Chasing

Snow, it falls; i called
a stranger i used to know,
and it was just bars on tuesdays,
lounge spaces, and dirty plush cushions for lovers,
all empty in december, but for the soft, raging music
that drifts in the air and finds no home,

and myself,
with a drink, in a sturdy glass,
drunk, but not piu troppo, too much.

Some people called, looking 
for me. They want 
me to be happy, yes, but please, 
don't be piu troppo, which they don't say,
and there is a scent 
of acrid hunger, the stone-pit pangs of wolves in winter.

Who is this stranger who walks in rain, and leaves us 
to our devices? Are you sad? I think
this is making you sad and angry, and I am worried,
so i say, yes, yes i am, i am sad and angry, and i am

lying, on a couch, in a dim bar, 
in the dark of the city,
and promise, to come home 
when i am done. So they go. And they sleep.

And a glass of something golden or silver, 
sits safe on my chest,
and i am alone 
with the ceiling and the walls, and the space 

of the solitary bar, feeling something 
secret, and raw, & most certainly piu troppo.

gummy bears et al, is the post dying diet.

the new art gallery opened, and all these beautiful strangers are crowded with each other, wandering, drinking mildly expensive wine, some sipping, because the art is so damn good and intricate. 

rugs. rugs, ornate and on walls, accented by the room, & a wall of tightly framed photos of foreign walks untouched by development. sepia lends depth, but so does the lone cat who owns an establishment more than any simian who makes his way in its silence. 

i am never sure, but maybe i never have to be. 
there's a sweet contentment to wandering evenings on quiet avenues. streets so firm beneath me as i am lost yet safe, the air is warm. there are lights in all the buildings and i am only a girl who meanders beneath them. windows and lamps, and though the night is here, there is a music that kisses me, first soft and surface, and i am tentative. 
then it kisses me deep, and i don't know what to say, so i don't, so it washes into me, right into where i've been waiting.

running

Catharsis was the line & story I was going to sell to the pretty thing.

I met a stranger last night, from the northern country. The rain fell, and as her husband took a leak in the restroom, we talked marathons, which we agreed, takes a certain sort of soul to like, with all the dull discipline and rigid routine required to hone a body for brutal, boring, paced running.

"I love running, though," she said, "I love just opening my front door, and going, and I don't know where I'm going, but I just go."

"I love that." She meant the stuff of long drives, aimless evening wanders, & meaningless sex with strangers you briefly think you vaguely understand, but never will truly know.

Her husband returned.

"Do you love that, darling? Running takes me away from you, do you love that I run?"
"Of course I love that you run. Look at that body that comes back."

And they kiss.

I bid them goodnight, and close shop.


-- 


Wandering the streets, towards a way home, I think about Catherine who fell asleep waiting in bed, at home. 

I think about all the Catherines, and all the souls that didn't crave going home to them. Catherine with her pretty face and her slowly shaping body, which is lovely because she has been trying. She deprives herself of daily simple joys, and pushes her vessel, so that one day, a man will come, and sweep her up into his strong arms, and take care of this little grown princess, and she won't have to worry about a thing at all, and simply play, with the children, and make food, and wait all day.

I think about Catherine who wakes for a sliver of a moment from her sleep, warm in the security of bodied company, and her sleepy happiness which brings my mind no ease.

I think about crawling into bed and fucking Catherine, and donning the movements of this man that she craves, and truth be told, she doesn't care if you're pretending, as long as it looks just like the real thing in her dirty romance novels and she never has to catch on, like she thinks she is some trophy you'd go through the effort of courting and lying to, in order to fuck, as if pretty girls weren't everywhere, as if there weren't genuinely kind, pretty girls in the world, who were capable of real love, who you wanted to make love to.

Love, and I think of other souls as I am slipping in quietly through my door.

I drop the things. I unbutton my shirt, slip from my clothes, & I am naked in the dark hours of the morning. All the stars are out and stark-bright, post-rain. I think of wet pavement under streetlight.

I find an old t-shirt and pull it slow over my head, and close, onto my body, and it is cool and smooth, and soft as tenderness. I don't think of bitter things, but of the way the loveliest souls smile, as they give in to the happiness that sweeps them. I roll the legs of my sweats up, and finish dressing. The world is asleep, so I slip out again.

The silence of houses and the moon. 
Catharsis, and I am not chasing it.

I go, and the feeling overtakes me.

bit my tongue; didn't know if i wanted anyone to know if i was happy or sad, or a little unsure, which is mostly, usually, the case. the problem with approaching the core of things, is that there is the point of arrival. the light & gravity pulls, and then you're centered and immersed. how is there clarity when you're deep in, when you're pushing for distance, so you can see all the rhythms that are clear to see?

one safety for another, and i don't like the vocabulary, which i am stripping down, the way a sick child strips open her skin, to find something not in her skin. it's not in the words. ink lets me down because the writer in me is at a loss for cohesive substance, because i want to paint the way i paint, free and unthinking, but sometimes i fall into the canvas, and i don't want to bind myself into something i can't rip myself out of.

so many words to spin around the same concept.

i had a dream last night, and you were in it, neither fantasy nor romanticized archetype. it was neither beautiful, nor ugly, but rather, literally existential. dreamscapes, they shift, and then i am again, a mute child on shifting ground, rather than some floating, amused god beyond all this humanity, which i like, but makes me sick, because mortality is like that.

eating is mortality, and singing is mortality, and fucking, is definitely mortality. i hate this helplessness, and this narcissism which stems from those ugly, childhoods spent hiding low under beds and in the dark corners of the cool insides of work desks.

sometimes at work, little hidden shards of broken cups get caught on my knees and shins, and it takes me back to the underbelly of beds, & floors littered with splinters of broken baby bottles. 

glass comes out. i never liked the idea of making myself bleed because there were so many sharp things about already. if you dance close enough, nothing cuts you. you never have to run if you don't let a single thing touch you.

i tell myself i am not this girl, but i see her so well. there's nothing i can do for her, this thing that exists in some dusty room in my mind, in an old, falling apart house from decades ago. i left, and she stayed, lingering in my old sheets.

The rain comes down hard on the skylight above my room of mirrors. Cold air from the machine accompanies me. I think about chopping my dark locks, but they are the mood to me when I am wearing somber expressions & white. I wanted to struggle & write a love song, or fall to the music of a different soul, but all there is, is summer rain in the evening.


-


I'm sitting in a room growing dark, listening to the songs of a stranger's soul. Blues and blue eyes. Is this a love novel? Every true story is a journey, a narrative on transition, on growth and loss, and going home. Where is home? I am already home. The sunset's coming out for me. Storm, yea, but there's evening.

The mornings are a disconnect. She names: intrinsic, innate, inborn, difficulty, and he says: well, try.

I have cuts and bruises all over my body; nothing remarkable; purples where my body collide with firm structure, slice-grooves where the metal-encased necks of expensive fluid warn me not to grip so tight.

I want to ask if I am going the wrong way, but no one will have the answer for me, so I don't ask. Their machinaries are input destination, output best directions; the systems arbitrary.

The sun falls through the skylight, and I could get to know these wayward stories of strangers more or less doing the same thing, or I could know the slouch in my back when I accept my tiredness, which I do not.

Blade, blade, stretch & flex, wings in flight.


---


I met a stranger and he fancies me a tortured artist type, one of those New York City creatives with up & down mood swings, & funky dark & light work in result, so I look out the window at nothing in particular, and take a nice stretch, a tense and relax in upper back muscles that cradle my spine, and I rotate down with the appreciating of my bones, & flesh as strong as bones, warming up like a dancer before irrelevant mirrors.

I think of dying, withering narcissuses.

Sometimes we become what we love, but that was a half-naked thought. I think it'd be magnificent, one day, to have a beautiful woman do a veiled striptease, except as she strips down, for each piece of fabric pulled invitingly from the tempting form of her body, there is nothing, but the other side of the world.

at one of my favorite haunts, after a movie, at an old theatre, in an aging part of the city, i am idling with the color & mood of whiskey in a solid rock glass. see, the whiskey, is just a beautiful, clear liquid under dim light, a coffee so i can sit and be alone in a place where people are trying not to be alone.

a stranger sits besides me, & begins his practiced dance of conversation, so i do what most young, unbruised souls do, in a bar, i give a smile back for his efforts. it's quite late. he names his accomplishments & snarks on some other writer. he is a good looking thirty-something year old, and he goes on and on, and then, i say, that is great. so what're you doing here? and he gives some reason. and then i turn back to my untouched drink, and i ask, as kindly as possible, so what're you fighting about with your girlfriend? and his face falls. he apologizes. i tell him that he'll be okay.

There she was, crossed legs & arms folded, one on top of the other. Her hair was long and neatly combed, a fine brown, an auburn nearing the tawny autumn of English literature paleness, and her face was lovely. She did not like eye contact, and did not want to be here. She was my patient, like a breeze passing on by, on a summer's night, which it was. Her boyfriend called her in, because she wanted to kill herself, and well, sad dames & troubled men who want to kill themselves were the only sort of patients I saw.

It was a beautiful girl on a beautiful night. It was three in the morning in my office, so I asked her the requisite question, "Do you want to kill yourself?"

"No."

"Okay. We'll follow up with you in a few days, but you can go home."

"Thank you."

She signed the medical & research papers, called a cab, and left.

She looked at no one. She was also the loveliest girl I'd ever seen, & the kind I'd fall in love with, young & silent & mooded & artistic in a classic, subtle way. She was a photographer.

I had met a beautiful stranger who wanted to kill herself.

---


Last night we all laughed about tattoos & the newest in fine dining experimentation, & bantered the vivre of Munich & all bustling cities. My tending partner & I agreed to meet in Berlin, at the behest of the teasing chef we were drinking with. The topic changed to dating, & identity in New York.

A couple walked in, ordered their drinks; proceeded to exchange looks and be slowly outraged at our playful verbal parry-fest.

I didn't recognize her at first, even though she was dressed lovely. Her hair was hacked short & highlighted, her tongue was sharper. She didn't kill herself. She let her misery turn her ugly instead.

monsters everywhere; they wear masks. sometimes i find someone i think i can be safe with, but it turns out to be another monster. and truth is, i walk among them often, drink & dance with them, & keep company with them, but i don't like them. & i don't love them.

i gave you a rhapsody while the shower head rained down. i was the discipline, innate, and the jazz ebbed and flowed, and even when i idled, it sounded good because i broke & crescendo'd in the way you didn't predict but craved. there is music in me, and a hunger for the new in you.

romance is laziness. i am guilty.

i brought you flowers, roses, orange & perfume, and this money, this ten-dollar bill in my wallet, and two singles for tip, found you a bouquet with baby's breath & a sprig of fern, wrapped in lace & plastic, on a grey day; signifies my true affection.

a boy rarely buys me flowers.

the last one who did, was years ago, some unseasonal tulips, which i loved, because i loved the mercantile & hybrid history of dual-toned, fringed tulips, not because i had much love for tulips, or the gesture of flowers as an indication for love. the dutch ex-pats had ambition & tenacity.

all true new yorkers are their protege. we are italian and jewish, & irish, & asiatic & ghetto. we are bread in the windows, and cobblestones covered over by asphalt & concrete, consistently pot-holing when the snows come. we salt our roads for efficiency. we destroy our streets, our tires, our boots & pretty shoes. we are used to frequent dissolves of beautiful structure; rebuild & repave come spring.

there is a new road, built over the old one, built over another one; layers & layers, and sometimes, in the dead of night, in summers, i want to lay down on 1st avenue, or broadway, and be so close to this city that holds us all up.

she asks me to come for a drink, which i'd rather not, because she is asking for something to ease her loneliness & ennui, but i come anyway. i order a drink and she orders a drink, and she makes talk with the men & the barkeeps who are also men, or children with the faces of men, and i let the ice melt. it gets late, and a pair of attractive bodies walk in, and they do the exchange of glances, because they are fool enough to knock for opportunity. if i were a man, they would leave me alone so that i could have my silence at the bar, but i am a young woman, and not repulsive, and not mean.

he drools out his resume, struggles for common ground, and i am uninterested & disinterested & politely listening so his friend can entertain my friend. i could be at home. i could be with a book that does not offend me with its shoddy nature in formula & algorithm. friday nights are for amateurs and i am happier on my fire escape with my guitar.

cavemen didn't go up to women with their skins of dead animals, and get laid, posturing.

It was a long fever, the kind that left you incapacitated & vulnerable to your dreams, & exhausted and emotionally wrecked when you woke for water to keep the body going.

The bones hurt, and the floorboards hurt, but the body isn't ill.

It's the same sickness. The weave of romance & existentialism. What is real, and what, is merely a body for our desires?


So many self-caught, anxious, yet wonderful, loveable souls. You can't really help a boy through his hang-ups. They're his alone to deal with. It's his journey. He's underground, in his strange tunnels with bad reception & poor lighting, and you're on your many divergent roads.

Meet me in Paris; in Montreal, in New York.

Meet me somewhere warm, or in a summertime wine bar. 
I'll wear my hair down, read poetry by the window. I write my heart, in the borders, in ink. I keep my poems company.

Stranger, lover, I've been waiting for you, my whole life, & I think it's all missed connections.
I think we must be wandering the same streets, the same bookstores, the same markets & coffee shops, just at different times, different days. We must've passed each other by, so many times, caught up in our lives, our jobs, our friends & families. I am waiting and waiting, but there is no destination, no meeting point.

Our universe shifts, and it's all timing. Maybe our 'verses will split, and we'll never find each other. Dante had his Beatrice, I just have a feeling.

Sometimes, the moods sweep me; dating sites are a copout, a mixture of desperation and lazy efficiency of acquiring a partner, merely to fulfill the need for having a partner.

There are no partners. There are no people, no right ones, just strangers and friends, all who are potentially enjoyable to an extent. Romance is the things of films and novels. I don't care for the I-told-you-so-ers or the drifts.

What is the drift? / Who are the drifters?

I drift a little, to an extent. I keep my hair long for safety. It's a psychological curtain, and I am hiding, breathing with my back to the wall around the corner, out of sight before I've got to go running again. I am always running.

Where am I running to? / Wrong question.

There is no destination. There is no journey either, just the pure lung-harshness and leg-muscle euphoria of being nothing-in-motion. Blur, blur, blur, which is a feeling of speed & air & sweat in the two messes of temperatures, which is aliveness.

Life is not narrative, nor sense. We frame life, yes, in systems, in art, in meaning and all that jazz. We say-- revolution, heroes, money, math, a drink, lovers, a tale, this god, that city, birth, the womb-- we sing in all our pretty words in all our stylized ways, in all our pretty clothes or sculptured-in-progress-bodies, but at the very end of the day, whether in bed, or in some scenic scape of a cafe or a beach, in the afternoons, or evenings, or the mornings, where we are most alone from the other things, we are just living bodies, muscle pumping blood & vital oxygen.

The body sustains its needs; it finds air and pulls it into its chambers. It finds food. It finds warmth. We are evolutionary creatures of cells & cells, all dying and being reborn in the warm, flooded remains of other cells. The body lives to live. It dies when it cannot be sustained. What is meaning, or god? It is existentialism in the absence of direction. 

There is no direction. Why language, why emotion?

It's just our brains. Response & memory. Beauty fills the spaces of evolution, of which there is so much in us. Our function is the stars, and we are the growing spaces.

One man, many men, many women, they weep because of the void, because it hurts to be alone, to know personal aloneness. 

Myself, I do not weep, but dance, in my step, in the shower, on salted floors, in imperfect sunshine.

She fell into my life like a girl drenched in rain. I don't think it was autumn; likely, spring, some March or May day; I don't care for April, so I don't remember it as April.

It was raining, and in our spring coats, picturesque in the city with our umbrellas and our boots on the avenue and the rain and grey, I left. It was cold, but not so much. There was no misery. My socks were dry. Spring was near; the star magnolias were nearing bloom.

She was wearing red. We were all in taupe and greys, & blacks, shades of the New Yorker.
And there she was, soggy, & dripping like a tulip. And she was mine.

Maybe if someone else had spotted her first, someone with a nicer mug & an extroverted temperament, but it was raining & evening had just fallen. She was like a damsel. Distress. Something.

"Here." I offered her my umbrella.
"No, thank you, I'm alright,--" she went on.
I slipped the handle in her soft hand.

"It's alright."
And before she could return it, I nodded goodbye, and crossed the street.

---

I loved her like that. She was perfect.

And she held back a sob. She was wearing black today. Some black frumpy sweater and black jeans, & nondescript black pointed shoes. Her mouth was painted a dark burgundy.

I did not want to kiss it. I hated her mouth like that, all pretty but undesirable.
Who did she paint it for? ---Not for me. Maybe for herself.
We only have ourselves at the end of the day.  It was almost symbolic. She was funeral colors.
Who loved death? Death is not catharsis. It's just the end.

"Please take your umbrella." She took it from the stand. She was playing on symbolism.

"No. It's alright."

"I don't want it." She started sobbing through her words.

"It's just an umbrella." It was.
She threw it at me. It hit me. Caught me off-guard.
I was angry, for a moment, but it didn't hold.

And she held herself and began sobbing harder. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to kiss her, but it wouldn't be the same.

The feeling went out. It was like a bulb, and love was the filament that broke, because thin filaments break. The light goes out, and it is just a dead bulb. I wanted to hold her, but it wasn't my place. I did not love her.

Without another bullshit art moment in me, I grabbed the knob, twisted quick, & left. Locked & pulled shut.

The air was fresh & damp. It was raining. I'd catch a cab around the first corner.