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

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

http://ny2pa.tumblr.com/

a supplement to this blog?

funny how
this meant
so much
differently
to me
back then.



Re-blogged from
Saturday January 16 2009 early early in the morning



i miss you.



whoever you are, wherever you are.

i miss you.

i love you.

you are so important to me. i really meant to tell you this a long time ago.

but, i forgot.

and it's cold. and i can see lights outside. and i miss manhattan, and i miss you, and i am so full of missing everything.

i went to school today and had tears in my eyes because this guess speaker came to talk about children in cambodia and how he was building homes and talking about how he built schools and how important life is and he showed us a video of all these cambodian kids singing a song and i had tears in my eyes and i have them now. and my spanish teacher was sitting next to me.

and i felt how strong and important humanity is.

and now i feel like you're so important to me, and that i want to see you again.

i miss you.

i had so many ideas about what to write in this post.

but i forgot them all.

Like a sleek leech, unwanted and intolerable, you writhed into my veins.
But even after everything. Even after the endless suckling of blood, the infinite excavation into every artery and vein.
I can already say that leeches’ spit doesn’t really impress me.
Entered into the wrong vein—oh so, so wrong. Stupid leech. And such an angry, blood-filled vein, just ready to explode. And it’s such a pity—there is not nearly enough blood to leak on it.

she sat me down
in the living room
outside the light was blue
and it came
in small strokes, like wind
blowing over meadows.

the room fell in a cool hush,
after she told me
what she had called me in for:
then, i slumped in my seat
as if somebody died
(and inside, somebody did die)
and i nursed myself into an internal
tantrum, and i thought
no no no no no no no no
(please no)

and like a pistol’s trigger pulled
tears sprang and levitated there
in the clouds of my skull,
and the rhythm of my thoughts
fell away into a thumping
as incessant
as silence.

...tell me it
is not true.
please, tell me,
it cannot be true!

but like a nightmare
that you feel should not have been a nightmare,
one that only you
could so utterly fear,
her words compressed in my mind
and created a brain of its own.

thump, thump,
it said,
thump.
a voice that
apologized for its words,
but in vain

i gazed away,
towards
the street
(that street, home, it seems
as if you still belong to me,
as it always feels when we leave you)
so she would not see me cry.

walls i hoped i’d leave willingly one day
closed into us,
each white streak of paint
inching towards the pulling gravity
that spilled into the space between her words
and my unseen, unheard cries.

(thump, thump, thump,
each word filling itself full like
a decomposing garbage dump),
the trees
wavered in the winter waft,
their branches clambering and
quivering like a heart
that stopped living, but had not yet
passed on.

when i ran up the stairs
i wrote an essay
and a rant,
and a cry and a cry
and i wrote myself a cry,
a sob i had to compose
like a mind thinking itself dry, i did not stop
for anyone or anything
but only for my own mind
to fleetingly die

my window
turned up bare brown branches,
each twig finger kissing the glass pane
as if to comfort, or
to say goodbye.

label me: poem

i read anonymous comments.

it's the truth.



i yearn to know.

who cares. who cares or ever cared about what i feel. about these ramblings that don't matter, that float in & out of space like clouds, or like planes through clouds.




drop a line,
give a cue
who are you

label me: thanks

you thought
there'd always be snow.

you'd always be
lonely,
and thinking.

you'd always
stay awake at night
listening
to the cicada scream.

you'd always write
when the house
was silent,
when the world still
filled with black smog,
silent.


you'd always be writing.
in that house, that
wooden house. "colonial"
they call it.
as if
we all need to remember
that they used to live in houses,
just like us.



there'd always be a coldness
when you "tiptoed" down the
stairs. in the cavity
of the living room

you felt the fireplace
blink. it permeated the air
and made you shiver. the floor
whispered cool prayers to your feet.

your music skirred
from your room,
a susurration of
night, of tonight,
of the long, yellow-highlighter
moon of memory.

outside the snow
shone against the bricks
like skin in a dark room.

and still you thought
it would never melt.

label me: moving, poem

your whole life for some certain breed of people who will immerse you and love you and support you and cause such rage of emotions in you as to make you love pain. i search myself and everyday i think i may never find someone or some people with whom i can have a reciprocal intensity who i can support and be supported by.


maybe they don't exist?

label me: friends, people

and music.

label me: music, song, video

write something that no one will read,
that no one will think was written. upset
that she’s leaving
and that we’re left to fend for ourselves,
claustrophobic
without patience
godless, yet fearful

these are the moments
that try souls, like a battered
body after a long hike,

with only oneself,
nobody you want around
and knowing that this
is what you’re gonna have to live with
for the rest of your life,
for the rest of these months
and weeks
and days and hours and minutes,

sometimes
overcome with emotion,
sometimes overcome
with loss, with the loss
of something physical, tangible
like the folds in a forgotten sofa,
the wrinkles of hands;
and something
mental,



because someone hates you, and they think
you don’t know.
overcome
i write something
so angsty i’d throw up reading it
only for the sake that perhaps
i’d gain some ill-gained sympathy
and that could help me
move on.

i’d never want someone
to ask me what happened

because sometimes
everything happened.

sometimes even the merest loud laugh
rattling from the kitchen
could set your soul off trying.

label me: loneliness, loss, moving, poem, sad

i am an accumulation of missing.

i can miss by request. ask me to miss the apartment on maklis in kfar ganim, where i took my first steps and looked out the windows and saw a city (a view i don't, can't remember), i will; ask me to miss my first house in america, the dinosaur chicken nuggets, the bar stools, the wallpapers that glossed like wet skin from the wall, i will; ask me to miss new york, san diego, palo alto, san jose, neve oz, and i will.

missing places is my forte. madrid, athens, yerushalaim: i miss you all with the fervency of an abandoned ghost, yearning to reach back to its home but trapped haunting its own haunted house.

label me: childhood, cities, miss, travel

i am really supposed to sleep at this moment

but i know that sleep will not come, for a long time

out of fear, of excitement, of nervousness

of this yearning to remember what i once wished i forgot

and thinking about knowing about thinking

makes me think about death

and i think about it

and sometimes it feels like a mini-quake in my rib cage

this thought that one day i will never be.

i feel like that now.

not dead. not not alive.

but not there. not being. not seeing, and feeling.

i remember the summer of moving.

i miss it.

turning 15; being 15; being new to a beautiful world.

label me: fear, high school, miss, moving, sleep, summer

i wanted to save this title for when i will be visiting you.


i couldn't resist.

oh, how i miss you: new york!

those black buildings. the rain's vicious pounding like blood as it surges up to the ears, each angry drop like another long string of muscle in a clenched, bitter fist waiting to pounce. night in the city. being alone in the city. living in the city--

but that's from so long ago.

i've downloaded so many new york city songs today.

so many songs about you, new york. and yet you've let the bay dig me a hole--a three-week-wide hole, a yawning gape deep enough to make me choke on lifetimes of air--so black and so permanent that i will never be able to wash the ennui from my skin.

now at least i'll have both hands on the wheels, like teeth punching through the ear of a corn.




at times when the at&t net coverage falters and i have nothing to do, i find myself reading old word documents. and i found a poem i wrote that i forgot about.

how i miss being able to write poems.

catchtwentytwo
1
i’ve been wondering
how to start this poem
for a while now.

i knew a capital i would be too vague. or may
be too specific.

my limbs are tired. worn-out.
i feel like a bag of arms, and legs,
and fingers and toes,
and tired old eyes. i never thought
the word catch-22 could be applied
to life—
especially to my
life.

but now I know.

2
it’s funny.
truth is cliché. “be careful of what you wish for”

i went to manhattan.

my mistake: dark, quixotic night, skies
that fall on tall, metal buildings like rain,
human beings like puzzle pieces, fit together, and
the sweet salt smell of coal-hot nuts in
aluminum, yellow cabs and rainy streets:

yes. november—i fell in love.

3
don’t look up, and don’t look down,
is how the song goes. mother came to me
and asked me: up or down?

sometimes, i told her, it’s better to keep straight.
i have a world waiting for me here: friends,
word documents. but she has worked. worked hard.

up or down? east or west?
and, you know. i was in love.

4
today the skies were gloomy blue.
the sun was muck yellow.
the sunset was curly, muddy,
like my footprint in the sand.

this is why it’s a catch 22, a cruel
circle: it’s either past, present, future.
and i am stuck deciding.

5
you can say that a catch 22 is a triangle
but i have to disagree.

you can say:
one vertex is where i am right now
and the two others are interchangeable,
one decapitation, another cyanide, and i
only have to choose.

but i think that a catch 22 comes in six round numbers:
which ones, i don’t know.
i am only on number 4.

6
the light in my room is yellow.
jazz music.

i feel stupid. but i know
that this is as profound as it will, can go;
that there is misery, and implausible skepticism here
(about my poem, about my life)

and that the light at the end
is only another tunnel

but at the end of the day the world is just a matter
of atoms—of metal, of plastic, of skin,
and one home or another doesn’t count.
one me or another doesn’t count.
one poem. one ending or another.

label me: manhattan, miss, ny, poem

it has been a beautiful two-year experience.



i guess moving has become more of a ritual for me now. i am not in disbelief; i am not a child ripped out of its mother’s womb. more like a child whose head has been pulled gradually over a seven-month period out of the opening in his mother’s body at an increasing rate, until he knows the world and the world knows him, until he’s ripped out, however gently.

this almost feels natural, moving: this room is home, or at least a home, already.



i miss nothing, almost. i miss you, my friends; i miss the city. i have thoughts of missing my house, but only surface thoughts, superficial. i don’t miss middle neck road, and i don’t miss the LIE or the LIRR. i don’t miss walking down the street wrapped up in utter blackness all alone towards home; i don’t miss the best teachers i’ve ever had; i don’t miss the library (okay, i might, because the dvd section here stinks); i don’t miss memorial field, grace avenue or allenwood; i don’t miss fireflies, mosquitoes, cicada; i don’t miss being able to see the empire state building’s jutting rib of an antenna poking out from behind a field of houses from baker; i don’t miss walking ginger up and down the same corner so many times, each one so different than the others (the time i stole a newsday to pick up ginger’s shit; the time she hid in the bushes and i searched for five minutes all panicked); i don’t miss bagel hut, amal, sushi palace, starbucks; i don’t miss the trips to new jersey; i don’t miss the snow; i don’t miss missing; i don’t miss the u.s. open, watching the sun set from behind the profile of epic structures; i don’t miss studying on the swing; i don’t miss the wooden den; i don’t miss the stars, the tall trees, kings point, biking to the point, cheese bagels, extra-large ice coffee after fours hours of sleep, rotten apples in my backpack, writing on the drama room whiteboard, screwing nails, eating caviar from 108th street, dripping rainstorm rain, tanned skins after winter break, the way a wall of heat packs into you as you step into those doors and blows you backwards and the day just seems to open up like a (very warm) flower, pajamas to school, free movie tuesdays, metacognition, ap world history exam, deli on the green, cuttinggreatneck.blogspot.com, dreaming about israel and wanting to move there, listening to the last summer, philly washington d.c. or boston, guide post, yctiwy mattress crucible, coming home and puking all over the office floor because you’re so sick and tired of working, coming home and puking all over the living room floor because of a virus, swine flu, morning swim, brittle rain, holocaust books, listening to indie music at night, athens 2008, pretending to care about the 2008 elections just so people would know me, looking out and look it’s snowing, snow days, cousins coming to visit, tuesday evening journalism, ordering a whole pizza pie and feeding journalism, going with the stream, masterswarm, thinking at first that i missed san diego.




i miss the idea of them. i wish i could relive them quickly so i would know what i did and where, just like everything and everywhere in life. remembering unremembered memories. i wish i would’ve known two years ago where i am today so that i could have understood it more. who i am today.

label me: great neck, memory, miss, moving

funny, how we miss missing. how we yearn for those moments when we felt so miserably in need of something, how we yearn for yearning beyond yearning. how we miss being alone in the darkness. we miss reminiscing, remembering old, patched-up visions of an alternate future and a better past.

label me: manhattan, miss, song

the house is freshly naked, just as when we entered it. it's a reawakening of sorts, or a degeneration; like a man reduced to his birth, young, innocent.

or perhaps that is how i feel about how i used to be then.

i remember my first visit clearly: green foliage so profusely lathering the yard. wooden walls, red, peeling walls.

je lamais.




and our first week here. the birth; the beginning. sleeping in this room, in the one i'm currently writing, the "office", mattress spread on the floor, the darkness seeping in with the wind. i remember sitting in the den, watching some movie; that larger-than-life room like a saga of its own beauty, feeling more naked than any other place. the silence boomed through the wood.

and now each room is more naked the next, again, memories of the beginning more lucid than this rekindled history.



as we came, so we leave.

label me: home, moving

O, to be borne back ceaselessly into the past!

Morning Again.

nothing to have,
nothing to love,
nothing to think,
nothing to buy,
nothing to sell,
nothing to say,
nothing to hear.

only the dawn to feel
like a disease breaking out across your skin
in thick yellow webs.

Streetlights:
from my window like an ember in a field of ash,
its glow smoothed into a distant tip,
a peak, a white flash painted yellow.

how i miss
the highway ones
with bowed heads
in rows and rows
and the head against the window
how i miss
the trembling growls
that whimpered you into sleep.
sometimes the light
golden like a sun
would wake you.

this was years ago.
morning, again.

today
i fell back into the empty black womb of life.

if i try to find you
in the inner complexes of my mind
i will be lost.

if i try to search you,
each rising tide will only erase us
more, and mor, and mo, and m, and

each black night
will only fill our souls
to the brim.

like
a mug.

womb.

inside
i will not remember you.
i will not find you, i will not search you.

i will not need to.

i will forget you.

in the darkness,
putrid,
calmly cavernous,
i will have my fingers to search for,
and my breath
and my toes.

even there
i can be lost.
but only in the darkness.

not trapped
but saved
from searching
for you,

whoever you are.

thank you
for letting me forget .

It's written in the books, in the songs, in the maps of stars/
What everyone is looking for, happiness, hoping/
And destiny, its color dark, deep inside/
Don't cry, little sister--it's not simple, you understand.

there's too much truth.



this song presents to me a divergent reality—of me, years ago, in israel, still 16 years old, still an average israeli male. it peels all of the layers that the united states makes you wear and rips them open to where that red-hot burning israeli core of mine yearns to return to normalcy, to a stationary life back home, where my family is, where my family’s friends are.



“return,
return.”

to my old home, in those rotten streets.

where i’m—new. in an old way. where i’ve lived my entire life. where i’m not different, or foreign, or clever. where i am what everyone else is.

such an impossible dream.

and no, it’s not as if i’m needing to be normal, to be average, to fit in—because my version of fitting in is different than that of israelis. i want to fit in there. i want to live there as a normal person.



i want to be transported back in time, to start in the late 80s, when the night was black and they sat on the roofs of apartment buildings and watched a city fall into the chasm of comforting home.

i don’t know what sprang this deeply-wound nostalgia in me. i don’t even know if it’s completely nostalgia—i guess, it’s more of a craving for a different reality.


an impossible reality.

listening to israeli songs.

sometimes i wish that i'd never have left.

again in one of those moods, longing for israel, reminiscing, engulfed by music, wanting to know what type of person i would have been had we stayed.

would i have listened to this music? stayed up hours trying to listen to it? to remember it? to remember the roughly pouring words that fit into one another like wooden blocks. to remember: the night, blacker than black, the white plastic chairs on the balcony, the balcony, the 90s, crumbling apartment structures immersed in age spots.

i know where i’m doinga my semester abroad.

label me: israel, melancholy, memory, miss, music, song

i’ve realized that i need more human connection.

perhaps it’s the frank sinatra single that has just rolled, or the fact that i’ve been hosting second cousins whom i’ve never met and yet truly enjoy spending time with. perhaps it’s thinking about this new world, attempting to take into mind every single kind thing that anyone has ever said to me (only genuine ones) and knowing that nothing could be genuine if it’s not part of a connection.

and missing that.




i need someone to swallow up the expanse of feelings inside me, to cause it and understand it. i need many people like this. i need to live in a community of people like this.

i wish i could go to the army, without the war. because—that’s what i think can make me feel belonged.




and it’s night. my favorite time.

great neck night.



i’ve never experienced anything like it. maybe it’s the black vastness of vibrating leaves, how each loose dark speck hangs over us and webs with all the others into a curtain of night. or it’s the wall of silence that separates the island from the city. or the peninsula, draped in the long island sound that keeps it so hushed.

fade into you mazzy star.



i remember driving around in the mountains in the desert somewhere, east of san diego, perhaps driving back from death valley or utah or big bear. a long black valley expands forward as you drive on the edges of its bulky red mountain borders, the road like some kind of ribbon that seems to slide into the mountain valley and the car just an infinitesimal speck riding on it.

it was sunset and the wavering maroon shadows of the sky pooled across the valley. we were alone on the road, the solitary witnesses of the purple dying fizzle of the sun. sometimes a car curved out into the road ahead of us from beyond a mountain; white orbs danced from behind us once in a while.

i love the desert, the mountains, the valleys for that reason. the pine trees glowed like embers. streaks of orange light corralled along the cliffs and died down into a blue obscurity.



and fade into you comes up on my zune.

--how can i say it? listen to the song for a moment: torched strings that peel away in the rural night, when only the cowboys hear 'em--the way they seem to fade infinitely away into the melody, into the clattering bells and into the hounding voice, the one that seems so, so resolved, so resigned, and yet it persists, it sings, it--it reverberates and echoes.

it's beautiful.

and the combination of me in the car, from this polarized window, all alone with the music looking out into the dying rays of the sun in this lonesome, empty green valley, with the haunting solitariness of this song...



---

i remember this because my zune broke apart very recently and i was just reminded of it after the song came up on itunes. and this memory has remained with me for no reason at all, one of those insignificant details of life that accidentally leaves a mark.

label me: california, desert, loneliness, memory, miss, nature, song

when old songs revisit me, so do old feelings, feelings that rise up in me and crash inside like a great big blue wave.



i am writing this at 12 am on saturday, june 13, 2010; classical gas by vannessa-mae is on itunes; i’m about to read the nytimes mag and atlas shrugged; on a word document because my internet’s down, i have no plans to revive it till i wake up.

i wait incessantly for the right darkness to settle into this room.

i already miss the winter. my first real snowy winter. i miss waking up in the night and letting the raw cold fill up the room, filtered by this window and kept away at arm's length by these walls. i miss the piano songs that ring in the ice. the way the blackness seemed to swallow one small yellow streetlight that blinked in the distance from my window like a star and made me miss summer.

i am isolated and insulated all at once. maybe this is why the words sound so similar?

label me: miss, snow, winter

these green trees greenest than green pour around my house like an insulating blanket. they're one solid dark green color that packs into this window like a thick liquid grime.




---



an old french song comes up on my itunes.

i miss a world i forget. i miss being five, traveling through europe with my family, those auburn stone-laden alleys, the blue july noons, so clear and distinctly airy, light.



i miss what i would never be able to do and be and have again. i miss those moments that seemed to wash away from me like water. i miss old friends, old houses, old lives; and the new ones that never came to be.

label me: miss, sad