love, read, write

You are sitting in a patch of grass extending into the sea of asphalt. The sound of childhood and after-school tag rings far away in the background. Your fingers are planted into the dirt, tufts of green between your fingers: soft, like the fur of an animal. The entire lawn sways together, a single instrument wavering indecisively with the sweet wind that combs through your hair. Gleeful screeches echo in the distance, as if recalling a past that you remember as faintly as the little voices sound to you now.

A curious ant crawls up your index finger:

Hi, ____ – it's me. I didn't see you in class yesterday. Or last week. 

→ read more

Time:
          A body moves within
          its shell,
          squeezing through the uneven cracks
          of each shattered frame, forcefully
          morphing, refracting,
          losing skin— black, blue, black,
          blue, red.

Memory:
          A mosaic— fragmented shards
          of my body and everything else I have
          collected from the street,
          a jagged painting of
          receipts and
          film rolls pieced together with
          tacky glue, still
          showering the ground with color in the morning, but
          empty of beauty at night.

forgive me —
six hours together and still
i have forgotten what you look like.
i have tried! yet you remain faceless
to my searching mind.
instead you return to me in irregular
fragments, little pieces that i glue together
in your image, a cubist rendition:
your words (but not your voice),
the flower you stuck in your boots, the moment
we touched hands.

Like slow waves, you crash
at my feet, your mind elsewhere:
her hair, her eyes, her lips —
all better than mine.
But still you tickle my toes
and the biting cold sings
sweet, sharp notes at every splash.

When the tide rises I fall
into the water, happily,
anticipating sea foam nibbling my neck,
thinking about the taste of the ocean.

On quiet Saturdays slipping into
Sundays, I watch from the darkness
dotted yellows and whites
sprinkling the invisible hill outside.
It makes me a little sad
but a cool sad, a minty balm,
like bare feet in dewy grass.


mood partly inspired by mura masa's song, blu

video:

Funny, the way the body works.
Lots of joints
and limbs,
swing swing swing.

Balls that creak.
Sockets that soar.
Shake hands,
cook food,
wash hands.

Wash hands one more time.
Wash hands one more time.
Wash hands one more time.

Funny, the way
the body works,
knocks on wood,
bumps into shoulders,
lies in bed,
stays there.

Entranced, the deer stops in her tracks,
captured by the moonlight in the forest.
It quivers,
then flickers off.

She flees, foliage in frantic flight,
tears dewing with confusion:
she fears the moon, the boom,
the foreign fire
in her heart.

Entranced, the deer
stops in her tracks, captured by
sleek, shining beauty --
so she flees,
foliage in
frantic flight. Hooves
crackle her untouched
wild heart which races
a handheld gun that shoots
but misses because she fears
that foreign fire in her heart:
she is a blur,
uncatchable.

i.

it hurts to hunger,
to think that there lies
more beyond the dirt.
that tired arms can row
large boats into new worlds.

ii.

i told my friend (in tears):
it hurts to dream
and it does, it hurts to
feel the darkness of the world
as i feel my way to the end,
my fingers tracing the folds in the fabric,
not knowing what lies at the hem.

iii.

yet there is no euphoria like wondering
colors which might not exist,
vibrant and enlightening.

iv.

possibility is a mathematical concept,
the idea that what could and couldn’t,
is and isn’t all live in the same, jagged universe.
you and i -- we dive into it.

she stayed for a month before my mother found something online,
but it’s hard to forget even ten years down the line the difference between
its uniform, robotic sweeps and her brush-like swipes on the floor,
little sunsets she painted with her mop.

a cascade of
hair falls.

two-part sword,
slice me in two,

unevenly.
so i breathe

she who slices the orange
slices my heart,
skin against skin pulled
apart, clinging on for a lingering moment
before the citrus breaks to
two,
fresh,
cold in my cheeks
icy pain against the soft of my gum,
bursting between teeth.

she who digs
into my skin
will find that i part exactly along
the dimpled lines--
perforated by
nature.

eyes meet
fleet away.

refolding cuffs, checking
the time

look at the ceiling:
silver.

curious eyes dance
to her profile,

the curve of her nose,
tinted lips glimmering

against the dim
elevator lighting,

while my head spins
like a satellite,

only watching
never quite doing.

my mind rips
open, drops.
skittles scatter
colors, spattering
onto the ground,
little clatters of
crayon dots,
hiding behind desks
rolling into crevices,
can’t collect.
lost my
skittles,
lost it a while ago.

crouched beside
     the bed staring
at the fringes
     periphery of thought
a prophecy of
     regret, holding a
krispy kreme donut
     two in the morning
shoveling glazed
     carbohydrates in
glorious betrayal that
     nobody sees: i inhale
and swallow,
     squint at the edges
feeling the cold stare
     of the omnipresent.
i sit on the ground
     stomach full of
half-microwaved
     gut-churning
resentment and
     coiled-up stress.

uninvited. a hand
threading through thousands of
tightly knitted thoughts
rips apart holes open their mouths
yarn frayed
pattern unmade to
utter dismay,
saw it coming
(blurred figures and
no choice but to endure the
uninvited).
strings came undone,
felt uncovered (cool breeze
touching my skin--
but i felt ice,
it bit me everywhere
slits slicing open from
the cutting air),
didn’t know what
to do,
even if it happens so
often, so uninvited.
sit still and shiver,
shame shackling me to
my beady-eyed stare
into space
unending;
i wait
for it to pass
before i pull out pieces of
old cloth to patch the holes
i have made.

listen:
i will be your first snowfall.
bits of my heart will float to your earth
in moments of fateful gravity,
blessing your world with my far-reaching arms.

the day i come to you i will be a swan of the weather
to cover you with the cold of my wings, drape my feathers
over your shoulders with grace and
deliberation, stitch my silent dreams to the
nape of your neck, my plumage your umbrella.

and when kingdom comes it will be me
who creates it for you in a gradient of blue to white,
warm to night, sharp to soft in the crevices of your body.
i’ll transform your world into a sky-floating palace
of plains and hills of simplistic beauty,
carve you fields of suspended, pure silence
full to the brim of your eyes.

as evening drifts near i’ll hang in the time-dense air
little ornaments of ivory. i’ll tuck into each crystal
lullabies of deer treading through blank slate
silent hand-made forests making
music with the muffled crinkles of their
weight in the snow and you will cry,
and i will blow on your cheeks;
it will be beautiful.

you will feel me shaping peace
into the spaces between your fingers,
splattering stars into the sky until they slip from its loose grasp
to create a gravity-orchestrated symphony of lights -

that will be me;
i’ll be that first snowfall.

no fall was ever truly
yours until the moment i came tearing the clouds apart
in winds full of ice stars,
when i kissed your nose in a burst of cold that you knew:
the world never existed until that moment.
no empire preceded;
no snowfall before me.

for years i lived with others,
in others, as others in a sense that my identity
was not mine unless there was someone else
upon which to see my reflection.
i had constantly sought mirrors in others’ reactions
to my every move and word as if alone,
my marks of life were too fragile to exist.
the reflections were often faulty, as others often are
when you are trying to see yourself through a remote lens
(i did not know that the identity which i wanted to see
was in fact right where i was, stitched into me)
so i lived, tormented and twisted with the gnarly veins of
discolored and misshapen refractions tightening themselves
into my eyes so that all i could see was the world
through a rotten net that i had let others sew onto me.

today i live alone.
the word still stings me like a faulty
claim about my identity, as if it is a negativity which i cannot afford,
but i now know better. because alone is a good thing,
alone in myself.
i live with myself, in myself,
as myself now, in a sense that my identity is solely mine
and i look to no other for any sort of reflection of my existence
because i stand before myself in a mirror
which i look through, alone,
and see the beauty that lies within and without me,
the person that i am when i do not look to others,
the identity which i create based upon myself
and my ideas. i look now to myself for my name,
a name which i can say with my own mouth,
create my own syllables,
and sing it out to the world without
waiting for a response or an echo.

when the lights around you pulsate
like blaring sirens screaming sounds of
self-deprecating soul-crunching
sanity-sucking spitfire insults
flashing lights like “don’t move” or
“don’t stay” or “don’t do” or maybe
“don’t say that which you want to say because
you are not worth even an ounce of grain” you need to
sit down and
calm down and
look to the skies because
there is a great deal of zooming to do, sitting in front of that
blue-light screen on google maps dot com letting your
scrolling do the trick until you’re small,
smaller,
smallest,
invisible with the white swirls and the blue oceans and the green land
and the skies and all of eternity, of outer space embracing you in
like a mother cradling her child, tucking them in
at night--

so will the world to you.
small does not mean
meaningless it means that the eternities stretching within you
are worth countless but the screams around you sound
so soft, so easy,
so conquerable when you stand
just a little ways off
as the sky and stars cradle you in
their arms when you sleep and whisper
that every steep slope is only a speck
from afar.