I must be cursed
A karma curse
It’s the only explanation
For never sitting still.
Headline news told me that
Half of the population has no internal dialogue
And half of all people say they’re happy
So what I’ve inferred
Is that half of Earth
Has chosen to ignore the narrator they know
In exchange for quiet interactions with the world
And yet
I am cursed,
With unsettled limbs of inheritance
a house in the Poconos
a house in Morocco
a house in Philly
are all places to hide
from the idea of my 9-5
when reality rears again
on Sundays, after six
you’ll find me wondering
if this is it
a place to live
a place to hide
a place to fuck
and a place
to rest my shit
pacing a track into the rented floor
in circles, within squares
to the sound of Summer Months on repeat
and conversations
with company I’ve just met
I was slutty before the shorts
now I’m a force
with tattooed thighs
and years of deprecating dialogue
strutting around
in my slut shorts
they were a source of power in the 80s
like Burt Reynolds
like Burt Reynolds mustache
like Burt Reynolds in a convertible
people thought that a single decade
could contain the power
of slut shorts
I wear them at home
I wear them at funerals
I wear them at coffee shops, dog parks,
city blocks, bars, bakeries, rest stops, trains,
gardens and cars
I wear them at Trader Joe’s
and everyone knows
me in my slut shorts
It’s almost spring
so it’s almost summer
and nothing can stop me
in my slut shorts
The sun doesn’t set on this side of the building,
but I can tell when the pink air is heavier than usual.
The hearts of the apartments across the street start to glow like
stage bulbs, orange after the lights dimmed
in effigy behind the scenes.
Everything outside my window fades around the ocher exterior
in a filtered vignette.
The building, alive for seconds sucks my breath
with the hope of never looking away and
reminds me of my own fragility.
One summer when I was a kid
I introduced a basketball to a bay window,
and it shattered in the same way.
A thousand shards, naked in the afternoon.
Blinking with astounded expectation
that let me in on a thousand secrets about
the passage of time.
Years later, I learned that
there is only one secret about time,
and all those fractured eyes on me.
I was terrified of my potential.
Forced into existence with the
fright of possibilities.
Time versus potential,
means endless equations that made me hate math,
and through a thousand glasses
dancing the ground, I watched myself
alive in each one with my back against the wall.
Tonight, I’m staring out a window,
wondering what else I could be doing,
and in terrible love with everything I’ve seen.
There’s nothing here
Nothing left to ease your mind
Five minutes at the bedside
Having half the conversation
And I’m only a visitor in
This little vigil over
The sound of your loud
Breath
Breaking the silence of the room
At regular intervals
There’s nothing left of you
And there’s nothing here to ease our minds
Rorschach waves, crashing out of sleep
and I’m forced to look hard into the asymmetry of my pillows.
Two realities tethered to the center of my bed,
I’m confused in the night, cautious in the light.
Two moons in a row on the cold cotton totem, awake in the wash of shapes,
black against black.
I always imagine that I’ll run into people from my past and hear about their life from the point where I disappeared.
And we could reminisce about how we were in love and things could’ve been different instead of difficult. A chance to celebrate old days in our new lives.
Airports are made for drinking, and talking to strangers while I recede from all the realities around me, deeply. A pool of nostalgia.
It’s lonely work to recall all the people you used to know.
I’ve got a morbid disposition, and all my hopes are about what I could have done instead of what I might do.
I’ve been looking at strangers
and getting scared
that I’m going to be one of them
some day.
When my old denim earns extra
holes in the pockets
and I’ve forgotten that time
was my enemy because,
I’ve run into the walls
it bounded me by
and left me embalmed with
memories of who I wanted to be.
And wandered off instead
in search of people of interest
because they bring me closer
to god than the heroes
of popular idolatry.
January’s fever settled on a Sunday morning
5am and I’m no longer in the business of sleep
For five days straight
High temperature, hi-score,
Hotel, high altitude, back home
With closed eyes
I don’t know where
I am
And the empty side of my bed, flat
With delirium
And the chills of my life
Where my cold back bares witness
To the small steps, padding the foot of the mattress
In subtle changes of pressure
Reverberating
To the fears of my youth
Everything would be better without a body
At least half of my choices would disappear
And I’d be a disembodied brain
Floating
This day should end early of it’s own volition
To explain the way that time stops when I sleep
Speeding home from work just to get away
From staring
To lay down with the curtains open
And watch the sun slink into oblivion
Setting the bedroom ablaze
And closing my eyes until
When I open them I cannot tell the difference
Between darkness and nighttime because
I’m tired of making good decisions
That other people nod their head at in respectful violence
People adore logical decisions
Logic my mortal enemy
Logic my measured risk
Measured only to exist
Getting out of bed is the hardest part
Not waking up
Setting out for planned acts of contrition
For my desire to lay with the indecision of a first life
Like I haven’t done this before a thousand other times
The indecision of a first life like this one is a karmic debt
From the last time when
I moved with my heart
And ate from the crust of the earth unquestioning
And the world owes nothing back
And the cosmic jest of reincarnation is that this time
I am bound with labels of mental chastity
Staked in the center and perfectly in conjunction with the
Constellation that birthed me
Born on a bad sign
My breath is always stale with the aftertaste of an errant disaster, came with the wind, came on the blue route in December. Came loud in Christmas sounds on the radio and I’m left reflecting on something that hasn’t happened.
When I hear new facts I file them like trivia.
Facts a everywhere and some day I am going to need to know that
Stephen King doesn’t even remember directing the 1986 sci-fi/horror gem Maximum Overdrive about sentient, murderous appliances
and my life is going to depend on it.
I’m pacing to the door
back and forth
the dog is pacing too
picking up the shared unrest
so now I have two shadows
three times the moods
and I don’t want to go out
but I don’t want to stay in
so I’m vandalizing the carpet
with miles of misadventure
in different outfits
with different shoes
to confuse anyone tracking
someone must have spelled me out
into a hex of indecision
and now I’m being judged by the plants
who would all be dead without me
I went to the porch meandering,
enlightenment! Alas!
but my neighbor had the same idea
and now I’m forced to drink civility
back into my blood
until I’m one with the universe
I miss that feeling of missing someone and I want to get it back. I want it back, and I want it in the way that I could read your mind in the morning knowing how you want your coffee black and burning so you only sip it slow.
I want it back and I want to listen to how you listen to the plants and whisper telling them to grow. I want it back and I want it in the winter when you crawl into my skin, and deliver little kisses bringing heat into my bones.
I want it back in the form of little stories made up on a whim when we look at pictures on the fridge in other people's kitchens. I want it back like laughing secret codes at things we only tell each other in our world of secret jokes. I want it back in the way that I need to learn your voice and pick up all your tones like inflected treasures and live between the words you never say and the ones I read on your face.
I want I back and when I meet you speaking plainly of the worlds I lived in looking for my ghosts, but I don’t know you, and I want to miss the feeling of missing you the most.
I forget to exist, and what I mean when I speak of vacancies is that sometimes I’ll get lost right in front of your eyes. Adrift in a what-if of imminent adventure, terms for departure. It’s only a few seconds, a stand-still, a minute at most, where I stand quite still, staring and the story stares back, unfolding in acts of confrontation and contrition. Odysseus the domestic, delivered from fates and all I did was blink behind a conversation that never happened, another car crash, a hero’s journey. And in a few seconds I’m standing in a room where I forgot to exist, where no one knows my name.