after yesterday, before tomorrow

after yesterday, before tomorrow

will you tell me something?

the secret to not holding my breath

but breathing in the infinitesimal space between

like the gap of two hands pressed tightly together

always holding a space for

solitude.

I will never make a perfect decision

I will never make a perfect decision

each one tainted with the possibility of the other

infinite impossible collages of the mind

no substance but the cyclical pain of fruitless repetition

at the moment of the jump there is no evidence

no argument that will make you see the bad you 

will sustain for the good you have not yet known, to understand your 

own resilience the truth that comes only with time

nothing but a blind faith

or a shred of

reckless optimism

can save you in that moment

logic futile

only now

the letting go

the trusting that

something will hold you.

tender(ness)

this morning I awake from a dream of you

still dripping from the shower

naked and looking down at me with a tenderness

and the shared secret of that mutual excitement

reflected between us like a prism

and the hope of you 

hands on my arms

and the memory that you

did so

I am beginning to understand I think

the way nothing makes sense

the way we can never see what piece it is

we are holding in our hands

we were not children this was a dream

and I lived it and passed out from it

life is a series of awakening from dreams

and I feel that acutely

I am tender

I am tender to that tenderness

I choose to be free (2)

I choose to be free

It is a difficult decision

My fingers still scrabble at the ledge even as I 

speak these words

going back against my resonant certainty

a betrayal a mixed message a last ditch attempt 

to save myself from drowning but

I choose to be free

to not fight battles I will never win for prizes I 

would never ask for blinded by the sharpness of my own pain

I choose to see that pain and to be free

I choose to rid myself of second chances of second guesses of second thoughts

to know everything I am doing I am doing because I am trying I am trying god am I trying

I choose to know that to love myself for all my destructive tendencies

For all my messiness (sitting at the dining table Sophia says, no one is every too much) maybe

I am too much and even so I choose to love myself even though 

I did not put the smiley face at the end of the text or the exclamation point and maybe it was a form

of withholding or maybe it was (and it was) an act of protection and I choose to love myself in that

protection and not plague myself with doubt for not performing

I choose to love myself even while I hope to be free of that 

To speak my mind in the winding path between appeasing and withholding 

To find the truth

I choose to be free 

even in the process of it

I choose to be free of that which I am holding on to like a life preserver

when it is nothing but a dirty plastic bag

I choose to love myself for holding that dirty plastic bag

for hugging it to my chest, I choose to say, oh baby and I choose to hug myself

to pull myself out of the water

to sit on the edge with my feet in the pool

and to look over the ocean

and to breathe

and to choose

to choose

to goddamn choose

to be 

free.

I choose to be free (1)

we went to buy shirts that were too small

and try on perfumes that we did not like

and we bought nothing, but the glimpse

of a different self in the mirror

walked away with only the heaviness

of the real self, but the thing is

I choose to be free (and I choose

to love the part of me that wants not to let me)

incomple

I never finish things,

it is one thing that I worry about

about myself - the not finishing

the always fixing the anxiety cycles

came later but the principle of the thing

was the fact now that creatively it feels

like I never find the period

today sitting on the toilet

I offered myself a moment of compassion

is life not in itself the greatest creative act

with an ever prolonged

completion

maybe it is just because I have been on instagram

reading poems by someone I went to college with

and feeling jealous that she is becoming somebody and

I sat on a step last night and cried to my mother after I could not

muster up the courage to ask a set hand on a film set how he had gotten

his job, begging the universe for someone to give me a

chance and I was just like the cocaine addicted roommate

my friend told me about who doubted his own potential 

and cursed the success of his friends. except I did not curse the success

of my friends just of the friends of my friends who were never

that nice to me at parties. and now I sit here

writing a poem in the style of theirs which I have never quite liked

for its confessional nature that shoves life's edges at you in your face

edgy in its ugliness and I make it about me even though I know it is not about me

and yet the only way to live life is to think it is about you

and I am an artist and I want to make things and I am a poet and I want meaning

and I am a musician and I want to say things without words and I am human

and I want to be held and to be told I am understood

in my dream 

he admits to being sad

and I reach up

and rub his back

as a fogged up window

the clouding returning

almost instantly

but comfort still

in the motion

the point not 

to make it stop

we reach 

his door and 

we pause

I have not

been in since

I say

the sentence

unfinished and lingering

what do we do

with our sadness?

when I wake up

I am not sad exactly

more burdened

lightly with

the feeling of

knowing

of having

lived.

praise for imperfection

And thank god.

I have found my imperfections again.

And they are what make me human.

And I am so glad

I am human.

lasagne

the lasagne looks almost indecent

in its insistence on abundance

oozing ricotta into the plastic tupperware

glaring at me

and writing this poem I am sure

this place never finished my sentences

but nothing is lost these days

everything is found the answer is laid out for you

without you knowing what question you were asking

(in all likelihood a different one)

why do I want to kill something.

the cleansing wave of destruction

an alternative to perpetual anxiety

and anger at things I cannot change,

I would take some abundance now.

I would take some, and then some more,

and then some more,

and then some

more.

little things

i.

do you remember then?

those viennese mornings

light and airy in the living room

reading poems to each other

as if to wipe away the dust of sadness

that accumulates in sleep

to hear you laugh or better

to try, a thing I could not fail to fall in love with

showing someone you love something you love

feeling they may one day love it too

feeling they may already do

and us just two americans

as the austrian sunlight filtered in through the double paned windows

first cold then unbearably hot

the trams incessant on the street below after the midnight pause

and a poem like an anchor

a gift given at the same time to each other

a little thing

and life is made of little things.

ii.

now I wake from dreams of you

where we never quite kiss on the mouth

and my eyes half-open come to the daylight

hungry for the fantasy of your body

for the fantasy of your mind knowing reality

never has and will live up to this

the true knowing of the dream kiss.

iii.

and you want it to be you don't you?

you had asked me

looking back on that moment 

I feel such full astonishment

even then I knew I was living

something.

And I stormed from the room and refused

to give you what you were asking for:

an admission of guilt

goaded out of me with jealousy

poking the bear that slept between us

that held us each in one heavy lidded paw.

vi.

there is no answer

but I think of you now

as I write a poem and now

that everything is broken

and will not be fixed and

yet amid the angles

the jutted body-like bones of broken limbs

the glinting of 

little things.

a moment to believe

Worse than a fever thoughts of you in my mind
Like it could be fixed if I prove that I’m right
Broken like the limbs on the trees
Nothing special, just time, that familiar disease
It takes a moment to believe

You say you think of us the same and don’t see me flinch
To me one of a kind is the only thing worth being
The closed bathroom door like a knife in the chest
A symbol of your eternal unreachableness
When all I asked was to be held

Whipping past half promises I cannot keep
If I do they’ll destroy me
So used to holding on so tightly
Didn’t want to see what it does to me
What it’s doing

[found on the back of a painting from the spring]

There is such a strong silence here today
It takes over my room
My jackets on the hook
My pictures on the wall
It says everything without words
It holds everything without words

I am not simple
I never promised to be

The danger of intimacy
is the pain of misunderstanding
and that is such a 
cutting wound

healing does not happen
quickly
and it will not happen
all at once
Fear is the enemy
of all resolution

Please I am begging
you in the only
way I know how
To try

amager fælled

How do I feel like myself?

It seems to require isolation.

This morning I cycle through the woods,

things I see:

fuzzy cows with long horns on each side

moving—in my eyes they look like machines, robot creatures

almost, and it takes me telling myself again to remember 

they, too, are alive (what does this say except perhaps

I have been spending too much time in the city);

also a pheasant crossing the path, then fluttering away,

I apologize for the disturbance, a "beautiful" loosing my lips

at its colored feathers, maroon, brown, green, ruffled, unruffling;

also soft hairy spheres—witch hazel? my mind offers up, I am not sure

softness along the brown branches on the path;

and things I hear: is it the wind or is it the snowflakes

falling lightly, constant,

all around me.

Bad Words

Running over barbs in my mind

Things you said once I repeat to myself many times

Pain is quick, bodily, unkind

Harder to feel alright

Say I deserve better

But you’re talking to yourself

Not about my needs

About wishing you were someone else

Don’t you think I know self loathing?

Insufficiency an ocean

Criticisms cycle on the shore

Easier to say you want less than you want more

And I don’t need more half truths

Wasted time or you

Misconfigured and uneasy

Saying what you can’t not what you could be

how do you love people for who they are?

for everything they cannot give you?

the imperfect answer to a question that seems so simple

yet is it not beautiful that you can never know the answer?

would it not be boring to be given the same answer you had imagined?

everything is slightly off kilter and I find myself

shaking my head as though I might be able to right it

in that simple movement of my chin up and down

as though rotation were easy enough

I am changing and you are changing

and it is at different speeds and we try to hold our changing together

in the intersections of shared glances, analyzing other couples

half bottles of wine and music and the heavy breath before you finish.

all endings and beginnings and you tell me you cannot be what you think it is 

that I want that I need but that is so limiting and boring and

what are we building, your apology incomplete

not what I would have said, but voiced in your own way

and I see, at least now, in this moment: you trying.

I remember you

implacable in the face of my anger

my technical difficulties

fixed by your steady fingers

tying and retying the knot with such gentle patience

even as I yelled and cried, threw things, disintegrated myself

and rebuilt myself in sequence three times, four times, banged my head

against a wall, and you saying take a breath, trust

my impatience a swarm of bees of wasps mosquitoes and you saying did you try this

and my rage like a fire catching and directing itself at you and your

thumb and pointer fingers on the shoelaces and there,

somehow,

it was released,

it was mended.

Nantucket

You took me to the island
And each day we went to a new beach
Kissing on the marble countertop
Skinny dipping in the sea

Showers in the ocean air
Mug in my palm
Eerily quiet, look over the beach pines
Search for calm

Bike out in the morning
Watching passing cars
Nothing but my breath
And seagull calls

Nothing but my breath
And seagull calls

Maybe I’m not the one you’d fall in love with
But I’m standing in front of you now
My ego like a bird
You’ve wounded with your words somehow

Do you resent me for knowing the end?
Do you find me boring, notice your own unwanting?
I know you’re no supreme judge that we all see things through our own shit
But I am so vain and that makes me full of it

It’s a lost battle against time against change
It’s a war never won to keep feelings the same
Is this a truth you are still birthing?
And I too empathetic a midwife, hold all your hurting

This morning

This morning

I feel stoic and serious

weighted by the wisdom

by the questions large and small of

how one might live one's life, or more

specifically––how might I live mine?

and all the little questions and

worries are like dust motes in the air

because we will die and this is true

and James Baldwin said it was so and it will be

in the same way that he is so beautiful and so wise

and no longer treads in leather soled shoes on the

sidewalks of this earth (I want to tread in leather soled

shoes on the sidewalks of this earth, to have that earthly

heavenly pleasure). 

                                And the thing is, 

life keeps going. Keeps tumbling over itself until the ending, 

and even then who knows? I am beginning to realize this;

phase after phase like beads on a string how many lives a life

can contain and how many I want it to (many, many, many)

even as each one breaks me––and in this way shows itself to be glass:

that which lets the light in and that which draws the deep red beneath our skin.

They say you cannot choose who you love, but what if right now I am not

loving, I am just trying it out. It being anything that I have made fully and completely

with my own two hands. And surely I am doing it wrong, but the secret is

there is no wrong or right. This morning I see this self assurance, a grey stone

in my eyes in the mirror, looking back at myself, hair pulled back tight into a bun,

a Renaissance painting, stoic, and not accepting, but seeing, but heavy,

and clear.

can I not let it hurt me?

your insufficiency

I tried to look away

worked so hard to ignore

the breeze through the closed window

the rain on the floor

the fact that this just doesn't

work anymore

Is it worth the disappointment?

the heartbreak?

fighting over what it is and what it isn't

temporary and longer pains

so many things that will never be named

love laying in a pool of shame

what remains?