transitory spaces

last summer we drank so much coffee
this summer, i am slowly getting rid of the dark circles under my eyes
but surely
arriving pitifully early
and dreadfully out of breath, still
beginning to fill those lungs again
and not with water
and not with smoke
(always an excess).
i will not toy with the idea of you but i am gnawing it like a cherry-pit sucked dry behind cherry-red lips that were once pale with loss of blood,
toying with words (yours/mine) on white sheets with dark stains (ink
or her formality that runs after great pain, at a distance, like a puppy (great dane) but
with all its grown-up teeth)
naming all the streets after lines on the back of your hand,
take me back
or anywhere, really.
your eyes are clearer than the morning
off and on again like the traffic lights
in the slow steady summer dawn coming in soft but undiluted
off, like one bottle rocket in a beer can
and off like my movements today
waking up too soon in the light
that chaps my lips and keeps my secrets

—

themycelialarchetype asked: what's the last book you read?

oh! i’m actually not a huge reader, but right now i’m about ankle-deep in 100 yrs of solitude (dense but rewarding). otherwise, i’ve been very into frank o’hara’s poetry and, always, the brilliant words of my friends jade, helen, and woodie. among others.

i feel more like myself than i ever have before.

vii

as they lightly drunk and busy net-work, heavily textured (i am not caught
(as a finger on the peeling top of a dolphin-safe tuna can, such real and striking blood))
i practice standing up straight and feeling out thunderstorms. i laugh at my own jokes.
with you
i tried to say the natural things,
which ended up being nothing at all.
but alone-
in the solitarily captivating performance
of condensation on windowpanes, steam 
this cacophony rises and rescues me
sweating with summer,
divided into six with lines of chipped paint and wood, just like
my heart   /  or something-
my affection
my isolation; elation
that lifts this small brown body trapped in a shaft of light

pray, how many times must we exorcise ourselves
just to return, in half-weakened but half-full force
before the latening hour draws words into meshes, masticular
movements and i would like to stop
to catch what breath i had to let the lights swim & reflect in your eyes
so quietly so i do
downstairs

some exquisite feeling in longer terms-
standing in the dust between the pews in an almost-dark antechamber, underneath and afterhours and still, where i can hear everything
and be nothing
and hide in plain sight:
leave through the side door disguised as the night

mustardblood asked: Woah I love your writing

thank you!! i’ve been inspired lately :)

if i told anyone everything, where would i go at night?

in your sleep i found myself alone,
with absolute translucence,
and in my solitude i stumbled in and found this bliss

the single sip in the bottom of my glass filling and flowing til my eyes well,
watching the water bead on my unusually bare hands
in the damp blue evening after the heat has gone
when the fans dance steady and gentle, non-fluorescing
(as trying to read in the laundromat)
but humid with somnolence (some word like that, some meaning similar),
stained with the red burst of words wandering back to
drops of pomegranate, fanciful and naive - ities, bestial beatitudes
the verses formed and lost a thousand times in the face of my younger self,
existing in a room in time,
in my mind,
with no house around it to hold it up and clasp it in.

i think of you and the mountains,
never one
or the other
alone.
you and the city,
you and the shore in the summertime,
i,
from this point of vantage and point in time,
if i have lived
to see this day, if i have lived to tell the tale
and lived to pass away
in circles spinning ever outwards and forwards. in the simplest terms, for understanding, for us:

we return from the woods and only one part of our species makes any sense;
we want to go dancing
but the parties died in their sleep and we feel tight-knit and alone
in the unrestriction of smelling of dirt, feeling of grease
singing with suntanned dashboard feet
and i watch the world roll by
and travel so fast along the isoglosses i usually stretch into lines smeared around my eyes,
forgetting that it is about the same everywhere,
oh
there is kelly’s auto
there is sugar creek
a hundred miles from home and every hundred miles every direction,
how did we belt this good green earth with dairy-freez and freeways? oh,
but what can you do.

i blend in until the wet grass soaks through my sneakers and washes it all off—
until it puts out old flames with a matchstick hiss,
until i can think
of one or the other-
i or the world,
you or the trees,
contour drawings or the smell of cigarettes
you’re all trying to quit—
i’m trying to hold on,
to the fevers that pleasure, the dangerous dances
the wide eyes, the careless glamor
and the glamorless care
with which we rend each other’s memories when no one is watching.
with which we weave others into ourselves while we are all sleeping, and we dream of this love and forget that we dreamed but we know that we love and have loved and will love,
the care with which
i think of you
and of the mountains
(and they are one breath, making fog of the cool air and mist of the fog and there is nothing it does not touch,)
with which
i come in from the world and still, and blindly, can find the lightswitch, with which
i wash my hair with bar soap
and think of only silence
and feel of only summer,
and only now
and how i got here

——

(i dont think i’ve ever been happier)

st. paul and all that, by frank o’hara

Totally abashed and smiling

such little things have to be established in the morning
after the big things of night

I think of all the things I’ve been thinking of

simply “life in Birmingham is hell”

when the tears of a whole generation are assembled
they will only fill a coffee cup

doesn’t mean life has heat

I am alive with you

hardness and softness

I read what you read

which is right, I am the one with the curiosity

the sun doesn’t necessarily set, sometimes is just

there’s no dancer in that bed”

you never come when you say you’ll come but on the

i dreamt we lined the streets with low-hanging branches,
with tiny pieces of our days that don’t add up.
we don’t speak, we let the tears fall down our noses like pinesap
and we are trees when we cry, new and cold where the bark has been stripped away, by some foreign hands in familiar lands-
i will cuff them with my teeth and i will chain my neck to your ventral valves and scream as the leaves do when the wind picks up,
until no one can hurt you anymore. i am done dreaming, done signing my name, ready to fight the world by creating it. destroying it. dancing that dance, walking those woods and the woods in me and the woods in you. give up what is correct for what is true, don’t ask me
what it means.
i dreamt of fogbanks and streetlights, the usual.
in sleep my body feels realer
back to back to the same worlds that have all the same streets in none of the same places,
in rhode island reds and black mamba blues, i want to paint portraits again
i wake up:
there is something underneath and something above
no one said it would be easy:
i love,
i love

SO it turns out practicing yr wheelies going downhill on main street is not badass, it is 5 hours in the ER. wear a helmet!!