"The writings easy. It is the living that is sometimes difficult."-C.B.

2011-06-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

I have layed in the stillness of thunderstorms and found nothing there but the churn of my liver, of organs unnamed and sly, and wept for the mystery of body.

Excerpt from a work in progress

2011-03-16T15:02:00.000-07:00

IV.
You were eight or nine but definetley
not ten and didn't know that song was
about AIDS but not long afterward you
cried after watching Tom Hanks in
Philidephia, convinced you'd never
get to slow dance in a sailor suit.

V.
And everything seemed so mullioned then-
yellow colored and light, truthful, like the way
you saw your body and didn't see your body.

VI.
I have wasted away the best mind of my youth
for eight million cigarettes and books whose endings
I can never remember.

VII.
The same rock songs sounds different when the
way you used to listen to them has become obsolete.
I have become so many butts and the butt
of too many of my own jokes and can barely stand to
take it all too seriously

We're not too sure

2011-03-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

My lungs feel like wet denim. Mishappen, heavy, and hard to carry around.
But they'll dry out, she said, licking the mess that was her popsicle.
He hated her for eating like a child, eating a child's food on the street.
Maybe, he said. But wet denim stays damp for so long.
Do you have to be so cryptic?
But of course, the creamsicle matched her dress, her sunglasses, her eyes, the shoes, the way light hits the high windows and the water and suffuses this neighboorhood with light.
John?
I don't know if it'll dry out, but why the hell do you have to be like that?
Like what? You're the one who's morbid.
No, I'm a realist. My lungs are weighing me down. You're the pastiche.
John- he began to walk away, hands curled in pockets like hedgehogs- John, you don't even know what that word means.
yes, but, I sound like I do, and you have creamsicle on your chin and no one can see your eyes so they're more inclined to trust me and my wet lungs then you and your.

After an abscence, you will contemplate coming back again

2011-03-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

Muriel Rukeyser once opened a poem with:

"Then I began to say what I believe."

I am struggling with what to say, what to do. I am struggling to see myself as a writer at all anymore.

There is something to be said about being "deeply affected" or "being affected deeply".

My Best Man

2010-10-20T21:59:00.001-07:00

I had a vision
because 'dream' seems like
too much a word here-
too improbable, maybe-might-not
come to happen...
Visions, like the world hanging from
a branch. Ripe,not flat like a table
between us- visions come to men
of a sure cadence.
Anway.
I saw myself,black lapels of a suit
pointing like compas needles, hour hands
away and out from heart.
I raised a glass, raising a voice
to you, to the many tables
to the chandelier which leaned in to
listen to the five words that shaped my life.
Do you want some rum?
Led to Do you want a cigarette?
Led to Do you want some lunch,
a future, a hug, to meet up with me later
Led to this day in my vision.
Do you want some help picking out a ring
for Her?
Led to, Yes, only because you helped me
pick out one for Him. Pick out names for Them
Led to christenings and backyard barbeques
and the table of brightly wrapped everythings
on a table before you filled with all the things
I wish I could give you back-
all the things all the things
You gave me years ago.
Now tell me really this time- Do you
want some rum? Or, maybe this time
Will a champagne toast do just fine my friend?

This is my Dream, It Really Hurts

2010-10-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

I want to be going gray haired at the temples and just too old to bother with contact lenses, with one too many light blue polos or silk ties. I will have great claves and a sleek, stainless steel coffee maker and kitchen knives that I hardly ever use or maybe use daily.
There will be bookcases, vases. CD's and pictures frames to dust, plants I will forget to water and that goddamned carpet I just couldn't talk him out of.

My daughter will cut her hair red hair off at age seventeen and never regret it. She will obsess over whether or not the resurgence of polka dots applies to her and where she ought to apply to college and for what. She will nurse a secret crush on the lanky boy next door who is growing taller, who plays the trumpet and who brings us our mail when we return from vacation in New York. Their fingers will brush when she answers the door and the envelopes pass hands. My daughter and I will exchange excited smiles later on over dinner. His name will be Terry or James and I will catch her doodling it all over the borders of her magazines as we sit at the DMV waiting for her to take her permit test. I will not know what will make me more nervous- her cautious driving or her driving away from me. Her name will be Jane.

My son will be sensative. A swimmer. He will smell like chrlorine and we will lap swim sometimes, never nearly often enough with my bad shoulder. He will boast my breastroke is better, but his butterfly will be graceful. He will move through water and crowds with confidence.I will yell, daily, for him to not leave his goggles in the bathroom sink. Dogs will follow him,lick his hands under tables. Girls will watch him from the corners of keggers and he will be kind enough, and complacent enough, to pretend not to hear his name whispered in huddles behind bathroom doors at parties. He will sleep with the same blanket, even when he returns home from college his first winter. He will take up smoking and join me on the damp back porch one morning and expertly toss his butt in the coffe can next to the door right after me. He will break my heart, make me proud, hold the door for me. I will let his father name him. He will name him Jonas,for my favorite novel and because the men in my life will be true Givers.

One night, before college comes and they will fall into the routine of videochats this night, phone calls to us this night, weekend stays and care packages on these dates and that- they will leave together for a party in a carpool. It will be early october,barely fall. She will ask for advice on how best to wear her new rouge. He will borrow his father's old denim jacket from the hall closet. Me and my husband, my wonderful man, will sit on the deck out back and smoke a sticky spliff. The house will be wonderfully warm and we will slowdance once back inside to "Namesake" by Anais Mitchell at full blast across the hardwood floors in the living room. He will still be in his work things- an oxford buttoned down to his navel, sleeves up, gray slacks and shiny black shoes. I will be wearing cargo shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt from our sons long ago basketball camp. No shoes, just socks,and I will barely wince when he steps on my toes. I will barely breathe when he dips me, suprisedly, and for no reason. The lamps on either side of the front window will glow golden and I will smell like earth and mums or grass and he will smell like midday cologne and my tobacco.

We will undress each other as we crawl up the stairs and not make it halfway up before we fuck, right there, suddenly and quickly, like we did while the kids were younger and only down for a quick nap. We will both remember this instance and familiarity and forget if we had done exactly this back then- because time has moved so oddly since then. He will grip my left shoulder- the bad one- from behind. I will place my hand on it. Downstairs, Anais will be singing "1984".

When the kids come home, at different hours, smelling like two different brands of lite beer, they will pause outside our half open bedroom door and see us half asleep in the blue lights of the tv screen. The sound will be off- Lucille Ball's Mame will havenever been better. Jane, then Jonas will pause, smile, say I love you Dad, goodnight, wake me in the morning?

I will say I love you too, goodnight and yes- bagels and shopping with Aunt Kate? They will head off to bed. I will nuzzle deeper against the clipped black hairs of his muscled chest. He will have fallen asleep, upright against the headboard we paid too much money for, his mouth half open, head to one side.

Tomorrow, we will look for antiques- I will already have all the pricelessness in the world.

In Vitre

2010-09-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

The Republican Party has traded again and again on the conjured idea of an American golden era, circa 1945 to 1960, after boys who were ripped from the arms of their virginal sweethearts and sent to another continent to fight a great war against tyranny and despair, had returned home as men, as heroes, and set to work, every last one of them, making babies with doting wives and grabbing the American Dream with both hands in the dawn of suburbia. Scientists in white lab coats and square, black-framed glasses toiled away to make American astronauts the first on the moon, and to fill all the pretty new homes behind perfect white picket fences with fancy, new-fangled household gadgets to make life easier and more fun. Teenagers hung out at sock hops and neon-lit diners, girls longing for lavaliers and boys wondering how to get laid. Elvis' pelvis was considered a scandal, and Marilyn Monroe a bombshell. Dad had a pension and the promise of a gold watch at the end of a long career with a single firm, and Mom had a Frigidaire. And everyone was happy.

Republica! Vote for us—and we'll give you that!

It's an empty promise built on an illusion, carefully constructed to conceal that America's so-called golden age was imperfect like any other, and perhaps even more so than most. Half a million of those boys who went off to war never came home—and some of them weren't boys at all, but men, who left wives and children with desperate struggles in the place where their husbands and fathers had been. Some who had come home were never the same, their bodies or minds damaged beyond real repair. Women who had been called to duty in factories were forcibly driven back into domesticity, segregation was a legal fact, every gay had a closet of hir very own, mental illness was treated with lobotomies, McCarthy was on his Communist witch hunt, and we fought an all-but-forgotten war in Korea for three years and lost over 35,000 soldiers. There were back-alley abortions, and the KKK, and Elvis and Marilyn both died of drugs.

15 was too long ago

2010-09-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

I have been begging my name back from the five year long night for hours now.

I have begged it back from bottles, from ashes, from plastic wrappers and the mouths of men whose names I don't know and whose numbers I've lost, from pictures misplaced.

No one should ever own this many books, this much eyeliner, this many shoes that aren't going anywhere- have been nowhere.

Is this post-trauma? I have walked from car wrecks, diving wells, runways and woods. I have sat on train platforms raised above the scar of my hometown and said Jump. Stared at the beams of my basement and said GodamnIt.

Who who who is the the way and where where where is his name.

After an abscene, you will dig tunnels

2010-07-09T18:56:00.001-07:00

A woman with toast colored skin
asked me once "Why do you wear
shoes that make so much noise?"
And I could only say

Because I like to be heard
ahead of time.

A man with hair like candyfloss
gave me a look once and between
the expanse of bodies trying to
stay standing on the subway
I wanted to call back Its not
an affectation- its just a
goddamned sweater.

A boy of seven said to me, just
recently, "Only girls wear two
earings!" and I gave his mother
a smile and said

He's right, but my head feels
unbalanced enough already.

Post Block Party (from the course 'Fiction Writing II', Fall 2008)

2010-04-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

Awake: the left side of his head sticking to the filthy table top. Beer and sweat and drool taper down his shirt like a Pollack painting. The sun comes through the blinds, hurts his eyes. Awake and still drunk. The living room smells like stale smoke, bits of glass bottles scattered everywhere as though a car wreck had just taken place in the center of the apartment’s squalor.
He hears the sound of wind chimes from somewhere outside. Wipes crumbs from his hair, unglues himself from the stiff back of the chair, peels off his sweat-stiff socks, his shirt, his grimy slacks. He stands, one hand on the tabletop, fingers splayed for support. A naked man, black chest hair curling like bits of paper in a fire.
He knows that she is outside, chain smoking on the stoop. Her pastel skirt hitched up above her knees like a frosted cupcake. She is probably fanning herself with a crumpled magazine, the smoke from her cigarettes blowing back around her head like a halo.
He hopes that this ring of mystique, this fog around her frosted, bleached hair, will distract men walking by with their moist underarms and shiny leather shoes. He hopes that the grandmothers, laboring to push stroller up the baking street will be distracted by her impossibly slender and smooth legs.
He hopes that the heat of the day will not give away what he has done in the heat of the inebriated night.
She hopes that her sunglasses, dark as the shimmering, scorching street, will hide her black eye.

Two Poems from High School (2006, age 18)

2010-03-08T23:00:00.001-08:00

Grace

This is the way
it was meant to be:
plastic bags and newspapers
neon signs and symphony
of homeless wind.

There's this girl screaming
"I'm never gonna let go of this balloon!"
So I guess it must be Mars
rising over us later on Main Street
Like the way your face shown
the first time I said your name
Under the sun on the best day
to ever grace the Park.

Sprawled in grass
bathed in the borrowed light
of our watches and windows up high
reminds me of a fish out of water
and I think of how I want to-
but there is this man whsipering against
the nape of my neck, saying
"I never want to let go of this
balloon!"

Finis.

The down is up. We wait at the dockside
since midnight. My 18th, threshold
of nothing really, but cigarettes and lottery tickets,
neigther of which I celebrate
and instead of parading down the lapped shore,
tightfisted and unruly, I have been calling my name out
to the water's edge for hours
begging my youth to remain attatched
to my branches like unripe fruit.
I hope I listen.

Simple

I missed you today
Similiar to how I miss
Jolton Joe and martinis
stirred, dry and never shaken.
Almost the way I miss
Marilyn, Billie, and Bette Davis
and the way "What Ever
Happened to Baby Jane?"
made me give you a stern
and steady look as if to
say "If that was us-I'd kill you."

I missed you today
the way Kansas missed
Judy in that little dress
before she went
Hollywood and Liza
hit Boradway like a fever.
I miss you in that way
where I know I'll never

see you again.

Leather & Let Her

2010-03-08T22:58:00.000-08:00

I.
You will always misplace keys,
important documents, wallets
and remote controls. But there
will always be an abundance
of random,
useless pennies and my great
worry.

II.
My Life as a Novel:
I woke up and then
something happened.

My Life as a Poem:

happened.

III.
On a plane ride across
oceans across languages
and tanlines that cut flesh
like cookies on a sheet,
a dear friend wrote me
words for the new year-
a simple recipe that I have tried
to follow and gain taste for-
"I hope love is your only addiction and
that you can be your own ambition."

IV.
A resolute chin and a
boxy-ness that lacked
any spring...I told you
the wind would shimmy
down this way. I told you
that the seasons
would alter, puker up and
malaise like women becoming
handbags digging in their handbags
for handcreams and photos saying
"Look here! New Zealand! Look here!
A cruise!" Saying "Look here!
A handbag for my hand in a bag
and I am digging out the bottom
of myself every day for sixty years!"

Lipstick collected in
the crevice of Marge's
bottom lip and offset
her wig. I wonder if she
found love, kept pennies.

V.
My life as a commercial:
Smile- it happened.

VI.
You will always
misplace key things.
They will always be
at the bottom
of everything.

For Mitchell Candreva IV

2010-03-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

One
I walked-and not many men take that miracle as it is:
to walk, to take that split second between footfalls
where we are bent forward yet backward as if ready
to tumble this way or that-
I walked in the way that I thought would make you proud.
That is to say, I walked with a smile on my face.

Two
I slept
and that says enough-that I could find the time to lay to rest
without the heat of your chest
and dreamnt of the shape of your arms around my neck.
A noose that gave warmth instead of taking.

"From the streetlight outside your window" or 'A Moth's Song'

2010-03-08T22:50:00.000-08:00

I.
How much could I get for my eyes
on the black market? They have never
failed me in the dark.
Or my legs- they have carried me far
and away and yet never at all.

II.
How much would I pay for your
shoulders, headrest for my sad
thoughts.
How many pieces of silver
could I exchange for a golden
morning in your sheets
Light coming through fibers to reflect on
skin to wake us but no

III.
We don't wake and you-

You are priceless.

'Alice' and 'All of This'

2010-03-08T22:49:00.001-08:00

A bottle that said Drink Me:
Bottle, your eyes- what's the difference?
I had a long draw and grew so high
I could mistake it for flying.

A sweet that said Eat Me:
A frosted cake, your kiss- who's to say
they are not one and the same?
I had taste, followed by a feast
and shrunk to a world where all
I wanted was more and more and more

A book that said Read Me:
Printed pages, the soft skin of your
body- pick and choose the finer points
but I read your body while you slept
fingered the fine printings of hairs
and pores, scars and steel muscles.
I studied- but there are things I have yet
left to learn. This is the story I read in
dreaming- the thing I yearn to study
the most.

A Queen that said not "Off with his
head", but a Queen that said:
"Take my heart, you have all of it
in exchange for your Wonders."

Three Moments in the Life of a Bird:

2010-03-08T22:47:00.000-08:00

1) I am skirting around brick streets, bobbing up, bobbing down
around the edge of a man's vision. He wears black leather- I can barely fly.

2) I am re-hatching but not from an egg, but from the dark in the folds
of green sheets. This is what happens when you say you love me.

3) I am picking the worms out of myself and offering them to you, building a nest I am proud to lay in. Singing your name your name your name your name...

When a Bell Rings

2009-11-08T19:12:00.000-08:00

Dad was drunk- we all had ways of dealing with that kind of car wreck. Tommy lit bottle rockets in the backyard. They whisteled up the mountainside, leaving tracks and little pink sticks in the crabgrass.
Sally braided. Her hair. Mine. Mom's, while she re-read last Sunday's post.
She braided the carpet tassles, the pull cords on the dusty blinds, even her ragdoll's yellow yarn hair (some of the plaits pulled away from the head entirely, surrounding her in a little nest).
I carved the words "not" and "working" on eigther side of dad's srying soap bar with the end of my toothbrush. Then I filled his briefcase with the cat's pancake-like litterings, scooped dog shit up in a brown lunch bag and smeared it all over his sock drawer. These were the best Christmas gifts I could give him- ones that I really meant.
Mom started sniffling between the screeing sounds of Tommy's barade. Sally strung the doll's hair on the tree and tried and failed to throw her bald little body on the top point like some sad angel. She lay there, somewhere near the middle, on her side. The shiny tree looked like it was swallowing her, the lights made her look like she was on fire.

Dad was drooling on the kitchen table. I pulled the warming bottle from his outstretched hand, thenpadded back to my parents bathroom in my new slippers and refilled his Old Spice bottle with whiskey.

The whole town thought he was a drunk. Now they'd know he was one. He'd loose his job, and then maybe Mom would brave the stick shift of the station wagon, pack us kids up, and go. A three inch metal lever was all we needed to get us out and away. I wondered if he's miss us. "The whore" and his "nasty little fuckers". I wondered, if we left in the night if he'd sit alone in the pile of ribbons and wrapping paper and regret.

2009-08-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

The senior year of College smells like a CD warpper (that clingy kind that sticks to your hand).

That is to say, it smells like anticipation (the overpriced kind).

Three days after her husband left

2009-07-19T01:03:00.000-07:00

The wind shook down what she had,
left it all at her feet.
No one wants to be 32 and swimming in pictures taken by
instamatics and poloroids that their aunts and uncles (long since divorced).
This is what happens on a Saturday when the sky is indifferent and, when
trying to escape the hum of a turned on television
a woman plans to surprise her mother with coffee and
store bought cake
but the door is locked and it seems she went away for the weekend
apple picking, with your older and much more lucrative sister
and her lite cigarettes.

So, you go down to the basement with the washing machine that gapes
and dig through boxes-
Half flattened, holiday patterned, cardboard and plastic.
Digging through a life of barbeques, communions, girl scout patches
and the horn-rimmed faces of all your
older brother's old sweethearts.

Where did these girls go? Wasn't this one's name Jane?
Or Sue?
Ghost women, always floating next to a vague uncle, a snack table,
a tinseled tree...where have all those women gone?

The pictures took up the day that
the wind had shaken down from the branches
and she had eaten all the cake herself, leaving crumbs
and crumbs and crumbs

Jane always was so thin.

Humlos

2009-06-20T19:15:00.000-07:00

Moon- just wanted someone to trace its craters.
Sun- hadno hands, ran away.
Moon- lost weight. Lost light.
Sun- tore holes in everything, despite lack of hands.

Moon- waiting behind clouds and clouds and clouds.

2009-06-14T02:15:00.001-07:00

I am burning the truth out of myself on a daily basis.

2009-06-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

The universe summed up in a sentence:

"And then something happened."

A Man's Man.

2009-06-08T22:57:00.001-07:00

While telling me about how terrible the new summer job is that his father set him up with, my best friend admitted to being upset and berated by his new boss who told him he was cleaning toilets wrong. This idea of his body that I know so well and have seen so well and come to love so much for, dressed in a muted green cleaning suit, crouched over a piss stained toilet in an office building somewhere in the city disgusted me in a way...the budding poet of our time. Knee deep in urine and shit and fluorescent lighting.

I told him he should quit. he said he had cried and already decided to never go back.

He said " God, I just hope my father understands."

I said, history would not have happened without that sentence, without that sentiment.

He said, "I just hope my father isn't angry."

I said, now there is a sentiment I know nothing about.

But I do know what an office building bathroom looks like and my best friend Matthew, has no place there.

Confirmation Names

2009-06-08T13:15:00.000-07:00

We studied the saints, slipped boys in through a break in the hockey field's fence, and led them to the woods the nuns had deemed "off limits".
Vicky let a boy read her palm there. he told her her lifeline was short, that she'd better learn reverence for the moment. She cried for weeks before choosing the name Barbara, patron saint of those in danger of sudden death.
Susan said she would only go "so far," but no one knew what that meant. Boys went nuts trying to find out. They loved to untie her waist-long hair, to see it fan underneath her. She loved their love letters, the way they'd straighten up whenever she walked by. She chose Thecla, who'd caused the lions to "forget themselves"; instead of tearing her to shreds, they licker her feet.
Jackie couldn't wait for anything. the nuns told her impatience was her cross. Even the lunches her mother packed would be gone before ten, and she'd be left sorry, wanting more. She'd chosen Anthony, "the Finder", in a last-ditch effort to recover what she'd lost. But the nuns gave her Euphrasia, the virgin, who'd hauled huge rocks from place to place to rid her soul of temptation.
Before mass, we'd check her back for leaves.
None of us, of course, chose Magdalen, the whore. She was the secret patron whose spirit, we believed, watched over us from the trees. She was the woman who'd managed to turn passion sacred. She was the saint who turned the flesh Divine.

Hostess

2009-06-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

She swallowed Gore Vidal. Then she swallowed Donald Trump. She took a blue capsule- a B-complex and an E- and put them on the tablecloth a few inches apart. She pointed the one at the other.
"Martha Stewart," she said, "meet Oprah Winfrey."

She swallowed them both without water.

Waiting

2009-06-08T13:04:00.000-07:00

Five days a week the lowest paid substitute teacher in the district drives his father's used Mercury to the Hough and 79th, where he eases it, mud flaps and all, down the ramp into the garage of Patrick Henry Junior High, a school where he'll teach back-to-back classes withour so much as a coffee or cigarette break and all of this depressing him until he remembers his date last night, and hopes it might lead to bigger things, maybe love, so he quickens his pace towards the main office to pick up his class list with the names of students he'll never know as well as he has come to know the specials in the cafeteria, where he hopes the coffee will be perking and someone will have brought in those doughnuts he's come to love so much, loves more than the idea of teaching seveneth graders the meaning of a poem, because after all he's a sub who will finish his day, head south to his father's house, and at dinner, he'll ask how his job is going, and he'll say okay, and he'll remind her that it might lead to a full-time position with benefits but he knows what teaching in that school is like and his date from last night call to ask is he's busy and he says yes because he promised to wash his father car and promises to his father are sacred since his mother died.
Besides, it's the least he can do now that he lets him drive the car five days a week towards the big lake, to the NE corner of Hough and 79th and you know the rest.

You may as well call me Michael Jackson's nose...because you knew I'd cave eventually

2009-06-07T22:11:00.000-07:00

I always said writing students with blogs are the worst kinds of writers.

It is summer and senior year and my senior project are just around the corner.

At this point, I'm willing to be that worst kind of writer if it will help me graduate and become the best kind of writer that I can be after spending so much money, effort and time thus far.