some thoughts on magic and measurements.

…..first Sunday of new year and toes begin to weep away frozen hangnails

 

I traveled under

the brooklyn queens

expressway

over black and grey

snow. Got lost inside

a taxi cab just for you

to read my skin again.

Yesterday, this face was called unpretty. What is it about measurements and masculinity that causes others to feel so threatened or disrobed.

After the romantic comedy ordered for free on computer screen, she removed shirt and began to cut her hair. Each slice was deliberate. Hair was pressed into last plastic bag meant for sandwiches not split ends. This pile of locks is for the woman who lives underground and all around me. When others visit her, they bring rocks. I give her my hair.

After three decades of back-and-forth addiction, I may have settled on this last one. Call it magic or movement. Cannot be purchased from neighbor who cooks it in his kitchen. Or bodega window where if you only want one and not the whole pack, that can be arranged. Or from lover who stores it in jars meant for fireflies or love notes. This drug is less visible and cannot be hidden in pockets or up nose. Last night, when I chased it all across Brooklyn, I fell inside winter potholes, hidden by frozen water. Most drugs can be purchased; this one needs to be found.

We can talk about our gender all day, but when I think about your mouth, I am reminded of the canoe I clung to years ago. You make me think of rivers and walls removed. You make me think of yellow and that photograph of costa rican sunset that hired a muralist to create such an exquisite marriage of red and orange. You make me think of oxygen and the ways in which you have trained yours to communicate with the earth to wrap itself around oceans and caves. You make me think of the labels sewed into the roots of my skin and the sensation of digging these restrictions up and out of my body.

Last week, this body was called gaunt. What is it about binding my body into a carefully unedited story that causes others to fear starvation.

Here is [some] modern love. This has everything to do with the love affair I find myself in with my osteoblasts. And the night I thought about Rebel’s question of rebirth through orgasm. So, I found my nude while rain wrung out its sad against my windows. And I did not think about addiction to magic and melting measurements. Instead, I gained entrance to the parts of me I am strange to. It is too soon to call it rebirth; maybe just a new devotion to the complication and deeply erotic overwhelm of my self.

reading palms.

Some palms are like walls. Too spackled and hidden to read. But when she let me grab her left and right and sit it in mine, I could have read for hours. She held novels within each crease. I traced each finger as though I had never seen one before; hers could have lead me to believe in anything.

She told me mine were artist hands. You’ve crossed borders on your knuckles, haven’t you? she said. I called her fingers pianos. I forgot to ask if she played any instruments. Maybe because I already know.

Around us, poetry. Occasionally, we would stop to listen. But I would not let go of her hand. I could not call her beautiful because that word describes days or meals. It is used everyday on too many things. She is more like a mountain. Difficult. High. A rubble of lives. Impossible to leave behind.

I pressed my fingers into her back. Rubbed at her energy. Yellow. Dim. Glow-in-the-dark.

I asked her to hold her gaze into my left eye for two minutes. I needed time to untwist the tether of her mind. 52 seconds, I taste salt. One minute 7 seconds, she drips fourteen yesterdays. One minute seventeen seconds, I see why she flinched when I touched her chest. One minute thirty one seconds and I feel what she feels. One minute forty nine seconds and I see green and owls and can taste the elephant in her.

Two minutes and I ask her what that led her to see or feel.

She smiles and I want to be homeless. She smiles and I want to be homeless so that I can beg her for the shelter that lives inside her smile.

I can’t…I can’t speak, she said.

Her face is contagious. I tell her to pause.

A poet walks on stage and she tells me that he is her friend. We watch and my knee touches hers and her shoulder leans against my forearm and all this touching should never have to end. Should never have to be named.

After our palms become instruments to honor the poems left on stage, she turns to me. I let her move my hair, which is far longer than hers but more masculine.

She whispers: Cement. I felt and saw cement.

I laugh because this is what I do. I touch people. I heal. I read. But I’ve never heard this before. I want her to clarify, but I also just want to leave that word alone.

It is getting noisier, but our pitch remains the same. We are now reading each other’s lips. Hers are small and she bites down on the bottom as though she is reeling it in like something she has just caught. Her teeth are crooked and charming. I whisper into her left ear a paragraph from Fear and Loathing. I ask her what she has memorized. When she leans in and presses her breath up against my hair and neck, she softly slurs: my name.

When midnight arrives, the chairs are put away and the lights tell us it is time to go home. I ask her to drink tequila with me because earlier she called this the liquid that causes her self to be left behind. We walk across the street and drink it on ice with sour mix. We both leave our straws behind as I hand her my passport and go page by page, reading out each stamp. She listens, creating poems in her head that I’m sure will be read on tomorrow’s stage. I want to kiss her but I am indelicate with my mouth and instead I press my chest to hers and we embrace. Tomorrow, her palms will be hungover and I will wonder about the three identities I located inside her. I will try to place the name of the forest her smell reminds me of while finding the remains of her salt still swimming in my skin.

on this day, a Rebel was born.

for R.
Trees fall out of you. And the earth wraps its oceans and fossils around your questioning gaze. There is a carving of howl. It sounds of violins and plucked stares. That shade of purple in sky is intonation of the academic lust looking for its disrobe. Red is all around you. In the heat of sun’s early morning music. And the one in Brooklyn who calls you muse. The threads of wool wrapping forearms. The fire attended to with stoker and teeth. You’ve biked over state lines just to search for the perfect book or pint of poetry. Still, you gulp shots of evening as though they’ve been fermenting just for you. And they have.

emergence of elevated fire fighter

for M.M.

you sleep with mathematics beneath pillow 

three layers of sacred geometrical fire

and

bark from pup

and  

strings on forearm–

soft wine ferments down throat

as

the tangle of your muscular twists like 

indian ricegrass, red baneberry, yarrow

 

comprehend

S/he smiles and I can comprehend that there is archive in this. Remember this remember when oh yes. Here is the thing: our bodies are not necessarily meant to produce over-population. Sometimes ribs can be marinated and pressed against placards protecting the ashes of buildings and nights can be so thick with dust that moons are removed from skies. Yes, there is more than one blue cloud opera. S/he is more than a poet with scar and west coast afflictions. S/he is historical. S/he is bound and bred into grilled nests. S/he is New York Times summarized chronicle of events. S/he understands the gourmet of anise. S/he touches wrists with the precipice of deep translation.  S/he is pianist and skin rhythmically tuned into slants and slices. Overlap. Overindulge. Drink in the drunkness of evening. When hours obscure and poetics summon a congregation of newly translated atheism  look toward the heap of recycled Brooklyn awaiting a crash of gendered aesthetics.