Something

There is something about stubble, as there is about roads home, as there is about deciding the decades in hurried handwriting, in bundles of strained certainty and ascertained strength. There is something about this opaque, imperfect place where I bet and breach but still belong. About an unhurried haven, a patch of evergreen in this striking city of sound, awash in winter lights.

Words

Mine begins under a bridge. It cries of cliché, that the blanket burden begins somewhere between a beginning and an edge rather than an end; at the rotted wooden breaching of a life I had not only chosen, but had curled around and grown as my own. The darkness was the same, or somehow hatched from a speckled, imperfect love; a lust sprung from my bright insides, my need for breaking dawn. Blue is the color that lights my memory of those moments, those moments inside of the most violent earthly velveteen. It is blue not in nostalgia or in mourning or in the full, frothy glass of melancholy served. Instead, what I see is blue as monsoon, blue as a better, if opened, sky.


The following is what lies inside of my father’s first folder. I knew he was a fisherman. But so too was he a poet, a writer I never knew.

I am an old man.
Fierce weather in the thoroughfare
Breaks the panes
And takes me to seaside
Where I wait, the last blast to lift me
Between the Widow’s Island and the Hen’s
That I be reborn as seals reborn, and porpoises,
Feeding on the debris at slack tide.

Many are the drownings, winters
Of fine, strong men
Swept to cold shoals and reefs.
Bones are found in tide pools at ebb.
Many the crystal forests, often ice storms
Make boats wallow in the heavy seas.
Mans flesh burned white by ice.

Be they so bold
There are many with one ear
Fingers taken by the sea
For smelt and sardines.

Paper cups

Christmas in this city is not crystalline but softer, simpler, struck inside of those memories we mightily pin down--we devour with traces of time. My memory is most fated to, fixated on our vibrant past of paper cups and paper dreams to match.

Outside the snow has melted, the sun streaming through the streets with silent joy, a jubilation of having outsmarted even the seasons. It is the same love that struck a chord on the wooden bridge bending beneath my lungs; it is the same love that snuck behind my windowed walls, my own walls, balled up in breaths I was fated to expire. It is the same love that blew my heart away outside of a DC bookstore, filled with metallic paper, that barely caught my eye. It is the same love that, liquorish flavored and frighteningly liquored, melted beside the Brandenburger Tor. It is the same love that struck our wicker chairs, wept into the northern lake shores, drunk high and mighty on the rapid heat that summer brought. All love is the same, in that it both alights and licks your wounds--in romance, familial frenzies: most of all in the walks where tingling fingers meet, failed promise not yet fully deflated, begging to be brought back to life in the louder, limited circumstance where love is lasting--where it may lend a hand.

Paper cups fill my mind, those empty and aching inside of wired bins; those too spirited to hold in hands; those paper cups you curled around, so slight and sweetened on your tongue.

New York

When I arrive home, I am touched by the fullest of nostalgia, vibrant past wings that beat against me and bring back a single expectant moment, at rest on the tip of my tongue, my heart. A single, uniting meal; a conversation underground; the promise of full green peas and a roast tied in speckled, string bows.

When I arrive home, I beg the roads to clear, although Sunday evenings are certainly congested, the city's cough crept around the highway, inevitable choice between a tunnel and a bridge.

I laugh out my love for this city, as animate and inhuman as it remains. Still I am somehow more alive in the pale green streets, where both my past and present are steeped, a changeling hood I can at least call home. It is not only the ghosts that are sweeter, stuck to my insides in true, traceable forms, as the pomegranate yogurt I revel on the roof of my mouth. It is the memory, never struck by the lightning I dared upon its frames, still so startling now that I have to close my eyes. It is the familiar taste of morning, the places of my walls that remain reminiscent of him. It is the red dressing of my room, a million books where I could always hide my head. It is the drawn out drawl of the Brooklyn Bridge, the children I have helped to grow.

I love this city as I should only love people, family, companions. I love this city for the vibrant beat it installs in me, the faster dreams, drugged up on too much noise and little nicety. And no matter where I am now, where I end, it is this beginning that reminds me: the first embraces on park benches, Christmas coffees, balancing of porcelain and a turquoise sea of awnings, headlights, listless, wistful, indulgent desire.

Sails

I am awaiting an end to the fluster, to the soft waves of uncertainty I constantly, consistently push out of my eyes. Still, I favor the past, with all of its giant, thundering flavor. Still, I prefer the phantom of what I have lost, with an icy assuredness, with the violet fawns of boxed rooms. With the chocolate breaths that burned each night alive.

I am lost there, even, on the familiar streets, where promise of pretention waits, where I can close my eyes and turn my frame to whatever wind it was that brought me, bought my beginning. Why I don't fight for anything. I can't fight for anyone, when my weapons lie preoccupied in other times, golden, grasped by frozen fingers, bent around the hills that hid their heads in portable, potable skies.

I drink to that, to them, to him. I drink in the skies, bled in circles forward that leave me dizzy and dazzled by loss. I should feel guilty for going back, if only in my thoughts, but instead am guilty in this forward march, in body or in mind. Is it possible to belong to a certain time of life, an experience evidenced by burning flags of love? Is is possible to only find yourself in other places, not those you have chosen, but those discarded, discredited for the flimsiest of flaws?

Suddenly, it seems, in moving this direction, whether forward or upward or back again--it seems I am waiting for a frantic fluttering of wings, a gentle, generous sign. I am waiting to take back the only words I have spoken and known to their insides, seen in their brittle bones.

Signs, like the skies, like the wind, are uncertain, if ever evident, but so are needed to tear out fears--to push back at the skeletons that embrace so suddenly, cradled in our insides and curved against our irretreatable sails.

Both sides now

What is love? And where do we find it, aside from in our blood, the breasts of kin. Is it understanding struggles, or gentle dreaming? Is it wanting even when violent, human hardships take us aback, take away that snow white stumbling characteristic only of first kisses and the rarest bonds we break? I am so arched around, so molded to my fat past of love, a gray past, perhaps, but one with doubt divided. I have tried, too, to locate love here, to wait for the foundations that shake and shudder to eventually calm. It is more exhausting, this waiting, this willing, than the very particular passion of love. All I know is that I want a similar syrup as my past, that burning bittersweet both sordid and severe, the swelling of my heart when the world, small and centered, felt full, purred back in a way that was mine alone.