I have

been happy for a long while.

And it has had nothing in the world to do with you.

Come to think of it, it hasn't had much to do with anybody at all.

Some Nights

Some nights, we find freedom in strange places.

At a strange house with strange people that we don't really mesh with. In a strange backyard

at a strange time of night with a dying fire and stale chips and spiked drinks.

Or maybe we feel free because of all that.

Because after a few hours and a few cups, strange people and strange places don't seem so strange anymore. And all that we would find hedonistic and despicable and uninteresting suddenly feels like art of a dark and mysterious form.

And then we're nothing but characters in a pencil-sketch, controlled by an artist.

And we're suddenly okay with that.

And even though we're walking around in a gritty, colorless world that has been smeared by the side of someone's hand, we feel like it's home.

Like there's no other place that could possibly be more comfortable than this odd, nondescript setting, where literature is more clear, and people are more beautiful, and a dying flame looks like a forest fire, and crass music starts to resonate with us when it would never have before.

And then you're more interesting, and I'm more interesting, and you're not really a stranger anymore because when the world is less strange, you're more transparent too. And I like the feeling of a not-really-stranger's hand in mine, though meaningless it may be.

But somehow, I don't want to believe that it was. Even though you'll wake up the next day, shaking off that pencil-sketch world like an artist shakes off a bad day of painting, and I'll wake up and rinse the embers off my fiery skin. And even though we'll go back to walking on either side of those railroad tracks,

somehow I'm still going to be left hoping that they're not perfectly parallel.

I am.

I am red-eyed, tight-lipped, searching, searching.

Born from the womb a silent mess.

Gales of wind and throngs of flames slashing through the treetops. The wildest storms that pitch burly men off shipsides and tear the shoeless from their mud-thatched homes. Hemingway and Keats and Poe and Aristotle and Huxeley and Plato. Tangled philosophies, morals erased and rewritten and erased and rewritten. Poets and storms and anger and love crumpled up and shoved into a

neat, clean skin.

Stretched and bound, like a new, leather journal. Wrinkleless, smooth.

Bottled and corked tightly, a crisp sauvignon. Corked so tightly, as a matter of fact, that it can't be drunk.

It's just as well.

There's too much strife in Pandora's box. Too much love and too much hate and too much music

and far, far too much poetry.

Of course, that's the most dangerous of them all.

So here I'll sit, corked and calm, tasting the color of the tornado in my gut.

Maybe one day, the plug will be pulled. My god, may the world be spared. But maybe it won't

and until that hypothetical, unknown day.......

I am waiting; you are waiting. For what? I don't know. Or maybe I do.

"I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern."

Me too, Mr. O'Hara.

Sunken Mornings

The world feels so large today. So unbearably large.

So large that it seems like no matter what I do, no matter who I meet, no matter how many ladders I try to construct or nights I spend in small rooms with loud music, sputtering on liquid Lethe,

I will never be able to bridge the oceans or sew together that horrible gap of vast nothingness between me and everything else.

Where are you? Will I ever find you in the 7 billion people out there?

What is destiny but coincidence?

Odysseus said "Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity." Is it bad that it is not eternity's vastness that haunts me but rather the vastness of what is now?

The vastness of human possibility, the vastness of all that we can't achieve, the vastness of everyone I will never meet, the vastness of the ground I will never cover, the things I will never do. I usually don't think this way. I usually soak in and rejoice in the large unknown. I usually celebrate it.

But today, I am scared of it.

This is you.

It's amazing how many words you can speak without actually saying anything.

Endless rambles in attempts to connect a 3-pronged plug to a 2-slotted socket. Endless nights of hollow laughs and empty folly. Wrong words, wrong people, wrong places. And then you walk back home, trying not to admit it to yourself, but realizing deep down that somewhere in there, you're asking

why?

Because in the end, you ultimately realize how much you wasted the precious time that ticked away through the cracks between your sore fingers, tired from playing the strings of the instruments that were not yours to play, melodies that you did not enjoy hearing. And then you realize that the more you speak, the less you sound like you and the more you sound like the tall, brunette down the street who owned a silver Lexus that her father bought for her, that beautiful, shiny car that you looked for on her driveway every time your mother drove you home from school. But, of course, it was rarely ever there because she was rarely ever home, and that upset you more than anything. No, it wasn't because you were jealous, you told yourself. Not at all.

But the more you speak, the less you sound like her and the more you sound like the girl in your economics class who used to always pick at her purple nail polish and talk about boyfriends she didn't have until her sister died in a freakish highway accident after running into a cement truck and getting suffocated in wet cement.

And your words disgust you, so you run to the sink and brush your teeth and wash your face, trying desperately and futilely to wash off the layer of skin that's not yours because it makes you itch terribly. And you realize you can't even remember the name of the nice boy with the red hair who sat there quietly, the one you ignored because he couldn't get you a six-pack and because he drove a slow car, not a fast one, and wasn't eager to hand out his number in a heartbeat like the others were.

So you crawl into bed, a tangled marionette, telling yourself that you won't do this again, but knowing that you will anyways because you don't know how else to do things and you're much, much too frightened to wake up and realize that it's okay to be alone because nobody ever told you it was.

This is you, loquacious friend.

Not a poem.

-

I want to sip sorrow through a straw tonight
sweet, sincere melancholy climbing up the walls of a narrow tube
to my worn-out tongue
to my parched veins, dry, scabbed, cracking.
Rehydrate me.


I want to cut you loose with the petals,
the sharp, silver edges of store-bought flowers,
tidily-wrapped department-store packages
for those romantic bastards.
Set me free.

I want to swim into Sargasso depths,
dark with a darkness unknown to the bitter globe.
They'll breathe down my neck, cling to my back,
the blind fish of a lost, shoreless sea.
Come with me.


I want to sew, with gilded threads, these letter into words,
into sentences, into paragraphs, and pour them on your skin
a dripping trickle to to climb up your spine
a sinful sip to drug you slowly.

Rewrite me.

Falling

You are the fulcrum
and I sit, precariously balanced on the tip. But, you see, I'm rarely precariously balanced on anything.

Solid thoughts, solid opinions, solid goals. I never took pointe in my days of ballet. No, not me. Certain and sure about everything... until you came along, and suddenly,

I was sure of nothing.

Nothing except for the fact that there was a tall, long needle on the top of the Empire State Building. And I had to climb it, the only structure left in a gaping, black abyss.

So I did, my bare knuckes gripping the rusty grooves of that needle
in the hot, stale air, in the frosty, numbing cold
inch
by
inch
until I started falling.


Falling, splashing, swimming, drowing, grasping, slipping, falling.


Falling for you
Falling from you
The crazy thing is, I never knew which it was,
only that, somehow, I was falling because of you.

-