cutting great neck

how can i start.

i'll just describe where i am right now.

i'm on a laptop listening to mexican guitars and typing into this box. there's no air, or at least the air feels very heavy. i'm sitting on a wooden chair next to a hard plastic pine green table. an old man sits a few feet to my right hunched over the pa daily news, his jaws grating visibly into a salmon sandwich in a ripple motion, his eyes drifting slowly across the pages (do they really serve salmon sandwiches here? weird.) next to him sit stacks of donuts and other dough-y creations, their glazed bodies glowing in a languid fluorescent shine, burning off-white for hours on end behind curved, filthy glass. a young guy--maybe a stanford student, maybe a foothill one--types with one hand on his mac, face somber and focused on the screen; cars fly behind him, suvs and trucks and smaller cars, their bodies beaming sunlight and blue sky-light from every inch of their frames like great lamps.

i think it's funny how this place never closes. i wonder who was sitting on this chair at 2 a.m. last night--a drunk high school kid, or a stoned homeless guy, or a jetlagged venture capitalist from taiwan with nothing to do and nowhere to go. i've been waiting for two or more hours waiting for the washer fluid tank in my toyota to be fixed in the car repair shop a minute-walk away. i hate waiting like this. or maybe i actually like it. especially now because i feel so insert-french-word-here, so bohemian freethinking liberal, so hipster, typing my thoughts up sophisticated-ly in a shitty hole like this. i've eaten like twelve doughnut holes and i don't care, even though i feel like a giant iguana entered my body and settled comfortably into my stomach. it tasted good and anyways i needed something sweet to accompany the iced coffee. hopefully the repairman will give me a call in the next five minutes or so, though i'd imagine it'd be in an hour, two hours. damn fucking cars. i hate waiting.

and i'm so apathetic about life. i guess that's what i want to say here, is that i'm so apathetic. i've been thinking about death a lot lately and how afraid i am of it, really for no reason, even though i've managed to park this fear far into my subconscious several folds beneath the surface of my brain for a long time before. i don't know what happened--i was just lying down in my bed like five months ago and everything was dark and then i just thought, "shit, i'm gonna die one day." and it's not like this was something new--i've known this, that i was gonna die, for many years now--but not like this. the inevitability of it just packed me in the gut and it was so scary, knowing that one day it will come and i would have to endure this black night for eternity without even my thoughts to guide me. and every day i wake up now and seconds later i think, i'm going to die one day.

and maybe that's why i just don't care. really, i don't. i hate how i don't know what i want to do in life, such a fragile, fragile life, and how i don't know what's going to happen and how i'm supposed to live, what i'm supposed to become and who. maybe i've become this apathetic because of this move--i've just become cynical, like, oh, another move, who cares what happens to me and what i do because anyway i'm just going to move again, anyway i'm going to die.

whenever i drive back from the baylands after running i think about this apathy. i don't know if it's really apathy--though what else could it be? i just don't think i'm productive. i don't remember what i did the day before, what i did a week ago--it's anyway always the same thing: maybe went out with friends, most likely traveled the world wide web. and here i am, not really doing anything either--at Happy Donuts, waiting for the Repairman to fix My Car, and when he's done i'll just drive Home and do Nothing, really. maybe i'll go to yogurtland with friends after i run. i stopped writing for fun, or for anything really. i read the economist--that's the only thing i read. cover to cover, the whole week long. i don't know why i read it.

if someone asked me what i'm doing with my life, i don't know what i would say.

i guess i'm just waiting. i guess israel and rome will free me from this prison cell of apathy--the lack of routine, that lose-yourself-in-the-moment feeling, seeing people you care about. then i go to brown.

yeah. it just became noon. funny how time moves like that. i hate that, thinking about time, how it's just a countdown to our inevitable death--and how we treat it as if it were infinite, "hey let's meet at 3, not 2", like that hour doesn't mean anything but in the end, in the very, very final end, it will mean everything, it will mean a lifetime and more than that, it will mean a thousand lifetimes. i hate that. i hate it so much.

and like, totally, everything goes back.

to my first autumn in great neck. totally, totally weird time for me. i dont know if i was happy or sad. i'm too tired now to elaborate--but just, it makes me miss thinking about athens and israel and drinking iced coffee and bagels on cold mornings and wearing my brown coat that droops down across my body like a dog's tongue.

“who are you to say that we were born lovers into a vortex of love”—
this night a whirlpool that pulls us closer and closer,
like how planets are created
when shattered crumbs of debris kiss in the darkness,
the sun glowing far away in the far-flung center of things
like the red lamp that hangs from a wire over our booth at the diner tonight,
and somewhere between us, inside us, through us, dark matter
pinches open the universe and spews out
something blacker than itself.

you whisper something
so low
i can hear keys jangle in your pocket like stardust.
the truth is, you say,
the truth is, i’ve never really liked the sound
of your voice.

the truth is?
the truth is, i’ve never really liked the way the universe works in mysterious ways,
how it always expands as if it will never be born, as if it will never die;
the truth is?
the truth is, i’ve never really liked the way poems have skeletons,
the way words have biographies, letters even have them,
the way sleep is just a condensed death;
the truth is?
i’ve never really liked
anything but you, really,
now
that i think about it,
i confess over dead yellow whiskers and a charred wheel in a bun.

from now we’re standing on the edge of a cliff
and pretend it was a supernova
and that we burned in it like tragic heroes,
you with a hubris of salad
and me with words that wade down my throat
into the depths of my chest
and so sharp and mean like bones.

can you sing a requiem to a love that died?
if death feels worse than this,
i want to sleep forever,
become a star, welded gas and gold, fixed
in black empty space, beautiful space, still
perched in the sky millions of years even after i die.

you drove me home in the rain
and i watched the scars peel off the window.
i’m sorry, your hands said with each jerk of the wheel.
you drove me
home in the rain,
and i fell in love
with falling out of it.
now, i can only remember
the diner, the stars, the dust—
nothing more, nothing that deserves reliving.
you might disagree, but i think it is a happy ending.

really, what is a rhetorical question
but an exercise in familiarity,
in sensation—the answers that swim
in your blood—what is it but a mirror
of human thoughts, you looking in
and me looking out? do you feel
what you see, even if it’s only threads of truths
strung into a reflection? what is a mirror
but a lie—a wall that seems to open
into another room,
another person looking into another?
do you fade into yourself
like the city into fog
when it yearns to hide from the world?
or do you always see yourself
when you gaze into mirrors—
even in complete darkness?

snow drapes roads and roofs,
sweeps the sidewalks, the swerving
side-alleys. when we wake up in the presidio,
the white grime seems
to slink down into the ocean.
would you wait to watch it fall nimbly
down skies, down knolls?
or would you strut down
with black leather heels that rim into sludge,
breaking the ice like a needle
into skin?

in the winter, before it snowed,
we woke up and asked ourselves
if waking up was a good decision.
to those looking into mirrors in bathrooms,
into oceans from decks of yachts and liners,
into eyes that run smooth with the truth:
do you dare look before you kick it?
the morning fog is clear enough
to echo your image in its thicket.
but if it’s not fog, then what is it?

when she tells him she’s pregnant and the night feels like plum jam that’s been sitting in the sun for too long,

he unwraps his thoughts from around her

and the coffee slips down their throats like a language that’s never been spoken

but that they both understand silently.

they’re serenaded into morning wakefulness by the cello suite they made love to last night,

before she turned away from his thrusting, impulsive body and crumpled into a sliver of concentration.

this is the home their boy will be raised in: a house where music

fills naked silences, a house where fingers play only on vertebrates, where eyes glance only at wrinkled scowls.


after she’s sucked all the sweet syrup of the fruit from her fingers

he hurls the jelly to the floor in an amorous italian rage and pushes her into the
shards of glass, heaving, his voice

hoarse with dreams: dreams of family (grunting) dreams of happiness dreams of dreams coming true dreams

that bring meaning into his life, the way notes give voice to a new sound, the way love feeds itself until it falls from the face of the earth,

too full to luxuriate in the world around it.


in the moments after she tells him she’s pregnant, the darkness feels

sultry, and sad. for breakfast she will spread that night on burnt toast

and crunch into it with hopes of forgetting.

are you a poem
or just a sordid fantasy?

if you’re blind as a bat
then can you feel the night?
or do you just
melt into it, the ridges of your separation
becoming more and more fluid,
blacker even than your memories
of color? can you feel the darkness
rise up in a flood,
the bent cold unseeing of it
like water gushing up?

are you written
in lines as long as fingers,
in verses as thick
as smiles? is there
a voice behind those lips,
a thought behind
those words? when will the wind
sweep you up like a stray piece of paper,
a current under everything?—
when is truth?

i’ve been out thinking
along those routes
of the mind, littered with pebbles
and half-consumed dreams.
and i wonder if
you’re there along the road too,
thinking, dreaming,
as the twilight begins to fizz,
and the darkness
eats away at the heart of quiet,
each chirp like the crack
that lost its bite.

i'm not in the mood to write elaborately.

it's just... i feel nostalgia, or perhaps just the feelings that i felt one, two years ago, sitting perched up in my room, with the night outside so cold, so dark, and the snow, and feeling so alone yet so comforted, so at peace right there, right then. how i wish i could relive those moments... how i wish i could still be able to experience them. i remember how i would lie down in bed and try to lull myself to sleep with these songs, and lying down after they ended and thinking of nothing, and the walls with the ridged, lacerating covering. on the weekends when it was snowing i would sometimes go out at 1 in the morning and wade through the snow with a tri-pod. sometimes i'd walk all the way to memorial field, through the snow, in the darkness... and everything was so quiet, and so serene... and i felt belonged.

this isn’t the picture you found mounted on the wall
with its black border as thick as a finger
so firm against the white, like gloss.

when the slabs of metal rose behind the glass
in bulging black blooms, windows that fleshed out light
as if it were blood to congeal,
did you really hope with all your heart to live?

when even the sounds of skin tearing
filled your stomach to the brim with thoughts
that sat like folded paper balls slowly falling apart,
did you really think you could break through?

when even the shadow of your straightened body
poured across the painting like a ghost of a structure
and levitated in it so corpse-like—when even
the night said it would be dark—when even the moon
desiccated into a strip of sour milk—
when even the earth early in the morning stretched
like the ocean and you couldn’t see anything
but the glint of eyes in the distance—
did you really think that the sun could never blind you?

this isn’t the picture you found mounted on the wall,
this isn’t the nail that bent into the plaster,
this isn’t the palm-center that ripped,
or the eyes that burnt on the thirteenth floor
of your innermost dying dreams;
this isn’t it at all. when even deferred dreams
crush, did you really think
crushed dreams could ever be deferred?

label me: poem

"you left a highlighter moon on the machine in the gym,
shining against the black curve of the plastic bike like
a broken half-petal. you’re so careless with your pens
and with your books. you jog out and find yourself following
a woman who looks like your mother, her red hair
and complacent straddling stroll a stark cue
that reminds you of everything but what you’ve forgotten.
you pause by the grass that grows from
cement. you wonder who had planted it there, who had
wanted it to grow tender green strings— the closer and closer
they are to each other, the quicker they die."

why did i ever think
that i could this thing.

so this is how it must be:
whole worlds built to separate me
from the ones i love.
i wish i were with you tonight,
and that we would crumple together
into a blanket
and cover each other up
to the shoulders.
this trumpet of a lonely city
has never rang so softly
even in the forest of my mind;
it’s never learned its song,
never listened to its own beat.
when would we lie together
until the morning took us
away? why am i the one
who always has to live
so far from everyone?

label me: moving, sad

i woke up on my first morning in san diego--two and a half years after leaving it for a much colder place--and noticed the sky. window screen half-opened into a billowing gradient of blue: bright, unfiltered blue--what blue will look like in heaven, its shades streaming in and out of one another cool-like and hypnotic.

blue is an honest color--yet here it seems fake, like a red watermelon's crust, misleading in its simplicity, in its beauty.

the sun is just fading, and i'm outside and the cold feels surreal, my exposed fingers wrapped in cold with each and every letter key that they reach to press. the sun is just fading from behind silhouettes of black palm trees and tall bushes; the trunk of a date palm is reflected in the pool, draped in christmas lights.

chilly.



sometimes i think about san diego. i think about the fact that i despised it, that i felt alone and misunderstood and rejected much of the time--that every house and every storefront and every person was a facade, a false face, a blue sky above an ugly, dejected world: and i would think about san diego, and i'd ask myself if i really believed all of what i used to believe--maybe i had simply lied to myself about it, or maybe i actually misunderstood san diego instead of it misunderstanding me.

it is a tedious, sad little place--i can see that now, sleeping in a house that looks exactly like mine did, and only a few blocks away from that house. it was a cruel place. where unending, circuitous nothing happened; where the streets spread themselves even with a disgusting yearning for space--pavement, pavement, oh so much endless pavement, like spilled water that never stops expanding.

and now with my fingers bitten by cold and the sky burning in a purple, starless white-noise, i can safely say that san diego was what i've always suspected. i hated it then, and i hate it now; its flaws more than make up for its good attributes.

sometimes i'd sit there and think about moving. moving to san diego, from san diego--a place that defined my personality more than any other place i've ever called home. and i'd think about san diego, and what it did to me.

sometimes i'd sit there and brood. and i brood, and i brood--and i wonder where my friends have gone and where have they always been for me.

and when i come to a place like this, i realize that friendship is the most important thing in the world.

sometimes, i'd sit there, and ask myself if i've ever really experienced it.

label me: friends, moving, sad, san diego, sun, travel, weather