So You Wander

He tells you that everyone is in search for God

In search of peace

                                                                                                              salvation

The man with the prostitute

The prostitute, an artist when it comes to falling in love

Love a holy too earthly
An earthly too heavenly

Its always a step ahead

You can see her strutting the room

He sees you flinch
he tells you of glasses full

You think of her
                                                    lips you can’t get out of mind

Imagine her spilling over in your glass

There are thresholds for a reason he says

You still see her
Untouched
Untouchable
So she thinks
So you think

So you are.

He says he used to be able to read people a mile away

You are closer than a mile

you ask him what he sees in you

He tells you he stopped reading
it never got him holy with people

People aren’t for reading he says

                                                                 It’s cheating

                              Whats the point of knowing before you know?

                                       So you try and put down your glasses

Reading doesn’t get you anywhere

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge

For the sake of safety

That

Is not where you want to be going

You walk outside to the man playing with fire

Give the fire some spin

Dangerous is the most calm you ever feel

                            Calm feels laced

Arsenic in the glasses

Filled with water wanting to spill

Fire
you know it will get you
When it gets you

You can see it

I used to stay away from storms he said

You never believed in that

                                                                                                 You always thought you’d find the holy after being struck by lightening

You’ve stood in a lot of open in fields

                                       It’s the walls that make you feel unsafe

                                                                                                                     Walls can come down

He sees you flinch again

Walls or fields

      Just put the glasses down

It ain’t gonna get you holy.

Group Piece: Alberto, Bring Me a Sandwich with Cucumbers

Me:

I want cute kisses

cute kisses when I get excited about cucumbers

and you think im silly

but I cant stop making you smile

cuz that’s fucking cuter than trite shit like rain

and street lamps

or Paris

fuck Paris!

 

Alberto:

Fuck Paris

Or better yet,

fuck in Paris.

Some serious shit.

On February 1^st, 2012
On Asbury
Between Evans and High St.

Jan,
The hot dog man
Handed me my turkey dog
With the works
And told me
“Don’t fall in love today.”

It was probably a joke about the grilled onions
But I took that shit so seriously
I went home
And boarded up all the walls
With caution tape.

It’s been almost a year of following his advice so closely.

That when you looked me in the eyes
And told me I was stunning
I threw out my thighs to distract you
From asking about all the tape.

A part of me prayed against your hips
To ask me
to slow down.

The other
Is so good with her tongue in cheek
She spun you out
Long enough to forget.

They say
easy girls are trouble.
I say
troubled
Are those that think so easy.

It’s complex work to nail yourself in this tight.

As you slept
I crawled out of bed
To ask the corner store clerk
How to love again?

He stared at me blankly
Asked for my ID
And handed me
My camel cigarettes.

We smoked them
As I couldn’t brake
My tongue long enough
For you
To catch your breath
To ask about the peeling tape.

You left exhausted.

I’ve been

Exhausted.

But today,
the homeless man on Broadway
held up a sign saying,
“shitty advice for a $1”
and he told me
to stop taking strangers’
words
so
seriously.

Three Vignettes of the Same Vignette

I.          She was petals unfolding before me. Soft sand at my fingertips. I wanted to engulf her and be engulfed.  Be water upon her. I examined every fold of her. How moist she appeared. How she could be water upon me. With every breath I exhaled, she appeared to pulsate darker and wider for me. Writhing in lust. I was a mere man. A poet basking before L’Origine Du Monde.

II.        They set their books down long enough to interlock glances from their tables. He rose up from his table and walked over to her. She giggled and shook her head, extending her hand towards the empty chair. They read lines out loud from their books. His bookmark fell on the ground—a postcard of a painting he saw at Musée d’Orsay. A French painting translated to: The Origin of the World. After hours of exchanging poetry and laughter they walked to his apartment where whispers turned to kisses. She laid at the edge of the bed as he sat frozen before her. 

III.       He kissed in French syllables writing out l‘origine du monde with his tongue down to my hips. He pulled me by thighs to the edge of the bed. He sat in front of me. When I tried to raise my body up, he signaled me to lay back down.  I peered between my legs.  He was locked in thought. My lust turned nervous ache as he stared into me. I felt like a giant rabbit hole before him, like he was contemplating diving in after Alice.

Jellyfish

Someone once asked me what I thought jellyfish dreamt about.  He told me that some jellyfish have 8 brains and when they sleep, 7 shut down while one brain kept them moving.  He wanted to know if I thought each brain dreamt the same thing or if they had their own dreams.

I told him I wanted to believe that jellyfish are actually the center for old people’s thoughts. Kind of like satellites for life to be processed and sent back to us in new codes. Each brain taking on different memories—playing around with them, trying to paste things together. Dreaming of people’s memories. Working like an assembly line. Basically I imagine jellyfish as creating the film The Tree of Life for old people to find some peace about their exsistence.

Every time I see pictures of jellyfish I think of them piecing together the good of my life.  The love, the laughter, the intimate.  I imagine the lust turned affection of a different boy who shared with me the numbness he felt after a father lost.  A tumultuous relationship I could never pretend to understand.  In passing, he told me he grew up thinking he was a mistake.  I knew more about that subject.  After cradling him in my thighs I told him that I hoped he didn’t still see himself as a mistake.  ”You may have come here unplanned like I did.  But I see purpose in your smile.”   He kissed me thank you and embraced me.  We slept on and off that night never letting go just mangled in sheets.  I think of jellyfish piecing this for me now.  And I hope they peace him something great.

Lucidity

A part of me wants to call you
and ask you
to meet me in Guatemala.

I can already hear you smiling at the absurdity of my proposition.

But I’m battling sleep deprivation, term papers, and a wandering soul.
So just go with me here.

I want us to go.

So shut your eyes and meet me there.

I’ll bring my combat boots for the rain forests
And dryer sheets to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

I just ask you to bring a floor length maxi dress
to blow in the breeze
for when I ask you to dance on the beach with me.

This is where you laugh at me and say you don’t know what cut will match your beard.

Yes dear, you have a gorgeous beard.

Though, I think you need to be more concerned about what cut will flatter your shoulders…
But really, I’m less concerned about dresses
and more concerned about being in the breeze with you.

Can you feel it?

Will you?

Will you meet me in Guatemala tonight?

Truth

Sometimes I picture myself locked in a white room with words I wrote repeatedly on the walls— ceiling to floor.

Then I wonder if that is a fear or a goal of mine…

Luckily,  I’m too lazy to ever buy the ladder to do such work, so I think I’m safe.

For now.

Passion. [09.2011]

The other day I learned that passion means suffering.
On days when we hand out our hearts in forms of thank you letters,
left to sit dusty and forgotten,
on top of old love letters too messy to deal with,
we would probably grow to agree.

But there is something here in Italia,
that makes me think that if passion is suffering,
lack of it
must mean suffocation.

People here pour their hearts into their food, their art, and their love.

A man will throw himself onto you
and endure the harshest kind of rejection
because these men
have realized
that to live
is to love everything.
Including the callous cold shoulder of a woman strutting down cobblestone.
The clicking left in his ears only reminds him of how many women to go before he can crack a smile out the one that’s going to be worth something.

You gotta admire a culture like that.

When you come from a land too scared to show any semblance of vulnerability
That teaches passion is impolite
And you must keep your calm
and  your finger nails clean.
You start to wonder how you’ve made it out with any feeling.

In one week, I’ve seen more Italian men cry in public than my years in the States.
And I never once doubted their manhood.
They are never afraid to tell you how it is.
No matter if it is vulgar and crude
They show you enough respect to not delude you.

A man here,
kissed me like he could find my undersketch with soft touch
As if a woman
was a painting to cherish even with cracks left behind by time and other people.

These men are nowhere near perfect.

Their gaze sometimes off putting,
intense,
but they are never frightened to be taken aback by a moment of unsettled passion.

They are willing to suffer
than to suffocate on the things they wish they could have done
or had enough breath to say.

They are willing to suffer here.

It’s the closest I’ve gotten to understand people.
And the most at home I’m starting to feel.

I is She in the Deepest of my Dreams.

She stained permanent inkblots on her arms and her sides.

A walking Rorschach test
When men approach her,
she shows off those sleeves of hers
and asks them what they see.
Those whose lips buckle under the possibility of answering the question are turned away
She has no room left in her to make terrible small talk with strangers

She is looking for artists and poets
But not the self proclaimed ones
She is looking for those that have not yet discovered their talent
That will trace out stories on her skin
She wants to see the meaning they draw on their own
Instead of always having meaning to give to them.

Somedays

Somedays…

I wish to be in Italy roaming her dirty shit stained sidewalks.

Avoiding the cat calls and lustful advances of men that do not care to know my name.

For communication barriers that make for anecdotal journal entries.

For contempt of America permeating through all borders.

For American tourists getting in my way.

To drinking cheap wine on that corner restaurant where the cook hated me for my inability to ever understand him.

For everything being in walking distance of everything

For trains to take me elsewhere.

To missing trains and sharing cigarettes with strangers from Germany.

For epiphanies in liminal spaces.

For money lost in conversion.

For money lost.

For being lost.

For getting lost on purpose.

For being in love with a city that never loved me back.**

For that slap in the face realization that anywhere but here doesn’t make there any much better.

For it not making sense why I am starting each line with “for” or “to,” but doing it anyway.

I miss being a foreigner abroad and missing everything I left behind.  For learning to be so fucking grateful. But I can’t stand feeling like I’m foreign to every thing that once was.  That is.  And continues to be.

I think I left my voice somewhere in Italy.

(**line borrowed from Derrick Brown’s Bar Luck)