Wednesday, February 23rd - "Quarter Life Crisis"

Waking up one morning with the sun shining

directly into my slitted eyes, I was suddenly struck by the realization

that I'm no longer a boy. This wasn't

a strike on the back with a hammer, an icepick

to the bottom of my spine, but more

of a creeping awareness, that must have come

in the middle of a bad dream

about running free along the shore

and being trampled by horses

before reaching fully dry land. I always wanted

to grow old, but somehow I never thought

it would happen the way a tree grows,

never realizing how badly

it's come to rely upon the sun. I always wanted

a stone house on the shore, a balustrade

to photograph the horizon. Someday,

a lover who I can avoid marrying,

a child whose birthdays I forget,

a car to drive down empty streets

all the way to the end of the landscape,

and an entire grove of peach trees, which

would shed one peach for each person

I had lost, over the years, roaming free

along the banks of every river

with no headwaters, apparently

not remembering to tattoo myself

with directions back upwind,

where even the mountains must go unnamed.

Tuesday, February 22nd - "Luna"

Sometimes, when lying awake

listening to the sound of the earth's sighing,

my mother likes to call me moth,

explaining that I'm drawn

towards light, the way a shadow

is drawn towards formlessness. When I sit

and watch the earth revolve, she says

that the sound of the wind

beating rhythms on the shingles

are messages from god,

reverberating dully off the moon,

sentries refusing to say my name.

When I inhale, she says

the lights in the sky

are breathing beside me,

their pale, nettled embrace

encircling the equator of my waist,

squeezing tightly and refusing to let go.

Monday, February 21st - "Why I Insist on Staring at Sunsets"

The

point,

contrary

to popular

opinion, is not

to find beauty in

the most mundane

visions,

or to look

at the way my

eyes shine brightly

in the wan half-light,

or to put myself in the

faintly degrading position

of

asking

how I look

when most of

my body is obscured

by the decaying lights,

but rather to stand alone

on

a small

precipice

and see what

the world might

look like if I were

to set the landscape aflame.

Sunday, February 20th - "When Artists Try to Understand Probability and Statistics"

 

“Statistically, we're all dead,” he says,

puffing on a Camel Light with all the fervor and aplomb

that a statement so definitive surely deserves. “That's why

I don't watch television anymore, don't

stand in the back of auditoriums

and clap lightly. In the end,

it doesn't matter, so why not

be the one on stage, dancing

while the world collapses?” I couldn't

argue with his logic, of course, so

I grabbed his cigarette suavely

and snuffed it out on his arm, watching

as his stunned eyes rejected

any thought of explaining my action:

statistically, he probably wouldn't understand, anyway.

Saturday, February 19th - "Why It's Difficult for Me to Fully Embrace One Religious Tradition"

While I absent-mindedly unwrap presents

in an alcove by the staircase, pretending

blithely to be surprised when my grandmother

regifts the same tired old sweaters, year

after ceaseless year, apparently not getting the message

when we send them back to her in springtime

to celebrate the rituals of her motherhood,

my own mother, so sure of the superiority

of her own traditions, sits down in the kitchen

overlooking the dingy living room, sipping vodka tonics,

saying that she knows it's a problem, but how

can you expect her to want to be fully awake

for the celebration of a holiday

which her family always told her was just a way

for Christians to dance around beneath a tree

and pretend to care about one another? Not

us Jews, she'd say, we just light candles

for a few minutes, and get it over with,

can't even be bothered to get together for long enough

to eat fattening fried food

and call it delicious. No, we're past that,

she says, staring deliciously

at the piece of coffee cake left on the plate

perched precariously close to the stove. Well,

don't mind if I do, she says to herself,

pretending that this is a tradition

which even Jews can't look down upon

without partaking in, like when I stood

outside in the light snow, puffing sadly

and asking why Jews don't have stories about reindeer

and sleds, instead like to tell boring old tales

of old men and jars of oil. Well,

we're boring people, my mother

always used to say, but at least we have the sense

not to sell dolls of our heroes. And with that

she's gone, back into the kitchen

to cut another slice of this ghastly, super-sweet coffeecake

which nonetheless drowns out the taste of the eggnog

which she has to sip, just once per year

to complain about its cloying sweetness

and feel superior to anyone who drinks it

without knowing that it has nothing to do with winter

and everything to do with falling asleep

and the inevitable rebirth that follows, hours later,

when everyone has gone home to sleep,

another year's worth of whispers and rumors in tow.

Friday, February 18th - "In Which I Imagine a History for the Boy Who I Sometimes See Outside the Drugstore Downtown"

Just after Christmas, unusually

mild weather, and the boy who hung out

by the drugstore every night plying his

wares was plucking chrysanthemums from his

faintly pockmarked pockets, little beauties

frozen there since summer, saved for afternoons

like this one, which seem as ill-fitted

as the too-tight jeans coagulating at his hips,

forcing him to focus his distant gaze

on the rust-colored bricks beneath him,

just to get the passersby to wonder

what could possibly inspire such lack. Across the street,

we played old tropicalia records and

pretended to dance to them, letting the

strange lyrics fall limply at our sides,

along with our listless arms, tattooed

with smoke and cinders from the

burnt pot roast we cooked for dinner,

hoping desperately that we might

have enough left over to eat for days. We

thought about heading across the street to

give some to the boy, who looked so gaunt

that he could live a life inside

his long leather cloak, and whose face

we convinced ourselves we loved,

just because it was a little bit

more damaged than the faces of the

kids we usually met up with downtown, just behind

the highway overpasses where the spiders go to

seek refuge. We thought about inviting him to

join us on our next trip there, so we could

smoke cigarettes and drink coffee with

too much cream and sugar, and discuss political issues which

we don't fully understand, but which make us feel like our

love has a social context deeper than our navels. We

thought about going out there and wrapping him in our

freckled arms, drawing little roses in the air and

asking him to name the stars while we waited and watched,

but instead he headed off languidly

to the dilapidated hotel lobby nearby,

where the lamps are always dim enough

so as not to remind him of how much time

is actually passing away on his eyeballs,

while we were left watching

from the shelter of our leaking roof, hoping

that the flower he lazily dropped

from his aching hands would one day

grow into an entire orchard,

producing juicy peach blossoms sweeter

and more temptingly dangerous than we could ever bear to swallow.

Thursday, February 17th - "Noir"

An empty window,

moonlight, a shadow,

a dream. The essential elements

in a story. A trigger finger,

a knife. A torrent of rain. Someone

says it's after midnight,

but none of us believe him. Looking down

at the way the light leaks

bloodied onto the tiles, it always

feels like dusk. Afterwards,

an inaudible patter

down the unvarnished hallway. Later,

the first remnants of memory,

dissolving like rain in our hands.

Wednesday, February 16th - "Makeshift Stage"

My brother says that he plays

only for himself, doesn't really care

if anyone out there in the vast empty space

beneath the stolen parking lot klieg lights

can actually still hear. Still, I notice

that he carefully keeps a tally

of exactly how many feet

he can hear dancing in the space

in front of the bar, just behind

the mosh pit, which he's carefully stocked

with only his closest friends, to provide

the appearance of spontaneity. It isn't

that he wants us all to be crushed, just

that he needs to know that someone out there

is physically moved by his dissonant notes

to want to destroy something, even

if it's ourselves. In the middle

of the crowd, we suddenly

find ourselves chanting lyrics

from a song that would be a hit

if my brother had anything

to do with such things, but of course

he insists that he doesn't care, is only

in it for the art, so when we find

that we can only remember the chorus

that he played again and again in the garage

while we were trying to study physics, we all know

that the men behind us, shouldering

their last lagers while getting ready

to leave before the encore, won't care

if we botch a few words, so long as we leave them

free to let the waves of sound descend over their bodies,

untouched even by the desire

to join us in the front, dancing away

any desire to contextualize

the interplay between sound and silence.

Tuesday, February 15th - "Sunny Side Up"

A small glance up the stairs

just after waking, the sensation

of snow in August. The light

left over from winter, takes months

to reach our retinae, traveling

across pockmarked bodies and cross-stitched skies,

to be that golden beam

on the floor beneath our bed, which looks

almost like the sun, if you keep your eyes

half-shut and roll over. From the point

of view of a body, all light

is the same, only the orientation changes.

In the morning, I woke to find

the sky still dark, and I drew the curtains shut

to keep this one beam

separate, special, holed up

in the back of our pockets, and touching

every part of our bodies where we'd been.

Monday, February 14th - "Point and Shoot"

Those overdrawn nights outside the bar, short tempers

and shorter lines of credit, gouging out self-portraits,

sketching treasure maps upon the asphalt –

all enough scenery to set the stage. So picture this:

you're standing atop a hilltop singing lullabies

to put the moon to sleep, lubricated with whiskey

and rubbed with palm oil, a lonely couple in the background

intertwining hands beneath a canopy of stars. I said

I'd make a movie of your life

unfolding beneath this sandpaper sky, screen it

in back room galleries on the Lower East Side,

ask for donations to document the entire course

of a life searching for its reasons. You cracked

a half-smile, tugged on my shirt sleeve, and said

point and shoot, darling, point

and shoot. Just don't think

you can capture me on camera

without first ripping me to pieces.

Sunday, February 13th - "Passage"

I watched your suicide

from the opposite side of the tracks,

that perfectly choreographed plunge

just as the train came round the bend,

like your entire life had been compressed

into this one single moment, this one flicker

snuffed out by the night. I watched

as the passersby groaned quietly

and shuffled onwards, lighting cigarettes

and fumbling to clasp hands, inhaling deeply

the roasting stench from the bottom

of the tunnel, rising slowly like feathers

in the midtown fog. I waited

to see if anyone would stay

and take the whole scene in,

and when I noticed one man, standing

with both hands in his trench coat

on the far side of the vaulted labyrinth,

I quickly darted away towards the surface,

hoping that his labored breaths

mixed with the nearly transparent

plumes of smoke, rising

from the depths of the tracks

like a song played for no one to hear.

Saturday, February 12th - "Still Life"

I fear that if I stay here long enough, I, too,

will become old and fallow, a field too dry

to brush up against heaven. Each gravitational field

irradiating from our bodies, each spot of ink

that dots the wall above our headboards, each shadow

looking for a form to justify its existence.

Tacked to the wall staring

at the one I desire, I will eat bricks

until I grow heavy and worn,

waterlogged like the bodies

we dredge from the lakefront,

begging the man with the rowboat

to dry off our faces, his starchy hands

bearing every sign of having once carried

love notes addressed personally to God.

Friday, February 11th - "Eve, Remixed"

I don't quite remember

the taste of the pomegranate

which I stole from the tree,

but I hope it was at least

succulent and ripe, and perhaps

worthy of imagining the sight

of those juices, running down your lips

like a river, sustaining life and beauty.

I used to know what it meant

when you ripen and fall.

It had something to do

with the flow of the seasons,

which ebb and subside

like the stains on my cheeks,

barely perceptible

from the tops of the trees.

Thursday, February 10th - "How I Learned to Howl at the Moon"

I was still stuck here,

earthbound,

and I didn't know

what you meant.

You said you meant

that it always

shines brightest

while our eyes

are snapped shut,

fleur-de-lis patterns

on our spinal cords,

all without ever

asking anything

in return.

Wednesday, February 9th - "Perfumerie"

Last rays of light

poured out onto your skin;

bottles of perfume

emptied out on the windowsill.

Occasionally, we catch

a scent of roses on the wind,

and you say, that you never

expected here, in the middle

of the mountains,

to feel the breath of midnight,

staining your forehead,

like the way a river

never dares

to dream of the sea.

Tuesday, February 8th - "When Nihilists Fall in Love"

I fell in love with her,

she fell in love with ideas.
I told her I had read Nietzsche,

had climbed up ivy towers

and announced the death of God

out into the morning rain. Said
I had scrawled aphorisms

onto park benches in California,

planted trees in Montana

just because I knew they wouldn't survive.

Said I had once written

a poem vaguely about love,

but I quickly tore it up

and tossed it into the river,

not daring to hope

that the ink might one day reach the sea.

Cracked a half-moon smile, took her hand,

walked out onto the portico.  Thought

we'd better do this quickly, before she remembers

that I promised I'd join her in dying alone.

Monday, February 7th - "Before I Can Sleep"

I have to memorize the lines

that encircle your eyes,

so that if I somehow etch a new one

at some point in my dreams,

I'll know to take credit for it in the morning.

Sunday, February 6th - "How I Got My Scar"

 I grew up

hunched over

a map of the world.

All my nights

were spent

plotting takeovers

of small European monarchies.

We lived

in a small orchard,

our beds beneath branches

which cast shadows

over our expectant faces.

Occasionally,

I would go outside

and practice my art

on the old Ponderosa pine.

Sometimes,

if I fought hard enough,

it would retaliate.

Saturday, February 5th - "Disasterology"

Tell me all about the time

when you ran into the burning building and

pulled the charred bodies out before they

turned into ashes to feed the pigs.  Tell about how

it was sunny, and clear, and the sky

smelled of pungent train wrecks for miles around, and the sky

ached a sad song out on its transistor radio for all to hear.  About

how it was late, and you needed to get to work, and the

roadway was on a schedule of its own, and you

pulled off to the shoulder and ran until you

turned into a phantom and forgot that you existed.  About

the blinking headlights streaming into the poorly washed

skylights, reflecting bad memories

onto the overcooked granite floors.  Statues burn

at a different rate from the rest of the world, and they

seemed to smirk and laugh and promise that

they would still be standing, after all this was done.  And tell me about

how you didn’t manage to save any lives, and you

weren’t a hero, and you went home disgraced and

melted your Vietnam war medals into scrap metal for the car, and I

tried to console you by kissing your hand and

making love in the backyard beneath the chimney.  It

always reminded you too much of burning, so you

held your nose and plunged in and

pulled out the remnants of our last cookout, sitting around the

hearth singing old Christmas songs and telling stories about the

last World War, when you pulled bodies from the lake and

brought them back to base camp to be buried, always

just a little too late.  The world is over, and you’re

still plucking dead bodies from churches and

making sure they get their last rites, because

Daddy always said God would want it this way.  Tell me that

our dreams are not in vain, and won’t

burn up and wait to be hosed down with ice water and

rubbed with perfume until they evaporate.  Tell me about the

smoke left in your eyes after you lie back and smoke a cigar, and

convince yourself that heroism is just a pretty little lie, and

sing little lullabies to the mockingbirds outside about

gardens that haven’t yet burnt to the ground.  Tell me that the

song isn’t over yet, and this is just an interlude.

Friday, February 4th - "Domesticity"

We could make a home

out of what we forgot –

the memories, the visions

of heaven, the songs

whose words we wrote down

on tattered napkins. Then

we could plaster it with paintings

and call it secure. In the rain

and snow, we could look

out the window, and wonder

if we birthed an entire city

in the vast wasteland outside.

Then, look back inside

our bodies, and make

a new country entirely

out of the poems sketched

on our backs, which no one

had the good sense to erase.

Thursday, February 3rd - "The Trouble with Skyscrapers"

In time we grew so tall

that we feared the stars

would have to retreat farther

and farther

and farther

just to keep their sheen intact.

Wednesday, February 2nd - "Channel"

This is what a mother knows: doors

are meant to be opened, drawers

to be rifled through, faces

to be moved to tears. Tides

are controlled by moons, bodies

by their footprints, hearts

by the strings that tug on them. Gates

are temporary, like shadows,

like words. Conversations

with the dirt beneath our toes

reveal truths, bricks

reveal histories. Cracks in the pavement

tell us about what we've been missing,

and just for a second,

about what we might, just for an instant,

have a chance at becoming.