Wednesday, September 26, 2012

months

maybe it was the sound of you that
i used to miss
earlier when i was walking in the
panicked nightwalk later before
what was early to rattle me just
the nonchalance of your silence

i am waiting very patiently and appropriately sullen i
curve steps that fake boldness at our doorways and
other things which
jointly owned
claim our elements

this stops being nostalgic
becomes the affected gait of
smells that mix into the furniture
books weave into each other like
spidered legs encounter the breath that shared
becomes less than the
breath that's
there

where i sit

dangling

feet held hover above the ground

and nothing
gathers here

we are a grand emptiness
the background music cheery and resonantly
echoes beyond the patina of dusty
memories where we painted this

all you did
agrees
i shake hands with it
and

all i did
drifts aimlessly

she finds it carefully
pushes aside petals like a surgeon

further days cough when they
inhale this powder

summer is a firearm

i play with it carelessly worn

your clothing muttering like a bomb

take it away to
where your will withdraws

it's ok
smelling like a headfucked vice

it's not here at all

it's where you were

Saturday, September 22, 2012

old stupid text to dead love

nothing is well.  not speaking with you like an ocd kid dodging sidewalk cracks.  like a lost flavor looking for closed restaurants.  like the words of a favorite novel written into a dirty joke on a bathroom stall.  like dead flowers garnishing the wrong grave.>
somewhere in between the insecure permutations of a ghost, drifting through a cage of patterns and memories (calling it a home) and the defiant experiments of a mad composer, painting surprise improvisations where none would sound appropriate.  humming favorite songs on poisoned avenues.  sitting on a friend's stoop, knowing that there is no one in 100 miles who cares what Lost Highway is about.>
but it's essentially ok and smoothly consumed.  he promised himself long ago that the streets looked like this: drawn out, wavering and unsteady.  every step led to something lost, and whenever he held things he was practicing.  they were a rehearsal.>

somnambulance

we barter in swirls of nostalgia
precise
we take milligrams of
what we used to be and what we wished we were
back when an alarm ringing clear out of a dead road
reached us now and found

signal in words no one will see or hear
me redistributed into chemicals
the years repeated tunes come on slow
when it's right it stuns me flat between the eyes but
when it's wrong it's below me

above me it's soaring past
like hair through fingers dry
on dry on
skin responsive to anything

i like to meet calm skies with half a
smirk to hide the dry residue of what arrived here
to be here without assistance
free and fucked
fleeing through streets to points known by
a disregard of the known
shrugging off reductions
meeting my carelessness and
wiping the hair from her face
another beer at a gathering
we connect
separate

don't walk signs rattle
become lapsed torches demarcating
impossibly elongated streets
exchange themselves with others

my emotions and growing concerns melt down my legs
blown around bus exhaust fumes and partially
eaten takeout drunkenly draped on fire hydrants

gathered in and consumed
selfish when i want my own window
take it with me for later
name it for me and guard it
ventilated in my conjured gusts

none of this is real
reassure
steeped in my shadow material
ego decommissioned
in array and out of time

never
ending
the
day
after

Sunday, September 9, 2012

the color of dusk

her skin her skin.  these were repetitions, as words rather than images as he always thought to himself in language her skin.  prone to droning, he returned to the vision.  dark brown, like smoothed soil, or the beginning of the morning.  he liked to smell it through the perfume she didn't need.  when he walked to the gym at 4:45AM the ground was always wet from some lost rain he hadn't been around for, her skin her skin.  sometimes she was naked and sometimes she wasn't.  sometimes she was angry or upset but most often silent.  he sung with recordings of damaged men at night, along with whiskey her skin.  crooning like a lovesick cat; the comparison cooled him, so he became abruptly silent.  that was somehow worse.  that was somehow worse her skin her skin.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

nowhere

i step out in a long city cluster
manhattan after work
prickly and exhausted before my
first beer and you inexhaustible

afterwards and among ten
minutes and much later in the
solipsistic venue
collecting brief faces and their
voices and private cantankerous pleasantries
the girl from sarah lawrence insists
that she is not a lesbian well she
was kinda but she's not a lesbian at
this moment she is not a lesbian
she has a boyish charm to match
her haircut and an easy laugh

the bartop populated by tech
industry social misfits and men in
suits for no reason
we slur speech stunned in the
amber light
weathered wood facing off against
the securities of this intoxicated
band of roomed elephants

i get obnoxiously loud on more
than one occasion and i'm not
exactly sure why
i celebrate nothing but my own
casual harm and shitty moves
skulduggery gambles in search
for your scratchy profane timber folded
into the communal noise like wings

they move air by me and at me and
everything in motion only further
hides you when you leave

i remain there remain remain
remain joining
jagged pockets of conversation being
shifted into others sometimes
browsing bored aroused
inspired drunken spreading the
honey of my failures on men
who i touch behind the shoulder in some
kind of fraternal gesture that only exhibits after
3 whiskeys
i avenge petty smiling arguments
remember most names bandied
about and smokechat strangers far
more elegant than i
think i catch my doppelganger in the bathroom
talking himself up out of a severe liquor rush
my feet firmly planted on the sticky floor in
fakeass zen

it will be three hours later still
a friend and i
sit on the sidewalk and eat nuclear waste pizza and
she cries and we talk about old cracked loves and
it is the quietest part of the evening

i think about auburn hair except
i don't think i know her hair
it only reflects barlights and ozone meshed stars
i only know her hair through hazes

i call her and she misses it and i leave her a voicemail
she calls me and i miss it and she leaves me a voicemail