Whisper (is it all gone?)

I love like I...

This is real, you Paris lovers...

This is the test and, in fact, nothing could color my energy...

Wait, scroll down,
I found a typo in my other brain
"and those who imitate convention...conversation...?
live in the parentheses,"
that's not right
(I just nervous laughed)
rather,
"My heart is lined with libraries,
or the rows of books they contain,"
I suppose that's closer...
is it (im)possible that all of it is gone?

I am worried that
I will be boiled down to a whisper
if the meaning is not recovered,
but the most useless helpline 
is the one most tightly wound,
and I cannot just tweet
my personal experience, can I?

From his lips effortlessly dropped,
"Just don't make my heart hurt,"
but he only called on the screen of a weekend,
and what is more dedicated than a text?
Perhaps the real life occurrence of one. 

I can only say with certainty, "life is random."

Unintelligble

She slipped her left arm
behind her back,
legs splayed in a prison push up,
and rather than collapsing,
breathed into the strength of her body and pushed,
the body that breathes as one
with the trees, with the animals,
the body bound to the earth
by forces
that cannot be reckoned with
no matter how often she flies
in her dreams,
released from the fear
of having chosen wrongly.

Having lived for so long
in a collective rush of energy, intimacy, intensity, fatigue,
the circles of repetition to and from, 

the over-warm subway
filled with the impatient clucking and crowing
of hens and cocks
jammed in a too-small space,
the smell of being lodged in the small of someone's back...

Well, it's a wonder to wake up
under a cream chenille bedspread
to the silence of soft rain
interrupted only
by a single rush of a nearby car,
a soon-to-be-quieted crying baby, 

two cats galavanting
to the familiar pitter patter
that is not often repeated
in the warmth of outdoor corridors
where an earthquake
is more likely
than a thunderstorm.

She rests and relishes
the expansion of her space and 
the lackadaisical intentionality of 

going about one's day in no rush at all,
for where does a person really need to be 
so quickly that it's worth the risk of ignoring?

It would seem
that to be a tree
is the same
as acknowledging
the inherent beauty
in a living being
that sings with energy,
even if the language is unintelligible to our ears
that really hear so very little.

Words on Words on Words

I walked past a shop basement 

barricaded by the NYPD,

where 3 policemen 

and their singular suspect shot one another

in the supposed safety of the West Village,

just around the corner from my first home

on Bleecker and Christopher streets. 

Descending into madness, 

I stand in the swirling remnants

of whispered nothings that seem so very much.

"I'm not thinking,"

and overhead an automated man asking the train 

to "stand up for what's right," 

while the pregnant

woman is kept standing,

hoping today of all days

in the sea of clammy humanity 

someone might cut her a break.

"I'm gonna let it shine,"

and someone threatened to throw

him off the train as another man

talked around and over - 

"move over, move over,

I know you can hear me" -

a young blond man

whose headphones 

and consequent deafness

were apparently très displeasing.

"oh my god, a lot" and 

"when you gonna take it off,"

and a plea, "let me out," 

an angry admonition to "hold on tight,"

I like to be immersed in words on words on words,

"you don't know why, don't say you don't know why,

of course you know why, I cried, and you didn't even care"

circles and circles and circles,

there's nothing like not taking a cab

and sitting in a puddle of human exclamations,

excretions, pore numbing dirt, and intense temperaments

Switch to the 6 to discover the next round

of stuck, not-even-close to whispers

that will be lost to the stifled air.

Lovely...indeed, a good thing

When I focus on delighting an audience

it becomes easy to be the girl

tucked around the corner

from a once-upon-a-time market

outside the building

where she sat under a raining roof

and slowly watched her perception

of herself come apart at the seams.

Locked in an automated message,

naked in the middle of an

“I will be back…”

I discover to my dismay that

I cannot retrace my steps

to collect the gumdrop trail

that would lead me back to comfort

and as dusk falls
I also come to understand that

there are no more light bulbs

in the countryside and,

consequently,

as it is with most things,

no way back

and no obvious way forward,

and so I stand

in the midst of a ‘hmmmm’

and decide I must collect

the scattered garments

blown about by chance

so that I might piece them together

anew to discover the truth

and forego the conclusion.

“You’re no longer wanting the pieces of you

that have been folded into someone else,”

she mentioned from a bathtub,

and the truth of the matter was,

she was right.

I am no longer confused

by the ever-changing puzzle

that fakes me out

with a semblance of completion.

If only once,

as we wait to wish all a good night,

I kind of look at my fingertips

and am delightfully flabbergasted

to discover I am lovely, a good thing.

lol. oh gosh.

Penser

I think at first the silence will scare me

into wallowing in the has-beens

and yearning for wine on the rooftop

that flirts with the water

and poses a fantasy in a would-be train car

with battered curtains

where once Mayhem had brunch next to me

and a tiny turtle peed in a cardboard box,

(seemed rather hilarious

after 4 bloody marys).

I think at first the silence will scare me

into yearning for the 1 AM

ambulance sirens blipping

(they rock me to sleep)

to create a space up first avenue --

perhaps I will be taken aback

by the smell of grass

and the knowledge of warmth

that isn’t tainted by swirls of snow

and is kept at bay with a sweater

(how ridiculous to yearn for a siren).

And I think I will have to remember

that small talk doesn’t have to have an agenda

(it can be meant in total kindness)

and I think I might not miss, but will always worry

about the women wailing in the subway,

the one I try to help by keeping Kind bars in my purse

and the one arrested on the platform

barred from help by the man in a blue uniform

bearing the initials NYPD.

I think I will miss the 22-year-old

who moved to the West Village

in pursuit of a particular kind of life

that she had been told looked nice,

but so sadly discovered didn’t fit,

and I will miss this girl

who desperately loved

and still clings occasionally,

this woman who came of age

in the city that never sleeps,

rocked by sirens

and drunken screams.

I am searching for footholds

in a circle of niceties,

jagged lines of a cat scratch

connecting the dots,

I stand at 1 AM

in the living room that never

quite felt mine,

staring out paned glass doors

up first avenue

and I become a moving taxi

and if I look a certain way

I can move forever 

up that singular avenue

that becomes and stays

a ribbon of abyss…

or I can sleep

and dream of a town

that smells like grass

and enfolds me in the silence

filled with the noise of my future.

and i miss him

walk slowly backward

so as not to alert the ghosts

to your presence,

because they didn’t expect to see you

again, so soon really,

they thought you were long gone,

embraced by the future

inevitably created by

the unwitting passing of time

23,36,45,49,60

he stands safely ensconced

with the version of me

that liked eating bagels 

on a Saturday morning,

doing dishes and listening to "Stairway to Heaven" again --

they don’t notice me and don’t know

that I know that this isn’t their future

1,2,5,16,18

and I desperately miss the man who came into the kitchen

and usually didn’t have a bowl of chicken noodle soup

because he was eating with or had eaten with Ed

and laughed with delight at the slightest provocation

because he knew we loved him so very much

and we thought the forever-future contained his smile

and that he would of course be there to watch us get married

and he would know our others and

and he would know our children

and it never occurred to us that he wouldn’t be there

and I watch him sit at the old white island counter

with a sixteen-year-old who can’t see beyond

the importance of being cast in a high school play

and he massages her shoulders and fills her with love

and I wish I could tell her

that she should sit there 10 minutes longer

because the future is a fickle thing

27,18,15,5,2,6

and I will never forget

the little girl

who paced and paced and paced,

wearing a groove into the floor

in front of the wall that was a mirror,

two of her grieving and muttering

because he wasn’t coming back --

she sits in the back of a car

in her favorite dress

and sings "Eagle’s Wings"

and I watch her and am glad to know

that she knows, at age 6,

what it is to love and be loved

26,23,16,6

and it’s so very, very easy to sit in the past,

to pretend to be still and walk backward

slowly so as not to alert the ghosts

to your present.

9PM/midnight hotel room

i nestled into the niche,

tried to fit,

said things like ‘queer futurity’

and hoped the body in and out of time

made sense in some capacity 

again again again

my once and future project

saying the words but

fishing, wanting, waiting, repeating,

wishing the niche was a little more grooved

it felt like the land that is and isn’t,

the warmth and wet and quiet 

of a 9PM/midnight hotel room, 

alone thinking drowning and breathing

and thinking and breathing stilly,

until change sunk in languidly and 

suddenly and

it’s one thing to look at a future,

another thing entirely to grasp it’s reality,

like gazing into a mirror and accepting

that perhaps there will always be a scar on your neck

and you should be grateful it is there 

because it is 

the study of bodies

women and pregnancy, 

the queer futures that would not be

because i couldn’t breathe.

i yearn for the emptiness. 

i am the desire to be and do 

to think and feel and study 

and mother and want and love 

and know and learn and know and learn 

and feel and study and.

how does every day become

a day-to-day and also the fantastic –

a fairytale, an almost, a could-be.

he never said a word,

honestly i think he didn’t notice.

he loved me for me.