What My Pen Wrote (While Waiting For You).

Should we miss only the dead
because it is more painful
to miss the living and lost?

Should we honor only the great
because it is harder to honor
the misfit, the demon, the daily smoker
powered by his hangover and his TV?

Have all of the new ideas been written
and if so, should we give up?
Have Hemingway and Bukowski
seen the only alternate world there is?

If it rhymes, does it count?

Is there anything left in what used to be?
Is there anything here in what this might become?
How can we gauge the past, conquer it,
kiss it goodbye when it still wishes to kiss us good morning?
And in that morning kiss, what should happen to our future
if we fall back into the sheets of it
and smell the clean scent of what we loved at the time,
the scent of what waking up used to mean,
the sex and the coffee breath?

You’ve arrived and I’ll put my pen down,
but when I do,
what shall come of these thoughts?

Afternoon kisses never seem as dirty
as they are.

Exhaustion from defensive arguments settles in around now, around midnight.  In the morning I’ll be sticky with a fake tan and my eyelids will fight against the weight of my tar-thick lashes.  I’ll buy a pack of smokes, take the matches they offer me and never use them.  I’ve got 42 books piled up in the center console.  Useless and unlit little paper pieces of miniature advertising.  You open the lid to the console and you want Diet Coke, you want Marlboro’s and Kent’s and Heinz Ketchup.  It’s fun to toss them in there, hear the rattle and the urge they all have to ignite.  It feels like something close to power.  Light them all at once, a few inches from the gas tank.  Fireworks.  Coke and Ketchup and tobacco and heat so fucking brilliant that my fake tan melts right off.  A little puddle of brown on the concrete.

My dresses and my skirts are structured around my hips like cotton floral bone-hugs.  But the twist of my words cannot be structured.  Ivy-whirl wrapping flesh-kisses around major muscles.  Veins tied off into electric-blue bundles.  No direction of flow, only the incessant need to string words together like salted popcorn onto a string of gold with shaking sticky fingers and ‘I hope you like it, I wrote it for you’. 

We tilt back our seats in your car and peer up through the moon roof.  Neon-navy speckled with sparkling stars and wisps of bright white clouds and you tell me that the city-smog leaves barely a diamond drop for us to wish on.  They’re all hidden behind a chemical curtain and I hold onto my breath for fear of growing infected.  I imagine the burn of stardust in my lungs mixed with toxic smog and purple-haze smoke.  Eventually I push the air from my belly and let it filter through the tiny gaps in my teeth and pierce the smoke that hangs there with my tongue to create crystallized rings like halos that we can hang around the rear-view mirror, so boldly-bright we let it light our way in lieu of headlights.

Nothing structured will you find in my journals or my blood or the way I wear my hair.  But I’ll pick those little electric rose bundles from under my skin and I’ll tied them off with silk ribbon.  My gift to you, for reading my rushing river of moments I feel suited to pen.  A thanks and a bone-hug, a flesh-kiss.

Over Coffee.

Your eyes, chocolate eyes, take up the whole room.  Your lashes bust the windows.  Your eyes inside the coffee shop walls.  The smell of sugar and the trail of cinnamon swirling along the counter top.  A powder map of New York and long dusty dirt roads that lead to me.  And my paper cup filled with hot water and tea.  And my lungs.  And your eyes, chocolate eyes, take up all of the air.  They shiver with thought.  They well with water and salt.  I am sucked up into them.  They leave no room here for my lips or the swell of emotion in my belly.  I don’t speak.  Your eyes, your enormous eyes and their flecks of gold.  The skin around my finger bones pick up the fragmenting light that bouncing from those specks and there’s an arch and there’s a diamond shine and there’s a spinning loop, round and round. 

And your eyes, your chocolate eyes and this coffee shop and the time you spilled your drink and it formed a little caramel river and it picked up the grime from the floor.  Your eyes, so large that I am no longer breathing, there’s just your gaze and you’re waiting on my tongue, but there’s no room for its movement.  There’s no room for my voice.  And I can watch the streetcars sparkling in there, all of Manhattan.  A whole city in your eyes, without so much as a whisper from me.

Engineering

You’ve really only ever been good at two things as far as I could tell.  Engineering and breaking my heart.  I don’t know too much about the prior even though I spend my eight-to-five’s fingering through blueprints with papercut tips and mailing sealed proposals to small-city big-wigs with dollar amounts printed on them that seem something of a fairy tale exaggeration.  And I’ve always admired the way the indigo ink dusts almost every wall in the office.  But I know a lot about my heart and the condition you left it in.  It’s mostly because you looked me in the eye while you fucked me.  My heart had been broken a million times (this isn’t so much fairy tale exaggeration as it is nightmarish truth) before I ever took this job but come to find out, eye contact during sex has a lot more significance in the moving on process than I had known. 

 Your shoulders haunch forward while you work and it looks mystical but all I can think of is the spot on your desk where I’d sit with my legs opened slightly.  You got really good at working the mouse with one hand but I don’t consider that to be number three.  That was still only a part of the second thing you’ve master.  The breaking of my heart.  And you know this just as well as I do.  And so do they; our wild-eyed coworkers with their wispy puffs of gossip over sugar with coffee from paper cups.  They know it all.  The couch in the ladies room, the desk and the dummy cameras that they so desperate wish were real.  They’d all love their own copy of our tape, I’m sure of it.  I’ve heard it whispered by the heavy-set girl who sits out back. 

 “Can you imagine?” she says.  And I can imagine.  I bet you can too.  All of their eyes on us, their mouths agape just a bit while a grainy black and white flickering fuck-film plays out before them in the computer room.  It’s what you always wanted.  Attention and recognition.  The pride of corruption. 

I’m willing to bet that if I cared to ask, you’d say that you’ve really thrown yourself into your work lately.  Your Engineering degree has really been doing you and your wallet well, you’d say.  And I’d feign happiness, as I always did.  I guess that’s one of the things I’ve always been good at. 

I hear there’s a big job coming up in downtown Boston.  A high school that could really use a reworking.  If you need me to handle any of the blueprints, just let me know.  I’d be more than happy to help you out. 

But if you’re not interested, that’s just fine.  I suggest you may want a hobby to occupy your time though.  There’s a whole world out there filled with things you could be good at.  I think it may be time you expand your horizons.  So to speak.

Outbreaks

I don’t write stories.  My head just won’t support the spine of them.  But I write tiny poems all day with the tips of my fingers on walls and skin and on the dirty windows of parking lot Jeeps.  I have thoughts like little outbreaks.  Bright pink and white polyps all over my tongue that make it hard to speak.  When I bite down, cherry juice and a hardened pit of muscle.  They come in rushes like orgasm but then they go and I come down with clean lips.  Sometimes they don’t plague me again for days.  There was a whole year once, where my tongue was free from the swell and I was left to bake sugar cookies at Christmas without carving flowery lines into the dough. 

I had an outbreak last night.  I wrote a letter for a girl I know in the soap scum on the shower wall.  Finished it on the steamed up mirror and then signed my name in lipstick on my grandmother’s antique vanity glass.  When it was gone my mouth tasted sweet and I drank coffee to forget the flavor of her.  I’m hoping for another swell soon.  I’ve got so much more to say.

Streaming February

I sometimes do silly-silly child-like things.  I blow bubbles into my peppermint tea through a cinnamon stick.  I chew my bottom lip.  I spike my hair straight up with lavender shampoo in the shower. 

But then sometimes, I do serious-sullen adult-like things.  I pay the phone bill two-days early by check and I buy my own stamps  by the book-full.  I read the directions and separate my laundry.  I drink my coffee black and I vote.

And some days I just sit on the edge of the bed.  I pile my hair up on my head and then take it down.  I crack the bones in my feet against the hardwood floorboards and then I go right back to sleep.  Those are the days that I can’t find the balance.  It’s the popping sounds my shoulder blades make as they’re dislocated from the tugging on either side that both lulls me and then wakes me suddenly. 

Some days I am unsure of me.  Some days I am unsure of anything at all.

Sunday. 

Sunday with book forts and greasy hair.  Flannel pants that end at the calf and leave me goosebumped.  Coffee with caramel and deleting words by the line-full.  Redhead glossies that always lead to masturbation.  Rainbow chips of white chocolate over strawberry sponge cake.  Sunday.  Sunday with Bukowski and a chewed split lip.  Got to water the bamboo plant in the elephant vase and order a stuff dog for the girl I love with the long dark hair.  Hummus tastes like silver when you lick it off the spoon.  Roasted red peppers.  Olive oil.  Without make up my face is a hundred different shades.  Red and purple.  Blue veins, clogged up under my eyes.  Black spots like I’ve been fighting.  You should see the other chick.  I joke but it’s not a joke.  Sunday with bare feet picking up dirt.  I want to cover myself in moss and lay naked, but it’s too cold to go outside.

Drags

There’s a gag reflex on the first inhale of the first cigarette I’ve had in months.  A closed throat and pink lungs.  A punishment in peeling skin and hang nails.  Winter hands and fingers, cut up but never quite bleeding.  There’s a lonely leather glove balled up in the pocket of my coat.  Big brass buttons and one hanging by a thread at the hip.  A second drag and I am the brick of the building, melting into the mortar and gravely red.  Inside there is so much paper I could torch the place with the flick of my thumb.  Inside there is so much pain but I could set them all free of their demons with a well placed tongue.  Third drag.  Up on the roof the cars look like diamonds and I can see the spots on their drivers heads through the moon roof.  Shiny like a disco.  I haven’t danced in years.  Fourth drag and I’m gone.  There are butterfly wings with jagged edges falling like embers.  I just hope the lies I tell myself, about the ground needing the nicotine as much as I do, find a way of coming true.  I press the sunflower yellow filter down into the hard winter soil with my heel and hear it breathe out in relief.

Cambridge & Town Cars

collect calls from the side of the road
bravery and bloody lips
i hike my skirt only after 2am
and this is all there is to life
wood bones
that i file the imperfections out of
until i’m left in a pile of dust
the diner took the spanish omelet
off the menu
and the forecast says warm rain
for weeks
i shiver and gulp cold coffee
that sits like mud
i think about cambridge
and town cars
add sugar and stir

Train[ed] Thoughts.

I caught the first train out.  Bruises kissing the backs of my knees and the sky still dark.  Rain.  Rain, but not pouring down rain.  The kind of rain you might not notice if your skin wasn’t so sensitive.  Barely morning and everything is grey and I’m noticing the cracked leather of the seats and the blur of the trees and the stream of consciousness that I pen is influenced by the motion of everything.  I think of songs about trains and try to hum them.  There’s a woman in a pink hat and she’s knitting.  Her hair is in curlers.  4:32am.  Rolling over tracks in Pennsylvania.  People are dead in upstairs bedrooms of large ranch houses and the sun hasn’t risen yet so no one knows.  Maybe some of them live alone.  Maybe the rats will feast on their meat before anyone stops by to check on them.  Maybe their phones are ringing all day.  That’s the thought that bothers me most. 

There’s nothing romantic about this kind of rain.  Except maybe the way it looks on the windows.  It would never flood basements.  It’s got no power.  It’s not artistic.  And neither am I.

Tiny Things

Lint balls from your wool sweaters are starting drier fires in New York laundromats while you’re at the cafe next door with earl grey eyes.  I can feel the heat and smell the fabric softener from Boston and the smoke is coming from under my bed where the monster hit snooze because I haven’t slept.  I wrote you a letter and left it in a subway car and I’m not sure yet if I abandoned it on purpose.  The fire is breaking news on my television but I don’t turn the set on, just feel it coming through the wires.  I keep wet teabags over my eyes and imagine your dirty laundry as smog over the city.  It rains down thread with sequins tied to the ends and by morning the smoke under my mattress has smoldered.  Everything is ashes and dirty footprints and the dry cough in my throat tells me I had left your letter on that plastic seat entirely with purpose.

We Made It

when was the last time
you sliced your finger
on the splintered wood
of a card catalog,
the yellow reaching your bones
like nicotine?
i like your red hair
and the touch of
a twitch your joints have
shock therapy
when i touch your exposed wires
to my lips
we write books
together
that will serve to fill the shelves
of big city art libraries
only to dull the echoes
of the gasps and screams
from the hallways
where the bums go to
masturbate
and college kids go
to study the architecture
of the homeless spine,
but i’ll tuck your hair behind your elf ears
and we’ll be okay
knowing that our names
are gilded gold letters
over paper
and our love notes
lay sleeping inside

We danced.  You and I and twin stomachs of vodka.  Danced with ballet flats ribbon-twisted up our calves and danced with patent leather, cloves, appetizers and strangers with cigars and early autumn.  A lighted tent, a pit stop for tobacco and Red Bulls and sticky-finger BBQ potato chips.  My floral dress and your glasses.  Fingerprints.  Pop music and back bones.  I danced my curls loose and baby hairs plastered themselves to my skin while I sweat.  A castle and old friends with baby bumps and wine lips and a bride with a dirty dress hem.  We danced and I’m not sure I thanked you for it.  We shared a cigarette on the ride back home.  Your stereo was static and the wind through windows stung our ears.  Thank you, friend, for your hands on my hips while we tripped over our buzz and the band.