l(one)ly,:

What remains in the background.

aloe and bike marks

broken string

clarifying verb

condom

curls

dust of suppertime

eastern parkway

echo’d gender in your back pocket

falsified accent

glass harp and your bladder

happenstance

interesting

jest of your dialect

knife fight

lesson plan from ghost’s milk

missed messages

no

old

piece of callus

questionable liar

railroad tracks rubble of voice

red dress

rest stop on the way toward your country

some blood

some coffee

that hash I almost smoked before we poem’d

two bends and a fold

u  u   u

vondelpark

wonder what would occur if you claimed me now

x x x x

your tooth

zipper lungs and zipper grunt and the day you stopped calling me ________ .

 

 

 

what happens to you.

Dear Kazim,

As you walk through this day as though it were an infinite hallway gathering wisdom from its length, I travel beneath the plaster of earth. Underground, I contemplate how hungry I am for home. An old man once asked me: where is the place I call home? 

In that moment, I was sitting with my knees together, surrounded by other writers in a classroom with no windows. Everyone else’s answers could have been found on a map. I could not help to say: My body. My body is my home. 

But even as I spoke this, I knew it not to be true. I was still searching for my coordinates. My own body’s map was water-logged and torn. It was faded and almost unrecognizable as a means for being found or locating an elsewhere. However, I spoke this as my answer because it was my hope to feel home in this construction site.

Kazim, I am moving again. Change of address; new route; another attempt at peace. This residence I leave now is cracked like sharp confetti hitting  me into bruises and tears. I may need to lock all these boxes and things up into a rented square with no windows as I roam. I need to air out this body until I understand it as whole.

The moon last night pushed through a curtain of clouds and called out to me. REMAIN!

I breathed in its romantic shadows and fierce eye contact. This lover changes shapes each night, but it never tells me to go away. The moon flashes me through this darkness as I begin my walk toward elsewhere.

Kazim, you wrote: the day is a hallway I am/ walking through

I respond: this Brooklyn is a fist challenging / my breath control 

 

talk about the time you lost track of yourself

There were only two ways to go and you chose the other. When words were slung, you loaded up with bullets instead of elipses. You were always afraid of pauses. All those times all those times you followed the sun and you never lathered and you never lathered. You trusted ultraviolet rays over medicine over sensitivity to light over cancer. You blamed the boy you blamed your body you blamed genetics you blamed misdirected diagnoses. It was that left turn. It was that fall in Brooklyn. It was that song that stopped you from kissing her. It was kind of like a dance move when ankles twisted into earth and ground bullied your bones and and and it was what spoiled in your lungs. And that time you breathed in someone else or they breathed you in and basement and fifth level garage and Denver and global warming and gluten and and and just find that slip of paper in pocket because those directions will lead you somewhere. You got your nose involved. You used your breasts. You stole soot, stuck it to tongue and licked your life away almost. You thought you were remaining but you were losing you were fading you were exiting the existence of your self.

a lover called moon

On a night where lost is everywhere, you look up and there is a face without judgement without declaratives or requests. A face without gender. It is no more remorseful than proud. It exists without fear of heights because it is so far up no yoga practice could stretch limbs enough to reach it. Accept this. It’s not about reach, but realization. You are overwhelmed on this night and last night and tomorrow night but in this moment you gather insight from this nightlight. Your fears hide inside imaginary pockets. You are monogamous with this moon; there is no one else that matters. No where you need to be and there is nothing you need to say. Put your pen and notebook away. You will remember how you feel in this moment because it will dig its satellite into your scars. Each one of them. Don’t make a wish; this is not about that. If you must if you must pray, use your body as a gesture of psalms. People pass you during this moment and you will want to tell them to look up too but they will notice when they’re ready. For now, it is you. And isn’t this romantic. And isn’t this the lover you have been searching for: far enough as to not smother away your senses and silences; gender neutral (yes, because your queerness is suddenly blurring into something that begs for shapes such as these that cannot be marked into a category). How beautiful how beautiful but this is not not about beauty. When you must part because the cold air tangles with your breaths so you must go inside and this moon lover will not follow you in like the others, you say goodbye. Do not weep in anticipation of missing it. The moon still exists even if you no longer notice it. When you are ready or warm, go back outside to sing it goodnight. Or remain there in its silent glow and wonder what it’s like to be so high.

punch enough holes in body to allow words to seep out like language’d sap

To find out what was really there, look in the background. People will always smile for photographs but teeth are just a costume covering the cavities and undetected craters of sickness.

How to walk away from documentation when words never run out of film or flash and isn’t this just hypocrisy?

Go a day without telling it. Go a day without questioning every moment and just relax inside an image. A feeling. A sense.

I actually don’t need you to tell me you are sick. I can feel it each time you lean your hips into me. You don’t have to announce your sighs. I’ve turned you up like a radio; go ahead, static.

Is there a world which exists off this grid of electric wiring and photographic bragging?

I’ve turn this body into a machine. Aren’t all bodies machines. With coils and metal and marks and breaking and instructional manuals.

Place suffix firmly against…against….against anything in need of a derivative.

Send me a map. Go on. Cut it up like Burroughs did. Hand it back to me and calculate when my lost will arrive. Then wait for me to appear.

sometimes a tupperware container can double as a missing person’s report

I’ve got a lacrymatory made from terra-cotta, but notice the one made of glass too. This one is pear-shaped without the skin or stem. And I am counting my tear drops and have run out of numbers. I compare its salt to what licks off my tongue. With each drop, I drop it in. A tomb/ a vessel/ a suitcase for the well-traveled sad.

I knew [her] from that time we took a walk in Prospect Park. I knew [her] from knowing someone else. We got lost against the backdrop of green, barbecue smoke, frisbees and brown. At night, [she] recorded [her] voice on the radio and afterwards, we got high, pressed bodies against buildings and savored the art of blind kissing.

*

I asked [her] how queer [she] really was and [she] took out all [her] notebooks.
“Read these. From back to front. Because I never really started at the beginning. It really begins at the end.”

*

[She] came to the dungeon once. Just watched. Walked off a few times, so there could have been some simulation. We talked a lot about Diane diPrima as queers got bound, punched, cut, fucked, and pierced. I could feel [her] weave in and out of our conversation like a dolphin dipping its head out of water. To me….to what was goin’ on in the corner…back to me…back to elsewhere.

*

I was only trying to remove the lacerations of memory. [She] said that to me, as our bodies practiced silence, nude and tethered by scars and hooks.

*

Here’s a good one: It was August and the rain came fast, toppling over us. We had been moving slowly from block to block. [Her] hand gripped mine and there was so much heat, I felt like we were melting and burning and sticking to each other. We forced our wet bodies into the wine shop on the corner. I’d like to drink Spain tonight, [she] said. We drank Chile too.

*

Well, I knew [her] from poetry. Read [her] and watched [her] several times on various stages I got on too. Baked [her] a crumble once. We made out on two benches. Once, with coffee between [her] palms and hot water with lemon and honey in mine, [she] asked me to count [her] teeth.

*

Oh, we knew each other before the alteration of language. Before [she] lost [her] mind. It’s somewhere in the Pacific, [she] said. We used to count sea glass, hide it in the excess of our sweaters or pockets. I always searched for green. [She] felt giddy each time there was blue or the clear with bits of writing still on it.

*
(found)

I want to visit a place where no ghosts exist and I don’t exist but what does exist is salt. Is sea. Is oak. Is dandelion. Is hylomorphism. Is hopscotch. Is soil. Is rust. Is igneous. Is carbon. Is green. Is blue. Is protists. Is music made from the instrumentation of footsteps. Is sap. Is harvest. Is orange. Is red. Is red. Is movements. Is nothing, but…nothing, but…everything.

oh bridge, oh breadcrumbs, oh night of graffiti’d silence!

I am looking down a lot.
I am looking down for the crumbs to lead me home. Lead me into the kind of love that shocks my poems and lowest rib. Lead me toward employment. Lead me closer to where the moon naps during the day.

There was a walk.
There was a walk across Williamsburg bridge where graffiti lit our steps and to look up was to read the stories of every climber, every dreamer, every escape artist and mother and poet and traveler.

I thought about jumping.
Does everyone think about jumping and wolves and the rising cost of stars in the sky when height is involved? When there are cables and wires and metal everywhere and trains slide by right below and how wonderful to jump on top of one and see how far it gets me/us….

how much longer will we be able to afford these nights?

[now]
there are lists written on my forearm and they contain the code to my cerebellum.
these words include the password to that memory from five years ago when I traveled up that roller coaster called parking garage and gave away my gave away my

[later]
a movement.
don’t call it a dance.
call it a bridge between others
call it a poem through limb’s language(s)
call it making love on stage
call it the intricacy of tangles and hitchhiked bodies
call it:
an end.