no erasers

sometimes I hate that in order for this crap to get out of my head I actually have to write it down which makes it permanent and floating and infinitely haunting. i can go back to a day when I was writing about you and crazy, man i know, it knocks me on my ass and all the forgetting i've been working so hard at just vanishes so fast it makes my stomach hurt. did you know i never told anyone? about your words. and even if i did they couldn't understand how much you said. i only wrote my own words in this ridiculous conversation with my conscience. and you know i never do this, but all of me actually hoped for you. but the way you turned around so fast with no explanation only silence baffled me cause in all my cynicism i am an optimist, just not an ignorant one. and yet you in all your emanating cheerfulness made it impossible for me to cradle any bitterness or discontent. only sadness and cravings and words.

something invisible and omnipotent

i watched a bird
in the whipping skies
accelerate through the clouds
by something invisible and omnipotent
and then drop suddenly

in a frivolous
moment of panic

over the spires
of pine and steel

through the grey rain

the seconds of
plummeting downward

filled completely
with a patient silence

waiting for the wind to come again its way.

to the rebel

i have seen your eyes in pictures
they water in the dusty ink of newspaper
i have seen your desperation
and felt the sting of your suppression
from my haven i have seen your women
take up the heaviest of arms upon feminine shoulders
you have screamed politeness
while your children starve and your nation perishes
and now in your moss covered mountains
and beds in the trees
in layers of sand-colored linen
you stand with unmeasureable pride with ink hair
and liquid eyes the color of your earth
you strike with the tools of the tiniest
terror and amplification

So gone

Gone is a condition that I keep myself in permenantly.
I like the feel of it.
Apart from the escapist connotations,
gone is really just the sensation of being faster than all the sludge that piles up on all of us.
Gone is the tangible liberation from all the definitions people stack up on our shoulders and from all the emotions people demand of us. I'm gone to all the places that filled my day dreams when I was five, gone to be the person I've been investing in ever since I learned to write time and draw faces and find vessels in wet clay.
So now to realize, after all the blustery exits and glossy-eyed goodbyes, shrugging off guilt and painting on confidence,
I realize that all the distance I've gone can evaporate in a single blink.
And I'm right back to the place I started from.
And that place. Is where you are.

Budapest

Budapest hums to me
my solitary footsteps announce my presence
on the stones of the city
as I make my way through castles
and dilapidated empires.
all the luxary of europe catalyzed on these bridges
and spits from the spires
on the skyline of this city.
I have beaten autumn here
and the leaves have all turned golden
against the gilded grey facades of finery.
the smell of fall swoops beneath my curtain of hair
and breathes on my collarbones.
madama's treble still echoes
in the hollows of my ears,
and though an insistent chill sticks to my skin,
I am increbibly complacent on the streets of Budapest.

inolvidable

barcelona stays with me
cool on the back of my neck
gaudi has left all of his calculated sensuality
along the curbs and between the bricks
and i rush like a child from peice to peice
enchanted
his creamy marble still chills my palms
and his great arched ribs still bend my spine
back in awe to swallow it all
my tongue still tastes paella
and i still hear the relentless pounding
of dancers' heavy shoes on stone
my eyes are still heavy
and they rest against the lines of las meninas

my adulation is cemented.

a landscape

rupturing out of the concrete city
the landscape of greece is savage and dishevelled
and the earth meets the sea with an animalistic satisfaction.
stone erupting from the depths of the earth
without making effort to host the softness of soil
or the cover of foliage.
the self-indulgent cliffs let the bodily weight of the waves
rush against them with urgency
and an anxious sense of tragedy paints itself
on every inch of one's skin.
there is no harmony in the provocative sculpture
of these mountains
and there is no calm in the cusps of this shore.

theseus

victorious against the blurred black canvas
still only an inkling tucked into the horizen
the deafening silence bursting excitement swallowed up by the waves
even his own father can not palpate the breath of nike
and neither does his anguish permeate the harsh noon sun
to warn his son of his ignorant demise
into the foaming mouth of his namesake.

poetic confessions

we make poetic confessions in the night
we blink slowly
letting isolation wet our pupils
we write autobiographies competitively
interjecting at an inhale to deaden
the sting of penitence
we line up transgressions
peer at the shapes
on the laps of our companions
we strain our ears in the darkness
to lure the repenting whispers and
seduce them out of their exhaustion.

the rocks of chalkidiki

like recalcitrant remnants of an old soul
the rocks of chalkidiki sway in the froth of the sea
their chappedeggshell surfaces press
into the delicate skin of my inner arms
and the backs of my salty knees
sagacious old bones arching up out of the placid blue
exposing their marrow in the pallidpools of morning
I walk barefootsun on my back
the great pores in the stone
worn away by the insistency of wind and water
suck on my fingertips and cradle the arches of my feet
to pull me up atop their cresting permenancy
to hover over the quivering surface of beryl
the rocks envelop my silences in all of their
negative spaces, crowded with sensual heroism
and their blissful compromise
with the schemingshifting sea

the creditor

i've painted and powdered and strapped down my heart
laid down the lines of my rapture
i've buckled and broken and knelt on the ground
and fingered the points of my fractures

she's tilted and torn and completely undone
all seams that demanded her mending
she's borrowed and begged and humbled her heart
to the debtor demanding its lending.

congested

my words feel backed up this week
my head is congested with this language
and my ribs ache with the fullness of my lungs
paused on a gasp
how fragile self-worth is
how disillusioned we must all be
to believe that we are any greater
than the millions at our backs
and there's no choice
there's only a selfish forward pull
only lights and shadows and the hope for joy
love, only a hesitation
only a gasp then an exhale then a pull away
because we just can't float with eachother forever.

grocery

fruit man wakes at dawn
lines up his apples and peppers
grunts his good-mornings
and sighs at my enept tongue
trying to form the names of what I'm hungry for.
his face is netted by creases
shadowed by a brimmed hat pulled down low
he peers through thick, broad glasses
rough hands on the delicate skin
of a plum
squinting at a scale
hanging in the morning light.

to syracuse

en route to syracuse my car was quiet
i peered into the worlds of the people i passed
or the people that whizzed by me.
the lushness of summer greenery still dripped from the hills
of the spittle of the Adirondaks.
and the simmering gray sky dribbled
moistness that gathered in the veins of every leaf
and between my bottom lashes.
a thick silver cloud squatted over the tops of the hills
and the white stipes of the road fenced gracefully
to peirce my way.
accelerating through long strips of farmland interrupted
by the great splotches of brown and white
bellowing from beyond catweed and tufted tall grasses.
the drive was precious and already
a memory as it happened.

noah's tragic elegance

fragmented biblical whisperings
a three-teired titanic
with an audio menagarie of shreiks and shudders
relentless downpour of the faithless perishing
into blue depths of papyrus
and the one-horned shimmering gracefulness of the unicorns
left wading in water
salty and sinful

hope

cool-headed we approach each other over states and flatlands flooded with uncertainties and uncomfortable prodding from stale air and persistent lonliness capitalizing every letter we ought to questioning the judgement of a far-off face and the histories of a parallel life one fiber in a thick rope winding alongside every story we've ever heard or ever told yet we all want so badly to be woven into another life to be integral in someone else's story crucial to someone else's inhale exhale so we all extend our fingertips into the dark into the cool earth tentatively hoping full of doubt but resolutely optimistic that we wil eventually palpate just the vibrations of someone else's fingertips the whisper of someone else's optimism the unwavering tangible fleshiness of hope.

greek

i'm learning greek
in the hollow hours of my indian summer
the sounds fit in my mouth
like the curves the alphabet settle on my lined paper
i picture myself
explaining the color of strawberries
to old greek men with creased faces
and wisps of white hair fleeing from their temples
the syllables stick stubbornly to the flesh of my tongue
and audible figurines of resonant sounds
drip from my fingertips
i'm sure that all the hunched grandmothers
who smell of feta and olive oil
will take my face into their soft motherly hands
and marvel at my incompetence

slow motion thought

i've opened my eyes in the middle of the night catch my breath press my lips into each other inhale look at you and you tell me to smile and that is just the sweetest thing anyone could ask of me so i smile into the darkness and let the strange august coolness settle in my lower back and behind my ears and i listen to the streets outside and the lovers making excuses and laughing softly into the night over the pillows and comfort of the crook of your arm i peer at the world that i'm about to drown in once again and wonder why everything that is so simple and pure and appealing does not pull at me at all instead flushes me out into the night to try and stay bouyant and graceful and focused on what i want with all my heart what consumes my thoughts yet i wish it was you i was consumed with that reminded me to smile at the most pivotal moments of the day when the stripes of sunlights press themselves pasta-like against my walls and over the curve of a bare hip and milk and cereal and morning tv all seduce me out of bed into the day jealous of the night content in trading the spotlight of the moon for the blinding brightness of the sun.

words

when you speak out loud, the words tumble over the rim of your conscience, float before your face for a moment, and then pop like bubbles into the air around you, gone forever, they may have left without being heard by anyone else, or they may have been inhaled and tasted by everyone else in the room,
exhaled and swallowed.

when you write words, ink makes them eternal, paper catalyzes them into everything you meant them to be. they are felt by everyone, even if they are read by no one, and you carry them around in bursting pockets and huge baskets of lined paper and napkins soaked with moments and lovers and time. you keep them all, catalogues of loyalty or legitimacy that you pull through the day at your feet, or bluster out before you in a flurry of importance. written words are permanant and they have a heaviness to them, no matter how small the print or insignificant the writer.

here

what do you all expect me to do
from where you're standing
pick uphold onsit downstay
where bricks flood the streets
we're all too close phyicallycrammed
beside eachother
to ever really seebelieve the expression
on one another's facespalmprints
overlap and you can't really know me
at all.

disoriented

you know that feeling even before you open your eyes in the morning and you're somewhere you didn't expect. unfamiliar bedside table, light switch in a new place, different colors on the walls

its takes a dizzying moment to ground yourself, remember where you are and what you're doing and who you are.

it happens to me all the time, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night.
when i look up from a book or a conversation
when i'm standing on the T and realize i could be on any public transportation anywhere in the world
when all i hear is a foreign language and i float in it like thick water
the waves are high and i can never touch

lungs full and throbbing and eager to exhale
heels pressing into sand
arms wide
eyes closed

somebody's blue on the walls every morning
and sweet hands at the light

soundless landing

soundless landing im back to the place i started
eyes closed, i need no explanation
but with my silence, i feel distinctly feminine
and i brush it from my skin with insistence.

that i dont care
is a lie through tight lips and averted eyes
its a burn that won't scatter with time
or fade with sun and its pattern is clear on my conscience.

but here all my pity has been swept into a pile
and then blown away by the cool night
and the pull on my collarbones drags everything down
to hardwood and concrete.

cravings

Brussels is damp all over
And too cold for sundresses
The buildings look as though they have literally been blown to pieces
Across the street from our hotel there is half a building,
And on the top floor, the open-mouthed room shows me a dining table and chairs
Like a doll house, sad and crumbling.

The people are woven deep and intricate and are lovely
to converse with
Trade words.
I can feel myself growing inside, smiling wide.

Yet every other moment or so
My thoughts litter themselves across your profile
And I have to re-read your words
Or picture the way you smile; not your stock smile - but that smile you have when it fills your whole face, and that laugh that pours from your eyes like tears.

I feel as though
The two places I should be
Are so very far away from one another
So I will wait until they collide again,
And I crave the moment.

anxious

i think the word i have been searching for is anxious.

i've lined up so much for myself to live and prepare for and recover from that in the interim of being inspired and awestruck i am left incredibly anxious. pee your pants, spontaneously throw up, cry hysterically in public

anxious.

and yet every moment in the moment feels awesomely slow. my air is viscous and my joints are stiff as i struggle to center and align before the next round of plans. i don't mean to implicate that i am not excited and so expectant of greatness, only that the brimming over of these things is making my insides quake.

good news, i'm writing again. being lost in graphite and charcoal is a beautiful bouyant way of linear thinking, but words are solid. stacked between ribs and piled on the backs of my knees. it's nice to feel another style, it makes you want to respond with your own. you can't ask much more from your writing if it forces response. four weeks of only words is going to be challenging

non-negotiable.

being as incomplete and amorphous as i am, your completion and full-faced smiles are so comfortable.

you haven't said too much.

my grandmother

my grandmother is getting thin
like a dried autumn leaf
and her bitterness gives me shivers

her garden is exhaling and rolling up out of the earth
in notes of sunshine and water
and i sit across from her in the twisted wire rocking chair

fifth cigarette drifting in her smoky eyes
bouncing between her lips
with every lovely thing she tells me

in her most eloquent vocabulary

she is the wisest person i know
and she stands alone shaking in her roses
its only me she lets wade in her tarragon

and listen to her fabels

her eyelids
are heavy and thick and as white as her eyes
and their milky boundaries magnify the cool blue of her wisdom

her silver hair is pulled like thick boat ropes
away from her face
and it always feels like shes running at you
with words

like pellets that sting
stick
sink in and lay in wait
until they are needed

i pick them out regularly
and put them in my jewelry box
along with my paints and purfume

my grandmother pushes up her sleeves
over her gardening gloves and tanned tissue skin
and her beauty is always astounding
despite all of her turmoil

back to colors

i’m driven to paint.
i miss the solidarity that crashes over me when i smear colors on linen with the insistency of hips.
i miss the compassion i feel for my brush, colliding with an Image i’ve plastered on my eyelids,
a silhouette that dominates every blink and every space between my thoughts.

i long for that ability to create the emotions of the day - instead of our usual positions;
me, standing at my tallest five two
and the day, tackling me with all of its blustery beauty and tortuous elegance.

when i paint the blue shadows beneath your eyes, it is with all the steadiness of a cold, deep sky.
i can fill the infinite darkness with the titian red of my anger and the cool hungry violet of my heart.

the stars settle stubbornly
condensation in the hollows of my collarbones.
as i paint with fingers wet with the day
on skin stretched and lips open
with suspicious eyes upon me I lay out on the rained-on blacktop
Smelling it Painting that cut grass green eyes

but trying to find you in my colors
is like trying to blow the clouds into motion.

insomniac

Because I don’t sleep at night
I inhale constant volumes of you
The space beside me
Is one of my voluminous exhales
And gives graciously against my palms
The night slices off pieces of itself
And they fall like great blocks of marble beside me
Crushing my exhale with a great whoosh
And my lungs inflate with your violent wingspan
As I struggle to chip away the icy stone
Trying to palpate the arch of a rib
or the hyberbole behind a hipbone
or the curve above the heart’s repugnancy
my belly sinks into the cool permanancy of wakefulness
eyes peeled open
you, still battering and twisting in my torso.
You will not be still, and I accept your chaos.
For in all of your dulce-darkness and turmoil
My breath would cease in your stillness
And in sleep your volatile beauty would fade.