Farbringen

Six blocks from the subway and half a block from home I realized I was happier than I'd been in weeks

Amber says that all things are the same in that they're completely uncomparably unique
and today was one of those days, the room of folks who nestle in to our diasphora in a way that's just like me.
We said: choose community over money. you need community to survive.
I've said that many times before.
Yet, on the subway I thought, sadly- that's it, Rachel, this show this is all you get.
and once I saw I was beaming I chided myself and realizing: no, this is all you need.

MEN WRITING LETTERS

these are men

always on the verge

of explaining themselves

letters promised soon

and never arriving

when the moment’s too loaded

they promise letters

when they have to go away

they promise letters

when what we ask is something

without an answer

they promise letters

what are their lives like

so far away without us?

what do they do there

but write letters

that never come?

men writing letters

don’t want to be there

when we find out

tonight there was a man

digging a hole outside

to bury the dead

someday you will understand he said

I am writing you a letter

1 through 7

1

the orange net means safety.  the orange cones mean rest.  the sky over the concrete wall suggests the ocean

2

coupled people using tinder for the first time

3

my aunt and flowers and my grandmother's legs

4

my grandmother's legs and shoes and a chair and newspaper

5

beatrice in the wooden rocker on the porch, wearing a checked dress and holding an egg

6

(part of) the bust of alexander skene

7

below, a white guy in a toyota stuck waiting to cross the road, caught digging in his nose for gold while he thinks no one is watching him

Daydream//////////7

garter snakes and tall grass
 sweet herbs and warm ground;
offerings
a mise en place  for life
olive tones and navy blues and
deep midnights expose
such great heights from which to
tumble
a practice: being fulfilled rather than
feeling full

oh the mice

12 days
dark and cold
quiet
everyone is gone
but the mice
the decorations slowly peel off the wall
but there's no one to fix them
only the mice
to add some color to their bedding

12 days more
before it's time
to pack it all away until next year
oh, not the mice

Labyrinth

I've had to labyrinth my body to
make madness make sense. Now I'm
trying to untangle. I know a labyrinth
is beguiling. Believe me, I'm meant to
get lost in here. It's filled with countless
rooms filled with treasure boxes filled with
bottles filled with feathers. But then
what? What did you ever want from
a maze but the organization of insanity?

When you sneak up on the pain
it bites you but there's almost always
another blind alley to duck down, a
monster waving its arms, a ceiling so
high it seems like it doesn't exist,
a hard dirt-packed floor. Walls that
are cracked creaked mossy and moist.
Sometimes an old stone fountain, sometimes
the walls are bushes. Who knows? Where
does this go? When you're approaching
center sometimes you find yourself back
at the very edge. Love looks like loss. Loss
looks like love. We're meant to get lost in this love.

But when you tire of love that always feels like loss or always
leads to loss, tire of labyrinthine logic and the loneliness of
loving lacklusterly or overly lustily, when you don't want to
feel like a little girl climbing around in a pit, digging a
labyrinth to make living underground make sense, when you
want to climb up above ground and taste the light on your
face, understand down and up and family and tree and
truth and honesty and loyalty, when you
long for your big coming out, the revelation of your
freaky side, which is, hilariously, calm, practical and reliable,

when you are ready to stand, small and simple and
a little dizzy in your own truth, then today is the
day to make your own home, make your own
famiy. Today is the day to take the arm of someone
worthy of you and hold on tight and let tears fall and
let ache ache and reveal your own sadness to your own self.
Then you can be your own best friend, standing in a green
grassy field, tree in the distance. Then you can hold your
own hand. Then you can reach out for someone else's
hand. Then love and loss are not tangled together. They
are simply what they are. Love is love. Loss is loss.

Rip Van Winkle 2015

"in the papers of" the past, given to, again, the past,

as fiction, in the intro, in the story.

What amount of time is 40 years?

Snooze a revolution and return, it's not so long, 

familiar faces, older, but that's fine.

To Rip Van Winkle is a verb to me,

a danger. I hate my shrewish wife and all, of course,

but that's just for the humor, that's no problem

or was it 50? 60? That's still fine

I Rip Van Winkled that, I think,

that party, textbook, life event, the news

If I sleep through revolution then what of it?

I mean, I'm no one (ask my wife!) but that's

the point. 

METAL KIDS

 
Beneath the National Army monument

the Metal kids slump on shady stairs

in different tones of tired cotton:

Guns N’ Roses, ACDC, Marilyn Manson,

a painting stuffed into a bursting

Metal Kid backpack,

purple and red

across cardboard.

They are Drinking Shumenko,

peeling gold foil back

from tall green bottles,

throwing it at the roller-bladers

and screeching.

My face is a furnace.

Please don’t do things

just to not disappoint me.

Please don’t disappoint me more.

Your girlfriend has a face

made of such fragile bones

that I am almost more in love

with her than you –

how could I not love

a thing that you do?

How can I explain

the extinguished YOLO feeling,

the trapped, deflated balloon 

to such a stoic face?

What does YOLO look like

in all-caps Cyrillic?

The Metal Kids switch ponytails 

to braid, smash bottles, 

screeching, slump lower 

against eachother's 

knees.

Beyond what

Laundry steam presses up against
a rare soft/cold city air
not far from where the
tire swing killed the man last month.

You can give away your
adjustable can opener
or you can come home to
your brother frying bacon
with a lonely face.

You can straighten the path out
or keep reaching
behind your partner's back
beyond what     

BY THE LIGHT

By the light of another dawn I find you
walking toward me from end of Ward Avenue
seems we are closer than ever
since I can even see the shadow hair makes 
caught in your mouth
I want to touch it-- your mouth; 
the hair-- to pull it out,
I want to hold fingers against your cool cheek
stubble like sand in the morning

The horse hooves have dug tiny caves in the beach
for likewise tiny plovers
My God! Nothing could be so utterly
perfect 
as a tiny bird, hiding
in places smashed in
by giant feet

When the light changes season I will fly to you
Like a plover
over watery miles 
the ranges of sea
watching the sky in the water for the first shadow
sign
how I ache to reach you 
my dust to your dust
to hide me

in the heat of your body

Lunch, 1983

Plastic compartments, pink pudding first.
Peas, potatoes, apart. Ham in rind fringe, picked at and ignored in
pinking grey, a gravy of ladled slop.
Potato barricade, processed delight, mass of sand in my sinus.
Dinner lady in powdery skin, thinning lips points at my tray.
The compartments have made my leavings specific.
I'm not ashamed that the ham has cooled,
but soon I will be in the toilet, unhappy, crying as it spills from my mouth.