338 flushing

2005.
338 flushing.
sweet treats by brownie pointz.
roofied.
climbing up a ladder in torn tights.
the igloo.
We-Tern-U-On.
vodka cranberry.
snow angels in a snow storm.
before 11, or way way late.

Goodbye to all that.

I've been thinking a lot lately about saying goodbye to this pile of concrete, this decaying dream, this fragile balance.

I've always been a traveler. I don't think I was born to do much else but roam - this is not to say I can't commit, just that I can commit again and again and again. I can start a job, and end it. And start a new one.

I'm not sure a career is for me. It feels paralyzing, almost as paralyzing as living here has become. It's been ten years since I said goodbye to a sky filled with stars and woods filled with bitterness.

But I can do better than where I am. I achieved a goal only to realize that I have bigger ones. There is no shame in leaving, there is no shame in traveling. This place will always be here. I can always come back to it. It's nearly thirty years of living between the bindings of one book.

It would be nice to write a new book. One of these days.

There isn't a day that goes by where I don't wonder what will happen to this foreign kidney living inside me. When will it fail, how long do I have to make the most of the life it has given me before sinking into the circus of possible dialysis? How will I find another kidney for transplant and how will I go through that again at an older age? It sucks to not know how long I have with this gift, like at any second it could be gone. I try not to think about it but it always sneaks into my thoughts.

i haven't written here in over a year.
i wish i had recorded it a little better.
so much has changed
so much is changing
stay lifted

try as i might to take back this night
it slipped away from me.
i wish it was filled with regret that i haven't yet met
the one

but if sex is a hymnal i'm singing along
and if women are meant to love men,
then i've been built all kinds of wrong
i'll kiss your lips, it won't mean a thing
i'll bite your tongue, just don't give me the ring

but this isn't quite true, i've loved one or two
it's just gotten harder to choose.
to stay or to go and i always go
it's something that everyone i meet should know.

to be continued...

At least LA has trees, she thought. She still smelled them, even as it crept up on a year since her visit. Limes. She remembered throwing them in the street at a boy she didn't know much about.

It was August in New York. An insufferable humidity had kept her permanently drenched since April. Yet she knew that fall was coming, and then winter - and she knew what that meant. People locked in boxes, refusing to leave their beds. Reality. It terrified her. Could she survive another winter? Did she even want to?

She used to dream about Christmas under a blanket of snow. Now she dreamed of a Christmas at the beach.

black mountain point

I played in thunderstorms,
Up to my ears in the water at
Black Mountain Point.

However tall the sky goes
This is something only you know:
When rain comes, I soar
Yet as the sun arrives I falter
And get a little smaller…

The trailhead told me it would be miles
Until the view resembled
A body, my lake.

I forgot the headaches,
How light hurts the tops of your eyelids.
An imaginary number
Carved into my stomach.

She said girl, we woke up one day
Speaking foreign languages
To bodies we couldn’t see in pure light.

I play in thunderstorms
Up to my ears in the water.

i used to have nerves of steel,
after the heart of glass.
and for years and years and years
i left all that anxiety to pass.

they say i'm still young, i should have life.

and as the years pass i find myself
going back to my high school friends.
because with all the changing
there was something lost
though i know we're getting better
it was at a cost.

I've always known I'm just not built for 9 to 5s. But it's getting harder and harder to survive. Suit up, stay alive? Or fight. Fight.

you took me to the top of some building
watching the political city stretch out with political lights
saying, the tuition is worth it just for the view.

I was ready to move there, thinking of June.
Like, everything would be better if I were older.
Like, you'd love me if I had been a bit bolder.
No. This was not my place.
I was still a child looking for a dream to chase.

You weren't the dream, you were maddening at best.
The shot in the dark, New York City, burned in my chest.

Never mind May, it's nearly June.
I am so tired of this fucking room.
So escape escape escape or don't.

The boy of my dreams is not the man I am seeing.
Remorse hits the back of my head as he grazes my body.
In this changing weather, I just don't know any better. 

this is complicated, see
even when we feel good
it's not really what's meant to be
i look into dreams and see
he's a little shorter and a little off
daydreams about how light
comes through a window onto my face.
points out how these beams and bricks make up a space.

we walk around a city, cameras in tow
we walk around a field, cameras in tow
and you are kind but you just don't know
that in that last sunset or the final abyss
i don't see you there at the end.
i see a painter, a poet, a dreamer,
the best background singer in a band
hand in my shaking, frozen hand.

Forever Wendy amongst all these lost boys.

Save a spot on your bed that you hope is for me. It won't be.

They told me his love was a test I refused to digest. I guess. I felt nothing in my chest. Prove me otherwise, but all I try to do is see the good in you. Love wasn't ever there, it changed names as many times as I changed my hair. Last year it wasn't so clear - I walked the edge. Save a spot on your bed that you hope is for me. It won't be. First comes love, then comes marriage. Then comes a cage.

i don't have a man to love
just a boy who texts me when he's drunk
and the two dollars on my metrocard
isn't the flight that i need.

some really old writing

I just found these two poems on an abandoned page on my website. They are written in tanka form, I wrote them sometime in the fall of 2004 (my senior year of high school) for my college level English class. There's something sweet about them that I still enjoy.

#1


slow stumbling tree
perfect purity and form
hollow haunting bark
white withers these trying times
this instant in time alive


#2

flying forceful change
colours crack controlling time
everywhere regret
lying living like love can
oh they fall fast toward gone ground

they say nobody's normal, or it simply doesn't exist.
but if you're surrounded by true insanity for most of your life,
you know that normal has to be out there.
in fact, you search for it for a long time.
in a lot of different places.
and as a kid, as a teenager, you crave it.

but idealism fades, you settle into reality.
you wonder what you'd even do with normal if you had it.
because you've lived so long with so little right.
all you are left with is that will to keep searching.
in a lot of different places.
and as a young adult, as an adult, you'll crave it.

it gets hard to put down roots. you open doors, you close them.
california, new york, florence, madrid, montreal, toronto.
they are all the same place.
places you go to never feel lost.
each is a trophy, each is a prize.
to know you can be anywhere in the world,
and still survive.

you know some days i really just miss landline phones.
or trying to find bookstores that aren't gonna close.

it's getting harder to get away from bad people and times.
when all they do is click a button back into your life.

i'm not trying to date myself here but i might as well.
cause it's getting harder to talk to men through a wall of screens.

We're not even the same person. Some days I see her in daydreams and wish I could go back and tell her all that she's about to go through. All that will happen to her, who she will meet, how she can prevent herself from being who I was.  I believe that I would stop time just for her. Let her be a little kid forever.

9, 13, 16, 19, 21, 24.