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.

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.