arrival

we are the same backwards and forwards.

There is nothing that is not god.

Here I am leaving, old man

Bundled in brown breathing heavy out

The doors of the beautiful blood-blown carpet.

Here are the tears of leaving you,

Forming the lake I could not stop writing about through my adolescence,

Before we ever met.

I see it in the movies, lake blue, your blue, eyes

panning the strange patterns speaking in the curtains

at the border, that light blue of dawn curling through everything

like smoke letters, that would-be title of my first book

but instead that was a moment to accept

apocalypse. Your smell laughs here

and there in moments, like now, when I can

spare the time. It grows cold as glass shards

beneath advertisements for bankrupt businesses

I think philly will never erase, maybe it can’t.

I burn hot, furnace fur where a history of lovers

Scratch their names but here,

Now, you are writhing this moment and with your hands open

Pushing it to the blue flame. In graffiti

Whispers, our perfection clouds itself

Like a storm, and we love

The beginning and end, don't we? Indescribable

And mimicking and indecipherable whether a breath

In or out. But in the middle here,

The n’s, where hope and sadness, excitement,

Love, human emotions prevail,

I will hold your neck hard and knowing,

Like the spine of the book I read every summer. Babe,

I know it’s confusing but I feel it everywhere

Around me and loving you is like rereading

All my favorites but somehow escaping out.

It isn’t you at all, or even us, it’s that

The pages are falling out and across the country

Lie roads to be driven and eyes

To be looked into and skies to open

And all already, already there. This is the wonder

Of a world so full, not me as in the solipsistic days

Of highschool catching smoke in the alleys,

But everyone's infinitely outwards and whole—the train

Overhead sounding the clop clop of horses coming to the river,

And the night, this night carrying my whole life

To me in a breaking open moment I know well.

She is dead. And she is dying and my first child

Is being born screaming and I cry alone in the theatre.

Orange and grey, green and black, gifted shoes dissolving

And trees growing like lungs to better take it in, my dear.

The moon is full as it was when my mother released the hawk that had crashed onto our porch through the harsh metal wires of a screen I had helped put up two years before that would later be chewed through by a squirrel and now overlook the closed down pool in light winter snow that will house the 85^th birthday of Sidney who will eventually lose it and die. I wrote a song for her with chords Michal had written for a musical. Ab minor.

You too know death. See it. I choose this here, again and again.

Backwards and forwards.

Her in chemo refusing to let me see,

Or her showing her brown eyes to me coming for the first time

Or those eyes lighting up for another,

Or my mother spitting bile into a pink fedora deep in the night as I rub her back,

Or you asking me to call you a slut

Or paul’s nervous grin when the hearing aide goes out

Or john threatening to kill me in the black woods by the lake

Or the car crashes that almost claimed my friends

Or the mushroom gangplanks to the moon

Or the endless giggles over the availability of every damn thing to be played with

Or when I told off a boss for the first time in his office and he shut his mouth and took it

Or when I tasted victory in dweh’s champagne toast and his hand on my shoulder,

Or in my fear at the darkening road on the wrong highway outside of Wroclaw

Or in the constant love filling purposefully each morning eyes opening sun down or up but a day coming full of trials,

Or in the way I always leave and begin again

Ive got it on my back because I know

There is nothing that is not god.