I remember driving through suburban New Jersey and daydreaming with you about buying a house with a lot of land and a river running through the backyard. I felt at home in your car because it was a silver hybrid like mine. You were speaking without thinking—just as you still do-- playfully yet paradoxically intensely. You were using words like “forever”, “definitely”, and “always” and you protected them with a light nonchalant underlying giggle that makes it sound like you are being forced to speak. I was telling you how beautifully the trees were falling over the road. They looked so magically green; they almost touched the hood of our car. Your car. I followed you to New Jersey that weekend you know.



I have a lot of baggage—mentally, historically, futuristically, presently, and most importantly materialistically. I have two couches, a closet full of clothes, two more dressers full of clothes, 7 winter coats, two bookshelves, stacks of paintings and photography, etc. etc. etc. I have an unstable, erratic, and extremely broad emotional and career background. I like your old love songs and your white walls. I like your vocation focused mind and your structured ways. I want to share what I am with what you are because I truly believe our love is born partially because of our polarity.



I have been trying to downsize for years. I realize that I am the most at peace with fewer items. The happiest I have ever been with my living situation was when I was in Costa Rica for a summer and had virtually no items at all. The beach meant so much more without a computer to distract me or three big screen TVs to record reality shows on. My meals were so much more appreciated without searching through menupages and receiving them after hearing a doorbell ring and digging through a bunch of plastic and a pile of paper napkins with logos on them. I really do want simplicity, and continue to seek it. Living with you will help me move in this direction because it is your personality and also because there is such limited space.



Speaking of limited space, that is my biggest concern. Not physically but more metaphorically. I don’t need to bring a lot of items but I’m worried that our worlds being so suddenly superimposed could lead to encroachment. I cherish you, us, and want to make sure we make the right decisions.



The reason I was in a bit of a funky mood today was because I was allowing my mind to wander into the past—as usual—and also to compare our relationship with your past relationships, which I realize is a self-perpetuating, useless, and obnoxious habit. I was comparing your time frame and living situation with Lindsay to ours. You say there was no passion but you were so quick to invite her into your home and she stayed for years. I was thinking about why you seem so unsure about me in comparison. I was imagining possibilities—maybe you were lonely, less in charge of your autonomy… maybe she even pushed it on you, which is something I know I never do. You also have mentioned in passing, before we were officially together, that you lived with someone named Kim. I don't even know if I have her name right-- that's how little you perpetuate her memory.



To be honest, I have felt ready to live with you since the first time you asked me—which was half of our relationship ago.



But instances since then have made me feel weary, confused, and even charlatanic. You asked me to move in about 5 separate times. Each time I said I wanted to, and I truly meant this and planned on it, but then you would make comments that suggested you didn’t plan on it at all. Sometimes you would ask me to move in again days or weeks later as if the former conversations had never happened. We even set a date (the end of January) and last night you acted as if you had never heard that before. Other manifestations of your vacillation include you clearing the closet then putting everything back in it days later, saying I will always have my home in Brooklyn yesterday, asking me to stay temporarily but emphasizing the temporary, saying I told you the lease was extended when I told you 1,000 times that even if it is extended I will sublet another room somewhere else. Your inconsistency in the matter has made me feel like you are getting caught up in the moment when you have asked me to move in but maybe you are not serious. There is that same giggle behind your voice that I mentioned in the first paragraph when you look at me from above and kiss my neck telling me you want me to move in. I know sometimes you say you think out loud rather than thinking things out before speaking.You still have rubyparker... I thought you said more than a couple of times that you would cancel that.



You enthrall me in ways I’ve never before been enthralled. I’m rapt, for once, in a reality that fits in this living world rather than in the dank despair of my inner world, in the pliable mountains of my quixotic fantasies or In my REM cycle. I am intensely in love with you and I believe we are at our best when our walls are completely down and when we are immersed in each other’s worlds to the fullest.



We fit in a way that is so beautifully authentic, unexpected, and inexplicable.



I just want to know what you feel when you have time to think things over because I have learned that you speak extremely, often change what you originally say with much conviction, and have a very selective memory. I still fear I am vulnerable to believing you when maybe you are only speaking playfully and in the moment. Even worse I fear that I could become a future victim of your selective forgetting.



I love you.

It is this indefinite tendency toward predictability, structure, and order so characteristic of this lifestyle that breeds my desire to explore yet leaves me unable to break free. The dichotomy is tormenting. How can safety=unrest yet lead to stifling inertness

I finished my volleyball game and caught a cab in the frigid rain. The cab driver assumed I was a tourist, and understandably so—I was dressed in an Adidas jacket and sneakers asking if he knew the address of the W Hotel. He told me the cross streets and asked where I was visiting from. I told him I was from Kentucky, which elicited a bout of questions I should have avoided by telling him I was from Brooklyn. When I got the W hotel it took me a minute to understand where the check in booth was considering it was 10 PM and the W Hotel is known just as much for it’s chic lounges as it is a chic rooms. When I found the check in on the 7th floor behind a panel of clear glass with a waterfall running over it you grabbed my shoulder from behind. You were wearing your square shaped glasses and you had a glass of wine in your hand. You looked happy and solid. You always look solid no matter what the situation is, you always wear those square glasses and say hello in the same tone. It’s almost like you are about to sneeze, or maybe that you are snickering under the formality of the way you greet me. “How are you doing?” you say and you give me a hug with a little rub on the back and you greet your friends in exactly this way was well. I had a drink with you and your friend Royce who you worked with in Indiana. He told me I could be a model.

We ran in to someone from corporate on our way to the room, his name was Steve. I didn’t sense your discomfort at all, but once he stepped out of the elevator you grabbed my hands and said, “He’s from corporate!” and you were laughing. “He must this it’s strange to see you with me, you are obviously so much younger than me and we’re obviously going to the room.” It made sense to me then that you told him twice that we were going to the lounge when really we were on our way to the room. The room was beautiful. It was on the 53rd floor and had floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city. I told you I felt like we were in Tokyo and you said, “Have you ever been to Tokyo?” “No, I haven’t,” I said. “Okay then we’ll go.” I love when you act this way—entitled, in charge, and determined… especially in bed. We ordered a bottle of white wine and sat with our legs around each other in the middle of the bed sipping the wine. We talked about my family and our Thanksgiving together. We talked about you and your family too. Our conversation was cheerful and truthful; I loved connecting with you at the intersection of those two emotions. Sometimes when you are talking I loose focus completely on what you’re saying and stare in to the pores of your skin. Your hair falls over my face like a curtain protecting me, calling me forward. In the morning I watched you undressing behind the matted glass walls separating the bathroom from the bedroom before your shower.

remember her reindeer eyes, her surprises left on my cherry wood desk
lilies in a beer bottle, poems scratched on napkins
remember his brilliance, his humor and his
scarce vulnerability, childish ruddy cheeks
islands in the center of a world of autonomy
remember her smile, her love
remember the tires whirling inside of me
i always thought i'd be so much more by now

There is no way that I can make her want something she does not want. My ideal night would be to sit on the floor drinking red wine and playing cards with her in the winter. We would enjoy the silence and the shared space. We would combine and evaluate our ideas with each other’s. Instead she prefers to spend most free moments touching her friends like lovers. She sees them every night of the weekend and at least twice during the week. She calls them names like, “Jane-ster.” It doesn’t matter that I tell her I’d rather be with only her. She reciprocates what I say and then makes no changes. I can’t make her desire my company. I don’t want her to concede to spending Friday night with me because she sees my sadness and senses the shadows pressing down my movements. I want her to want to spend Friday night with, but instead she wants to show up at another lesbian party with the same pathetic lesbians talking about the same pathetic things. When I am 32 I hope I am nothing like they are. I’m nearly a decade younger then most of them and the whole thing already seems amateur to me. They stand there all wearing the same clothes—skinny jeans and a vest with a button up shirt underneath and they talk about the same thing—girls they’re trying to start a relationship with. In my mind they all look exactly the same, like robots, programmed only to behave and speak in one cyclical and tiresome way, programmed only to appear in only three bars on three particular days of the week. They are drones. They are simple and boring, how could I have chosen one of them to fall in love with. Now that she’s started a relationship with me it’s like she’s confused because now she deviates from them. When she brings me flowers she tells me not to tell anyone. When she tells me she’s in love with me she tells me it’s a secret. I’m starting to fall in to a pattern of trying to prove to her that I can make up as many activities as she can. It’s such a silly game. All I want is for her to want to be around me the way I want to be around her—which is in a secure, adult, relaxed, and eternal way. I have no interest in standing around in a bar with a cocktail and asking about girls. It’s like watching a really horrible reality TV show, such as “My Super Sweet Sixteen,” or “A Real Shot at Love.”

I miss painting. I miss feeling like I’m loosing control of my mind because so many visions and ideas are fluttering around and bumping in to each other and I just can’t wait to bring them to life, to smell them, to taste them, to hear them chatter. I miss feeling untouchable. I miss feeling like I could go live on a foreign island at any moment without leaving anything at all behind. I miss Africa and the way I didn’t know anyone there. I remember the way the air was—so arid and enticing. It made me want to work. There were no machines beeping there, no cell phones shaking wildly on the table, no fucking buildings pounding down on me, just trees. Just lions who made sounds more beautiful than anything I have ever heard. Just birds perched--as death and life the way it is naturally.

he had one of those faces that protrude into a rounded mountaintop in the center where the nose is-- the kind that makes him look like he's always begging for something. he had on a cream scarf, it was cold out. his eyes were large like his lips and both were half open to the world-- innocent and weary. he was nervous to ask me how to find the latest basketball sneakers, "Lebron James VII," I believe they were called. "Do you want new ones or used?" I asked. He was shy to respond that he wanted used ones. when him and his father saw the price tag, even of the used ones, they were shocked and uncomfortable. i wish i could have bought those sneakers for that boy. i would do anything to buy those sneakers for that boy.

white icicle lace
tied out to dry in the winter
when there was no heat to
pull the water droplets out
and away

i remember the look on your face
when you reached the peak
with your index finger pointed
toward the bottom of my lungs
where I breathe deep

blue Wednesday comes again
strumming his thumbs on his
vintage mandolin
in the morning, in the afternoon,
strumming

you didn’t hear me when I asked you
about Christmas sweaters
or feel me
when I reached over the top of
your personal-help books
to touch your hand

undying sunken ship
sending flouting music up from the deep
red sea serenade
red blood promenades
down my forearm and to the tips of my fingers
onto my floating wood floors
into the soil of my groaning trees

when you’re young it seems all you need
is someone to love you like your mother does
someone to show you the way
across the street
so that you don’t get smashed by racing
cars
how incredulous and incorrect
you were about love then--
the dimensions of the pain
and the desire and the glory

there was a night in Africa
when the safari truck died
even the lights in the flashlight
went out
the night was alive with the sounds of insects
and a rainfall of starlight from the sky
I heard a deep roar right behind me
And I turned around
To see the king of the pride staring at me
With glowing eyes beautiful and
terrifyingly mesmerizing

An old man walked in, his skin as pink as the tail of a mouse. "Can you please help me?" he asked in a tiny begging voice. Imagine his life, imagine all that has led him to this place at this second. Imagine his pain and his loss and his unexpected joys. Imagine his mistakes, his regrets, his glories. Imagine the way he zipped his blue parka coat near the door this morning. Look at the icicles of hair hanging from his head and see the water lying still in his old, old eye.

All I wanted was a quiet romantic day with her for my birthday and what she wants for hers is to go out in the lesbian scene. How can I date someone 9 years older then me and still feel like I'm the one who is trying to settle down. She does tell me she loves me much more often then I tell her but actions speak so much louder than words.

A girl on the street passed me a few minutes ago with a small mixed breed dog, and she was happy. She asked, “Are they both yours?” in reference to Roscoe and Diz. I told her that yes, they were both mine, although I guess Diz is technically not mine. “Cute!” she said. I wondered what she was so happy about. Maybe she is in love. Maybe she found out about a new job she got. Maybe she had some good ideas today. Today felt sad to me. All the wishes on the eBay holiday page at work were dismal. “I wish my husband will go through surgery without getting his spine injured and that he will recover without brain damage,” one of them read. “I wish I had money to buy my children just one Christmas present,” another one read.

Elise is still not talking to me. Three days ago she attacked me in the living room and told me she wants to break my neck. She screamed that she despises me and that I’m worthless. She threw me in to a wall and I got the wind knocked out of me. I didn’t fight back and I couldn’t slump down to her level to yell anything back at her—which I think made the situation worse. We had a Thanksgiving dinner planned, but now I’ll be doing it alone. I miss Sara.

I wish I were in a field with my dogs Diz and Roscoe and also a pet dragon. I wish there were diamonds that grew on trees so everything sparkled like the stars. There would be no passage of time, but the stillness of dusk would last forever. I would sleep in hammocks near the ocean with my dragon. I would ride her to other lands to visit friends who would speak slowly and softly. There would be no alcohol or drugs or fighting or loss or death or loneliness, only hushed tranquility and sleep.

I took Sara to the Colts game today for her birthday. I’m realizing I should write things like this down so I remember them, even if the task seems uninspired. Every time I start to write about Sara it turns in to something else, usually something more creative, and I want to make sure I’m not forgetting how to journal about my life. I bought out Colts tickets off e-bay while I was on the job—working another promotion. As overqualified as I feel I am for these jobs I can’t help but enjoy the work. I like the holiday decorations, the upbeat music, and talking with the other random unemployed people working the job with me. One guy is from Barbados, one girl is an old model, and another is a bible thumper who is developing new ways to walk that are better for your bones. On the eBay website there’s a little section where people around the country can type in things they wish for this holiday season. Yesterday I typed, “I wish Sara loved me,” and watched it scroll across the website homepage for two days (apparently whoever is selecting which wishes to put up on the site liked my melancholy desperation). When Sara and I left for the game this morning we were in good moods. She keeps citing how surprising it is that we haven’t had any serious fights in about 7 days—a record. “I’m proud of us baby,” she says. She was wearing a Colts hat and I wore a blue turtleneck in an attempt to show some team spirit. We drove 3 hours to Baltimore and as usual I couldn’t keep my hands off her in the car. Well, I should say I couldn’t keep stop thinking about her hands on me. If it were up to me we would be touching each other at all times in some way. Sometimes she makes me put my ear up to her ear. Today at the game we held feet instead of holding hands. She also likes to pull my ears, which I have come to enjoy in a sort of strange, particular way. In the car I leaned over the counsel and laid my head on her shoulder, kind of how we sleep together. Her collarbone area had this hollow and warm quality that seems like the perfect head support for sleeping. My head fits perfectly there. Once when we were going to sleep I imagined all the things that that neck/collar bone area had been through. I felt the land it tread over, the music it moved to, the clothes that brushed against it, and the people that had stroked it. Often when I think of things like this my heart fills with rage. I want to have been there to hear the music, I want to have walked over the same ground that the collar bone walked over at the same very point in time. These undeniable occurrences all sunk inside of Sara that I will never know or feel are like demons to me. When I think about them my heart sinks. On the drive home today I told Sara my heart was sinking, and she said I have “SHS,” or “Heart Sinking Syndrome.” I wonder if she ever feels her heart sink. She seems so much less capable of feeling than I, although it seems impossible that she can’t feel as deeply because sometimes our love is so inescapably present between us, and so equally resonating. She tells me she loves me so much more than I tell her I love her, but I know how much I feel it. No matter what little fights we get in to, I can’t help but hear myself begging for her touch, regardless of what I’m upset about. I need her hands like I need water. I need her voice especially. The Colts won.

A wine glass filled with the forgetful water of Lethe
Tempts the throats of angel escorts
Parched and alone the feats of the moment stir
A becoming, breeching, and glorified covenant
burning in an obscure hearth inside us

The pulse of a soft-coated donkey
Harkens dissatisfied cries of sodden nights
Sots soaking in lost sunsets
Darken the awakening morning sunlight

Violets grow up trees like a strangling skeletal hand
Oaks breathe their last sap gum, tiny twigs disband
In a delirious tremor they fetch the stars
Ephemeral and illusory, stars feed arbor glow
Golden death

Before yesterday I could fall in droplets
Spell out fields of intractable pictures,
Break

Pertinent Quotes:

“The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-Society, vote with a great party either for the Government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.”

“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them”

“Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hands of the harlot, and flee.”

My (relatively) connected subsequent thoughts:

[These may not make sense if you haven't read the full text]

1. If inner character and thought is symmetrical (quote “character is the same when read from right left or diagonally”), then how is it that inconsistency is critical for growth and self-understanding? What inconsistency is there in something that holds definitive symmetry? Perhaps it is it more of an uncovering and honing of inner truth than a reforming or shaping of it that Emerson seeks to promote.

2. Emerson talks of conformity and consistency as congruous and undesirable if not servile to the collective whole. (quote “I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more.”) I see the relationship between spontaneity, self-reliance, and truth but where does order come in to play and is self-reliance reliant on some sort of order which must come from consistency and conformity? I

3. I hold the declaration that institutions are merely lengthened shadows of singular, astute men close to my bearing of hope. I believe in the deity of original thought as opposed to eminent ideas perpetually reborn. It is sometimes so disgusting how much of an imitation we all are of each other and formers. And how much of an imitation every societal application is of the past. ( quote “Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place?” “Bring the past into the thousand-eyed present”)


I didn’t talk about virtue, but that is one of the underlying liaisons of the entire essay.

“quote The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.”

These quotes on metaphysics of soul are kind of unrelated but evocative:

“For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and preceedeth obviously from the same source whence their life and being also preceedeth. We at first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain of thought.”

“Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye maketh, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.”

I obviously miss school...

My heart beats tiredly and deeply because it is drained of its energy. My writing comes out simplistic and predictable because that’s what this is—simple, predictable, and so incredibly definite. Last night she writhed above me like a thirsty water snake, my body paralyzed below her. “This is crazy,” she whispered. “I’ve never felt like this, do you know how much I care about you?” I can never look her in the eyes in the dark because it’s too much to handle. My gaze stayed on the crease where her neck meets her jaw and my words stay locked up in my head streaming in circular rapids, “I love you so much baby, I’m so so in love with you, I love you.” It’s as if my identity has left me for part of hers and part of hers for part of mine. It used to be that my time alone was what made me myself. Now, when I’m not with her all of my worlds of expression and thoughts are rerouted to thinking of the next time I’ll be near her. We sit for hours in silence just touching each other and staring at each other, hours are seconds and days are dreary memories. I describe my past of indifference and stunted emotions for others and I feel like I am a person that was just born from the clouds describing another life that was buried away long, long ago. This morning I woke up and saw her standing in front of her closet in a dark gray suit and back button up. She saw me awake and came to sit near me on the bed. My blood goes cold when she approaches me, still. She stroked my hair and smiled down at me. “I’m going to buy you a sailboat,” she said.

I never thought I could love anyone the way I love her.

I’m very aware right now. It’s because of definable occurrences in my life that have made me so. I sit on the stoop of my Brooklyn apartment and realize how obvious it is how that actual occurrences in the past have manifested themselves in negative ways ad become fallible truths in the recent past. I fear loosing or becoming estranged from this alertness. Every obscure action or sentiment stems from something nameable for me, I must always remember this. In the past I have believed in impregnable mysterious truths that have no foundation when they really do.

When I am with her I need nothing else to entertain me but her. Music, TV, and other people are never needed even though we are so new to each other’s lives. We are always in silence, but even the vapid silence can’t handle our resonant fervor. I can sit near her for hours on end and never grow restless or want to leave her, never. The energy we give and take from each other has a magnetic force greater than any I have known or thought myself capable of feeling so clearly, explicitly, and intrepidly. Last night we reclined on her couch together talking about something… everything. She started kissing my neck and I can’t explain the intensity to which my body pulsated under her warmth. Even when I get a text message from her or see her from a distance my body reacts in this way--like it’s a starving corpse just now becoming aware of its own death and hunger, and yearning, writhing for revival. She kissed my neck slowly and so softly and moved up to my cheek. I turned my face away from her and stared into her faintly lit apartment, trying to focus on anything but the growing fire inside me, trying to maintain some kind of control. She put her hand on my cheek and turned my face back to her. Our lips met… so soft, silent, and slow. The tenderness with which we touched each other defiantly rivaled the electricity striking inside of me and around us in a thousand directions, reaching hidden places I never knew existed. We stayed like this for some time but not long enough it could have never been long enough. “Do you feel this?” she asked me. “Yes.” I said. “Promise me you feel it,” she said. “I do.”

Siberian Kiss in June

How is that we are all made of the same elements constructed in nearly exactly the same way but while most people pass by me like air over the waves
(Hardly able to affect each other than in slight changes in temperature)
you astound me, radiate me, release me?

If one molecule were just slightly shifted
Perhaps a few hydrogen atoms linked to form different geometric shapes
You wouldn’t be you
What could be so small and incompressible
And at the same time be the seminal difference in what makes
What is, Is?

if you’re the wave then I’m the ocean floor
you ride by above me dropping sentiments like
tiny glistening ornaments of ingenuity from your hazey sky
they crash through the 33 miles of the deepest part of the ocean
on to me,
they shatter and sink deep into the sand

through our first night’s bouts of pleasant silence
and muffled laughter in between our kiss
I could hear your voice
Calling to me from Romania
my fingertips brushing your infinity
And your stunning gaze piercing through my head

What is it you’re saying to me?
Your sound waves echoing, bouncing
Off the snowy Siberia of hallow hope
Have you trekked here for me like
A husky through a ceaseless storm
Across 14 of the 50 states and now
You’ve made it?
Riveting.

The first few days
of summer
are as quiet
and as
still
as the first few days
of summer
should be
in my Home Town.
A large patch of
Wild Daisies
springs up
in my backyard
and
it gets bigger
every year.

The paint
is pleasantly
damaged
and blue in
the light
of May.
The trees
step forward
from their
forest hiding
to shake hands
with
Summer Zephyr.

my hometown has a
French Name:
LaFayette.
It is shocking
how vastly
these first few days
of summer
in this town
differ
from the other 362
days
of the year.

LaFayette is:
Gray. As in
dirty slush
melting off
a pair of
abandoned
Nike sneakers
in a garage
that smells of
peanuts and
chemicals.

The houses and
the trees
are too spaced out,
too short and concave--
like they are sleeping.
Imagine an out of proportion
Bob Ross painting.
(and not only
out of proportion
but re-printed on
low quality canvas.)
But unlike
a Bob Ross painting
people apparently
reside here.
most of them
reside here for their
entire lives,
in fact.

Their clothes are worn
and damaged from
the years
of exposure
to the acrid air.
our skin is pocked,
buzzard-like
and we all walk with
a limp.
It’s alright though,
because no one
looks
at each other
in the eye.
Or even through
a car window.
Our cars can barely
push through the
turbulently
vapid
country roads,
tires flooded with
the black ocean
of a sky
that sits
on top of us,
windshields
cracked
from storm
upon storm
of tumbling clouds,
children unloved,
homes forgotten
voices silenced,
by the continuous
hum of
highway travelers
gliding in
Exit 14
for a few gallons of gas
or
a
warm
coffee
for the road.

But the daisies are so lovely
in the first few days of summer.

When I bring you to life
in my
imagination you are,
and always have been
floating.

You’re tiny stomach fades
down toward the ground
into a smeared mass of colors
instead of breaking into two limbs.
And instead of looking down
Into your eyes
I stare up at you,
Like a peon to a goddess

Two days ago
I sat cross-legged
in an enormous day lit room
on the Hudson
You were lying
On your back below
surrounded by strangers
who were going to
Heal you.
Heal you without
using any tools
medicines, or even words
What can be healed without words?
I thought

But the drums and the silence were enough
All the dim noises of the city were blotted out
With the intensity of each person’s strength
Convening above you

There are bowls in my soul, waiting to be used
Red pottery bowls, at least seven of them
And I could feel them rattle
Like fire burning in a far off land

There was a silence in the air she couldn’t bare any longer. She slammed her hands down on her desk and stood up. He was staring at her with his arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe in his unconditional, predictable careless fashion. She looked him in the eyes with an intent she had formerly to keep hidden behind polite words and pseudo compliance when he showed up in her cubical every afternoon with senseless requests and hideously misunderstanding critiques of her writing, or worse, her outfits. She allowed her intense stare to last long enough for him to uncross his arms and shift on his feet ever so slightly, but still he said nothing. She new when she looked away from him it would all be over. Her corporate universe would be shattered, her closet full of two hundred dollar black pencil skirts useless. She slammed the door with so much force that even the aloof janitor who she hadn’t seen look up from his mop bucket in the past fourteen years let out a muffled gasp.

Daphne Nord was born a pre-me. She weighed a mere 3.9 pounds when she was born, twenty-seven years ago. She rested peacefully in the incubator in rural Ohio for three months with tubes going in and out of her orifices and giant faces appearing and disappearing through the plastic window of her world. Daphne deeply believes she remembers those days, and she plays them back through her mind when she can’t sleep at night. She recalls how simple and peaceful her sleep was back then. She thinks about how wonderful it must have felt to be working toward the simple goal of survival, and to lay inert every day sheltered from the chaos of the outside drifting in and our of sleep as she pleased. And her father was there. No mater what anyone tells her, Daphne swears he came to see her when she was in that fish tank of a world, and not only then but again when she was in kindergarten.