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Tag: poet

  • something about cities

    People are like cities here
    But you’ve always only been yourself, haven’t you
    Rooftops in Brooklyn got
    Nothing on your sneer 
    Or twinkle of eye you don’t yet know you’ve got.   

    At least this time around.   

    Hipsters have their babies now, 
    Canon satchels
    Warby Parkers
    ‘Manhattan on Safari’ 
    That’s what we’ll call it
    Dickie couture
    Yves Saint Laruarnt
    Cut offs tucked into running shorts
    Fanny packs are back
    You’d think they’d run out of ideas by now
    Scuffed shoes
    On
    Lorimer, though I counted them all 
    All
    Scattered and flying through like stars, or
    Streets I used to stumble
    Or like there in our L.A.,
    The houses that belonged to Simon Cowell. 
    They say he’s drinking beer, 
    You never liked the taste
    You prefer a whiskey Erasure.   

    There’s still magic here I’d forgotten, you know. 
    Mothers pressing hands on baby’s ears, 
    Smiles down under on the platform,
    As their C to High Street’s rolling in
    The baby keeps on sleeping. 
    Poet Fathers with Picasso sons
    Cardboard signs 
    ‘Love and care our Earth’
    I want to see you hold a child’s hand.   

    I ride a train towards another person’s home,
    Another man I’ll fuck for the view. 
    Where are you now? 

    I’m somewhere under still,
    Someplace between 14th and up.
    You’d hate the heat,
    At least the way it’s been
    Swamp dick, a musty ass
    The desert suits us more.   

    Here there’s other men.
    Different flours,
    Water always never tastes the same
    Depending on the hangover 
    And or the avenue
    These island boroughs have stayed the same
    However
    There’s now a Starbucks on Allen and something or other
    God this heat 
    Week-long Summer. 
    Beads of sweat that taste of tears
    down here
    I know you don’t like those
    And yet 
    I’m beginning to think I need them
    If not to love song 
    Then to plea for you
    For you to hold me in your arms
    For me to know you mean it tight
    It’s not an errand 
    But something that you want
    For me
    Or for us
    Or for you so I’ll keep
    The train’s a station away
    It’s getting hotter by the second
    Breeze of the underground 
    Break this Earth I stand on for a living
    That’s a living
    Living to want to Live
    I beg of you
    Submit my fever dreaming heart into 
    Knowing that you’ll want me back 
    So that this home I wish to 
    Show and brag with you
    Will simmer from Hudson river aqua into rat-trash fumes
    Into yesteryear until it’s finally gone.
    Even if you only say it I’ll think of it as true, 
    I’ll hold off that demon air in corner number four
    And tell my aches 
    I’ll still be wanted after Christmas Season
    After parties
    When Winter People are no longer wanted
    And tossed with flipsides of high life
    ‘At least we had prosecco.’   

    There was something about cities, here,
    I was working hoping leading towards concluding with, 
    Something like the other shoe.   

    I wish you were parked outside my house like that one time,
    The time I pretended I wasn’t home. 
    I wish I were home and looking out the window
    Watching you
    There was something to you hoping
    An
    Embodiment of something 
    Someone 
    Wanting me.  

    I suppose.
    Let’s just meet at the Grove? 
    Valet in the parking garage
    There’s a gin bar I’ve been meaning to try,
    They say Constance Wu is fantastic in Hustlers. 
    Maybe cities are the people you do things with. 
    I don’t know what that makes people.   

    It’s too easy calling you L.A.   

    Re other men, 
    I’ll swallow all explanation for later
    Please trust me,
    For I will no less and inevitably self-destruct 
    The way you know I can
    The way that irritates
    Yet makes you think you’ve done it right,
    Your stronghold my frailty 
    Kamikaze dreams of arms
    And laughter 
    Plastic cup cupboards
    And overcooked falafel.  

    I wish they had Mamoun’s in Chelsea.
    I’d love to watch you act as if it’s something you’ve had better somewhere else. 

  • santa fe

    ‘Welcome,’ she said and 
    meaning it too.
    ‘thank you’ I 
    said, needing to pee.

  • noise of the wood

    Noise of the wood
    A clink with a spoon
    Skies in its colors
    Mahogany to quartz
    And into it too
    Like pillars of salt yet
    Rested on sand   

    A dinosaur.  

    Bark cut-ted to glass
    Shard-ing jewels, city towers
    Their speckled roofs of different heights
    Grooves and floor to ceiling heights  

    Helicopter pads, too. 

    Just   

    Jurassic tenacity with teeth mazes, maps needed
    With Latitudes and Longitudes
    The stump 
    Now that’s the hemisphere  

    For these crystals of a crystal of time
    Now polished and chromed over
    Drilled into bits for a hose
    Then gutted and fitted 
    And set in a corner  

    A sheltered space
    Protected from the meteors that first
    Turned this tree to rock
    And
    Left forever to be ignored 
    Or set next to the garden gnome

    $2804.

  • mason

    Last night you told me you were going to be married 
    That you’d found your choice 
    your settlement 
    That you’d known fear and 
    found the means of which to live with it 
    A chosen partner for the shadows 
    Except for the ones deepest in your skull 
    A willing commitment 
    towards the fires 
    except the ones you light with your feet 
    A tangible hold on purpose, apparently.   

    A determination towards happiness, never mind to ride of grace  Your sincerity lacks subtly.  

    Scythe to my scalp 
    Rebar to my veins 
    Napalm your wax of Paris 
    The holes you’re trying to fill in were dug with your very fingernails 
    Tears in your styrofoam cup, let it settle let it muddle a 
    molotov cocktail of sympathy and of drastic proportions
    I’ve never trusted what you call reliant. 
    Thrown towards your subject of protest
    I think that’s me  

    The me in you
    Or rather the you in me in the back of me
    the me in you you only know for certain –  

    How you’ve hurt and betrayed 
    and laid it all on 
    me and with your sincerity you hope 
    and aim 
    for alleviation of your character 
    You think to tell me is to bury you, to command the pyre
    to hold in what we were
    what you are, once again, what I am 
    I am the ghost and
    you can’t dream the weight of these shackles that hold in all that is long and of knowing you, your fists to my cheek one thing
    the way you told me my days were limited, the same
    But how I was New York  

    Fuck
    Your sorrow and earnest degradation
    of what’s left of my heart
    And lately what that’s been
    A yearning for more
    The desire for cliffs and empty oceans of Moab
    Looking at mountains as the reefs
    they once were or islands belonging to a Jurassic sea
    Now
    On my last night in heaven you spew me your words of Hell
    That it is with him you’ve decided happiness
    Though it’s with memories of us you’ve preserved freedom.   

    God
    Though how I envision it.
    It.   

    Ours
    You’d
    We’d have,

    Polished concrete. 
    White linen. 
    Ironed. 
    A southern barbeque.  

    Rooftop in Red Hook.
    We had dancing pandas  

    And
    poFinally  
    You’d rapture me  

    Yeah.  

    Sans shirt or contentment though I fetishize a tux  

    A B-n-B.   

    Probably off of an AirBnB.   

    Edison bulb lights and mason jar tartars.  

    The songs we used to dance with brood  

    Now caricatures of our adolescence and not what either of us have remained.       

    That’s as far as I usually get.

  • he’s a good egg

    He only cracks easily.

  • lucky dog

    Little kids are playing soccer
    The ones acting like I used to
    Tangling themselves in goalie nets 
    The parents we never turned into never-minding. 
    A daddy plays his boombox
    For the crowd 
    Empire of the Sun, remember them
    His playlist blaring louder now
    You know the one
    Remember when we’d heard it 
    My first time was magic but for you a chore
    Over at that spot we used to know 
    That Extra Fancy
    The one where a lady-turned-mommy served us Gansetts 
    And the lighting looked good enough for oysters?  

    Do you remember Steve?
    That dude
    The one
    The guy from Full Circle 
    Cracked us tall boys of Genesee I think
    Fixed us skee-ball that one time, then handed over tally chalk for scores?
    I think saw him wearing Chinos
    Outside of Artichoke
    The one on North 7th 
    By Starbucks
    By the Dunkin’
    By the train
    And fussing with his iPad
    Sweat-back looking grody
    Did you know they’d one day grow into what we’re close to becoming?  

    I suppose I never thought ahead,
    Too much looking down
    My hand with yours
    Or any time we walked along something new For me 
    Polished concrete
    Or that hallway towards Larry Lawrence
    They closed it down
    It’s gone for good.       

    There’s also people here

    Who look like what we used to do
    Doing things we used to be
    Though now they’ve got their White Claws
    And Triple-Lens phones
    Lounging on our bench-shaped stones
    And dreaming upon towers
    We never knew or cared would one day exist for them to ponder on
    This never was our spot, was it?  

    Wishing wells erode
    Over time
    And yet there 
    Still remains,
    Some times at least,
    Yesteryear precipices
    Those Mesas on top of pillars 
    Floating glad-ware lids for canyons 
    Too large to fresh-seal shut for good. 
    These plateaus are carved around, 
    Speckled relics sometimes close 
    But often far in way
    Luckily still
    Lucky Dog and Allswell 
    They’re still there
    The promenade at Brooklyn Heights 
    I suppose that one’s all me  

    The ones once ours 
    Were they really that
    Or just new for me and still fun for you?
    Did we fall upon a world of our own disgraces 
    Camel Blue kisses
    Or without regard
    A concoction of totems familiar enough for you to bleed freely? There remains however
    Our temple of our Four Corners, though.
    You remember it, don’t you
    You must
    How could you forget
    I won’t allow you to
    Their Grand Ferry Park
    Our Sapporo’s in paper bags
    Hands held after
    Even after fights 
    Outside Vanessa’s 
    The one by you
    Transplanted from the village
    Oils for the hangover.  

    The smokestack there Still remains 
    The bench where words were said
    You said something Like on your roof
    I’ve never forgotten
    PJ knew it too
    I knew her after you but
    ‘You are this city to me.’  

    Two times you’d told me
    The first a proclamation
    The second a surrender to decision 
    To you leaving 
    We won’t go there yet
    But the first my God
    Muttered whisper ignites the waterworks
    Lullaby under bridge’s rumble 
    Commotion of stampeding thunder
    You mumble
    Soft rain in Spring
    But Spring between Barrow and Morton only
    I look up under bridges
    Because on top is where you showed me where the river bent
    You hold me
    And the Hasids are watching
    And the Freedom Tower’s going up
    And the Empire’s not knowing what reigns will trump its spire.
    The Domino sugar factory was still there, wasn’t it? 
    Remember the cranes? 
    Or Glasslands for rock? 
    And the rock
    Gone
    Mostly 
    You’d think this space was separated with glass
    No touching.  

    Camel Blue’s from your pocket
    Another Sapporo. 
    Clouds of smoke…
    Though with certainty we’d know
    It’d all soon change.
    We knew we’d leave. 

    The geotag was ours but so soon 
    These towers would be new again
    And they are 
    Bleaching skyline and our promises
    Into something out of Mars.  

    The playlist is still going.   

    Mommy’s thrown a football 
    To her little boy 
    ‘Good one, Adam’
    They’re playing sports now
    The ones who’d grovel for a taco at our Union Pool
    No, Theirs.

    Perhaps they always did.
    Grow, I mean
    Grow into something they had to be, by choice or missed train
    That shaped into them Gwenyth Paltrow yuppies with cleats and doggy-walking apps.
    Perhaps I never noticed
    Seeing now
    As city people grow
    And move and have
    And watch and grow I held on expecting it to stay the same 
    For a dream of you and me
    Perhaps Should LA ever burn
    We’d have concretes where Blue Bottle used to be,
    Remember when that was new?
    How’re your wedding plans coming along?   

    Wishing wells erode over time and 
    Yet there still remains
    Our chiseled
    Relics of the beaches for which we would lay for even dead Winter’s Sun. 
    People like rivers and water, I
    I wish
    That these canyons
    Came with drains
    So once all was dry I could climb down and spelunk
    Maybe then I’d find
    The reasons why you left me 
    After choosing me
    Your City
    Your place, apparently, 
    But yes,
    Your ghost,
    Searching the streets that led us through our high lives I haunt them now,
    Right now
    These mesas
    And these bars of cities we once knew,
    As if for the first time, and always that
    Whiskey’s tasting old.

  • anasazi

    There’s a city in the cliffs
    Where at night I know you wish to hear
    Yourself as silence. 

    There are the birds in the cracks that swarm 
    With kamikaze formation during
    The day,
    Singsongs of war and territory, 
    Fights for nests in holes 
    Once Sprouted springs 
    Of sandstone rain. 

    There are the crickets of the setting sun  
    Layered chirps sounding like a river’s near, 
    Sonic bowings on their wings, 
    As Earth as mulch or air, 
    Constant and assured. 

    Crumbles echo
    Down go fallen rock
    One squirrel, 
    Scraping ground far above on heaven’s ground 
    Pebbles drop and they flee
    Cascade towards the bed of their canyon,
    Yearning with
    Pounces of desire,
    They scream 
    Like you, they want them known.

    The shivering leaves in the dead of Sun — 

    Too tired for the siren glow of the rising moon. 

    They’ve all calmed. 

    The crimson of our setting star,
    Its reprise of mauve and marigold, 
    All has calmed and settled for you,
    You
    Now
    Standing in the city in the cliffs
    Back turned from the shadows of these relic tales  
    The ruins of the Anasazi – 

    Not a breed of man but neither the translation of ancient man, 

    Its definition, the term, the term’s definition
    Needs defining. 

    But you don’t know that do you? 

    The Hopi neé Anasazi, 
    Neé Ancient man, 
    They too knew that cities become tombs. 

    Like Pompeii, 
    Present day LA
    Mausoleums of traded resource, 
    The emboldened passion for survival and luxury, 
    Dried corn and roasted yucca, 
    IG stories, DSLR, 
    They’re all the same to you. 

    Your phone is your kiva, 
    Your veiled pleasantries desiring affection and attention, 
    The need to be seen your mortar. 

    You hear yourself in silence, 
    Amongst an orchestra of ghosts
    And yet
    Your eyes scream towards your Black-mirrored ally, 

    It’s not enough to be alone
    No, you need them all to see you alone. 

    You take pictures of your feet at the 
    Grand Canyon
    Then face your back towards its Sunset 

    To ensure the colors you want other
    People
    To know you’ve 
    Seen came out the way you wished to have truly experienced it. 

    You edit to form, 
    Edit towards expectation, 
    Never mind the reality you’re given. 

  • are you trying to disappear?

    Are you trying to disappear  

    Is that why you hold your screen so close to where your heart should see   

    Compass driving, Enterprise rented  

    Your face but a foot from the window before the world –   

    Rays of light can pierce through glass but do they even know it’s there?   

    Lower the veneer  

    Let the air wipe the jerky-stifled air out of our cabin   

    Let it bounce and burn, all of it  

    Direct contact  

    The singe, amber hue of promise  

    Southwest of our America 

    Landscape of dreams your father promised you 

    The Wind our God, the stability of its billowing wallow 

    Given to us for today and yesterday and hopefully tomorrow  

    It keeps us  

    A presence  

    Tick and the tock of the world  

    Quick  

    Lower it now  

    And let us breathe

    The brush of the desert crunch   

    Soil burying untold legends,   

    Arid cough of dirt  

    And Turbine breeze 

    Wiff of rattlesnake and canyon –   

    Our interior-dried Slurpee, 

    Crumbs of banana chip and scattered tic-tac   

    Planned sips of Seven-Up Zero

    Or your un-known, done-branded bottle of berry-serumed sparkled drink, 

    An act of forced away from the projection of your purchased lens,  A yearning to capture without process,   

    Without concern 

    Or placement —   

    Don’t tell me that’s what you’d prefer to breathe? You capture so that you may not see,  

    But you know that, don’t you? You must, 

    My God  

    At least I hope you do.  

    Knowing that you photograph to look away, I mean   

    It hurts to assume otherwise 

    Although

    I’ve come to settle a knot in my own stomach 

    That perhaps 

    In truth   

    While you may know what you need you may not know how to keep it.

    Or analog   

    To you, to document with time stamps 

    Blockaded lengths of moments in which one may memorize over time as only those   

    select   

    Fragments. That were real. Even only existed.  

    Maybe   

    I get it.  

    We had been fighting just an hour before. 

    Come an hour later, everyone you and I know will come to know we’re having the best of times, aren’t we  

    Can’t you see that you’re beginning to disappear? 

    The alloy before your gaze,   

    The blockade,   

    The yearned desire to redirect while still facing dead-on   

    What you capture   

    Is it to re-remember?

    Or is it something worse  

    Something like to disregard  

    Or the preservation of a tale? Are you tired?   

    Are you finally set in what has become of you

    And in doing so Come to assume what will become as me  

    Fabled promise of your wisdoms  

    Another deviation from the truth that our world has decided for you?  

    Is that why you face the window to your side? 

    Yes.   

    Yes, I told you of a secret. 

    I do not know that I want to be what I always knew I’d become   And that my home has always been a stay-away 

    From where   

    The heartbreak of nostalgia tethers at my sternum   

    The falsified promise of a future never lived   

    A shadow dancing with a glisten

    Over points of constellations but of paralleled skies –  

    I’d left a trap for a chair in the corner,  

    For a disease of the blood, 

    And another of my society,   

    The lust for wonder wander fading like the pink to the blue of a lip,  

    Lungs filling with sand 

    Ashes of the American Spirit 

    I’ve admitted the fadation — the process of fading 

    I’ve just made it up 

    of my soul –   

    That is the stamina to yearn, 

    To yearn so much it has already been said three times 

    Now four I suppose I like the word  

    No longer your boy I am now only my name.   

    Our anger with one another now stems from the fractaled realities of two separate lives   

    Skies, remember   

    Yours and mine,   

    Mine with consideration of you and yours in consideration with mine considering yours,   

    The closeness of our time together has revealed just how far apart we truly are,   

    Not laterally of course  

    Again 

    Constellations, plains  

    Sliding Doors, Gwenyth Paltrow, that guy from the Mummy. 

    To live is to suicide by grace if you’d like, 

    Mine by twist of an arm  

    Or the drip of the drink  

    All of it  

    Chosen disregard for the abbreviated chapters of a man – 

    They’ve chosen marriage, Rite Aid backyard furnishings, 

    Trips to cabins with pre-frozen chocolate-covered strawberries,  Shared Facebook spaces,   

    I think I’ve chosen Joshua Tree

    My patio   

    Take-out preselected my lover.  

    I wonder if you see me drive and speak without awe,  

    No wow’s   

    No Look at that’s  

    No wow’s –    

    No points     

    No jabs towards rivers

    No prescribed desire to the awe,   

    You tell me rocks look like children,   

    And those like men,  

    Lions and Sons,   

    How they kiss the sky  

    And cut it so the clouds may stick their landing  

    And then me   

    I think now that you see it  

    My fizzle, postmortem pedal to the metal –   

    Perhaps it’s not you who wants to disappear. 

    You’d hate being an Angelino.   

    Death Valley comes before landing in LA  

    Granted it’s little North of that   

    But what’s that say about the basin?

    I fear you’d hate being me. 

    About as much as I fear you’d hate to need me.

    That’s what this is starting to feel like.  

    I don’t feel equipped. 

    That’s why I get so mad.   

    Not because you annoy me –  

    But because it feels as though the way I’m going  

    We’re going, really  

    I could never help you  

    True  

    Buckled knees buckle less when with woman with hope

    At least that’s what I’ve come to understand from sharing this cabin here with you  

    But  

    What of a man devoid of any?    

    Perhaps you see that of me too.   

    No wow’s. 

    I’m starting to see it now. 

    I don’t think you want to disappear. 

    No  

    I think it’s someone else you don’t want to vanish.  

    For your two lens,   

    I’m beginning to think not both of them are just for you.   

    Your timecards, points I convincingly feigned happiness, if only for you.   

    At least so, I pray it’s worked.

    If only that were enough.   

    Don’t let me disappear.   

    Mother who knows me no more  

    Don’t let me disappear   

    From the man that I’ve become   

    Who still sings for the boy we both used to know  

    Somehow still in me  

    Gypsy-dancing over coals  

    It’s getting hot and  

    The car AC’s blaring blindly.

  • summer’s started changing, already gone

    Miley did this thing where she 
    Wrote a song about this guy she used to love,
    Now grown distant from,
    Something about needing the city, and no longer the ocean,
    The woman’s got like nine homes, alright, and 
    Apparently this guy, Chris, 
    Sorry, his brother,
    Like,
    He never knew how she’d felt about any of it, 
    Up until one day he’d gone off in his car and just heard it on the radio, 
    That new song of hers
    About that pool and pill life and having to leave him for the city and she’s got an orchestra playing for her when she’s performing it live and all and she’s forcing these tears of hers and all of this heartbreak she’d hid off from ever admitting to anyone but papa dollar, knowing she’d never get off it of it the right way, singing it to his face and making sure her eyes are locking in with hers. 

    Thought she sucked but look at me now. 

    Summer’s started changing, almost gone,  
    I’m weary if this time apart should have been 
    For the better
    In that I’m sorry, but, 
    That maybe we should have 
    Simply stayed where we were the first time we stayed apart, 
    And we both assumed we’d done what was best for one another. 

    You need me like a box. I needed you like a pedestal. 

    If not to get higher than at least to feel as though I already were. 
    You’d put me where the linens were. 
    I was good at thinking that maybe they were made of 
    Lace or paper flowers
    And this closet is just us on the floor
    Of some home
    Not yours but maybe partially mine
    And there’s a mattress
    And you don’t mind the smoke
    And I don’t mind the plastic cups
    And there’s a distance Though my ankle’s on your shin 
    Some sort of cracked-back lullaby’s playing out of the AC.

    Even though the window’s open
    And the sounds are dancing with the 
    Breeze between the clapping of the blinds
    And our groans sound as crisp as the air, 
    Until it was time to wriggle out of bed and time to play 
    And masquerade and hide the poles we truly were of our uncompleted world. 

    You admitted you wanted a man
    Someone who stood equal to you and your stature, not your back but the other kind you favor, the
    Hi-Tops likeability 
    Round for the table, back and forth 
    Nights of nice
    But of kind
    Of holding
    Needing kneading,
    No.

    I was the parched starvation of your larynx. 

    ‘I loved you at a 10 and you loved me at a 24, I win.’

    Once your words of dismissiveness 
    Somehow forgiven again, when yes, I clung, 
    And yes I crazed 
    But it’s how I loved back then
    And lurched with bated stillness 
    Towards your critique of the quirk
    The things I’ve got to fix
    Always fixing
    And wrenching
    But apparently
    A different pipe or beam, every time
    And I did it, I fucking did it
    So I could house you
    In this house of mine
    And fix me
    So that perhaps you 
    Could finally see you fit in 
    Within the carcass of all that was my love for you, but. 

    I don’t know that you even wanted that. 
    No, I forgot. I’d always known that about you. 

    You say I taste disgusting 
    From the flavor of my tongue

    The moment 
    After I have smoked That’s it 
    No more kissing or touching
    Your ticket to leave me
    No longer even out front of 
    My home
    Lately even
    It’s just been at the bar
    Goodbye from the bar
    The one you loved
    The places you always took me to, those places with names and  Shadows of acquaintances
    Who see me not by name
    But by the docile, broken sweetheart
    Chosen finally and 
    Sided with the enigma of your ego. 

    I was tired. 

    Yes of you
    But of this city
    Perhaps you are LA after all,
    Unless of course
    The city’s made you right in its eyes, just
    Nice.

    November of last year. 
    I’ve only known you for so little. 
    You’d said you’d got my number. 
    Akbar after downtown with my mother
    She’d come to visit me Remember 
    And I went on over and
    you jabbed me with your finger
    Lower than my shoulder
    ‘hey, you’re cute’
    Remember that? 

    Leaning up against the bar,
    T shirt
    Kid jeans but for a man
    I said ‘thank you’
    Needing to pee.

    There it started getting blurry.
    You’d asked me what I did
    Almost excited, knowing I’d ask you in return. 

    In between the drinks I’d 
    Go out for myself To smoke with myself and Talk to myself
    And 
    Be with myself 
    The chemical mix
    That erasure is mine
    Feeling like a man Who’s made the mistakes of a boy
    But in those fine moments
    Something spectacular in my head
    Had played 
    A movie of a dream
    That injected my veins
    With the pop rock crackle of
    Wanting tomorrow
    Until knowingly tomorrow morning Hit.

    You never minded the smoke back then. Was it bait? 

    We moved to the jukebox and continued on
    Excited to ask me where I lived 
    So you could tell me you had a roof, and so 
    I followed knowing I was an easy sell
    But also thinking
    Something about you
    There was something hidden
    Deep in you but maybe I could hit 
    And nerve-connect 
    With you
    Like that scene in Avatar 
    Ponytail sex
    Or maybe even just a sling
    Maybe you had something more in you you’d admit but then for now It was just a roof
    And a TV outside, a TV roof, that never fucking worked.
    You’d always try to finagle
    With the fucking thing
    Instead of looking what was
    Just beyond the ledge –
    A pool of stars littered in a basin bucket
    Hills so dark they reminded me of thunder.
    For just a moment I had it 
    With you
    My arm around your waist
    Plastic cup of ice and the expensive shit
    A view made ours but 
    Only for a moment, Until I saw it in your eyes and saw you looking out and thinking that that’s what people did with views they savored them like steaks, 
    Remember when you said that thing about
    You seeing the forest while
    I stay focused on the tree? 

    The things said over text
    Still only 
    Six blocks apart.
    The need of being right over the need of being with each other. 

    Part of that bar conversation,
    You know, that night we first met — 

    It was the fact in a long ass while 
    I hadn’t really,
    You know

    Come out.
    In the sense of like.
    Coming out.
    With what I am.
    Have.

    Even now I have trouble writing it outloud.

    But I told you.
    And maybe the song was right. 
    And we’d only kissed four times. 

    I’d said, you know, 
    And you’d said, you know, with a shrug but without a shroud, you’d asked me, really, 
    You’d said, 
    ‘But aren’t you still you?’

    You did. 

    Knowing now what’s left of what I know of you today, 
    I’ve teetered the thought if that you or you being nice or you living with your liver, 
    But no, I’ve deduced over time and with time because I’d be a fucking lunatic otherwise by giving into my paranoia that, 
    No, 
    All of that – was the most you’d ever be with me, and that was also the most of me I’d ever be with you. 

    I said yes. 
    ‘And you’re taking care of yourself?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Then what’s the problem? You’re you. Staying you.’ 

    I don’t blame you for not remembering. If in fact you had. Thinking you’d forgotten has made it easier for me, at least. 

    You were being you. And I was being me hearing something I’d never thought I’d hear out of a guy with your proclivities and habits, status. I’d come to assume things like guys like you, and with your words in my ears, I was willing to do all that I could to ensure you wouldn’t prove this – phenomenon of a man – you – just like all the others. 

    I deluded myself into thinking I could help you there. In fact, I’d deluded myself into believing I could keep you there,
    And in retrospect
    That wasn’t an assumption
    But rather an ignorant
    Obligation
    Towards a man who’d already
    Believed he was one and therefore is, you know, a
    Completed one,
    But I admit, Yes. 
    Something that I pegged as
    Something worth expanding upon was just me, 
    Trying to course-correct you, 
    I.

    I guess at first that’s what made me stay,
    Thinking I could iron out the kinks
    With you I’d yet to see,
    Ignoring that we didn’t know what we’d yet become, 
    Even though, 
    With everything in my power I tried to find untrue, you always  Validated me. 
    I’d always known you had. 

    You gave me back my presence, by offering the extra that was yours, freely. 
    I hadn’t felt it in me 
    That power, 
    Since before that day at the clinic back in 2016. 

    It was enough for me. 
    Needle in my arm, I was running with you baby, 
    Never looking for something new to inject
    Into my poison-filled blood and soiled liver,
    Until those times I let slide, 
    The times you brought it up with the hurrying and the towels so you wouldn’t get it, ‘that’s how you get it,’ you were wrong, but who was I to argue you’d just bought dinner and everything I’d ever wanted without earning, God, or needing, to the point when I was gifted anyway I thought my God, I could poison you, why on this fucking Earth did you decide to stick it out with me? Why me if you’re so fucking scared? Why me if it meant the surrender of the refractory ? Why me if the ways in which I could make you feel the way you’d make me feel alive were subpar, half of a gift card, a drive down to Palm Springs with a broken-tired SUV on the ride back to LA. I felt inferior, and perhaps what it fucking was was that throughout all of these goddamn days in these goddamn hills I’d become convinced finally, after years, that there was nothing to me,
    When there was so much to you. 
    No one was you. 

    Maybe what you are is how
    You make me feel
    What more is ever a person? 

    I wanted to stay with one foot out the door,
    Others no less seeing it there, my foot, 
    They’d ask me ‘Man, what’s up,’
    And I’ll smile knowing you’d be coming 
    Down the steps any second now,
    Hopefully holding that door open so that I could carry in all that I was and of this world. 

    I should’ve never made you carry my shit. 
    But maybe you shouldn’t have told me all of what I had was shit to begin with. 

    I believe I loved you
    And that one day maybe you’d know how to love me too
    Or more
    To love being with me and
    Take my hand
    At least for now, back then, I mean, maybe just the finger, I’d think – 

    ‘Quick!
    It’s turning into Winter!
    The Wet Season lies ahead and there will be 
    parties to attend
    And whiskey to sip and 
    Suits to wear
    And lights convincing us
    Now with these festive 
    Feasts Of fervor and froyo 
    Or Yayo
    And we can show the world 
    And we still have each other
    The blind with the Mute
    Maybe it’s the other way around
    Who cares
    Just
    Get your phone out
    Put it on the both of us
    Until the both of us are looking good
    Good enough to be
    And or convince 
    People will be happy 

    Lol

    To see us, at least
    At least it’ll sound like that to us
    When to them
    Those we really care about believing us
    Will see us as just a moment
    Of their night
    In their own worlds
    Feigning convinced admiration
    For the both of us
    Sticking together
    Until they go home 
    To who and what they are and need
    And we’re in our Uber
    And my street’s just coming up around the corner.’

    Poles, remember?  

    Perhaps in that capacity
    We were perfect for one another. 

    When the light of your eyes
    Come across these final words

    I expect you will say no thing…
    With the same amount of time it takes
    For me to
    Hit up my stories on IG and pull up to see
    And hope to God at the bottom of my scroll there you are just peeking in your cave 
    And by graces of wind and fortune I’ll catch your name and your handle and at once like it’s always been the case I’ll know deep down that you will have me always. 

    Just. Know that.