light crumbles into our bedroom
waking me. slowly i tease the new yorker
out of your hands - returning it
to its own bedside tower
building towards the sun.

i am so happy

i would like to take some drugs

some cherry blossoms

the light and the traffic held up and the southern wind delivered upon us, a moment. he and i don’t speak the same internet, so how we got around to this topic, i couldn’t remember. i’m pretty sure we began with talks of nuclear and the impending water crisis, and i hardly risked opening my mouth on such things. yet this was when his mind edged forward, towards my thoughts, and perhaps for a second, unknown to eachother, elbow to elbow, we mingled like the unfriendly mingling of traffic we loved.

i am having a love affair with your books,

the marginalia that tease every line of delillo

with emerson. a pen pal to another you, 

years ago, unworn yet by the memories that have

kept you here in this city. while the rest of the world

has gone gatsby, you said to me (three years ago)

but do your thing, and I shall know you.

and i fall asleep with your book folded over my heart.

John Hock Wheelock

If a poet is really good he can give you a moment of reconcilement to the tragic nature of things. Poetry, as with all the arts, enables us to reexperience. Most of us pass through life in a state of semi-anesthesia, with life itself blotted out by the business of living. We shut out life itself in order to carry on and survive, and the function of the arts is to pierce that shield and make us suddenly reexperience something that we’ve always known but haven’t been experiencing anymore. Shelley said it when he described poetry as stripping the veil of familiarity from things. It can only be done obliquely or by implication. A certain musical phrase, or combination of sounds by Beethoven, will arouse feelings of intense sadness which would not have been aroused if Beethoven had just put his head down and cried.

a new city threatens us with invasion, 

like all the cities that came before.

you, you flake off by the summery breeze

by each new caresses, so purposefully gentle.

me? i am beautifully painted, 

the whole surface of me, 

glittering in the moonlight in 

an enchanted armour. 

it shines tonight, encased by

fire escapes that someone forgot

to design into chelsea, it whispers

savages savages they are

barely even human. savages savage

they only see this world. 

and the swell dropped like a catapult, totally filled with autumn. there was nothing to do but wait, and hear that sublime uncommissioned sound of the sea. those little curves lapping, forever reaching to kiss the clouds. do you see this? their sighing and sighing?

i still believe the sea can teach me things. like how there are people who just want to be alone with life! and then there are those who claim dreams. when i am alone here, in the sea, afloat, it tells me that there are holy lakes within us, crying out for sky. for a lift that we can almost catch if we just went with our guts and chased it like some crazed fisherman desperate for rapture. 

surfers are the best navigators, because forgetfulness is the property of all action. this brain damage is the core of things, like how we must love without any memories. i am the child of forgetfulness, like a chip in lamplight scattering shadows, and distances are no gain here and we are burnt all the harder for it. what does this mean? i don’t know, but it will be from now on. you can subscribe it on a monthly basis. the blog of expectation without desire. 

there was someone in my life at one time or another
who made me out and overcome, who trebled and
shook clear at the words’ excessive keatsness, and broke
with a knife, a heart at all fronts. even here. can i be
as unburdened as i was back then? without memories or countries
or wars? 

suddenly a wind knocks me down 8th avenue, as if an
ocean of affection awashing me of all sins in this dour light,
and i stand straight, over the whole city and watch the future
like a virtuoso who have just composed this song of crowded voices,
their knowledge of midnight, and its inscrutable noisy laughter of
witticisms draped into a well. i wish he could see me like this
succeeding each breath of air in my breast. 

a part of me knows he does, out there, across the sea.
the world is not so big and we are not so disconnected.
and if i could see him i would thank him for
the luck of leading me here, quite unlike the others
who have beared me down. in this way, i know
we have loved.

the world became a question of rivers, houses, 

worships of princes carrying eachother like scepters. 

will this allow the sky survive to the end?

what about the waters?

when i was happy lambs were born

dances held the perfect centre of things and

no I’s were too jealous. when i was less divine

the moon held up a fake gray plate and was

sorry for the darkness.

generally? generally? how can i make pictures

when i couldnt dry those old books?

how did the others do it?

the distance between your hands and the apple

had something to teach you about death. like

how the sun under wood on the way home was trying

to stitch together words like ‘happiness’. 

come here, stand to my attention. i can see

your heart waiting for poets to get back to 

their business of writing about what changes

what stays the same what beats what mellows. 

here it is: forget the tangle of the last rain, the

reluctant dazzle of that september sun. forget the

second winter in a row that has fed up 

all your longing for spring. let’s go and 

retrieve that irretrievable love of light

on the pier; black pen and yellow writing pads;

seedy quartet of the moon in all the

cornered places and beach ferns ecstatic for 

our communal bodies. they symbolise mystery

i suppose, they are so black and sweet. 

forget that we picked so few apples today,

the ones we got tasted mythic.

the people who lived here before us
also loved succulents cuttings and ferns
that bend into the mornings. they made their way
up here while the whole city was breaking camp
into this way and that, they sent the children
to gather the firewood, told stories,
knew that we were all here from the same names,
summer fox, weathered home, gooseberry moon.

late at night you tell me that once you walked
into a santa barbara bar without any cash and
someone bought you a drink and the
world was made. the guy said, there are
wolves in the mountains and then he left to pee.
wait a minute, you asked, you wanted to know which
mountain and what kind of wolves and which world
and what time? wait a minute, he said, what sea?

i think about this story in the mornings when i wake
without knowing where i am and where i have
come from, which seems all too often these days.
on the northern most tip of this island i can almost
see my yearning like a contagion, disseminating
all over the air particles. we all meant so well, but
it is a terrible thing to travel for love. 

under the williamsburg bridge, i have seen
my ghost broken, my body blessed,
a specific charge spoken to the sound
of a slow trumpet at nightfall. a man
dispossessed chants on the corner of
bedford ave, ‘it’s movin’ time, movin’ time’.
is he not a prophet in this moment?
shall he not be worshipped as a broken seal?
as a form of eden?

just like those girls! there are so many fucking
beautiful women in new york, sharpening
the mist, accommodating our lives together
or apart, it doesn’t really matter. their eyes
should have set off revolutions by now,
i don’t know why they haven’t yet. it’s
probably the same reason we are slit
ear to ear cries of motors instead of
waves, why the moon shrinks from
our smoking and raving in the night.

don’t say it is lovely, say something i can understand,
what you mean. in a moment, statutes will be moved
to museums and we will be subjects of the German Secret Police
paralysing sea of numbness in penitence for years of
excess passion, foolishness, unnecessary jealousy,
in that despicable loneliness of snow under a drowsy sun.

a calmness is enforced by this mute earth and
soft sun. what can i hear and where shall i go?
my life is a winter hot with needs, just now,
autumn so arrogantly unlike spring, burning out
to know (as much as i would care to) how to
bend to wishes and not to break. how?

it’s autumn and i am again studying
the state of tasteful undress, kinda wingin’ it
like those art thieves who were the most
ardent lovers of art of all time. like time that exists
so that not everything happens all at once.
ain’t that the truth? luckily, time ain’t
no angel of sentimentals. 

it’s autumn and these trees are like no
trees i grew up with, so extortionistic, so red,
how could i not press that into an cliched phrase
about aging and burning? it has occurred
to everyone else over the centuries, and in that
can i insist on my intellect? and will that lead
to winter? 

For F

For it is christmas again,
      and unseasonably weathered.
For you woke me, too early 
      too early that morning.
For the MFA taught me
      I had only beautiful questions,
and that was cool,
      totally cool with me.

For the ocean is always what
     I mean to say, but fail to say.
For I was afraid to turn,
     left at intersections.
For I was in a turning lane,
     and signaled, despite myself
For I could not throw
      myself away.

For the streets for New York,
      that showed anonymity.
For I finished reading, and loved
      only what I did not understand.
For the distances and contours
      of my ignorance, of which I am proud.
For my small authorities of will.

For identical lamplights, reflecting,
      my reflecting.
For the nosebleed section,
      more merry than any other.
For the helpless love of music,
     our old music.
For alternate endings.

i, too, struggle with the unconditional. sitting at the edge of the ocean close to dawn, on the edge of that bright dark, the open wish of the world was too distant to mean much. like how when music is to far a way, your eyes won’t flinch to their touch….

you also suffer from the blindness of poets!

thoughts of you folded in and out of my origami-ed mind

late afternoon when the storm clouds came 

down to lick the tar like surface of the sea. 

the world slowly unbraided itself for us -

sugar cubes slipping out of her hair,

the earth fluttered against my soul.

it was all you. 

only you could find the catastrophe of 

my personality beautiful and modern.

you looked at me like a french word. 

the one for nursery.

the one for rain.

Euclid once wrote
a point is that which has no part
but i have no such purity
in me, outside of love. so i waited
on the tarmac for the waves over
the southern point
to break open our veins.
i cry out those marine slangs
for you and your naked storms
at dusk. we splash about
in that giant flesh, imploring
for more. we go like blossoms.

he is so restless, as am i. 

the blueness of our hour slowly leaned into 

a moan - a wrinkled vista. it’s time, you see.

the sky was grey and clear, pink and blue shadows

under each cloud. but i was too distract, too wild.

all i could think of was how there was

too much lime in this world and

not enough gin. how the gentle are curious,

the curious not so gentle. 

then he said -

come sweet breath, sweet rain, sweet dives 

into my sandbar. see how spring is lifting you

like an undercurrent, softly rearranging 

your dreams? have you not been saving 

yourself, just for this? this fucking full moon

rising over a vague september sky

devouring in a gulp - that

we are not yet in love?