12/25

Last night I found you and me on a beach somewhere where the water lapped up on the sand like slopping mouthfuls of garbled words. waves fell and rose eastward like men kneeling in prayer. The meeting was peaceful and silent and the night sky was bright low in the distance as the horizon pushed daylight upward into sight. I hoped that lightning might strike and strike and the sand would turn to glass.

When I woke the memory was vague but the sensation of being near you clung to me. The feeling lingered, the feeling that nothing existed outside of the two feet of space we kept between our bodies.

Then today I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike and every crooked tree that sat against the rapidly darkening day was an angry tangle of spines. The sky was orange and the bark was black and the landscape laughed at such unrealistic hues.

Discontent

There is a deserted town
with doors swinging,
willed by phantom winds and
the translucent fingertips of
tourist-ghosts.
No one is here in the cold
months, only the in-and-out
of a freezing tide.
She needs
a change of scenery,
and at least
twenty more degrees.

India! Or: Dear Roommate, Across the Ocean

There you are across the ocean shopping for saris and I imagine what it must be like to go back to a place with which you are so related but from which you are so estranged.

The sun is on your skin and it is warm and if the air of our neighborhood and that of your current location were to collide it would smell like cheesesteaks and curry and there would be a whirlwind tornado of dull winter greys and brilliant dyes of purple and orange.

Something important would merge and sitars and bucket drums would ring like weird bombs in the freeze and balm of a crashing afternoon.

Thermostat

Last night I managed to sleep with ice cubes in my head and I was sprawled out in suspended animation somewhere warm and the kick and hum of the heat vent was a noisy breeze that ran itself awkwardly through my hair and across my shoulders. The years all fill to the brim and then spill into each other and there’s no way to separate them once they mix and so I’m six and I’m in the womb and I’m nineteen wrapped up in farm animal sheets having my first dream that I can remember. My house has turned into the inside of a clock and I am climbing through gears hoping that I won’t fall through and get my ribs crushed into a million tiny bone needles. It’s six in the morning and the ice cubes have gone and now it’s just a million pounds of water vapor trying to leave my head and the light creeps in through the window and people start chatting outside and I am thrust into another day and all I can smell off myself is stale lemons and limes.

The Jazz Man

I found my old USB drive recently and it is chock full of ancient microsoft word artifacts such as this one. Enjoy very much, please.

He pounds on the
protruding belly
as if to wake a beast
from an ancient slumber.
He plucks at the strings,
vibrating sinews
belching guttural lows
number after number

After the Flood

Last week, the rains left
mangled umbrellas in

pieces all over the neighborhood.
I watched them decay like roadkill

over the past three days.
The taut black material eventually

blows away, and only the crooked,
spidering metal of umbrella skeleton

remains. But they do not decay, really
they disappear. Tattered city tumbleweeds

that roll down, down the block
and eventually catch in the gutter

or get carried up to a garbage-nest in
a wheezing grey tree.

Everything Suddenly Honks

It is the afternoon, the week has recently Decembered. I am praying for a sea of yellow cabs to burst through the skywall of the city and flow onto Broad Street. Suddenly, it happens! They begin falling. First slowly, and then a downpour. No one knows what to do. Cyclists and old ladies and bums everywhere are getting squashed under the great weight of a million falling cabs. The pigeons all fly off in a grand flutter of moldy grey feathers. The squirrels move in closer to investigate the sprawling and continuous wreckage. They think that the cabs are going to feed them. I look around, wondering what happened. I had only wanted a little excitement. A little bit of New York buzz to get the blood pumping in my veins. Instead now the city is peppered with yellow piles of metal and everyone is terrified and I never knew the capacity of my own desires.

An Open Welcome to Friday, and a See-You-Next-Week to Thursday.

Is love the blood of the universe?

Life flows through us, within and without us, and I imagine every pulsating organ, its own vital factory. And then we are real. Some mornings when I wake I take a moment and realize that I am seeing the world as if my eyes have turned to fish bowls in which my pupils can swing on a hinge and look in every direction. The day breathes on me and I am alive!

Last night I drank too much and I leaned on a friend’s shoulder and there was some memory of a voice echoing in my head and it read like a mantra and felt as if it were the deepest of truths but I came to find that it was really just some clever rhyme to remember at an inconvenient time…. “Beer before liquor. Never been….” To Europe! And I had never been there and the voice in my head knew and I realized it was mine and it rocked me up and down, and from side to side. The Earth could be uninhabited.

That was a momentary shift in consciousness, inward.
Last night I dreamed and I could see everything happening to me transferring to my brain as I slept and goodness I remember my dreams and I worship the REM cycle! By day, I saw my best friend caring for her pregnant sister and I swelled with every emotion that means something beautiful is happening and in my dream there were awful horror movies, terrifyingly crude and terrible, but I could look away because my best friend and I were surrogate mothers to the same batch of children and we held hands and knew that everything was beautiful.

That is exactly what I mean.

The universe is a giant body or a heart or a moment and it pulsates and moves and it is a functioning massive being and love flows through it and makes it go. I know it to be the most natural state of existence, to love, and it flows through us and we are hearts and skin and fingertips. We embrace and push away but most of all we embrace, or should. And I love every child spilling out of the womb and into this earth and if the universe is living then there are bustling worlds of dust and static between every planet and there love exists too, even if life forms do not. Love transcends and arches over all else. Love becomes us.

Pulse

“And somewhere lions still roam: so magnificent they can’t understand weakness.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Contemplating the blotches on
our skin we are
compromised.

All night I would rest
my weary head
on a block of wood
attempting to transfer
from one to the other
some form of
consciousness.

Look at this landscape.
An endless silhouette of
upward-reaching
steel and metal.
I do not know
chemical compounds.
If I did, perhaps this equation
would come simply.
But I do not and it
does not.

There is an emptiness
associated with
the shell.
That is, material
surrounding space.

Once I thought
that every building
was my father.
This was disproved.
Instead I now find
that buildings fill up
flat endless space.

Try to fathom the universe.
And we do. And we do.
So now there are
oranges and bodies and children.

So now there is
a world so
full to the brim with
things, that we can’t
believe it was ever
previously so full.
There are cavemen
suspended in time.
Icy tombs ready to burst
with life on hold,
if only the sun
could melt them and revitalize
their contents.

Beneath the endless
cracking clay there are
pots that once held water,
ancient water.

Geography consumes
and bellows.

A child in a basket
floats down, down, and we are
all immaculate.

Everyone was conceived
without consummation.
In this way,
we accept existence
without disgust.

Breakfast

Winter comes as I am cracking eggs over
a frying pan in the concrete grey morning.
The trees have gone bare but
the lovely young women are still fertile,
as if summer did not end, but rather
took refuge in the mishmash of organs
behind their flat white stomachs.

I imagine a field of sunflowers
bursting brilliant greens and yellows
inside my uterus.
I hold an egg in my hand and somehow
feel I am confronting an ovary.
Sipping coffee, I realize I am
lost in the refrigerator's
cold trade winds,
contemplating fruits and vegetables,
trying to figure out
how to be a woman.

Limbus

Walking down the road in the morning, he began to feel old. His knees ached and his shoulder ached and his head was aching earlier but the pain of that had subsided, mostly. He knew nothing about Barometric pressure but he thought perhaps that was part of what ailed his joints today. “The air,” he thought, “does feel exceedingly tight on my body, as if I’m wrapped—parts of me wrapped— in sheets? No. Plastic?” He could not place the sensation, as he’d never felt it before. It was as if the air had taken a tight, knotted grip around his lower thigh, above the knee and also around the place where his arm and shoulder met, near the joint. Suddenly he awoke lying in the middle of a field where two men stood over him discussing futility. He did not know what kind of futility. That is, the futility of what. He felt his left shoulder with his right hand and the hand came away covered in blood. He looked down at his left leg, to his knee which had ached. The knee was gone, and all the rest of the leg below it. A man’s belt was cinched tightly around the leg and the pool of blood beneath it suggested it had bled for some time before subsiding to a slow pulsating stream. He was torn apart as a doll at the mercy of some sadistic child-god which had plucked pieces from him. He closed his eyes and grasped the sticky wet grass with his wet red hand. He felt hands grabbing, perhaps those of the futile men, grabbing as if trying to keep him whole. He retreated back to the unnamable, implacable road and walked, for he would much rather walk with an ache than stay in hell; would rather walk than lay half-dying on an expanse of half-dead field. The day was not cold, but suggested that the cold may come in the following days and weeks. As he walked down the road, he touched his shoulder with his right hand and the hand came away once again covered in blood. He looked about— no one near, no one for miles it seemed. He looked at his hand. “Strange,” he thought.

For the Record

I did not consume the apple.
The apple consumed
me.

I explained this to you. You, with your green scarf and year-round tan skin. Your hair is short so that the dark curl cannot be detected. I explained that the apple tasted fine but normally I probably would not have liked it. It was too soft, but at the time the texture in my mouth felt good, as if the atoms in it separated like sand that wasn’t tiny rocks.

Millions of tiny
grains of apple.

The surface was jagged and fibrous. It was mars, it was tundra. The landscape of it was wet and white with tiny green spirals shooting up from it, nearly imperceptible. I saw the apple living, I saw every fiber of its being. To the core. I ate it then threw it out. I explained everything about the experience to you. In this way, I told you I still love you. I told you that I am still alive and that I detect in everything some form of life.

The winter season
changes me annually.
Without
fail.
Receding
fall.

I imagine you in your city and I, in mine. We don’t have apple trees, but we have apples. I realize now that the white jagged landscape is really your concrete jungle a few hours north. I devoured the thing, devoured you. The whole episode was exceedingly strange. It resisted… interpretation.

I kick myself
today.
I wanted
the apple for
breakfast.

Somewhere in a black hole there is brilliant light that can’t escape. It is there that you and I exist in the same perpetual moment. It is there, squinting with my hand above my eyes to shield them from the light, that I tell you I love you over and over. I eat the same endless apple.