Kalaidescope

I want to isolate in these rare artistic moments, fraught with feeling, a foreign vanishing, grown of wishes and my own great expectations. As summer creeps open, vigilant and viceral, the world outside seems to mirror my insides: icy, blooming and blushing, groomed only by the gods.

For all of the mistakes, misuses, abuses, moments broken by wishes at our feet--spilled like bloody wines on cotton whites--for all of these real broken hearts lie sly certainties, birds with bated breath, slightly soured by the whole fishes gutted before their graves.

My world, my inside world remains soft and plush, as pathetically protective as a spotted tortoise shell, familiar as the slate grey pigeon that carried my initial love--overbred and full of promise, unique as the red-sand desert, filled with rodents somehow deserving of sun's nurturing eye.

Sometimes, many times, I want other things to matter most. I want to revel in the wash of hot water, be pleased by the rare if perfect sky. To sigh at the inhale of bakeries and weep in moonless nights. The small, not of my back, but of my own knowns, is that every rain of laughter is colored if not brewed by love; every tear shed is empowered by love. Why it has become both my house and my martyr, sacrificed by some sick strength of my heart. I am certainly discerned now from my lover--no longer are my cheeks wet with someone else's tears, my rage our offspring (virulent, violent and somehow still wonderful). Yet when I close my eyes I reinvent memory, or reignite its slight flames--a playback of familiar films, kailadescope versions of life that dance on my pupils, soft lenses baked to the core. Sometimes they are spinning, set to pounce, and other times as dumb as deer, greeting demise; or a child on the brink of opening the world, without the bulging chocolate of bunnies to tickle the armpits of the real, raw, sticky alive.

Sometimes I can stare back at myself with an open yawning of callused hands, milky bath water, sandpaper stubble and the disappearance of dunes.

Dunes of course are the high build up of sand, washed up barriers performed naturally and crushed only by children with vengeful tools. They are the real glass walls, set aside any ocean--the perching ground for parasitic birds, opaque, ovaler, wedded to water. They are barricades, barriers not only to the waves but also the lax lull of storms, the thickest silence of us all. To write about love, to live next to love in this sense is a velvety dawn, smoothed of a smothering landscape, disengagement, grown-up stomping out and down: not short of sand castles and buried feet. It is a devouring of the dunes, spilling forth, damaging of all the dams built between. And in this gnawing of the gates, not golden but skeletal and washed out by times in the sun, secret gardens bloom bent and born again--a gilded age of innocence, never wiped away but whispered through our crackled lips.

Love of words

Of course old men in pubs throw snow at girls who dare the streets. It is obvious and yet I am still oblivious to this very British life, lifted up above a past as short as my own, my nation, my city of god. They could be angels, these frozen fairies broken at my feet, or strings of cotton awaiting warranted spring. It is here I would expect them to write, a rare if real creativity cordoned off by ice queens and quick outpourings of skies, not love that lasts. But yet I think of poets that belong to my city and my own song. I think of stories not of pebbled pretense, not of Portuguese winds or those winding roads in which I saw desire, but of the very south of home, of the wildest buildings grown pale by the sea.

Perhaps writers are simply snared by words, themselves; they love rhetoric more than the real, soft, feathery beings that can keep them warm. They are cold perhaps, snowed in by wounded, wound up minds that never stop, the trails of tick-tocking, internal clocks that shudder even in the full mooned nights. Perhaps these snows, or these failures to warm the ice are real stakes that bend in hearts; they are the stakes they hold, such flippant hands in life, all aces or nothing, at its very, beaten best. All wings tucked into the crevices of breasts.

Vampires then, I find in writers, as I find in dreams. They have sucked in the life from others' lives, from lived experiences claimed in desperate prose. All stories told are real, not white lies but black realities. real as that fleeting cotton that will melt in moments at my toes, real as that ornate aching of every, any broken heart inside the darkness of these english pubs.

Words, as snow that does not belong on this forgotten island, as deep and damaged as the pebbles that grew our greatest poets--drowned inside of themeslves by active, enemy skies. Set to lurk, set to flight, their phantom fangs never abandoned, for no saunter, no skin can live up to a love of words.

What dreams

A patient of my father writes 'Any man who knows enough about figure drawing, germanium vs. silicon transistors, photography, "taking the air," farm-life, nightlife, Mexico, Lucky Strikes, cellphones, and making me feel half normal deserves to live forever.' I wake up in the middle of the night from a dream in which I am not asking my father not to die, but am asking him for a warning, something slower that will seep in over time. I feel guilty for this dream, where I want his death to develop like tea, a timed occurence, one with warning but still blackness at the end; death has become inevitable and instead of attempting to step up, to stand against it, I try to postpone it, to let love live a little longer.

Somewhere in my mind is a dance. Or rather, a song, 'Stay, just a little bit longer.' And for some reason, in these lyrics, I see my very best friend, I see car rides struck with the tears of the skies, rains to which we belted old melodies; I see a wedding where we danced in circles with a dark-haired, older man. I see walks down Riverside drive, measurements of the new distances between us. No longer do I feel afraid of age, of developing, losing, changing over time. I am, however, terrified of sudden loss-of the wrenching numbness, the outgrowth into pain, the raging anger of my very own storms. I am most afraid of the weeping at the end--the portly nature of a pain that will not subside, so raw that it invades the nights, so real that it shatters smiles into frowns.

This is often how too it is with men, though there is no comparison to what I feel for my father. I am not writing here of the present, but in a note to a friend I emphasized the eventuality of hurt from separation, as she has recently split with her lover. Pain may be postponed, but it will show its face, whether by peaking from underneath hot covers at night, or by just full force, a skeleton from an unlocked closet, or a living being frustrated by the mundane passing of time. I am good at ignoring such pain--or rather, letting it in little by little, droplets that can not make me drown.

With my father, however, it is a wash, a shower, a bath of pain. Some days, it is deeper, I cannot move beyond 86th street and the roads it has built in my mind. I feel ill recalling the emptying of his office, or I enter his closet realizing how sentless it has become, or I empty my bags to find what I saved (a piece of a shirt, a small photograph) to be lost.

Although for the first time, I do not hold onto things so fully. Meaning, I have given up believing in such magical ways. Whether I hoard his argyle or not, he is gone. Whether I surround myself with questions of creation, he is gone

Deserving is certainly not enough to entertain reality; to assuage the airlessness that ate him up. Dancing is certainly not enough to alleviate inside aches, but still memories act like melted snow on my my lips, spun sugar that counteracts this sour--not the shuddering sour of citrus delight-but that which rests within the bittering part of the tongue.

I am thankful for the dreams where I hear his voice, even in the hours we so less treasure. I am thankful for the moments when I wake up warm from a love, just a little bit longer, all mine.

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.