cutting great neck

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