in the same exact outfit

the way the neglect of your
intrusion is
fondly recalled
lost
bartered for
offers rescinded is
almost why

i remember you fucking my hand in
the cab and lips parted and the
stretch of gauzy blocks at
dusk and a smile beneath another
smile emerging in the smoke of
your hesitation

and promises loosely shaken from
provisions and cinnamon hued
skin and freckled and
pink and
lost
tentative defied ultimatums
and this
is almost why

stray on my canvas painting shook out
lines
argued as profound
travelling always at nights and in
them and at
them bulletproof or
isolated and as them walking
me into my own chapped mouth
rubbed smooth on you and

abandoning medicinal escapes at
the brink of
exhaustion is almost
why
now
three nights of dreams of you wake
me and
puncture my lungs


stopping each
other pausing
me quietly and

your interruptions don't
resonate any longer and
your doubled smile doesn't
fit in my hands anymore and cuts
them deep and your curvature doesn't mean
shit
again and the city isn't colored
green or
brown or dark brown or dark brown
reflecting anymore


missing the nothingness
the rank dissolving occurrences
where i
found you and
you and you and at
times i am creased
disheveled (and you)
bold and
denied
proud and suspicious
yammering heartfelt in the ears of
cynical associates or cynical at
stunned gazes never
quite
fucking
right is
almost the reason we continue
to meet

fiona apple

and it's not money
set on repeat
echo
nonchalant in t-shirts years old

jeans don't fit and
collect the spills and torn barely
bond to frame

tonight its fucking freezing and
quiet and you drink yourselfself calmly into the
dullest most sympathetic stupor and you

hold the moon outside between distant
hands and she smiles whenever i
close my eyes we always
had that

it's the admitting part that's the killer
it's watching long fluffy curls of delicate
advice fan out in strands around
it's the rustle that remains in the bed you
don't sleep in anymore or
that's missing from the one in which
you do

it's listening to music without words so
nothing muddles these toxins
so when you find yourself singing or
spitting out blood in the sink or
scratching the back of your neck to
find an old wound you don't
lose it when her voice bellows

instead
you listen to drums and humming
equipment
you are able to stay (did i
already smoke
that cig
yet? no)

burial - truant + rough sleeper

i don't know what it is about burial.

burial is a british musician from the UK who makes music i can't even begin to understand.  and no, it's not a result of having just pricked my skin on his bizarrely beautiful anti-music.  i've listened to every one of his songs hundreds of times and i understand them and i don't fucking understand them at all.

a rigged patchwork composite of recorded sound effects, overwhelming vinyl crackle, rainsounds, whispers, clipped slipshod drums, videogame bits, mashed strings and jagged murmuring vocal samples and lullaby bassline meshes.  all this seemingly disparate matter composed into soundscapes that echo condemned buildings, sneakers sticking to wet concrete, lost souls dancing against streetlights like moths, neon lights spelling out your truths, passing cars, humble banshee girls next door, your mistakes, your redemption.  your secret favorite thing.  the shitty stupid thing you said to her, what she looked like when you said it and how she looked at you.  and, later, his music has that fucking indescribably impossible, anachronistic, chemical component: it says "it's ok".

i've listened to burial since i first started listening to him.  there's a reason his ramshackle tunes have persistently remained in the unforgiving eye of the culturati.  an anti-persona, an anti-musician, he paints a weird welcome and we all flock to it.  he really doesn't give a shit, except he totally does, he bleeds into these minutes released in their always-too-slow trickle.  longing for an era he missed by making music out of time, music that doesn't exist anymore, except he's making it, so it does, fucking up the spacetime continuum.

time travel.  wet concrete.  factories churning out smoke in the distance, away from us (doesn't really matter...right?).  there's a sound that comes off four houses down as we walk, it's a bark, a dog-sound, it's the dog we grew up with as a kid who died.  there he is, four houses down.  we walk past.  we're not crying, right? no.  we're adults now and we don't cry about that shit.

but there he is in the headphones.  scratching away at that shit.  soon our steps are catching his stepless rhythm, we find it, or find its lack of rhythm.  and then we are walking, walking.  and feeling miserable but alive.  there's the diner we like, tonight we don't go in, but it's there, it exists and things are OK.  we walk past the graffiti that's still there from last week, we appraise it again, amused and inspired by it, until it is in our peripheral, curling around our right arm with just the lightest tug.  we'll see it tomorrow.

and oh god there's the elevated train.  like an angel on ragged wings, ragged tracks, shaking the very earth, and it splits through the headphones until I am listening to "Stolen Dog" behind its casually beautiful carnage.

there is very, VERY little music these days that stirs a conversation within me.  2012 was a fantastic year for music and there was plenty bubbling in my little humble android player companion.  i would talk your ear off about it if humbly permitted.  but the truth is that very little of it communicates with me, back and forth and back again, aside from burial.  i listen to great records and I marvel at their greatness, their decisions, their failures and immense accomplishments.  their impressive fidelity, their curing properties, their escape.  and i listen to burial and i speak with it, and i walk with it, and it grounds me, sadly, pleasantly.  and i know it even though i would disagree with every choice, every badly placed beat, every tricky fucked up gritty missed trigger.  if i knew him i'd be like why the fuck, and who the fuck do you think you are, and come on clean that shit up, and come on come on.  and there at the 13:04 mark on "Rough Sleeper" is that fucking bizarre synthy bit that starts up, it comes on twice, twice before the end, because that's all that was there, because that's all that was needed.

it's always exactly right, shabby and worn and stubbornly confident.  it plays coy, and plays serious, and fucks with you, tricking your ears, painting something forgotten.  at night it joins me on walks home from work, or walks home from walks.  it's background music, except it's a feature film made entirely out of background pieces.  it's the video from Infinite Jest.  it's about the only characters you care about, but you've forgotten their names or wondered if they ever had any.  or if that matters.

burial released his last bit recently.  it stops and starts, it shrugs and straightens its tie.  it doesn't know if it's interesting, or if you'd care about it.  but everything within it is indiscreet, and its emotions shoot true.

the thing with burial is that he doesn't have any "tricks" you're not aware of; it's all true.  he's a terrific liar, for sure.  he hides in plain sight, a scribe for a history half-experienced, a guide to the only city he knows, the city that's not your own.  but it's all true.

my body has a shitty tomcat inside

my body has a shitty tomcat inside and
he leaks poison out the corner of
his ragged permanent smile making
dainty repulsed hustles through
street filth texture aching limbs
philosophizing old haunts
remembered vivid aching

at times there are distant noises
and he looks very seriously at the
noises as if they were things come
unraveled but displacing the air
until he is hungry again

then when he swivels around
the scene renders to primary
colors and tension lines

i don't know how to speak to the
things that don't know my animal
they regard me with congealed
confusion lazily knowing me

they ignore him
which makes him rub their legs rudely
he finds a corner to play with a
piece of stray trash very briefly then
sleeps deep

and every introduction is a fiasco of
insecure learning and
paws catch on the clothing of strangers so
we stare at each other awkwardly as i
disengage

my tomcat is lazy yet emptied of
homelands he
barely holds his own recent scenes down and
when he shrieks and
coos into the wet bread of night he is
throwing his own precious energy away and
couldn't tell me why

the parklands and gaunt alleys and other
nightmares of nowheres are
where we divide
he into the dreaming and
i into the dreaming

repeat

might be the will to reopen
joining with the wind
night appears before me like its joking
centers the longing to reappear here
what two hands do to disarm this
patience
these thrills are beyond this
patiently i reach beyond this
alarmed by the symbolic and
the last song spinning around the
last song spinning around the
last song around
summers
out there
like a tonic for the wounded
emptied of its tears
whole in the june light
what do two hands do to disarm this
patiently these thrills are beyond this and
i  reach beyond the summer skin for
the thrill
lost in these years
and the last song spinning around
the last song spinning around the
last song

after and before

sunday light
drunken mirages below
14th and she is corralled in her
own streets

misbehaves
like a vaulted hellion before the city
meets a hurricane again

tonight there will be rain in these
streets and
she runs her tongue against the
smooth aluminum rind of a beercan

she doesn't know me enough to
keep me anywhere in mind
the thought of my name summons
jingles and loops
i imagine her so defended against
the barest approach of my humble
memory i could be an allergic mishap or the
weather eighteen days ago

summaries of this night and others exist
somewhere
scrawled in a two word note
tumbled in pocket with keys and disinterested
nicorette and 54 cents wrapped
tight in a pointless receipt like a
lover on the
next to last
day

delete / gently

and he crosses paths and makes a funny stumble like
this is not deeply felt
it narrows closely
like a thickly drawn line of words

adolescence is permanent markers and
songs of crass nullified defiance and
cigarettes proud and elongated chained
repeated and remixed into
conversations with strangers to flow
over them like blankets punched with breath
and more words

these are more words
keep coming
scatter my eager entrance into
pocked regret

find my wrecked reflection in metrocards and
underneath beer glasses in the packed bar
residing in my handled relics
transfer meaning and submerged eloquence to the
objects touched in travel

i seek definition in privately held things

finding it
wretchedly disappointed in it

color each segment of the sidewalk with
thoughtless steps to somebody else thinking
i
can't
be
here

for long not long i snaked a careful finger on your smile
touching your mouth before it parted before
rediscovering its shade

no shadow hides me and
i would erase this
becoming the cul-de-sac of a bruise

hands of strangers welcome me rudely
expectantly
erroneously

i drink two beers that say
fuck you
and leave

if i am young and recast as traitor to
all these careless mishaps

then fuck you is a smile that welcomes and enervates me
that walks me towards your wall

yet i pick these moments gently

if i am old and crushed by fuckups old and young i
cruise with it

i lift it from its odd angle

i put it down

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

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

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.

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

making my escape

the opening of the day is golden
crimson burning through and i
taste private metered segments of
it collected through previous hours
and on the remembered texture of a
new tongue in brooklyn
i'm the bottom bit of the last beer of the night
spun in my mouth before
licking handwriting into you and
down your neck
or not
maybe didn't happen

hours of the day colored and
repurposed by disintegrating spurs
of the moment meet me here
along the long dark street where i
once lived and rarely visit
always recalled in nighttime as if
daylight never weighed it down as
now it hovers heavy and sacred
always in bronze twilight
always hollowed out and wet with
summer air
always the same bar

with the same space in the back
i'm late to find you and your one
drink grin mellifluous and easy
when i sit down we are away from
those next to us
later on i am thinking that we are
farther away
we waver stray

abandoning laconic clues to me
where the fabric is softer and
warmer underneath it your
voice raspy and leading

farther away i don't meet you
or never have
or have
or never thought to come
not really looking for anything
nothing really found or surrendered beyond
roundabout glances and the feel of
old streets pivoting near
hair pushes away softly and
gives
walking through the shameless
laughter of late night basketball skirmish
pausing and giving ourselves to
calm
until the breeze is too close to you
as now it hovers heavy
i could walk endlessly like this
dreaming and not sure and
next to you and afar
the proximity of you and the old
neighborhood and my own
footsteps cascade reassuring
echoes as the season dies slow

headlight eyes scurry and scare the
shadows down the avenue
i find myself in step with them and
join their
road
to
leave

graffiti and old cars

every thing alive and dead becomes
due for the next life
we wear them in colored hair
in gym minutes
in long draws on a craft beer
momentary lapses of reasons are
countries under flaked wheels
destroyed by this illusion this
destroys and leaves all pieces real and
handled by those arrived
before we arrived to destroy

it could be any stolen morning
destroy destroy
laughter heard through
headphones jockeys for space and
attention to
take the requisite steps to
approach her (though longing
for new nighttimes she inhales
through her nose fiercely and
repurposes my weaponry almost
absentmindedly as a car
almost devastatingly in her
refusal to speak even once destroys and
it could be any lost conversation with
her until
gutted eternity) though longing though
only occurring in the friction of
strangled time and never
approaching her only
in this destroy
destroy destroy

speaking with an old friend though
longing she
knows what i loved of her
most definitively is the same strength she
nimbly produces in my idiotic wake
and the silence is more articulate
than my jagged aching destroys
me though longing like

the old faded paint of the
neighborhood's names hallucinate their
former colors and summon themselves
to form in the sunlight
remembering their own radiance when
the nighttime still encounters them
peeled of splendor though longing

i could be that hungry image
finding her elements in the cast
shadows of cars destroys
i        run           around         the           neighborhood
painting and signifying the recollected
variations as much as i
speak to her or reach
conclusions built of parts fresh
from the factory and
unknown by any touch

everything is new and
nothing
repairs my
machinery image in the
darkened
glass
sways

river

it is that rare night which finds me
limber-smiled
brokentooth bold
distracted hands open to the sincere
wordbuzzed and calmhearted

encounters at the other end of friday
unspooling smalltalk and bon mots at strangers
at the bartop a gorgeous blonde in formfitting fabric
positions
her hand up for a hifive and i meet it with no
small grace
she chitterchatters
we muse mockingly on the bartender as another is tapping my
shoulder with a nervous joke i gratefully
consume with my first sip of beer when

my drink arrives i am not lingering with them but
returning to my table and other faces
her tattooed arms are young but somewhat masculine
wearing bakery years on her small rocknroll frame with
virginia hair pushed back and sunburned and

in her eyes maybe a cool river of forgiveness that isn't really hers
and
as if gathered on the shores of interlocked strangers
where the essences of decommissioned loves circle in the salted wind it
pours forth unhindered by the self-conscious airs i employ

and at times the bar becomes isolated in its noise
and we find pockets in it which are
like blooms
or intimate theaters and

i find that i am less conversing with her than
with other lost women
i wonder if i always do that

i am speaking with a distant love
with an envelope of braided hair and photographs
touching the freckled cream of her hip when i am touching her hip when
i am touching her soft
echoes of movement that duplicate and expand in response
to the noise and airconditioning

we steal the food off of somebody's abandoned plate
conspire and tease
drunk and pleasant
bewitched and summoned by these semi-transparent yearnings

in aforementioned virginia hair which smells of cornstalk and handrolled
cigarettes yet
other women manifest and fold their fingers and unfold and
repair me
medicinal ghosts of this burial ground where we
all connect if only to add commentary to our roadmaps made
precious by lost time

she stays with me too long i surmise
i leave her with the newly materialized guy she doesn't want

the one she was supposed to know

chances are / spies

and it is late in the miracle evening and
a soft savage breeze demarcates the remnant sand caught between eyelids and
angry language and
it is a kind of strength he
finds himself saying to no one

it will be weeks someday
at some point he will eat a muffin
or stamp out a capricious cockroach before bedtime and
like every other dead thing it will
be dancing
patient in the tufts of his hair
it is arguable that he will be listening to music
or reading a random book from his shelf by the guide of a torn
receipt shoved meaningfully in at page 97
he will give a woman money for a thin bottle of clear rum and
she will hand it to him with practiced boredom

chances
are
he will remember the lines in that Peter S. Beagle novel again
the ones that circled his pre-adolescent mind feverishly
utterly rapt
almost repulsed by
their symmetry and ungainly honesty
he will walk a short circuit through a one bedroom apartment
speaking with someone on the phone and instantly forget who he was
speaking with until their voice returns
he will consider this no meager victory

there will be long pauses followed by cruel activities
he will step on her foot in the crowded bus
a child will kick him gently as he exits

back on the streets
he will be staring at a sign for a breakfast special in a faceless restaurant for a while
he will not know or understand if he wants to eat here
someone nearby will be angry at someone else
somehow this will cause him to come to a decision

he will remember the lines in an old novel
in the way one recalls closing a book
more intimately
than opening it

egress from a brightly lit land (part 3)

i tread these roads with some modicum of trepidation and

neatly stored fear

gathering supplies in wait of the requirement to pursue new roads

with a nuzzle she motions to the horizon as if to

a new purchase or series of bad scenes

when he turns around she

disappears

appears

here there is soft music around the dying fire and

other adornments for sleep to shudder through

the crackling fibers and whispered conversations and

though nothing is secure or steadfast we hum in

unison to the sunlight to come

til it is the middle of night

and one mind might be awake in a sea of muted

voices

alone on this night he finds himself leaving the security of

fabric to find a private surface upon which to
feel the blue air of the evening and ponder curious
calendars yet to be made real in

months that flutter into time made
disturbed and intricate
into a flipbook of hours
of pretty faces and ill-received mentions or malapropisms pasted to
beloved tattooed skins

he communicates to nothing and nowhere in self-interested playlists
merges with his own dishonor
becoming one thing
a mutant of his faith in the ideal and his own
craggy movements through the pride exhibited by strangers with quick
smiles
trust really a peculiar currency always at the ready
bartered handily with the faces that darken these roads and yet

not sure why
the bold reaching of irrational misspent youth has gone black and dry
he is old now
as grasslands frozen gold in repetitions of sunlight
a consummate liar possessed with disbelief
alone for these mere moments in the dying firelight

maybe at a loss for the dramatic yet making
manic urges
blood rushing to hungry arms

alone on this night
perhaps leaving these fellow travelers behind and scraping the dew and dirt to
fill up my footprints

before him
every highwayman and cold trickster and solipsistic gypsy feeding off the milk of the road

leaving his blankets and bandaged remnant gear

neither alone nor released
he has shaken off her fragrance
clothing only smells like me and moonlight

the only sounds elemental
the only sky grey then forgiving the early morning
the only shirt soft from repeated washing and wear
the only reason a promise wasted on a lover's burning glance

the only movements these movements
owning nothing but clenched sentences

the only thing real is this place

the only thing that leaves it is
what's left

Swarms - Old Raves End

http://swarmsuk.bandcamp.com/album/old-raves-end

An absolutely incredible, lush and ponderous record.  You can hear it for free on Bandcamp or kick the people a few euros to keep it in your headphones.  Well worth it.

Just wanted to mention it, since track 3 was an inspiration for the previous poem and was played on repeat as I wrote it.

ojo ojo ojo

the flicker of your eyes
renders dollar store shelves of
rainbow colored plastic shit smashed
with riotous sledgehammers

the flicker of your eyes rushes crowds
of well meaning itinerant children
into tomorrow's parks tugging at
shirts haggled on tables in times
square

the flicker of your eyes destroys unopens
destroys unused gated fields suffocated with the idle
debris of unthinking candy bar wrappers and
erects quiet faced guardians to stand
watch over lost spaces and welcome
those who need them and everyone
needs them

the flicker of your eyes drinks every
bottle in a bar dry and fills every vein
dead with clumping heroin slurry and
every bronchial tube with sweetly
violent smoke violet through diner
neon and burns every hangover

the flicker of your eyes is a cruel
irresolute madness backbroken on
the quick injurious words of a lover
seething across a street learning a
penetrating truth

the flicker of your eyes is a child
touching everything in the store
and getting the shit smacked out of them forced
to the parking lot in hideous
unjust tears and finding a space too
massive to even understand filled
with more people who don't
understand or care than it seems
there are grains of sand on a beach's
anthills

the flicker of your eyes is a fucking bitch with
finger deadset in chest coloring you with each
bit of pressure knowing you and rendering you
soluble in dust with each knowing pierce

the flicker of your eyes knows me through you knows
this through this finds me thinks me whole runs
me lost past post offices closed from disuse in the
reflection of caribbean goods windows and ghetto
doctors offices chased by the slow gait of a woman's
decisions like music flickering

the flicker of your eyes fucks with parallel universes and
unchanges changed decisions and changes and decides and
drops judgment like tropical hail rattles the walls of jails with
hope and mystical longings makes the free feel chained up and
ruined with jagged movements in your eyes

the flicker of your eyes tries makes efforts for me it walks with me
through the cities that won't stalk my failures for me following
me swallowing edges of manhattan in pieces guardrail by stoop stairs by
moonlit bad choices stacking bits of a hundred country's voices til
babylon is a bar i decide on on a moist summer eve i find the roads
where your dilated pupils migrate the movements of intoxicated strangers that
touch my arm reminding me to hoist expectations while murmuring the
lyrics to car alarms your eyes

flicker making me healthy urging each sidestep to danger no closer to better
off without the observation of sirens either bad intentioning females or police
textures watercoloring the contents of my pockets violently transfixing a
touch to my shoulder insecure your eyes flicker and ask directions demure and
unknown standing before the map lacking the craft to find stations which
fill me even alone empty and unknown standing in wait like my passion will
speak for itself as it disregards the words that insist to wait for

the flicker of your eyes bold and unyielding and standing on chairs too loud talking
loud yet fucking with sarcastic prettyboys and debonair rooftop partyclub
gogetters smacking fourteen dollar drinks out of their hands like WHAT and
screaming shitty obscure options to deejays on tuxedo dancefloors with utter
sincerity prepping moves in mirrors to shake strangers to

the flicker of your eyes intelligent unbelieving melted salt caramel confrontational
anarchic confounding predictive debunking thrift store riches and favorite
cookbooks with flair

the flicker of your eyes is a one dollar fifty special on hot dogs at gray's
papaya panhandled on a wednesday afternoon to the tune of vegan supermarket
muzak and samples of mexican food dropping quarters in the empty guitar case
of a travelling headfucked hitchhiker playing blackjack with bad acid trips for
good ones and doubling down

your eyes flicker and mountains go unclimbed and elementary school poetry withers
unrhymed and awkward in the hearts of bad students with more ink in the margins
than homework assigned accomplishing empty gibberish for the bathroom stalls of
their furious fearless minds learning curse words to mouth in the mirror to present
snickering to bullies before untold acts of cruelty

your eyes flicker and everything stays serene to contrast the stutter of a pair of ill-
fitting denim pants at the shindig you thought you'd stand out at spitting game to the
pinkhaired character smiling at the goofy unkempt bold motherfucker who keeps
ducking out to smoke his pack of unfiltered social anxiety in the windswept solace
of lamplight leaning on the brickwork in torpor

your eyes flicker and the city speaks cruelty even in the lack of your flickering
eyes looking for judgment and redemption in a smile to accommodate these
wasted yet urgent grasps for reason and the cosign of a strapless bra shuddering
close to my blathering mouth territorial for purpose in your effortless mouth
territorial

i flicker when you watch me
jumping in and out of your vision
surreal and televised
conquered and yielded
your most minute graze thrilling
your most particular shift documented

ruined in your careless glance
a jazz solo in a muted cough
the flicker of your eyes annotated
footnoted and obscured to smaller text

muted trumpet when you speak
never speaking when you speak
you are here with me

the city only ever a memory
witnessed
replete with imagery cataloged in disfiguring prose
the flicker of your eyes recording me in silence
epoch in a grateful glance

we could be nothing and you'd forget each of these words
but when you watched the sidewalks shifted alignment
i stepped north to go east
then you ordered hispanic sodas in the confusion and

all i tasted was sugar

palabras

some of these sundowns the dreams somehow
pierce some of the blank blackness echoing every
single night and
i could be remembering something i lost months or years ago

could be finding it like a drawn breath in

dawn light and i fight suffocation

to return to it

recline into the chemicals of waking like
rubbing the arms of a long lost green chair before standing up
to breathe in all the incineration i've caused

it's fast and slow
like the drift of her through hallways last night
a phantom adjusting the stupid things i've placed around
the house

woke up today and cleaned it like life or death
put together the broken shelf and replenished it
with scattered minutes and hours we spent in dusty
bookshops
finding fragments of her poetry bookmarking half-read chapters in her
messy script

i'm sitting on a freshly vacuumed carpet
squinting and cleaning my glasses to discern these
words

words used to be all we had but they transformed in the grind
of years
drained of their direction she
angled them into herself
we used to sit and read to each other passionately in that shitty
studio apartment with the junk lamp and the proud
futon i purchased and pushed home in an abandoned shopping cart

it happened a little bit, later
sometimes we found a passage here and there in someone else's writing
and escaped for a minute sitting close together with averted gazes

but she stopped reading me poetry
very quietly
in her way that she has
in her voice always too loud (i called
it her portorican voice
sweetly) in her abrupt and running movements were
the silent withdrawals she demonstrated
the ones i pretended to ignore

words used to be all we had
we wore them and placed them around each others necks
and kissed them and fucked them
we strung them through the house
we machinegunned them with cocaine and
sometimes even took the ones we didn't say and
said them to each other

in my dream she's a laughing spirit
flaunting through burning doorways
destructive
troublesome
angry
i drink her fury and chase her
tearing at myself
pulling off outfits of myself
her distance mocks me
i stop chasing her because it is
the only way i can imagine that she will
find the joy i neatly removed

i wake up and clean the house
i put all the words away and they are neat (not neat
like she used to put all the words away) and square
and spilling over with her blood

i sit on the carpet and read the words she left
behind
almost none of them are complete
little fragments
i find myself mouthing my name written in her hand as if
it is her words mouthing my hand written in her name

i am still sitting here
i've been sitting here for months
not knowing how to write myself a space where she remains

i put the words back into the words and put
them back onto shelves of words with other
words of hers maybe hiding in the the words of
others that i haven't found
that maybe she hasn't even found

i know them
i don't have to look for them anymore