sugar

paris was old architecture.


--


songs for the sailors, songs
for the tourists-- nothing, and
nothing. the light
in the evenings makes me sad, she said.
and i kissed her. i kissed
her, and she tasted of clementines,
and tea, drunk by the ocean.
and i wanted to take her
home, make her fish,
strip the pale pink flesh from
the bones, and feed her,
lemons, & summer butter--
and i kissed her-- promised

her roses, rosy and delicate as her cheeks or
pale as sand & cream, and she laughed
at me. and i knew 
it to be bitter. so i did not want
to cook her fish. i did not
want to lay her on my bed,
i did not want to kiss her,
as so sweetly.

and she tasted my cigarettes,
and she tasted my coffee
gone black and cold,
and she kissed me, and
she kissed me, and i could
taste the drift & ebb;
waves rescinding into colder water.
and she walked away.
her footprints imprinted
to the ocean. i did not
count them, and i did not follow her.

on a tuesday, months later

I do my best. I really do.

I was about to up and leave the cafe, but a song came on.

It was lovely, though I thought it was going to be prettier than it was.

There's a man, --a guy, really, (because what is a man or a woman these days?) -- who wants to slide over and put his arm around this gorgeous stranger sitting at the table next to his.

People fall in love, all the time. Little moments. The day is young.

I think I'd like to live in the financial district.  I'd get up, go work for a few hours-- and then idle in a cafe and write. Watch the light change over fire-escapes.

I know it gets lonely and quiet at night here, but I think I'd like it.  I don't mind the solitude.

So many buildings / so many souls behind glass.

I wonder how many people wander by their windows, at the hours between 10 & sleep, and think about all the other people in the city.  

I bet they don't. They have no reason to.  
There's never a reason to be alone, unless you want to be.  There's never a reason to be lonely, unless you choose to be. The solitary life is fair enough. 

I think all young people are caught between alone and not, and lost & not-- but the direction is good. We are all going along our paths, to whatever our end destinations are.

We all look for signs & directions. Options everywhere. Such safe answers.
Risk & chance, and less and less to touch, and less and less to hurt. But what is there to love? 
I want to. I really do.

Choose your own page.  2, 4, 16, 25, or shake up the rules and jump to the middle of the book, or the last page. Happiness or death, or redirection to some other page, but it's your own journey.

That's not a good enough reason to read a book.  I want something I can mull on and love.

I want a well-written book, and well, that takes a kind of certainty.

I'm not in love, but I'm also not not-in-love.  What do you call that feeling -- that's not discontent, nor dissatisfied?

It must be what a mote feels, little dust particle in sunlight.

If it's a feeling, the word is not in German, nor in French, or any old world tongue-- but in English, --and perhaps, the strictly American, New York City kind.

We're all little atoms anyway, muddled up in the same high charge/ low charge medium.

Most importantly though, is the universe infinite, or finite?

tuning

little bird sitting on the top of the tree,
the sky is blue.

smash my guitar. 
shattered wood. 

so softly it weeps.
i could tear the cords out, 

find the bones in my fingers
on six, suppliant wires.

what's wrong is i drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes

some days i wake,
& my heart is a pound, pound, pound

so i say,

it was the coffee last night and just general unwellness of being and

my wet charcoal breath says,
you 

are still drunk, so i say
poetry, didja save me?

Sometimes we hate ourselves. It starts when we're young,

You're a loser, a gawky awkward kid, so the first clear thoughts you get in your head, most of the mornings in your young, insignificant life,  is that you hate yourself.

Wherever you go, there's the same ugly, plain, caveman, simian sorta face.  You stare back at you, from the train windows underground, set against black tunnels.  You're in every shop window you pass, when the sun burns down on your city-sheltered skin.

So you get older, and promise to be better.  You get fitter, buffer, toner.  You get prettied up and shapely if you're a girl.  You mar your body or paint it appropriately.  You don't let a goddamn hand touch your face, not even tender fingers on cheeks, if you were all craters and scars.  You cultivate a style; become an epitome of urban, center-of-the-universe perfection.

You are individual. You possess opinions.  You follow local & global politics.  You have an urge to change the world, but also to find personal happiness.  You make art, or songs, or something that strangers like, get pats on the back and celebratory drinks from your peers.

Without your mother making you, you wash and rinse your hair as frequently as you can without destroying it, and soak it with some sludge, scent evocative of something summer, and pure and clean, or of a sleepy, mildly exotic, distant land.
You kneel in the shower spray until the clock in your head tells you that it's already been five more minutes than the time you've allotted yourself to wallow in your exfoliated, dead skin cells and the draining fluid of the cold womb or grave of the bathtub.

Or maybe you're happy.

Maybe you play love songs, and the way the sun makes everything gleam, and gives a translucent clarity to, makes you secretly want to go weak, fall & lay down, or curl up with loveliness on the warm grass.

Maybe you harbor something that glows, but for now, you're under dark clouds, idling, until that August storm hits. And when it does, the sunset will burn itself into you.

Ink costs more than the cool breeze of a blue day.  

Autumn comes quickly, even in the midsummer.  Maybe you know what I mean; pool of morning anxiety in my belly, or maybe it's all the whiskey, never properly appreciated in the dark, on ice cubes.

finding the lost language

she arrives when i am drifting on the bus.

not anymore, i tell her. and the others, so they wait.

so many discarded selves

and their suckling mouths.

so good on the skin.

they lilt.

why, bodied & suffer
when you are steel and suns
and something else
underneath our wet tongues?

it's only organs.
fleshwebbing & pulse. exoskeleton.
must you craft a 'lume,
to thread others into your hollow?
why boats or roads in the night?

motherless, schizophrenic god;

fragmented stars,

& the spaces in between.

lost children in a dream,
i reply.  alone,
but for the poetry 

of another hand.

the mornings feel like gold.  in love, the breeze by the hudson, the silver pen in my bag, fountain and pointed like a sword.  musicians.  piers and piers. some other land.

something blue

Sometimes, when you fall in love,
you wake up on your unmade bed
& bare mattress,
curled up
& cold
on soft bags of clean laundry.
The pale morning light lingers.

The only scent in the room, is yours
& the beach,
which is where you'll drift to again.
The ocean & the sky are the same today.
Mermaid souls,
ebbing foam,
are clouds today:
sweet, white,
& quick to dissipate.

There's some joy to wading & swimming alone.
Summer is lovely.

There was something you forgot, as a child, about solitude.

The sky,
sleepy, and full,
of the occasional, distant, passing planes,
will always be your lover.
Sheets of paper,
bright and rectangular,
will always be your lover.

The bed,
which you have pushed against your window,
and have piled high
with pillows, will always be
the constant sandbox
for your girl body.

As a child, you did not think much, but you listened,
to the song
of the wind & cerulean,
and the rattling car drifting down your street,
past your house.

Your heart
knew the happiness of counting things that flew.
Your body
fit the square frame of your windows.
Little, round, black chimneys
of the houses across the street, were wonderful
on your tippy toes.

And now, you live elsewhere. 

playing on the guitar made me cry today;
aw, who's got feelings? who's got feelings?