cutting great neck

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

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.