you know

[somewhere i have never travelled] by e e cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near


your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose


or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending

This Years Love

I like to slip inside of songs, mostly when I am tired, or when torrid memories make their way back, pinch me in my sleep, sudden reminders of love--as loss--a lurid, breathing babe left behind. Photographs of youth are scattered on my nightstand, memorable moves between schools and styles of life, these make me look up in the middle of the night, not away; they invite in all that I shift my gaze from, inevitable arches, powdered peaks I cannot reinvent with words. It is both pure and pathetic, but love stands there, in my past, in my present, in my future in all of its forms; what I want is not to embrace it, but to enter back blindly, born into feathered arms.

I sit here, supposed to be working, or writing yet another collection of annual reports that somehow justify funding my scattered academic pursuits. But all that this year presents to me is clouded, or clouds, themselves, real but untouchable; present but impossible to climb inside of, to understand pragmatically, to incorporate as mine. I sit here and I write in code because real words, real explications are ugly and blind. All simplicity forgets the most important facts--the beast of ambiguity having made a home beside me, worse yet inside of me, an unfriendly fiend I cannot remove from my life, my skin.

Time moves in a muddled, mysterious way, and yet I remain, rock within the rocks of days I have lost, days when I could fully lend my heart. The heat, today, is a spring I rarely laugh upon, a flowering that should cater me in winds. Still no dressing for the wettest wound of all, still no sun that could bear its shadow, or free its soul.

Of course I miss my father. Now the words do not come any more, but shocks of pain that wake me, midnight breathing when I tell myself he is present, when I beg for some kind of ghost. I want to believe that the wings breaking the wind, I want to believe that thunder and sudden rain are bred in his name. Worst of all, I continue making deals, not with devils or with god, but within myself; all that I am prepared to lose to see him close, to inhale my other world against his chest, all that I will sacrifice for one day, or hour, for five minutes to bite his smokey breath. Maybe this is what stands between me and return to my racket of emotion; maybe this is why the whole world seems shallow, mild and shaded, rather than wild and alive as it did before. Righteous in missing my father, I am selfish in missing myself.

All I want is to write, to write and ache, invent and love in a way that seems far past to me; half of me ripped from my clutching arms. If I could write; and if I could be--for more than a moment--certain, I think the nights would pass in slumber, my bed would empty of black ice.

flannel hands

It matters less that there is sorrow. More that these waves are felt, so many miles away. That the vibrance of sweated nights, generosity, the gentleness still shudders to the bone. I cannot help but picture wider, wide-eyed skies. I cannot help but slip inside of such small scenes. What I do know is my agile, insurmountable self is what stands between battered dreams, or jaws hung open by a time that ticked away unwarranted, unwanted, and yet still warm against my chest; dried through my heart. It is a time scented with both spice and human, flannel hands. And here, in covers and coats of downy dust upon my skin, I can close my eyes and build there the home already stomped upon by my feet, my fists inside: build that better, sensible self--a self I should admire but still shudder at, as I could never adore. And adoration is, still, the only cardboard box I have kept through the years, such love bent out of shape and shorn of all its gems.