Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe, take mee to you, imprison me, for I except you'enthrall me, never shall be free


I feel a brewing, a light steam effacing my head and eyes. It's the hot wet whiff of coffee and you take off the lid to examine the contents. It's the pent and tingling insides of a child-mind mingling with the old reasons and the humble beginnings and the starch in-betweens.

I'm only nineteen. Not even twenty. I was slipping under a scaffold today to get back to my room and I thought, what a little space I can fit into, what a prick of a person on a city map from an airplane: it's why you always want the window seat. The nymphet cars and fraction people with penciled highways and plaything houses

I'm only nineteen, I'm not even twenty. A one year old adult, just moving on from apple sauce to crackers. Hmmm.

Reconciling needs to be done, here. Recently I had one of those epiphanies they keep telling me about, that elevated "eureka" moment where your brain finally cracks the puzzle you haven't even realized it's been working on. I have been gently bubbled in all my life and I feel like everything is hitting me like hot soup on my lap, the shocking temperature change of politics, morality, beliefs, lifestyle. To an extent, I think I've shut down, numbed up a bit from the warm insides to the cold outdoors. I've been running from the fact that I must put these two worlds together, and I can't just end what I was and still am. I'm marveling at my drying valentine's flowers that I am cared about despite myself, and I'm hooking back up to the IV: taking my time, gathering the little broken pieces of glass and me and petals and clay and searching for a mortar. I will be strong enough to be scared out of my mind and hanging on to the railing. Learning to walk takes time.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.


This is for you. You who demand I complete every sentence and make me wonder how I deserve you. A candle left burning all through the night, musicals wound up in my head, and seals and sun and winter walking with snapps in your nalgene and two hands in your pocket. This is for you, I promise, not because I have to but because everything about you makes me want to. Because you are every shade of ardor and heightened palpitation, and when you aren’t there a stick breaks and I cave in a fraction until you’re there to fold it back where it should be.

This is for you because depending on you is okay, and perfect, and fine, and wonderful, and delightful, and changing and beginning to addict me. This is for you because of Boston, sailing, Italian, chai, stir-fry, chicken parmesan, the Patriots, the Count, the green ranger, Darth Vader, duct tape on your carpet, hookah smoke, Lolita, and the allure of Love Actually. This is for you because you make me so tenderly hopeful, because you are wonderful.

Woman on the Baking Mix Box


Inflections waft from scissored pie nerves steam curling
profoundly where she buried her apple tirade
thumb ribbed on slope screwing circles for peel
unbroken

Setting out pocket masterpieces
diced cloying juices
the froth pungent
her beached expression a spooky natural

This is the woman who bakes only colors from Arabia
Hibiscus crisped in ruffle crust
Spoon hip-holstered in the ordinary hopelessness
sterile glitter sanctioned:

the libation’s in the sink.

I died for Beauty, but was scarce adjusted in the Tomb when One who died for Truth was lain in the adjoining Room


Here is something no one knows about me:


There was a labyrinth in the garden of my home when I was in Africa and my first memory is of a swinging and “no girls allowed”, and bats that we saw and my mother didn’t when I watered plant leaves thinking they would grow if I made them shine and near the foam gutter and crane mysize and African faces. I couldn’t watch Jurassic Park but my older brother hummed the theme song to make us jealous by the small table where I cracked the jelly jar and the inside stayed a tube and I opened a huge box of minute furniture and walked in a market where people touched my hair. A Lebonese restaurant where I learned french fries and the check before the meal with heat and poor children dressed in only fragments of boxes and those who pretended to be blind and sold water bags and scrubbed the car window. Crying in a rocking chair being held asking if I was saved and racing my younger brother to the warm side of her bed before school where I wore a brown dress and wrote in a blue book and I climbed a tree with Annie thinking that I could be her friend because she was mad at Dragana because she had blonde hair and no one else did and someone’s house with trick or treating but no fortune teller because it might scare me in my wings that someone somehow found for me to wear Kofi’s beans and rice and no electricity wondering what MacDonald’s was and feeding monkeys but I wouldn’t hold the crocodile

Thinking now does anyone feel anything does anyone remember the sensation of Christmas morning or do they just see their brother’s expression and prick their insides until they feel what he felt but they never really knew like the pictures in a photo album looking lovely when I looked a little happier where I am now so I must have been any you say, yes I remember, because it pleases them and you like to know that was you who everybody watched over

I took a sip of water and looked around the
room. Everything was normal, the paintings, the
chairs, the sofa, the lamps, except there was this
man standing in the corner. He was examining my
liquor collection and furnishings, barely glancing at
me, so I knew he must be harmless. His demeanor
was pleasant enough. “Come and have a cigarette
with me.” He said as I approached. “I don’t smoke.”
I said. “Well, this is the last chance you’ll have to
see me.” he said. “Ever?” I asked. “For the next
week or two, anyway.” he said. So we walked
out to my stairway that’s facing the street. We lit
up our cigarettes with hotel matches and
I coughed a bit because I hadn’t smoked since college.
My neighbor happened to be walking by. “I thought
you quit.” she said. “I only make exceptions for
esteemed guests.” I explained. “What’s your
name?” she asked him. “It’s not so much who
I am but where I come from.” he said. And then
he pointed to the night sky, deluding our view with
a heavy exhale from his mouth. “We aren’t allowed to
smoke up there. But they do have terrific weather,
I’ll send you a brochure.” He dipped his hat, ashed
his cigarette, and walked away. “I always
did like that guy.” I said, lighting up another one.

I Shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent. Watching the future come and the present go - and the little shifting pictures of people rushing in tiny self-importance to and fro.


The "next blog" button has this strange, cloying appeal. The cursor moving over it suspends like dice cupped in your hands, driving smooth dull indentions as you shake, ready to click onto something (someone) new. You could be shuffled into a family vacation blog, or one with a password (I hate those, they are so pretentious, I feel like I haven't been chosen for the dodgeball team or something), you could end up somewhere political, obscene, in a foreign language, or honest. When you're writing, ready to post on the vast, anonymous network, it's the third martini olive that rolls up to your lip. Inhibitions down.

And you, reader, who are you? Craving a tryst with the unknown? What does a reader want from a blog? Submit a personal add. The ideal blog is funny, liberal, can cook, great personality, grammatically correct, long walks on the beach, etc.

I suppose I write this blog with a savior complex. When I get down to it, I am under the belief that I post a fragment of me here, composed of actual fibers and desperations, reading it will close you, open you, change you, heat you, cut you, if only for the brevity of a moment of a flicker of a dice roll.

(Revision)


Your spine groans
under weighed
sonnets. Wash
mud crowns and
salt rivets
loose wet veins
and unction
rubble. Watch
shams spin down

Sand gathered in theorems near wood cracks
brine pieced, crusting as frost over
cupped lip incisions
something like shells broken on the stairs

And heat is the soft hegemony of
your swept hair
pooled over me and wicker
ribbed knuckles gleaning serif and salt

When you contemplate the walls you understand
the last sip of lemonade
the drying syrup circlet
the porch light


of all the poems about you and me
this is the best
(because it doesn't mean anything)