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