4/27/2016

when we walk around the avenue
the air follows us and it looks like dessert wine

1/8/2019

an argument down below
i get up,
gaze down

from the 16th floor
black sheet over window,
punctuated by this:

orange and white
the concrete of the street
i hear voices

they feel something
i can't find them
i hear them rising with passion

all i can
think is
i agree.

i sit back down
stare at the wall
remember where i am

i
keep
forgetting

6/16/2015

last june
the grass seemed a little
more alive, more like it was willing to
fight, you know?
i ask her
and she just nods.
i think you think too much, but
the sky was bluer
and clouds were shaped differently i
suppose.
I take it as it is...

2/2/2017

your look, i saw, i aimed for a reply
i couldn't find one and looked
at the ground

i went to see my friend
i tried, the windows were
dark

hello she called and opened the door
she never keeps the lights on
there are things in life you just cant predict

and i sit in my room during the winter
and i hate to use contractions in my poems
i wont i promised myself again, but here i am and here ive been

i tend to stay in my room , dont move a muscle
or a tendon that is
while the lights get lower

all its missing is the smoke of the lounge
and i very much miss cigarettes
the ones i rolled for myself almost a month ago

i know i will grow to love them though
so i
dont

Null

-

I heard passion on the streets of New York City
the sea foam of the sky hanging on the Persian shield watching over us
the gloaming brings retrospect
the healthy green pendant of the six train matches the bushes in the square
in Little Ukraine
it is dark
we bounce as we step
I know when I move I will
be on my own
she tells me she hears yelling. is it happy exclamation or anger
I don't know. I say. I don't know

The Smiths
were playing in the background,
I couldn't tell if it was in the bar or in my lager smelling dorm room dappled with posters memory.
Princeton windowpanes dusted with clusters of snowflakes pressed
against the dark wood in the bar basement.

and so, she said, twisting her straw,
*i used to have a problem with morality, you know?
and *** and stuff?
i was just a kid then.
then he'd tell me stroking my hair
'babydoll, i love you though,'
and i'd say 'i know.
there'll come the day that you don't,
though.'

that shut him up, real good.'

1/15/2015

sitting behind the shed at the seminary
where we'd rolled off together for the first
time that night in the fall

but that's another story.
stolen lighter flick,
first hit's my honor

and soon my manibular ramus
is reaching towards orion's belt and
i realize with that it's your

favorite constellation and I think about how
I Have To Laugh plays, the Fleetwood mac
hurting the crests of my pink pulled lungs

swaying said manible to the slowly winding
upriver bass remember when LSD was legal?
she says and they used to test it on citizens?

it rips up through my own breath with the
guitar mucking creshendo and the words
it's over, it's all over and i'm glad to be free

and i laugh,  i cannot stop it,
i look up at your favorite constellation
we promised we'd look at at the same time

at new years and i feel very bad because it
is a long time ago perhaps even two weeks,
and the tobbaconist laughs when we ask for Ozium

and I feel bad i don't think of you that often
but then i stand up and say to my friends
hey where you going i'm hungry

and then the fleetwood mac's a story
on itself from the past and i feel my
legs growing on and i realize feeling guilt

because of you
is thinking of you
and i feel a bit better about myself

and dismiss it completely
and keep walking
making sure to cut across *Alexander Hall

Null

11/29/2017
"
I
...Bitter rain by the mouthful...

II
More hands on the terrible rough...
The whole thing turns
On earth, throwing off a dark
Flood of four ways
Of being here, blind and bending...
A final form
And color at last comes out
Of you- alone- putting it all
Together like nothing
Here like almighty

III
Glory.""
James Dickey


October is here and
you are not dead yet.
the room is always hot-

every room is always hot.
at least to me,
a month later

a fever takes my brain in its hands
my body trying to fight something
this is a delayed reaction to

your blistering lies to me as the
sun set and cast
ochre glisters

that only autumn can create.
i fear the winter
and its pallidness

and i fear the delaware river
looking at it too long
and perhaps discovering the truth

whatever that may be.
it did not happen
this did not happen.

October
and you are
not dead yet.

November
and neither am
i.

when you said you
were proud of me
my confusion grew.

proud of eternally ******* up
and looking at you
when you needed me to speak?

the words I have used today
have not done this or you
justice.

no, not at all.
days stretch on
and nothing happens.

time is the biggest thief
and the biggest trick
known to humanity.

one day the light was shining on us
the same shade of ocher crawling in through slats.
i stood up and closed the blinds.

i would always ask you to guess
guess what?
only to say something quite obvious.

guess what
october is gone
and you are dead.

3/3/2015

At three years old, my
mother's grandmother took my
hand and proclaimed:
She is a nervous girl.
my hands shook. my hands shake.
in my younger years I stripped the
skin off my hand with my teeth,
in the ides of my youth I swallowed
many a perique blend–
all to cure the shaky hands,
that came with having to ask
if friday plans were on every day
since Monday,
exclusively listening to Joy Division
because jazz makes me nervous
and screaming music makes me rattle.
'You've said that 3 times already'
I know I know I know, I'll
never be able to live here
'you're so nervous!'
a wind is going to knock mine out
one day

2/21/2015

Way too cold and dark out today
to be ******' with this, right?
listening to Jesus and Mary Chain

with the crack of my neck
I wanna just drive to the worst cafe
drink the ******* black coffee on the

bottom of the Sourland mountain.
but the fuzzy distortion of ****** rock
hurts my ears and I keep on writing.

"Twist. I always get chocolate twist." I smiled down at the cup. Sunny day in south north central new jersey. Good day for custard. Good day to die. Good day for anything, really.
"Of course,"
"You say that a lot."
"Because I concur with you, a lot?"
"Hem. Hm. Ha" A low hum and then a laugh.

   A lot can change. It has. In fact so much had changed I could hardly keep track. The days followed each other closely with vague hints of urgency- I did not know why, figured that was for later. This was a change- both things. Things had never seemed to carry much weight and for the first time in years I was really just content with seeing things play out.
Peter Yorke and his orchestra played in the car ride home. "Love, here is my heart." OH, If only it were that easy. A simple offering, or presentation.  The sun beat down relentless. Earth was dying and all the great works of art anything that was ever to be made had been accounted for and done.

first kiss.
I said
"don't even play, you know
I write poems about everything
That happens to me."

Turns out they were never too interested
In what I wrote.
People are so vain, though

Seems people like to ask
Or be shown be told
"look at this poem I wrote

Hope you don't mind.
It's about you."

3/1/2015

I don't miss it now,
your cold calculated cut
with an inflamed disdain of normality.

I'm starting to replace my love for you
with something a bit more concrete. someone a bit more real.

what can I say, it's ****** anyway
if I do or if I don't, I'll still sit in the summer sun drying dying my death out on paid vacation time.

6/7/2015
princeton, nj

now, I don't often
go on walks by myself
anymore like I used to when

I had things to think about but
I don't exactly spend time with others
Like I used to when I was trying to

Pretend I didn't have things to think
about,
Stepping out of the church doors
early,

believing that Fresh Air and sitting in a nice nostalgic bath will do me better
than prayer, as my father insists,

Turning round the rotunda by the Chapel and Firestone,
stopping like a ***** to take in
every single detail of the virginal church panes

Church glass wiring miser.
There is three only three
students I have counted on my walk

One walks with a hand posed as if
he held a cigarette but he does not
have one.

with every step the phantasms of
men calling me from dorm rooms
and crawling around town asking
for cigarettes,

Dressed for parties,
the overall wintery sadness of it all
escapes me and all I am filled with

A very real sense of loss
for a thing I do not want again
I say "I surrender"
To the garden of prospect.

11/22/2018

the leaves underfoot
i'm here to hear
while i walk in battery park

the river sways, partial to the quay
where moss covered rocks
and gum wrappers lay

and i liken it to my brain,
how it moves between
garbage and rot,

things that have stuck to me
through nature
and time.

i entertain the idea
of jumping into the hudson
shake my head. that'll have to wait for another day

but why?
that i cannot answer.
why the delay?

as i sit and stay and do nothing
hoping it'll get better
it never does

i shake my head
and turn
and walk away

9/11/2016

Feburary 2015

you were so tough I thought,
I always have this belief about men that they're not as tough as they think they are and I'm always right
I don't know who my friends talk to I think maybe I'm just soft or
and I remember you,
who'd come from poverty
and no father
would smile vaguely when we, all our friends
sat in your house and when we drove in your car with the windows down it was feburary but we didn't mind
you never showed me any feeling we never knew
what was going on with you
you were excited to get your life together and bring honor to your country
the week before you did I saw you and
it was a Sunday we were alone
you gripped the steering wheel we had stopped somewhere because you had to do some business whatever that meant
a man came to the car you called him ******* and he called you chamaquito you went into his apartment and came back two minutes later
the car was silent as we rolled past Westminster and the Seminary
you cut the air
"you know I don't want to go to the marines
I wanted to be a businessman"
I never saw you after that


you went away to Arizona
and I never forgot that
because it was the only part of you
I ever truly knew,
of this vague polarizing figure

5/30/2015

today is your birthday
and although it seems just like
four words strung together, a
part of me wants to say happy birthday, we haven't spoken in 5 months, but it's ok, because you're not who you were a year ago anyways.

what a hallmark card.
I have spent the past 48 hours staring
at the beams trying to imagine
a happy death
because of unrelated events.

i woke up with dried blood on my
face for some reason or other today,
in the cavernous trash pit of my room
and I declared this a sign.

11/29/2015

I haven't eaten in three days.
The enamel sticks to the pearl and strips away

swift current of stomach acid
throwing up something I don't
have,

rejecting something I don't have,
clear puddle
that seems like an extension of
saliva

I wish I wasn't a coward,
and I sure as hell wish I was
a person

But it doesn't work,
never does and never did
I stare at the bowl
blood mixes in

it's pink now
and foamy
if I didn't know any better I'd say

It looked like shorefoam
across the banks of an African lake.

12/25/2016

i remember how she'd
noticed my eyes wavering
and wandering along the grey sidewalk

watching shoes go by from
the basement window
they seemed sentinent

she asked
what are you thinking about and why
after all you are my best friend

i know you better than any man you meet
i took a deep breath. "why do things go away?"
i had barely touched the jasmine tea.

she poured me
a cup
"you think too much,"

3/29/2017

Time divides us like state lines
coming together,
apart again

After all
the mismatch words
and my would not, could nots

Simmering, cooling
into stability
My past now

Agrees with all the books i read
i am not tortured,
i was

I have said before
that year, you didn't think of me
But i believe you did here is the problem:

Better to not be thought of
than cursed but
maybe they were secular thoughts

Don't you think and
there was an incident at the
canal street station today

Suicide- i was running late i didn't catch the 6:40 train
maybe it is better i did not.
as i got to the platform, hot-to-trot

"They did a good job cleaning
it up," i looked down sick to my stomach
vertigo rising in my chest, ailing at the fact that was my first thought.

1/17/2018

"the going into winter and never coming out."
-frank o'hara

the lights of nassau
***** and white
like raw pearl

shining down on my shoes
and
i, moldering and wicked,

sitting on bank steps.
you held your hand out for me
but i stood up by myself

this is how it happened
simply put, and no
metaphor.

you say to sit and talk
i know where talking is
red gravel i kick up like i had

before
and all i see in the cold and the dark:
your pupils, your hands

held out again
i would be dumb to take them
a month ago, dying for a lack of you

and now i try to catch time by its tail
but i can't
for time isn't an animal

it could have fooled me,
by the way it slinks and sidles
in the dark of the woods.

sitting in Anacostia,
on the phone with you,
dead roach on sidewalk

so long ago
back to reality:
you ask me if it's alright

and i say yes
i let anything happen to me
and everything happens to me.

i can not hold on to it
time is in the air
but what i can try to do is remember it.

*II*
my life is lived in the past
a life not worth living
a life not respected

there is nothing
i can do about this
i think, as i walk to my car.

the great horned owl outside my window
calls for its mate lost in the forest
and i understand.
our only difference is
he has found her
and has stopped.

-

on the train with grant
its cold
its white
sterility                              ok

ok   you cant hear anything when it snows
        and it isnt as cold

i cant see nyc but i looked for it

                   ok
i wanna quit and cry full time

i dont know x79,345  
                                i dont like when people  
                                   watch me write
it looks like its cold but
it (?) why                                     that was a test. i dont care
isnt cold                         ok

it is cloudless ok they laughed kind of
ok
im dumb it snowed we have two hours

i have to finish my story about rich people

ok oooooook

9/16/2015

lately I've felt the pink **** of my metal cranium

swishing with every throttle

i close my eyelids touch my skin

i dont feel real

in the end of july i felt like a disembodied heart on the streets of

bowery and village

vowed never again to the pink drying milk

2/16/2015

I first realized, with a start,
the green bowery of knitted green turf
in May by the McCarter would
never return to me
in the winter, or maybe that's just how I felt.

The five kids sit and smoke,
and, in all honesty,
in groups I really find no comfort.

To me it is calling you scared before
and you saying you love me and will
be good.  

Guess the call didn't hold on though,
guess we're not all good now
I have 2 bars and
...

No service

2/18/2015

I can taste you in the air now,
even though last lazy excuse
for you is long dead.

The rainy days seem to me a
small price to pay and I've
noticed in brilliant sun tundra winds

The potted lilies have started to grow again. I saw three leaves on a stem and
the sun seems to stay for tea.

In my newfound journalistic ventures in efforts to further understand my self, of course and the

Wiley depravities of people i think I now see that in the coldest winters
the brilliant sun alone was enough.

12/27/2019

this emptiness
in my ventricles
could fill a room

and there is not
much else
that i can say.

Null

1/18/2015

here is one thing i have always liked
about myself:
i can force a poem.

12:27am on a sunday morning,
i wonder what you are up to
thinking probably you have more

**** than me,
more luck than me
and you'd told me once

walking down the orange streetlight sidewalks
in mercer county developments
"you gotta be in a good place in

life to do drugs, and i'm always
happy, i gotta celebrate that."
your crooked white teeth

curling upwards and your
blue scary sharp eyes smiling
i just shoved my fingers in the

ripped jacket pocket harder
and gripped your hand with my
other.

"i guess i could never
do too many then."
i'm kidding, though

and i keep taking hits.
i haven't heard from you in weeks
last i saw was your

scaryskinny naked legs
next to mine on a scaryskinny bed.
but i do know you're not exactly

suffering out there
and i wonder what your secret is.
i'll never see you again after those

scaryfast two weeks
i know that and yet sometimes i wonder
how i learned to force my poems so easily.

10/17/2017

it's not real.
not here.
not yet.

driving past the
streets i've grown to memorize
clapboard and craftsmen, american

summers drifting over me like haze
and all the memories that ensnare me
all i know is the past and that scares me

i am
thinking of exurban new jersey and thinking of
last week,

the lights across the Delaware river at midnight
reflected perfectly
but not quite,

orange red and white oil slick in the black of the water,
the lights of cars creeping across occasionally.
i burn a cigarette out, toss it into the water szzz

ah, god, you say, looking up from your stoop
i love that sound,
i recall i used to burn them out

on my hands because i did not feel them
and for a while there is nothing say. you look back down again
and it is quiet.

but look, i stand up, almost yell,
almost wading into the cold October water
and

maddening with interest by the second.
is that a light i see, in the water?
a glance towards you

again you look up,
now leaning to the side
the faintest glimmer,

you conclude.
i wonder, out loud, what is it.
you tell me it is hard to be like us.

i ask, what's us?
eyes still on the water.
oh, well, you know.

then i understood.
striking a match again
and pacing round the riverbank

i throw stones now,
smooth ones and rough ones,
each making a different sound as they hit the water

trying to hit the glimmer
then stopping, wondering why?
i sit back down, chastising myself for my inability to relax

you listen to my heart
oh its fast
tap my thigh as you hear it, head on chest

dundundundun
i laugh because my heart's gonna **** me one day
just like it did my grandmother's father

and so on
and so forth.
driving back,

on the bridge,
i shake my head.
point at the darkened spot

hey, thats where we were earlier
i don't tell you this, but i look for the shine in the water.
i don't find it.

Null

ND
1944-2018*

You taught me how to write
it took me too long to write this.

When you died,
the nurses combed your hair

and put your favorite perfume on
your neck.

without you I am nothing
and a ceaseless
mess

but for you
have kept
living

in 1967 you had a daughter,
born dead.

you never visited her
grave  you didn't want to know where it was

but your husband did.
and the first person he told about you was her.

she was born with
lemon yellow curls stuck to her head.

the pain is so much
but not as much as your beauty

i will learn to live without you  as
you would have wanted it

racing matchsticks down storm gutters
i still don't believe in god.

But if there is a hell
that means there is a heaven

I would take eternity of
darkness and iron hot
pokers

if it meant you could be
with your lost daughter
and hold her.

things that happened to me
that seemed so full of eternity
and set in green and granite

things i figured i'd never forget.
The city distracts me but
i go back to dry land



everywhere i find evidence of my memories:
people, places, streets, trees,
the laces they took from me at the hospital

i cannot find them-
they lie in a bin,
in a landfill, deep in the ground under the rot

but these memories-
i cannot find it-
the idea they happened to me



i am finding ground
and lying on it
but falling through to the core.

forgetting what it is like
to feel air on my face
to feel my chest when i cannot recall

the feel of anything
or anyone at
all.

the few days i do remember
are vignettes of a film,
stored away in archives and
exploding in a kiln

the other ones run from me in a tunnel
towards green orange and gold days
of leaves, and air, and trees and hay

to lock me out forever
to send themselves away
from me.

to forget my memories  
it's like a sickle wedged into my heart,
handle out towards the hand of time that sunk it there

who did it happen to,
and when, and where and why
I don’t know

purple vermillion skies
in October, the turnpike pulsing under me
flying past on an over pass.

Now a year later I lie
in cold sepulcher of room,
wooden smell and dark purple night

I can finally see the stars
but they do nothing for me
except to remind me


they were there this whole time
and remember more than i could ever
dream of.

3/3/2015

"Hard when all my friends are
addicts, down low people, you know..."
caught her own thumbs.
spring'd only come in calendar form,
it hit her astonishingly coldly like
"Please don't let her do anything that could hurt her.." From the others and the don't worry I won't that came with it.
"I don't know my value," adjusting her skirt
"and I guess I never will"

I always want to say
and maybe it started when I was
young, knew what a man really was

I always want to say to the men
if I'm not talking I'm thinking
about how I'm gonna write this.

And then this sort of poetic
philosophical tendency
where I try to live as many

Metaphors as possible
when I walk in front of you
and teeter on the edge

Of your doorway or
hand you a lighter with my index
singularly in your room.

especially when I sit in the
bathroom and look in the mirror
with you

except this has been executed
by every man ive ever been with
and at that point it is called a motif

11/28/2017

"Desire and
All the sweet pulsing aches
And gentle hurtings
That were you,
Are gone into the sullen dark..."
Ernest Hemingway

Pain
because the sky is darkening
and turning bruise blue.

I glance out the window
look for some kind of answer
and nothing comes to me.

I stumbled into the sun
I didn't know what I was looking at

5/26/2017

I search desperately for it:
the drive to write.
It can be found in my inability to stay satisfied

The visits- never too numerous
one call I'm thrown off
oh, it would be great to see each other

I stare off and agree.
i dislike driving
because i see all the dead animals

on the road
one call from you
still no response. still no response

6/4/2015

you pour the milk in first
In the bowl,
like a kitten mewling for a
meal

Milk is poisonous to
adult cats.

Not fondly
not with hate do I recall
My friends would ask,

The crystalline creeping February
with all its rushes and frozen rivers
"So, how was he?" of some man
I didn't care for

He had one job:
to make me forget for
1 hour
or maybe thirty minutes.

"...Surprisingly big, right?"
they'd finish it for me
Smiling and grinning
like my heart, I suppose
and my depth,
I suppose

I would not say anything to them
just smile
and light a match

7/19/2017

"I did, and it broke my heart- into a billion pieces but I had to. I had to."
"He held up his head with his hand, steadily observing her. He turned to his side fully. She could no longer see his face.
'you don't understand,' he said finally
'i've always been afraid of being an egoist'"
"'I've a couple idee fixes'
'not any i need to know'"
"i'm sick with the idea... sick with it.*"

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose."*
Charles Bukowski

I miss you
holy ****, I miss you
I'm not saying it out loud

because i can't even say it in my head.
I am
going to hell.

He tells me he likes
his girls selling drugs
just like him

I smile a bit.
I am hated despite my
despises my

and i stretch out a bit
hey, how about
that eighth you promised me?

hold up, girl
we're almost to my house.
and i think maybe it's your fault

then i remember my morals threw themselves
out of the car
and at what highway?

4/18/2018

the waxwings singing
through my window
remind me of when i was young.

letting bygones be bygones and
staring boldly out the doorway at the
morning sun

but who am i anymore
if i cannot be that girl
i don't know, i don't know

to sleep's to dream
and to love's to keep
April– the canopies turn white and green

11/28/2017
"I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move."
the thoughtfox

The sun set on us
there was nothing I could do.

We talk of
Ted Hughes and the thought-fox.
you say I will be a good anthropologist

i don't want to travel if it's without you,
I learn this:
Plath bit Hughes when they met

for some reason, I thought it was relevant  to us.
it is the last time we meet.

You are reminded that I disgust you
and say it has to end.
Earlier you said

"I feel like I am your Ted Hughes."
and I reply:
"He killed his wife."

11/28/2017

Grinning,
but who's to say I'm supposed to bear it?
dreaming of being loved and

tops of parking garages
where I will make my Olympic dive
perfect form, perfect form!

perhaps I'll make a show out of the whole
thing
the rigamarole of my rigor mortis

i wake up at four am and
think oh my ****,
life is a nightmare

you told me your self it wasn't fair
but you made those rules
and stuck to them


i will grow to hate your countenance
eventually and soon
when i rot and bloat in my grave.