December 3rd, 2015

Even as she pulls you closer

Overhead red stars and sweat, darkened wood grooves,

Oak fans spilling van gogh onto a crowd of upturned beards

As a recorded eagle cry ricochets through the soundscape—

You cannot help wondering about the laundry watered garden in tuscon,

Or the roof tucked with stars in the savage crevice of el paso

Or a thousand other cities and the love which goes with each.

Philadelphia shrugs up its hood in the December rain,

The street is filled with crawlers and limpers and fuckers and

Slitherers but in the houses, a sterile electric hum signals

Our inability to think of anything meaningful to do on such a day.

One such house is filled with boxed books and paintings turned

Into the wall. It sleeps the way half the city sleeps, without choosing it,

Up on its massive quads and dreaming of nothing but itself

Or an end to itself.

Another great grey ennui for the next bend in the schuykill.

After the dirty, but constant, factories curl around their own tails

And disappear, there’s a stretching that you wish would end.

When you first moved into a dorm room

And you wanted to sleep with the econ major

Whose eyes said “ I need you I need you Ineedyou

And I’ll do anything to make you know it”

You said “once you love someone, you

Never really stop.” It was a grand gesture in a superman t-shirt

And one year long relationship with a 16 year old under your belt.

There’s a picture of that night, dented tin can on a bedside table,

Someone’s hand over her mouth.

And since, with a deep green sweater over dead leaves

And an autumn of morning after morning waking

Up with nothing under your heart and it falling into the

Lower intestine where nothing but a muscle wall,

A tired muscle just like the heart, kept it inside you at all,

And since then a bit of playing and red lipstick on men’s suits

And several compliments to your bartending

And a couple bosses fucked with

And a couple nights impossible to remember with hands

On hard pectorals and business casual imposter laughing laughing

At the power you have, and the new people in your life

Terrified, terrified of the eyes you slip into

When you want to keep a room away from you by making it look

And LOOK LOOK all the evidence you are doing it right, from adoration,

To the $$ in hands unaccustomed to it spending it at bars and grocery stores

In southwest, to the great mess you make everytime you come home with a life so big, to the tension with your father not because of what he’s done but between

His body and how you tell him and LOOK LOOK the sadness which exceeded love, and LOOK the fear looming larger than she ever did and LOOK you’re not sure you’ve even loved once and now you’re here with somebody’s real life, real body, real choices of where to live and what job they take and where they go for pizza in your hands and LOOK everyone’s got to feel this way sometime so why not you now you aren’t responsible for shit except never stopping trying to figure it out with all of yourself and LOOK everybody makes mistakes but you gotta trust when you love it’s love and when you hate it’s hate and when you fear and hunger and run and create and build and show and look its all real its all impossibly real because LOOK  since you were 13 and had to reckon with death nothing has been the same except you, except the warm mind beating itself against the world to make a damn pretty image before it goes dark

It matters, it matters and the figs are falling

Around you soft as dreams

And light goes out in the houses by the applachian trail one by one

And the wolf of the night begins its keening

But you are waiting for 5 o’clock still when beer will go to $3

And it will feel, surrounded by faces you owe nothing to,

That it is starting over in a way it never could before

But it can everyday. you look around, annoyed

At a moralizing tone and the idea that any advice or truth

Can scroll through your life like a red news ticker beneath a handsome face

And just when you are ready to strike out

The voice disappears.
______________________

Will it touch? Her

Sitting on the dusty floorboards like a hundred bags of glass

Shaking. Asking for more.

______________________

When the woman from west Virginia comes,

She brings red handkerchiefs and kimchi

She brings the glinting of light from the mountains

And the anxiety of a small town.

Smell of 13 hours on the road, eyes from sun glare,

Unaccustomed to telling people what to call her,

But enough knowledge from where she started

To self consciously flirt as we pass a bottle of wine between us.

___________________________

The feeling of ending is back.

Hollow echo. Call across the lake.

Phone out of batteries. Rain falling between the leaves.

Empty house. Packed bar. Seasons changing.

Nothing quite making it ok.

Knowing she is calling. One more word

And that’s it. This time you’ve got control.

Doesn’t make it much better, now does it?

____________________________________

Out over the field like an ocean

Corn subsidies poured out

A sun behind thin clouds

Spreads it all opaque and flat

And so easy to get lost in.
___________________________________________

On halloween it all comes back.

Nobody is unmasking

You though that’s what it takes

To get you up nowadays.

Lipstick is smeared like blood across her lips

In the fluorescent lights and the thrum of a west philly happening--

All the good liquor on the floor in the closet

Beneath the blanket you won in college for swimming in 40 degree water

Hungover and watched by almost 100 people, you almost threw up.

At some point in the night, arms

turn into the seasoning that makes taste.

And so it all comes back up.