as well to die young. being, and nothing more. til the body runs its
term. no indignation and no complaint. whether it has been done to me whether i did it to myself.
in a bed in the street in the dirt. neither condemnation nor praise. surrounded by love or nothing.
smiling or no. whether paradise or hell. with all my love and all my grievances in tow. not what
dreams may come but what thoughts will be with me, then.
you've wounded the good. you've turned to shit the freelygiven body in the name, in the
equivocal name of a ferocious love which has made its claim as both inconsumable and
inconsummate. yet you welcome the ludicrous chase, after the shearing of clothes in a drunken
midnight to the nail trailing its edge across alien skin of whatshername to the hair slung
through the wedges of fingers finding their way along the curves of the body wherein is the
desire searching for you, hungry for your answers, eating their way through to your core.
of course the core. where else. could the finger that traced you tell you more, the breath that
insensibly rolled over your chin and along your cheek, the feet that didn't know what to do with
themselves so those fatuous toes curled as best they could, the belly hot with the breath that
could not keep with the beat of the heart shivering the chest in the dark as my fingers, as my
body lay into the curves it somehow recognized as home.
lightning in the air split down the lowlying clouds. sheets of water slow falls a dali dream
in daylight. where things ought not be yet here they are.
how the dream is the closest you can come. how the brush of a stranger awakens so much as if the
coincidence of bodies situated in subways held the finest jigsaw solution. what is it when
you get the answer before you even ask the question?
where things ought not be yet here they are. perhaps myself, le sans-abri. we call ourselves
without, those missing the integral part though how frustratingly nameless though it is possible
at one time it had a name we have forgotten though it is possible we decided it was so valuable
we chose to forget it. perhaps, to forget is not a gesture of meaninglessness but of affection;
i only want to experience you in that most perfect moment, before you became familiar,
that moment i refuse to remember because it has no place aside the usual. i want to know you as
you are in your beginning.
still, the unbelonging things must go on living, must. the law of compulsion. watch in the center of
a rooftop bruit the sliver of electric death carving its way through the air heated before even
touched. in the riff of trains beneath. in the concrete slab blooming its gravel in the sweltered
ire of summer. in the pitfall sin of always. the pitfall sin of never. laws of being, always laws
of compulsion.
so hauntingly familiar. and here by neither port nor pass yet here. disbelonging but for that i smile
i laugh i nod and i eat. it's funny how genuine you can be how genuine you
there she stands with something like a smile, a body like a pile of curtains with a face
with something like a smile. i don't smile back with anything like a smile. for fear,
you know, of it looking anything like a smile.
you stand as you have these days, the monstrous skyline consuming horizons with its light,
with its usurptious grandeur. loud with memory, unbearably cacaphonic. unbearably as the
climax of a history unyours, as a history blown into you simply by being, and the fucking
language it speaks to you. fascist in its demands, luxuriant in its passivity. like evasion,
like an infant impetuous reminding you the power you really hold how love and rage return
to the same home at the same time with the same sheets in the bed yet how neither can really
remember who made it that morning.
yet the woman. nothing of fear, not even of death. you look, and it strikes you that desire
should, or might have been there. old as she was, wrinkled in drapes of skin as she was,
halfblind as she was, as if she still harbored some secret sexuality which could touch into you,
those untapped and regretful climes. a fool almost synonymous with a wiseman. yet the woman. and
such like a witch can only do, mocking the flames that lick her toes, that slowly melt away the
parts of her you touchedlovedkissed at the skysundering crack of thunder in some ridgewood apartment
like it was expectedalmostsomethinglikenatural though her walls held something of a truth which
spoke yet in such an unfortunate dialect.
of an unremembered wisdom. look but don't touch. fuck but don't touch. touch, but for god's sake.
only at the skin, and talk in cliches. any deeper, even at a nailscratch, well.
though, you've been there. in the classically beautiful brooklyn; in the ugly tealiron manhattan;
and the sun flickering through the antisuicide grating via williamsburg. that at 28th street, well.
well, i stand there.
tu dis ne me quitte pas ma chere. d'accord. your face in a photo scanned, might as well at
multiple removes like between two mirrors chasing the immediate into the most impossible
infinity.
yet the smile at the brimmed exhausted twilight of an earth that seems so tired of revolving,
so ready to turn over into waitful and comforting space. the unpregnant black, ready and empty.
not a threat, not a promise, but an offer.
yet her smile at the edge of the act of thinking like some oppressive embroidery, threaded to
remind and nothing more as if it were so easy to turn on your heels. sometimes you watch someone
walk away from you for years before you get the idea. and even then your heels are like stones
undetached from the earth and part of that obedient core spinning elegant about an undivulgent
nothing we so uncreatively refer to as space.
then, and only then, at the confrontation of myself and whatisnotmyself (but perhaps that
formulation is obsolete) can i ever say hers were the hips my hands remember hers were the eyes
mine think are watching somewhere hers was the breath heaving at my touch curving into the winter
like a meandering wish and hers was the body halflit by moonlight and hers was the voice filled
with a desire i answered and hers was the body. hers was the body.
in the retrospect, it's like a present you remember living but you don't remember having. the sight
of the father in tears and how it evinced a kind of humanity, and years later how a similar trail
seemed to sign something inside of him. an interiority you would be proud of, solemn. learned and
redeemed.
though how it sounded real. though it came into you like something promising rectification.
though his face, the face of a man who existed in the times before you, gave his hand in
your making. though he seemed the craftsman, there was only the apprentice. and a minor at that,
a child himself, something human making humans. boys long for it, and it takes some time to hit
the wall that lets them move on.
desire waiting its time to disenravel to disinvolve itself. when there was a heart and how its beatings
now seem the echoes of an organ used to wanting. though feeding off the pulse of ancient lovers,
to recreate the age when the alien hand put itself supple against the young reverberate chest, feeling
every beat through the crevices of fingertips, through the identities granted us via the fathers
with their offturned faces rough hands lips straight and void of movement, of those signs
reminding us lovers of the fools that made us.
it's the comedicallybreasted woman at the counter that tells you: your desires are not only not your
own, but they're also quite ridiculous. the greatest mistake you can make regarding
the perfect is to trust it.
yet the perfect is maddening, if only because it exists. so you walk around with a noose in your back pocket and
something like a prayer in your hand through the streets you walk so easily, so routinely, like a spinning top
used to the motion yet on the outside an anomoly because for god's sake it will not stop spinning.
yet perfection is something other than what you know in the moment. on the corner of stockholm and cypress, on
the six next to the woman whose downturned face hides with the black sheen of hair her face and when she looks
to remind herself of where she is in the geography in this city you see someone who could love you.
of course, it's just a thought. the thought of a boy whose end may be his own. the nameless, in exile, searching
for a thing without a name. absurdly romantic, absurdly so. though he confronts the threatening horizon, so
beautifully deaf, so naively commanding, as if the thing didn't cover all our hopes and fears. as if there were
nothing so frightening and so promising beneath.
yet perfection. that look in the glint of the sun. though you were moving too fast to give it the answer it
seemed to be looking for. the desire that waned because you answered it with a question and not like bloom's wife
a yes and oh yes a yes. to announce the terminus of something great. something outside cause,
which neither wants nor requires something to come after it.
christ without his followers is still christ.
he loves you, but in french. c'est son minimalisme postmoderne. c'est son amour, tu vois. what they have
to do with one another. he's a fool, yes. though you love fools, and he won't disappoint.
he's taken your curves with the greatest delicacy, with the most controlled of fears. he has been in the places
men dream of when they see you walk, with that untouchability, that soulsuspending beauty. a determined step,
in shinhigh boots, the wind brushing that firered hair like a weeping willow before the storm. quiet and
tempted, knowing the danger, knowing the summer night blast of sudden thunder and how it comes how you hear
it only after it has blown you apart.
he stands facing the slowly billowing clouds, knows the arching vertebrae in his neck are not his, nor his feet,
nor his heart having emerged, bodied out of immutable laws unconcerned with him. that we know we die, that we are
born with an endpoint, we must have been special to have known this.
or so his thoughts run. though they always return to you, no matter the starting point. they have always found
their way back to you. how in your warmth. how in your endstopped desire sitting next to him, watching scifi and
him feeling and not being wrong about your ungrantable wish. how it was not you but another shade of you that drew
off his clothes, to touch you in some enclosed and unimpugnable space. how he looked in your eyes and into their
satisfied vacancy, how his desire was laughably disproportionate with the touch, the look, and the spread of your
legs. and if you're unsure of the things you say, if you have even the slightest tinge of doubt, figure time into
your equation. and henceforth be absolved.
il a son desir seulment.
there's a part of you. it's sick. it's the part that climbs to rooftops and stands to watch the
horizon, that undulate horizon of light they call a city. how the buildings stand so geometrically
stoic, so blithely lit, with all the fear and uncertainty and all the pain living, sustaining, irredemptive at
their skyscraping feet. though at the southern tip of that majestic island rises a building birthed
to repair twelve years of pain. to think, that some of us walk about, the living symbols of some
antiquated and unrecognized pain. our mothers and fathers, tortured til death but that we are here,
that we are walking among the living.
that i came here to recuperate. that i came here for some resolution, to find instead another part of
the curve. the curve of the circle i've spun myself into. it doesn't spin without my lucid moments. my moments
of nostalgia. of love. of feeling an alien soul revealing, involving itself. perhaps i came here for the
same reasons, why this place rebuilds on the very site of destruction and nowhere else. as if it had a choice.
yet part of me, it walks with all that winter memory. right at the cresting of apocalypse that seemed
so beautiful as it held to awe all the watching eyes. and though it came crashing as it promised it came so
slow, so seductive like a lover's hand and what you thought was pleasure was actually obliteration. the sleeves
of life are long, and though perhaps not meant to deceive, are nonetheless expert at the execution.
she likes the weathered things. the things decaying. becoming lesser to become more. she likes
the poison of a slow addiction. she has no adjective.
what a range, she says. what a god and devil living under the same roof, bickering over the rent.
what a range that can somehow sustain a living thing yet that's the thing you know how i can
be near her and not implode, how it's possible that all of me can still be so when i walk from
her door, still be so when she touches me holds my face in her palm holds me in the sallow
austerity of her eyes. if you've ever been on the knife's edge of annihilation.
and boy this is the definition of foolishness even in the solemn and beau light of a space which
is not yours but a place which welcomes you as either love or disease, as either one of the
thousand names of god or as your own, the name which they know you as the name which they call you
the name of lazarus. though they don't speak the word that is the word nonetheless. lazarus. back
from the dead.
too much always ensures you get at least enough. you do it to yourself. that's okay, because i'm not
blaming anybody.
show me god. i know you might just be a tour guide but you can point me in the right direction.
it's not enough to know there might be. i need to feel it in my face, i need to feel it in my heart,
i need that divine scream which leaves me in no doubt as to what i'm supposed to do.
there's something of the future in how i write, though the past is what fuels it. i guess that's the
way it goes. darkest before the dawn, damned if you do, and other cliches. it's not that i have an
aversion to the hackneyed. the fact is that this is genuinely new. nothing like this has ever happened
before and will never happen again.
it was her body rising in the early morning to the sound of thunder tearing the sky and the cold
about me. it was how the only thing i wanted, could then ever want, was to lie next to her. and it
seemed nothing else, nothing more. to touch the bones beneath her, the solid certainty of flesh, or
was it a reminder that the pulse of her talk is more than that which fuels her heart. so i'm to reprimand
when everytime she speaks i want to close us with a kiss.
my hand to my chest, watching the city of fame, the horizon of pixelated light and this is not my
terminus. there are other things. there are greater things than this.
understanding isn't always a good thing. sometimes, it's better to be so involved with something that
you forget such things as objectivity, manners, calmness. we sometimes respect a little bit of
ignorance, a naive and fervent spirit that has few reservations about crossing an ocean to put bullets
into other people. freedom needs a body count, you know.
it's the writing. it's like an ailment. no. it's a fullblown fucking infection. it's a godgranted
disease for that silly transgression. punished for fruit. if we desired before we fell, we were human
all along. but sorry genesis, your sin just ain't in fashion anymore.
yet. i've felt what it is to understand. i've sat across from her in the cold breeze from a strange
spring day, under the high ceiling, and i feel from her more than she speaks. like most things: not
nonsense, but sense in pieces.
it's feeling yourself watched on the subway. feeling some other's eyes on you, comforted by the sentiment - that you saw
me out of all those others, that i was the one whom for some reason you couldn't take your eyes from. you couldn't take
your eyes from me. but then comes that voice, benign yet inhumanly factual, "THIS IS...FOURTEENTH STREET...UNION SQUARE."
my stop.
it's that feeling at the corner of 37th and lex, where the admonishing orange palm tells you to stop your feet and the
droll rush of traffic and the girl in the black slacks on her cell phone may be looking at you through those
infuriating sunglasses maybe imagining you shirtless in the low light of her midtown apartment but maybe not and
the sensation of being in a place which once was trees and where people have died - on the corner where you
thought that annihilation might not be so bad. where you thought that even though it might hurt - well, what's a
little bit of pain?
from the brooklyn bridge, it looks like nothing else. i don't know what i came here for. it's almost like i wish i never met
you at all.
you can't tell me i don't remember what it was to sleep so near your bed. to know you said, even feel, the words
you spoke when you learned what my true thoughts were. you make one think twice before he writes.
the problem is that you can't edit immediacy. you can't unsay that joke you said to your date, the one you were so sure was
funny but once it left your mouth turned out to be not only unfunny but vaguely offensive. and one of the most important
things about being human is learning not only how to accommodate such vagaries, but, perhaps even more importantly, how to
laugh when you fail to do so. it isn't set aside for us that we should perfect ourselves; indeed, we shouldn't wish to ever
achieve that insipid, boorish state of perfection. and if one does, we shun him as a dystopian. a tyrant. one whose absolutism
appeals to our desire for that perfection. we would have called him hitler seventy years ago. now, we have no name. we are still
trying to figure him into something a little more, a little more human.
i didn't come here to be safe, or secure, or happy. i came here to know what comes next. rebecca,
i came here to know.
when the towers came down, i didn't care. i was cool then. nothing, nothing could touch me.
but i was stupidly passionate about things. i had half-formed philosophies and unpracticable ideologies. i had a way of being
which could never be. now that i see more, now that i know more, well, all the knowledge without the passion to put it into
being. let us not teach history; it ruins the future.
when the towers came down, i was alone. my mother shouted through two floors of our house in jersey. she was scared, for some
reason. but i'd be the stalwart. i'd be the glass which is still glass even after its breaking. fly a plane into me, you'd only
get laughter. but when you've time to think, when destruction in general takes a sickeningly human face, when the calm and
monolithic silence of two towers turns to burning and collapsing and the air turns to ash and falling bodies and men and women
leaping into certainty with the immediacy of thoughts put to strain with the laws of acceleration and their falling and the buckling
of impervious steel and the smell of roasted concrete and the smell of grey and they're falling and what have we done. victory
looks sick when it so resembles tragedy.
when the towers came down, i don't remember what i felt. now, watching one world trade center plaza, or whatever you want to call it,
going up, there is a sense of having arrived here upon something of a reparation. upon reconciliation. knowing the past and the present
are in no way similar yet finding some way for them to meet, even if it means making a bigger building. i watch it, everyday on the
williamsburg, its black frame rising with a glass shell in slow but sure pursuit. i think so many things, whose expression has no single word.
when the towers came down, i was a boy. i was a child with no inclination but to follow. in the fear and rubble of an angry
world. i was a boy and nothing more. and now i am unsure whether anything makes me more than otherwise.
when it comes down to it, i was nothing but a child inclined to fear and rage to the foundering of my soul. inclined to follow
terror out to its conclusion. to chase the violence into my core, find something there, true, to my utmost conclusion. i was a
boy, born to equivocal will, fraught with life, unto the fierce and irrefutable.
looking through pictures of those ancient lovers. one of the more vexing problems is the modern condition. voices that
seem to speak from every philosophy. the passionate. the stoic. the rational. the cynic. the mad. the extremist. the humble.
it's to the point where making a decision is like standing in the corner of a room where every philosophy from every generation
is sitting and bickering with its neighbor about the niceties of such and such decision. before you know it, you're dead, having
never made any decision at all.
but yes, remembering. the warm light from your desk lamp, the silence of your books. that warmth from your body with the leaf
tattoo, the safety of sheets. and the whole empty just past your window, an entire season devoted to attrition. not a year since
i held your body, kissed you like the flash of a blown out lightbulb, could feel my fingertips on your bare thighs like the most
severe gratitude, annihilating such a stupid thank you, like the wish of your moaning, like the quiet stun of lips and the
shocked arch in your spine, telling me a kiss can hardly do more talking. not a year since you understood i couldn't give you
what you wanted.
it was your finger tracing the sheen of snow on the table top, in the coldly silent air. "i was here"
what i came here for. that's the question you ask. why here? to answer "why anywhere, as long as it isn't where i was"
is too easy. in that case your question answers itself. no. i won't be here the next time you wonder what i came here for.
and if they ask, tell them: i left to find out why i left.
because the world still has some shimmer of meaning. because there may still be yet something left to stick around for.
hell, if it didn't, its fraudulence would have been exposed long ago. and unless you're comfortable with it, you don't
remain where everything is lying to you.
the end is nameless from the outset; its quality, its significance, supersedes your ability to name it. but it's like sex.
an end desired unto madness, only to roll over and go sleep as if it were never there. as if the end eradicates the beginning. and for some, won't be in the morning.
and i do argue with myself. in bed. in the subway. in the bathroom. that this is it and notions like transcendence and ultimate
redemption and heroism and good manners are nothing more than residue from past cultures which has unfortunately snuck its way
into our own. that skin marks the limit. that piss and shit and blood and cum are the reality, the truest fluids whose mechanical
and obscene flow make possible that godgiven soul. that my desires are mad longings for something that does not exist. and will
i risk my life, will i expose myself, will i so sever the present, for this. for this?
the question you ask. the curve of her breath in the winter air, scaling up and billowing into the city of fame. i still
remember you and your memory is the pause a customer sees during the wait of credit approval.
there comes a time when it hits you, "it" being whatever. the potency of the moment in which you understand that it is
this way and not otherwise. that she is looking at you and there is nothing else but the vacancy of your volition and the
promise of humiliation you feel if you don't close the aperture between you. sometimes you must create your own will, else
the world keeps spinning as if you were never there.
i remember. i remember.
the question is one of style. you must write, but most of what you write is, will be drivel. fodder. practice. and writers after you
will read you for practice. and those after them. hence.
i saw a girl in the union square subway tonight. she was playing bach on the violin. i saw her eyes look about the crowds and i watched
her and she was beautiful.
it is honesty in writing. truthfulness. sincerity. i'm no musician. no artist. no lover. but a writer - if i am, i will be. and if i am not,
it will be quite the story to discover so.
beauty on a rope. the thing about hanging is that it uses the body's own weight against itself. all that mass leaping into space to become
the body's destruction. a crushing with nothing pressing down.
new york has become a site of not memories but the place of memories. i dont drink to forget but to remember in ways otherwise, since the
man is memories and only so. i need to feel, i need to remember. to not is to be a perverted something. and i'd rather be nothing than that.
always at the edge of what could satisfy me.
i was her bony king of nowhere. how long can we rip on pop songs before it becomes a joke?
didion says she doesn't know what she's thinking until she writes it down. does that serve better as inspiration or as a goal i should strive
for? je ne sais pas. je ne peux pas gagner in any real sense. i think - the fact that suicide exists makes it all seem like bullshit.
i haven't said anything terribly profound. i will eat you alive. there'll be no more lies. it's part of the problem. somehow if i don't do something
absolutely significant, it doesn't seem worth remembering. i know my desire is to form a narrative complete with a beginning and an end and only the
most important stuff in between.
but that isn't living, boy.
she wasn't even close to me, but here i am writing about her. or my thoughts of her suicide. i saw her sometimes with that steadfast smile
and innocent expression. did i think something was wrong then? no more than with everyone else.
but there she was. and perhaps it was that she was beautiful that it strikes me. as if the team of the human race had lost its best player. perhaps
the proximity. perhaps the fact that i saw her, had been in the same room as she had been.
if we had shared a word would it had been any different?
so tell me if it's easy. tell me it meant something to you. tell me you thought there was something more and it wasn't anything but transcendence
you were after. don't say you held all the answers before we had met and didn't share with me all you knew of beauty and human life.
the volume of created art exceeds the possibility of its adequate criticism,
unless academia adopts a curriculum of specialization which will allow each piece of art its due. that
is, if academia wishes to preserve itself.
anyway, one truth i've learned moving to new york is to trust your gut. we may not be able to articulate
those funny feelings, but we can let our instincts lead us. has reasoning with the world gotten us any further?
tanqueray and the pen. which is inaccurate. broadening the mind and the pen is a better statement. whether liquor or illicit drugs are
your stirrups, let them widen your awareness into either ease of thought or discovery. birth and death are your bookends; what and how you choose
to read in the midway are your choice.
if you ask me what i would like to see from this, i can only tell you this. what i see, saw, and will see might as well be what i wish to see.
for there is no other world save that which we have made.
she had a hurricane smile
the storm is over, and another storm begins. rather, it has been ongoing. and the knowledge
coming out of its experience is precious.
i stood on a rooftop, the wind ripping at my clothes. a cigarette in hand and a bottle of gin
at my feet. i watched the greyed clouds and the sky aflame with the spent terror of a storm.
the earth was in heat and i was her lover, at least for a night.
i watched the empire state and its tower, as if in spite of the storm. if we have made anything
to counter the cool indifference of our mother nature, it is a building that still stands after a
storm.
yet i thought, this place, this fever of capitalism and the offspring of anxious ideologies -
it was made by those whose names i do not know, whose wallets were perhaps no thicker than mine.
men and women who wanted nothing more than i do. this is my history, and as such cannot be stricken
from me. what has built this place is also what has built me.
and the thing which has made me, it has a name i cannot speak.
the suggestion of disaster is the best salesman. today a hurricane is predicted to hit
new york and i can only say been there seen that got the t-shirt for another promise of
apocalypse. at some level, we wouldn't mind the walls of our home being ripped from their
foundations or the very pillars of civilization toppled like castles of sand. i think that
maybe our being in the presence of great destruction is reassuring, since then we would know
that there is a force that exceeds, humbles us. let it take the responsibility of ordering the
universe, since even our best philosophy has only reiterated what we know in our hearts.
let our gods destroy us. then we'll know they're really there.
the girl with the hummingbird on her arm. the man nearnaked on the williamsburg bridge.
the weeping child who went around the corner out of his father's sight, who does not understand his father's
anger as anything but anger.
i see what i am. and what i remember is never the total record of what i am. i am frail and dying, and the time limit
imposed on me is evidence that my life is, like beauty, either the most precious thing or the most futile.
and the fear in my lungs when i hear that sound of a ubiquitous doubt, taking the color of whatever i look upon. i
must learn how to live with a tongue that speaks both flasehood and truth in the same word. then what will i gain if
i put my finger in my christ? the divine has nothing to prove to me. it knows nothing of divinity. it knows nothing of
us. it has made us but what of it? the deaf musician whose beautiful note rings out from his instrument and fades
into a colding air.
and its remarkable that if you pass that paradoxized boundary between god and man, it all comes to the same. the
shivering of your soul in a mute infinite, awe to incomprehensible enormity whether what you find is god or nothing
at all.
i only had change for bach, a paltry thing i know. is it better to give nothing at all,
or give a little when you know you could give more?
i saw her on the subway car, through the window which i could not cross. there was another's hand around her,
caressing her hair, and i knew where i stood in her regard. the times when i am most surprised are those when i
tell myself i'm not.
and then the woman at the station, forcing herself in front of me and pushing open the door with her hand saying,
"let me get it this time," with a cold retributive glare. i knew i must have offended her, or that she thought i
had offended her, which are the same thing. i say nothing in return. let no one tell you reality isn't at least in some
degree composed of what we imagine.
"throughout humanity, god has revealed himself..." ---eavesdropped conversation
in union square
to follow the dictates of my latheshaper. to think, then know, then believe that once you do a thing
you have been doing it through eternity. then to only understand that you are in time, and the process
of your doing a thing at fifty has its roots in ages before you. forget free will. be free.
it isn't to say that those who have spent their lives in thought to prove philosophical concepts
spent their lives in waste. without them, we would have never learned how futile the whole endeavor is.
which of course brings up the whole question of waste. how can i tell anyone they've wasted their time?
how is my business any less wasteful than yours? is your business that of social reform and progress?
look at history and tell me a father's whole life hasn't been reversed by his son's profligacy, or that a
humanitarian scientist's greatest theorem hasn't been put to use in the decimation of other men's enemies.
among other things, the atrocities of our passing centuries argue the point that a good thought would perhaps
make a better miscarriage.
in new york. at long last out.
my little prophet reveals to me, and i'm solid at the shock of her foretelling. in a way i know these things.
i have always known them. is it my fear of choice that leads me to the supposition that my life is ordained a track
not of my own creating, but that i am following the grooves and channels made long ago by some celestial carpenter?
the thing about infinite is that it never was.
the rite of every son, to overcome the father.
it's an old argument, destiny. whether at every moment you or your god is at the helm of your decisions is a question i
could never hope to answer, even perhaps for the purposes of my own life. the benefit of our historical position is that we've heard the question
endlessly repeated, droning in our ears from our forbears. there comes a point in every argument where you simply give up. either because you've
exhausted your rhetorical artillery or because you realize age does not stop if you don't have the answers to living. we are getting old, and
our problems have always been the same. i saw a man in brooklyn today selling water bottles out of a cooler in a shopping cart. there he was, like
a shouting salesman from the old days: "get yer cold water!" we do what we need to, even if the struggle is needless.
the trick, boy, is not the doing but the becoming.
i was convinced for a long time that if i wasn't well off in society, i would die.
somehow, without money, all life would come to a halt. i would watch money go into my bank account,
money come out - bills getting paid and life going on as it should.
but i can't see that the captains of economic growth have kept up their end of the bargain,
and as a result my entire outlook has changed. for good or no, that's not the question.
the question is as it always has been: what am i going to do about it? i'm facing a problem unique to
the selfdestructive or those on the threshold of great things. i would like to belong to the latter group,
though these things are hardly of our own choosing. it remains to be seen whether or not i'm on the precipice
of madness or infamy. for most, the best parts of our story are told by others, and you have to go through the
often unpleasant process of dying before anyone would listen.
but i'm sitting in a chair trying to tell my story's importance before i've lived it. i have to feel the rawness and the concrete,
the fear and the exaltation, before i can have anything to say. like most things in life, there's a trial before the reward. will
i make anything of this, or will it turn to something of no consequence? an old man retired from his cleaning job, a minor pension,
tossing seeds at the birds in the park. no real story to tell. the best thing you could tell about me was that i died mad and drunk on
the floor of a dirty apartment with the pages of a masterpiece crumpled in my rigored hand.
dapper is one of those words you never use. the last time someone called me
dapper and wasn't telling some almost-funny joke about the nineteenth century...i can't remember.
it doesn't mean that the people i find myself in conversations with have vocabularies smaller
than my own (though this is often the case). it means - among other things - that words, like anything,
behave in trends. no one ever called me dapper just like no one ever called me a "avaricious carpet bagger" or
a "scurrilous rake." and even though these were pretty mean words to throw at someone before the twentieth
century (especially the former one), if you used them today you'd get more confused looks than challenges
to duels.
the wisest man, you can be sure, was once a great fool. and if you meet an old fool, he is either extremely clever or hardly there at all. old fools have always been so, and it is a mark of their stubbornness that they have never changed. when i meet professors who are out of touch with their students, politicians with their voters, or leaders with their armies, i cannot but think those eminent souls either have never been questioned or challenged, or have never thought it worthwhile to alter themselves for the good of their circle. the former are also some of the most myopic people you will ever meet, the latter some of the most dangerous. yes, it's in the interest of most of us to be ourselves (especially in a nation which has always prized the awesomeness and intractability of the self), but a prudent self knows when to be such and when to let the world flow over it, take a little taste of its waves and not mind too much a bit of therapeutic erosion. because, you know, it happens anyway. death is just the end.
d-day.
we celebrate holidays because we have a deep human
need for return. sacred time is infinite, and the only way we can approach that is by celebrating
the same day each year. it is easier knowing we have something to wait for, flirting with the end
of things.
too much have i recreated the present out of the inert echoes of distant pleasures. too much have i made trifles of the events of my life, as if they played no great role in the scheme of things. too much have i distrusted the idea of a scheme.
