Retribution

Oh baby you don’t have a clue
The things I am going to do
How you’ll see my name in the paper
My face on the screen
Read my words in your books
In every magazine
Say I knew her once when
And no one will believe you

When I’m on the street signs
The monuments all mine
Masterpieces on the walls 
Of museums, galleries,
Newest season on the runway
Designed, made, modeled by me
You’ll look out the window
And wonder what you could have had

Had you been 

what you should have

You’ll say I knew her when
And no one will believe you
You’ll say I knew her when
And no one will believe you

No one will believe you
And why should they? 

It was never true
You could never see what I was

Right in front of you

Right in front of you
Now won’t that be some 

retribution

Goodbye for now

If you can't see me now 

You'll surely see me then

wisteria

Do you know that sometimes things just work out?

We hold each other in mutual unknowingness

temporarily stitching together sadnesses in the afternoon sun.

The details are unimportant, cumbersome, besides the point.

What matters is the mutual acknowledgement of frustration,

If we do not talk about it we will burst, she confesses.

Holding space need not entail perfect comprehension

to go beyond an understanding as light as it is deep.

We reach a wisteria grove 

purple and unexpected

fragrant and pungent 

and she places a fallen sprig

on my knee

                    before departing.

I sketch it hungrily, wishing for color,

an arc of green and flashes of purple.

as I sketch I realize, what I thought was 

the end was the beginning.

What if

What if not getting what you want is a gift
Perhaps the best thing that could happen 
A salvation from your own accidentally induced forms of self destruction
Darknesses that you will never know
(Saved as you were by refusal)
You will know other darknesses surely
Lovely and lonely
Chosen and not chosen
Who are you to think yourself master
Of anything?

You know how to play me

You know how to play me
blow deep blue notes into my belly
lightly touch my highest strings
make me tremble

You know how to play me,
you know how to play me.

Turn your face like a spinning coin
touch my waist just where I'm small and breaking
linger when you say goodbye–

You know how to play me, 
you know how to play me.

Never let me see (past) your eyes.
Trade in shadows and overcoats.
Say much less than it seems.

You know how to play me,
you know how to play me.

Keep me circling the sun,
unable to realize the clouds have come,
and think I was the only one:

You know how to play me,
you know how to play me,
you know how to play me.

Rejection

Perhaps to take the edge off,

a gentle setting aside,
an act of love, a care,
a saying of: not this, but that.
not now, to allow the space for
something else.

particular infinity

And then I realize
Everything is crawling with life
Watching the black ants moving in circles spirals patterns that I don’t understand
Again and again the message: live in this exact moment
In its particular infinity

mother ginger

when I am far from my mother, ginger becomes her.

hugs me with her aroma, tea in the morning, soup in the evening.

purely good. a love that is lingering. tender and soft.

I peel with the back of the spoon, Joris said, I love how you do that,

it is so delicate, but what he didn't know, what even you didn't know,

was the peeling is an act of love, the cutting, the imbuing, the drinking,

even when it doesn't lead to drinking, the ritual of doing something that might

make you better.

plants

It takes so little to upset me these days.
I walk through days as though they are glass, rapping on the windows,
fogging up the glass. Wiping with my hands.
All day I keep my windows open. 
Feel so uncomfortably hot, need the cold air to remember I am alive,
that I am a part of this world. That I breathe, that I feel.
These things, sometimes, are not so quick to come to my mind.
Slow, slow, slow down, baby. Even slower, baby.
Almost so that you can't tell that you're moving,
that's the pace these days, you need.
Even though we don't see them,
the plants are growing.

In Enghave Plads

I had
a really good kiss
one night
over a bicycle
that left me
wanting more
all the way
home

a break from bad weather

I don't know what to do, so when I get a chance to, I sleep.

E says isn't this and its ongoing presence

a characteristic of depression? depression, as though a huge finger

is pushing me down deep into the earth from above,

is stopping the come-up.

(And when it takes its finger away

perhaps I will zing towards the heavens with equal force

unleashed unbounded high

before my eventual crash to reality).

Papa calls me. I panic, but I pick up.

(So painful these echoes of a past reality. Grief begets grief, recalls grief.

Male archetypes in my life that I do and do not know how to speak to.

That I did and did not know how to speak to.

Now E joins their ranks).

He tells me that things have been okay.

He has been quite busy with work, but really has been wanting to get out

into the day (as he has been accidentally doing these past months he places

his hand over the speaker and I cannot hear him, and I must chide him, his child,

and this lightness buoys against the secret darknesses of our conservation).

But it's nice, he says, to have a break from bad weather.

And I laugh, a sudden sharp hurt hopeful laugh, I could not have made two years ago,

maybe even, two weeks ago. And I say, as though it is explanation (it is not)

that sounds nice. he pauses,

are you needing a break from bad weather?

and I do not even have to say, yes, yes,

desperately.

dear morning light

dear morning light that seeps in my window
how is it you touch me with your changing hands?

today I got to thinking about the insufficiency of words

and the way in which they become so unable to communicate

when we most need them to communicate.

we overcomplicate, type, retype, but it is futile–

how do we say the thing we do not know how to say?

I love you I do not want to talk to you anymore

I hate you and I want you to be in my life forever

I am so afraid to change though I am already changing

how can meaning in all its contradictions and impossibilities

be crammed into words that are meant to say one thing?

as though a comma could change everything

(eat, grandma. eat grandma). it does and it doesn't.

we are not able to control how others perceive us.

we are not able to control the future.

I was doing my best, I was always doing my best.

and I can die, knowing that.

marie, yannic, and I

sit on the sidewalk curb

eating oranges and drinking yogurt

and talking about what the versions of us

two years ago would have done had they known

what they were about to embark on. 

yannic smokes a cigarette. then after marie asks if

we are not going back to class, and it becomes apparent in fact

that none of us will, he smokes another. marie says certainly

the biggest thing she has gotten from this is language skills,

are language skills soft or hard? none of us know.

maybe hard I say. yannic says her German is very good so sweetly,

his blue eyes twinkling. the madrid sun has tempered and in this shade

everything is orange like the skins marie piles into her empty yogurt cup. 

the moment is perfect. recharges me like a battery. 

makes me remember what it is that I want to live for:

tiny moments like this, the small teaspoon on my lips, 

yannic's hand cupping the butt as he lights it up again and the smell

wafts over me in the wind, and marie places her spoon directly on the concrete

without a second thought. it is a spring moment tinged with summer,

anything is possible and the smallest things are dangerously sweet

something one would give their life for over and over again

never getting anywhere, but never needing to.

I don't know anything

i.

I don't know anything

this is the only thing I know

the only thing that is quite clear to me.

ii.

I am sick of perfection.

Let me be reckless. Let me be foolish.

Let me be irresponsible.

I spend most of my time crying,

anyway.

iii.

Things I wish for:

to wake up and feel rested

to wake up not anxious not worrying if I should go back to sleep

the intimacy of a watch on the bedside table without the pain

comfort

to finish my thesis

to not be so tired

to know what to do

vi.

life perhaps

is a constant undoing

of past illusions.

(and what is built up

in their place?)

ode to the French boy to whom I did not speak

oh French boy

you are so beautiful

I truly thought I might die

"He is so cute I could literally die"

I type in my notes app

(and for all intents and purposes,

for all intensive purposes: I

mean it. I do not exaggerate).

Thrown to me, a pure product of

happenstance, and I so in love with you

a month ago on the metro, eyes roving

your sweatshirt and your knit cap, 

drinking you in, you were so beautiful to me even then

served up to me again today by so many overlapping moments of chance

and then you order the same sandwich as me

and I can not believe my luck

an opening, to say something, anything

it's good no? but I shy away, I always shy away

(oh god you are so beautiful, too beautiful, and nervous

when you sense me in my noticing, I can tell)

but you see me register that you have repeated my order

and you smile and inside, everything I have ever known

sets on fire.

Perhaps that is enough.

On the metro

The little girl does not want to sit

She holds her father’s hand

Her own clasped around the handle of her pink umbrella

She makes faces, pretty, ugly

To others, to herself

He is telling her things

Speaking to her as though she is an adult

(Emory says he likes this,

You say you love it,

Reflecting later on the escalator

At your station, going up)

And he is cautioning her about the day

She ran down the block and fell

You still have a bruise he says

Touches it on her temple

You can’t see it so clearly

But sometimes

Did I cry a lot she asks

He says I can’t remember

You did cry though

And she nods

Trusting him

To tell her the truth

Too young to remember everything

She wants to get off a stop early

But he says the next one is closer

So we’ll wait okay?

She says nothing

Come come he says

We will go wait by the door

She follows slow and silent

I see them pass the window

The top of her curls as

They amble down the platform

She drags her umbrella

As they pass the door

Scaled to her size

Hitting her chest probably 

Where Emory’s large one 

Hits his

I hold tightly in my fist

To their existence

Her curls tight and bouncing

They are a duo

And I remember my own palm

In that of my fathers

Our skin tones reversed

And I long for a child

To hug

To be friends with

And talk together

Know that we are duo

With which to see 

And share 

And discuss

The world

the day I found out

the day I found out doesn't exist

is this chance or a metaphor?

I don't believe in casualidad I believe in

synchronicities

I am always making meaning

you are always thinking about everything

Anniversaries mean a lot to me

I say it as a form of explanation

I hold it like a notebook in front of my chest

covering, protecting, the tenderness

I look for reasons to grieve, to mourn,

for moments where my tears can burst through the everyday

like a form of avalanche - is this performative? is this wallowing?

(her words a constant specter: life moves on fortunately and unfortunately)

your voice on the recording the other day, more high pitched than I remembered it

and affected and kind and I so longing your approval even then, years in, so wanting you to

choose me.

some things must not ever stop breaking your heart

it is futile to compare pains what is the point when what you are feeling is the 

slice of the knife in your chest

the holding in your palms of everything you once were and will never be again.

the right thing

 if I could stop focusing on doing the right thing

maybe I could manage to do anything

maybe I could find a way to stop this unproductive

self-flagellation. I am like a bug caught between two panes of glass

I see both lives and I cannot choose one.

Don't you see? I don't know what is best for me.

I don't know what is truth and what mirage.

What about the left thing? The thing that is left behind.

I judge myself incessantly for trying just trying to take care of myself

in a world I no longer recognize and have not for years now.

The fallacy of thinking decisions are simply black and white

and not disintegrating spirals of life like orange peels in an adept hand

And what is wrong with a little bit of regret anyhow?

But just a shot god and not this constant drumming thrumming humming

pummeling of the inside of my mind for just doing its best

honey I'm just doing my best

trying to sort through what's right and what's left.

A small kindness

It makes me feel soft 

The way 

He comes over and asks me where I was 

And says it is worrying 

And offers me some of his snack 

Small acts of care that reaffirm 

The two of cups 

The balance in the question and the situation 

To search for it and find the resonance that rings true

The sun moves in pink streaks across the sky

And I adrift in youthful memories of love and irreplaceable wounds 

Rise 

Stand at the window and remember 

Open the latch and lean out in the cool air 

Well aware of death down below 

Of my own teetering 

Choices of destructions a tilt away

And I look at the pink in the sky 

as even now it disappears 

turns to purple to the expectant gray blue of a morning 

Like a secret I wrap it shut 

And go to wash myself clean

do you miss him or do you just miss someone he asks you standing in the horrible light of the kitchen

you pause for longer than should be necessary

(there is nothing shameful in admitting that it is both)

yet still you hold to old lessons, reciting, dragging your finger across the page,

like prayer beads these things that are so impossible to unlearn, that we teach ourselves

I cannot change, I cannot want another, I want to go back, I must always be available

Treating others as you would want to be treated, but never will be

(a consolation prize of perfectionism, of womanhood)

never able to exist in a moment always tumbling down the hill of future fantasy

following things to their (il)logical conclusions in the imagined reality of your mind

one of the scariest things

(excessive time alone with one's thoughts)

I was thinking maybe you wanted to be more independent she says face pixelated by the connection

but I didn't want you to think that I wasn't here for you if you needed me

you smile tight lipped but not taut

forgiveness given with the time with the missing with the familiarity of exchanging words

yet still something kept hidden a pebble at the heart round and smooth and produced by your own body

she sees it but lets you hold it

perhaps this is wisdom perhaps this is fear perhaps this just is

(I know you've thought about it he says to you you think about everything)

You fall asleep with his shirt pressed against your bare chest and though he must recognize it he says nothing

Remembering tiny details like the paintings you made, moments that plead to be remembered:

the curve of his wrist, the arc of his back, he is simple and flawed and you do not love him

but god is it not wonderful to try?

months later it still kills me

(you always did)

some things perhaps are always haunted

will never cease to hold the specter no matter how routine

even before you were truly a tragedy 

you held that tightly to me.

From what are you wanting to be saved?

Deny deny deny on your light I am dependent

But it's not my honor you're defending

A sentiment I understand better now I think

as the lyrics come to me without reaching

the want to be illuminated by an other

so much about you, so little about them

another just a pawn in a game we play with ourselves

(constantly, endlessly)

I wake from dreams of war, of fighting,

of escape canoes. I look her in the eyes and say,

I don't blame you.

(She does not take it well). Endings are never endings as we construe them.

Even if we pull them off they are always stickier than we had imagined,

dig a little too deep, draw blood, landed slightly funny on the ankle.

It is an eternal fight and in the morning light I see again that it is the only one.

That it is the one I am fighting and wishing it were not so

is one of the many ways to lose.

(Perhaps it is not a battle. Perhaps thinking of it in this way is also a trap.)

The key to find the light within oneself, or out in the world, but to trap it within oneself

for it not to lay reflected in the face of another (another painful fragment from yesterday,

words lodged between your ribs, she must integrate what it is she is projecting on him to herself,

that's the only way to stop loving the wrong person) is it wrong to love anyone?

can I love any one? will the stars let me? drowning in existential first world dilemmas that are

at their heart the issues of each beating chest. to make great art must I live great loneliness?

nothing is ever assured and how do we each find our own enough. find and shape and define

and redefine it, painful and necessary as that is. how do we live another day? how do we tell

ourselves, not today darling, today that is too much. today the weight of my mind might drown me

in the ocean of my own thoughts. today I must be simple and rejoice in my simpleness.

delight in the intellectualizing of such a trivial decision. today I must make decisions and not overthink them. 

today I must take at face value that what claims to be, true.