Smarts

Adorning your mediocrity with an heir of simplicity,
I find joy in the minute details,
make sand castles out of grains of attraction
build it to the highest honor, but always
lie defeated in the true, lowly reflection.

Meanwhile a man and a woman make a pact
to find themselves before settling down,
to quest for an old man on a mountain
handing out medicine for their trials
treasure maps for their goals,
a shame they don’t know what needn’t be taught about insanity.

Do you ever get so tired of the routine
so tied to it that you start to enjoy it, then
marry it, sewing excuses to stay within it:
The abusive relationship to a faceless entity
who wants nothing but mindlessness and cooperation?

What adjoins us to this stillness?
The only species with the crown of cognition, we flush it,
become every primate who ever picked it's ass,
clapped and laughed.

The mind is not a canvas, but the obscure tool we must invent a function for,
find meaning for,
create something out of and onto ourselves with.

After all, that mind, like life, is the sunset you can’t see by the minute
until every color has passed
and suddenly it’s night.

April Flowers Bud in Concrete

This city stings with transition.

Winter, to spring, to the sporadic zing of summer.

In the air, the static cling of sex sticks

to timid girls, overpriced garments cut above the knee

to men, with long, sticky jeans suctioned like honey to the waist

In a crowded subway, tangled in strangers

we refuse our own space, billow in like an angry orgy underground

knowing we are all members of the same species

but pretending we’re not.

Doors open, someone’s eyes undress and fuck me while my red fingernails

white knuckle the pole, I imagine an empty train

and your hands caressing my insides, but between 116^th and 125^th

the tunnel bursts from underground and the tracks expose to daylight,

the world looks dry and we will never see each other again.

This city stings with transition.

From Saturday nights, red lipstick and sadistic cigarettes to chase the vodka

making conversation in a bar, drowning in predacious conversation as a warm-up

to the better subject matter, the “where are you going later” matter, the

“I want to taste you” matter, the “we are young and animalistic” matter.

to the florescence of Monday morning, revealing the disorder,

shines light on the desire-full weekend,

the incense still crushed against porcelain tray, the pipe rests silent on the edge of the bed, clothes still drip off furniture from their initial tear.

This city stings with transition.

Anxiety

The cab driver hovers his hand over the horn

waiting to bark on impulse,

and like a spoon bends against its façade of sterling strength

I change form a little, breaking at the joints,

anxious to the anticipation.

That nauseating twist of knowing you’re alive

pre-determined guilt sifting through blood, guised as growing pains, elementary sanctions, the realization that you have power to affect

while the mind grows and dies in a simultaneous pulse.

I’m sitting on the edge of a chair that’s about to lose its legs

teeter—and clench—teeter—clench—with the bite of a cheek

hands involuntarily form fists in preparation

waiting for the fucking shoe to drop could expire me

So like the galaxy abound

Let me explode.

Then exist as tiny gas mounds reflected off the moon

illuminating the bittersweet,

bright tomb. 

GRADIENTS

New York City is a fat island of disillusionment.

Everything means something, and something means nothing.

The wealthiest shmuck draped in capitalism resides on the same block as a penniless hobo donned in poverty.

And me, a lower class suburban white girl wards off the surge of Harlem’s chivalrousness to make up love stories out of glances from the cocky Soho elite.

Every day my heart breaks and rebuilds itself.

Everything I truly love is rooted in a hate for ever making me endure the kind of illness love is.

My marriage to the cancer of giving too much to save that love:

To obey that love, each day new guidelines to cement my insanity to my personality,

To follow the ambiguity of love’s expectations. 

the sex stone

There is THC releasing serotonin in my brain

as I sit here listening to Elliot Smith tonight.

Honey and Junk rests beside me

read but not digested, those poems brought me here.

What’s the point of sex?

Just two souls forging comfort in a strangers ability to give them a vanilla orgasm.

While we're created for biological dependence in the opposite of ourselves,

the help of modern technology has declared self-fuck buddies to give us sexual independence, but alas

always,

we ache a silent hurt for another human

to bring us into our own self: that pleasure sewn into us like a tiny orb of light

always floating within, only claimed in moments of intentional, hard, defeat.

A Date With Jim Morrison

If Jim Morrison were here, draped in soiled clothes,

I’d pour us two shots,

Preferably under priced, gut-rot whiskey

to speed up the conversation.

We’d write on napkins, on used paper goods

about the ‘08 election, the economy crash.    

We’d call this society troubled, ripped,

Abusive toward thoughtfulness.

I’d read him his book, chuckle at the line

Why do I drink? So I can write poetry.

Maybe I’d disclose to him my recent arrest

And for once enjoy telling the story.

I’d ask him if he’d mind saying a prayer

tainted with his kind of glory.

He’d answer that I’d asked too much of him -

Silence, until a pressed whiskey gargle beckoned the sunrise. 

Seclaration

Today's empty haze,
seems a barren replica of an earthy field
once mobbed with sulfur, sparks, and dust.

Once the dirt settles, the crows circle and feed,
a used, but vast moment begins its new life.