15 was too long ago

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

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)

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)

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

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

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'

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.