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

He only cracks easily.

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.

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.

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.