searching time

It is not my back

Up against the wall

Of this tall, branchless pine,

Which stretches and stretches

And does not end.

It is the little one,

Spine arched against the cold,

Who wants to go up.

He threatened first when he was 12

Beyond jokes of masturbation and thin, worn

Doormats in the basement

by the tools, he wore all black

Stopped pretending to be jack

black or daniels and muted

his high pitched laugh.

In the backyard, sun filters

Green and yellow across the grass

Towards the largest cemetery

In the small town. Beyond, a long dead trunk

Withered by wind and hardened to rot

Whispers of what it’s seen.

Today they found him by the bird sanctuary.

Honda parked pristinely within one of the two spots

Leading down through mulberry and birch.

But then his mother was well known.

He would recount stories of abuse but

In the suburbs you learn an inactive form

Of listening.  Like clipped dog’s ears,

Blind to lower sounds—the clicker did no good

For him. The forms that hold us,

What we might do today, or what we

shall ever do, for him, were threadbare

and woven of needles, witnesses to their own failure

to be more.

Red and orange and yellow and full of

Blood. Dying by the edges this time of year.

The leaves form something too clear.

He sent me.

When I could not stop in the lunchroom

And he had the whole jar inside him.

That day I embarked

(And we never stop)

by whispering the truth to a giant Hart

And sending the flashing lights down harris rd.

And yet it was then he disappeared for years.

Today he disappears again.

On the phone, I hear John running through the woods.

Sam, he says, just sent Danny a letter.

Do you have your car?

Look for a white Honda suv.

He could be anywhere.

oh please

How long has it been

Since holing up

In these dirty carpeted apartments over hairdressers,

Piling cans against the black gunmetal

Of a walmart firepit in the lot bordering the highway?

I wonder if I understand the great journey he is on anymore.

When I come back to visit,

Mike tells me it is a struggle to stay close to it.

Something so bright it could end it all.

But we knew it made us what we were,

When we were young. That didn’t mean

We weren’t afraid.

My dreams have been growing in power lately,

For everyday I close my eyes

and try to be the man I said I would be

yesterday. Sam heard the call,

As he did 12 years ago.

Clear and bright like a bugle.

Perhaps it has never stopped calling.

low and resonant in its notes like a copper bowl.

His eyes must have suddenly changed,

Alert to their staring

As if late at night, anxious,

Staring straight into the lid.

Chipmunks live below the rocks here,

Chirping fear out to the clear cut patch of swamp

Just beyond the property line.

They go under and around me.

We share the animal sense of something not understood—

 the moment you are suddenly aware you have the choice.

Crab apples sweetly stink in the fading light.

What courage it takes not to make a hole!

To stare down the human being

As the shadows lengthen

and you begin to feel your back

Up against the whole world.

I imagine him

A week from now,

Sitting once again in the white walls

But this time smiling

And holding in his cupped hands

A bit of water

That is never still.

vacation

You said you were

Overwhelmed by Havana.

I sat in sweat, unable to leave bed,

Shaking from dystopic visions

Of life where there was no fullness

Turning my smartphone over

And over in my hands

Trying to find somebody who would

Let me leave this place and get to you

Or get anywhere you said you were

Done so many times holding off on loving me,

Leaving me back in the deepwater going

Further.

Today I ran from table to table

In a dirty shirt trying to keep an eye

On the American bar where Josiah was trying to hide

From the fact that there is someone that spits

In his face everyday, and everyday he smiles

Another day clicks on the counter of who he does not want to be

And it is the same for me, tray of $15 cocktails crusted in unsalted butter

And sour jam in hand trying not to show anger

That another day of fighting in the open,

Wearing what you believe and feel with comrades,

The fast, I will have to miss, have to shadow

And knuckle it under the long list of things

I do not allow myself to need.

You said you were

Seeing me everywhere,

But I wish you weren’t,

Wish noone could see my set jaw

And the quietness I cannot hide

When the world does not bend.

There is an hour before

Some meeting I set to measure the time

Before someone else decides it is time to move

And fight and I will not drink,

Because drinking is a valve,

And I will not watch tv,

Because tv is a blindfold,

And I will not sleep,

Because I cannot sleep.

There is nothing to do,

Nothing, I am ashamed,

 and you are in the old streets

playing soccer with children, reconnecting to

an old soul that lives in your gut,

part of you is getting healthy

without me

And the sickness is I am glad.

beginnings i.

I have thought I was different ever since I can remember. When I was young, I jumped down a whole flight of steps every day to get downstairs for breakfast when my mother was calling me. I remember doing that when I was 4. At 7 I was making deliberate social choices, knowing the concepts of gain and loss and that friendship was neither inevitable nor natural, that I could choose my friends or whether to have them at all. I began to be singled out as jewish around this time. What that meant to me was twofold. 1. It meant something sacred and inside, untouchable and beautiful for its very irregularity, unknowability. It was light flickering in someones eyes as they stare at a flame, not the flame itself but the graceful and immaterial thing that through various signs gave us notice of its presence. It was the one night a week my family made sure to be together for dinner and that all of a sudden, despite all the stress and argument, we would release our fists clenched over the damp sand of life and sing together. This was especially notable given the amount of stress my father was dealing with at that point in his life, traveling all over the world in what he saw as not only the necessary moves to advance his career but also to uphold it in an effort to support two elementary school kids and one newborn without another income in the house. Plus his worth was measured by his dual capacity to earn and serve as a father-figure in a mimicry of his father. The second thing being singled out as jewish meant was 2. Suddenly having an external image or persona whom I was constantly in relation to. Bankers, movie producers, accountants, moses, the jewish people in other school kids lives. Not only was I compared to them, but my every action was related to them as if they cast the light by which I might be seen, and the difference, was a shadow cast along the schoolyard. How did my actions relate to greed, to physicality, to success, to being American, to Israel, and most importantly how did my actions manifest my difference from everybody else at school. Even if at first glance none of my actions did, I began to see them through the light of difference.

            It was at this time that a superiority complex began to take root, egged on by my academic success as well as uncanny ability on the football field. Let me start with the latter. I was aggressive. Actually that applies to both fields. Ever below average in weight and height, I was widely known as the hardest hitter on the field and was consequently given the position where I got to make the most open-field tackles: linebacker. Despite being relatively scrawny, bookish, and unsocial, I was able to intimidate the other plays and through sheer abandon of the precipitation of impact or pain level players with much more momentum, despite their greater mass or velocity. This ability in me was noted, praised, but most of all it was taken by me to be central to my identity, this irrational strength,  this talent for overcoming which seemed to exist outside of the realm of sense.

            Academically, I was smart. Smarter than anyone I knew at that time. My mind seemed to move even more quickly than the teachers at times, though I have since attributed this to a lack of reponsibilities and multiple tracks in my mind and a plethora in theirs. I would finish problem sets with time to spare, write paragraphs in minutes when it was supposed to take an entire class period. But more important than the speed differential, was a true difference in effort. I did not know what it meant to struggle with a problem. Each new mathematical procedure or book to read seemed keyed into an inner process that for me was already running at high capacity. Any task given to me became an outward manifestation of my abilities rather than a challenge which brought them out further or nourished them.  And in the absence of challenging tasks, mastery of every aspect of the classroom became my goal. I began observing my classmates behaviors and how they spoke to each other and their parents. I carefully noted romances as they developed, curiously noting the void from which they emerged and how they rewrote their own histories after proving to themselves that they had roots and some form of longevity. And though I was not popular nor could contrort myself into the social form of leader of the pack, I mechanistically broke down the reasons for which and by which people obtained such positions of power. Joey cookson, talia zizza. Briefly kaela edson and zanni. Bryan pierce for a time before his physical difference began to make this more difficult as everyone grew taller and he stayed the same. A desire to make manifest my power became a priority. Whenever given the chance I would dominate academic competitions, seeking out, facing off with, and eventually embarrassing whoever promised to be the closest competition, thereby making the gap between myself and those who were struggling with the academic material appear even larger than it was. I knew I was seen as a force and I liked it.

            At the same time as my will to power manifested itself in the academic arena in public school ,as my sense of difference grew larger through bullying and fights at school, and I released my aggression on the football field, I had a separate world full of new social dynamics and what felt like a reinvented persona through my jewish community about a 20 minute drive away. In Winchester Massachusetts, I had a strong group of friends, mostly young males, of whom I was the unquestionable leader. We were loud in class both in discussions of material and during break times. We were boisterous and joking, we were unafraid. And it felt like we were this way because of a choice that I had made. I do not remember the moment, but I remember the thought process coming out of my social deductions in public school not that it was objectively better to be popular or outgoing, but that the experience certainly appeared to be better. Like the common people in siddhartha’s experience, I had seen the brutish pleasure by which my peers enjoyed each other and the world around them, seen the way they could share space without desiring to dominate or destroy, or at least when they felt and acted on these things that they could not do them. They appeared slightly out of reach always and therefore the interaction was sweet and unrequited in absolute terms, but always fulfilled in relative terms. There was no expectation of completion, or even a perception of what that would mean. There was only the action and its result. I chose to be that in my new world. I chose fun and popularity and extroversion. And for a time, felt like my best self, before the wearisome self-flagellating id of self-improvement imposed itself on the perceived differences between my two personas.  I sang and ran and argued with gusto, and without an outside voice or eye comparing what I was doing to anything else, to my parents, family, other jews. Because I was among them. And I was the greatest example of myself, the platonic aaron growing and developing as the first flower from the first seed did in the garden of eden, showing the world what it might be.

            Then came highschool and the great collision. Sexuality, depression, adulthood ( at least in the sense of true force in the world and consequences both by and on me), the truest kind of friendship, peers, an explosion of interest in the world, spirituality, and open defiance of the father and of the laid out path.

may summer come

This is the sunfield--

Dried oatmeal left by the kitchen cleaner

Beneath a heavy blue flame;

The unrecyclable literature of a middling

Candidate sprawled across the mudroom floor

Beneath bike tires and beer kegs;

Mice at the corner of my vision

Flitting out of boredom, out of fear

That comes with days like this,

That there will only be days like this.

Sweat and no blood,

Sweat and no tears,

Planning and no action;

The bickering of organizers over

Whether you can say that to their committee,

The dried red crust of garlic sauce on a green spigget;

I am coming for you middling America,

With your dried bones you keep for medical powder

And your holy wars fought with human resources.

I am spray painting my skin for the high

And using my nakedness to collect

stories of your sexual exploits.

We are in the brown backyard together,

Watching the piles of dead leaves bake.

We are paying too much attention

And believe me, I am going to ask you

About this later.

Because it’s my fault we sit

At $13 wine bars and create

sporadic monuments to our intentions.

Perhaps that is what I do now.

It is my fault I am tying to enter into a cool room

Filled with silence about the things that turn us on,

Turn our bodies and souls on like tiny bulbs

Along a cosmic string.

This is the sunfield—

Bleached and bland,

Overstimulated and homogenous,

Bright, bright, and flat.

Where are you in this sun?

What color do your eyes change

And how do your muscles pull you up?

What memory comes with that hint of breeze?

What are the words to that song?

Tell me how you love yourself, even now.

I see you growing like a universe,

Circling like the ocean.

How do you stay quiet with all that inside?

Where have you been?

everything just takes me there

Unharnessed horse riding

Spiked midnight juleps over

The double life of looking in

the mirror slanted, canted angles of

The body new and formed, muscle toned

Harvesting new life out of an old life,

New nights spent at the bar bending beneath

Racks of dirty glassware to emerge

Halo-topped in the misty history

Of cloud cornices to be strutted

and the great sighing of the city.

Wissahickon runs through it like a vein,

As my soul pulses through the work.

Would that the ivy would crumble these statues

To silence and the trees would spread their hearts

To help us breathe.

She is standing tall, fully clothed,

With a buzzer in her hand and the porcelain

Toilet is cold and the floor is full of the past

And I am choosing here the dark path,

The path of eyes closed, the path of

Slit my throat if that will help you breathe.

The time is shaking itself over and over,

Disbelief over “where it’s at”, droplets of water catching sunlight

Slinking away from the trash like a dog,

A fall, turns into a spring, turns into a summer

And I cannot have another thing I cannot control

While the refusal to choose shade wakes me

at dawn to her sleeping. I always

take a moment at the edge of the bed,

Back bare, breathing deep and dark and my head down,

Then I get up and go to work.

We are knowing ourselves into meaningful existence;

The great choice already made and now only to follow,

Use the right words, hold yourself

to what you have made yourself,

and win,

then it will be full,

Wont it? I haven’t the faintest idea how to produce energy

Without hurting people. The options are nuclear.

Life mimics life; though the body renews itself,

Water pours through like the recycled mires

Of the city’s sewers sold back.

She is she is she,

And while plunging headlong hurts noone else,

The hunt heaps yourself onto yourself, bald pain

Into misdirection and then you’ve got a bad scar

Under bright cloth. You’ve got a bad scar.