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.

I don't know about portraits of the soul, but in days of sunshine, sometimes I go away for a little bit, to have time by myself.

And sometimes I am writing, typing on my bed, by the window.
Or sometimes, I'm sitting against the wall, making songs on silver strings, with pencil & strums.

And sometimes, I go naked, and turn on the shower. I put the music, loud in the basin, leave the vent & the lights off, and shut the door. And the water is a little too hot. And my knees and the little balls and palms of my hands find the smooth face of the bathtub. And there it is, hot rain, and clouds, all in the dark, and I breathe. It rains and rains, on my head and down my back, which wants to let go of this tension. My hair yields to the torrents which do not care. I could drown in this. If I were a weeper, I'd weep, but I am a breather, so I breathe. I could sleep in this water, which drains beneath me, pours down from above.

Are we not all alone? 
I am alone, and it is both relief and safety. 

What is the weight that weighs me? I don't know. I think I am sad, all the time, but I've learned to not let it stop me. My sadness is with me in all moments. What brought me this sadness? I don't know. I've had it forever.

I could cradle her in my arms, and pet her hair. She's quiet, and she is not unkind. I could love her, and she would still be sad, in this soft, close-but-distant way. How could I be lonely, when she is always here with me?

All these beautiful autumn couples. Grey days, & love. It must be love. What else do you call a sweet companionship?

Sirens in the distance; there was an accident. I am in a cab.

If I had an office, it'd be the backseat of a cab. Or on occasion, trains. It's the transit. Movement in the cityscape brings me calm; helps me focus. I always have everything I need. Lucky pens, and favorites. Paper, all heavyweight & lovely in their notebooks. Water; coffee, in a clear, whimsical container. Sci-fi stories. All the vitals.

Keys, if I ever want to go home. I never have to go home. 

Or keys, if I want a rooftop in the city. Keys, if I want in, to a mental ward, and keys, if I want to lock up a bar, or open one.

I have candy for children, and coins for wishes. Tissues, for the woman who begins sobbing, uncontrollably, on the street. The emotions overwhelm her. I don't take her photo, but she is beautiful. Women cry on the street, in the afternoon. All these strangers walking on by, on the avenue, and it's all this strange safety, because no one is seeing it, this breakdown; this breaking of her heart.

Someone is breaking her heart, and all of her life, this apartment, that job, those friends, right now she is only tears, and her knees which can barely hold her.

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.