laughing with a mouth of blood.

i wonder

could i love the stars

if they fell from the sky

or the moon

if it pulled the waves to my feet?

could i love

the ground i walk upon

as much as i have loved

those who have treated me

with a similar indifferent kindness ?

well it seems i have

already given away

all the love they have given me

and now i only have broken pieces to rearrange.

those already on the outside of society tell me, “love is love”

as even they forbid the love

of the moon and the stars and the earth.

love is love,

they say,

but is love still love

when you’re under construction?

this is something new. i have not written in a while, but i am back. i keep asking myself, in my life, am i transcending it all, or am i just being stupid ? here is another version of the same piece.

there once was a boy named she

who loved the sun

and glowed with his warmth;

who waited patiently

as the moon brought the waves

to her feet;

as the ground pressed up

with the same indifferent kindness

to give love

to the boy named she,

and she loved them

with the fervor with which

she loved all creation

which treated her

no different than any other atom,

but instead judged her

for spreading her love-seed

over the land

like a careless, foolish johnny appleseed;

spreading it thick on the toast

of those who only consume

prosecco and petit fours.

love is love,

you say,

but is love still love

when you’re fighting a war ?

i just wanna be a sheep

so much for dancing in time,
you pulling me in,
whipping your arms around,
the You you can sense
pushed against the Me i hope
you think i am
sloppy
and gripping me closer
dragging us around in a waltz
that ignores the music;
i don’t know what to think…
Just take the lead
I’m trying to follow your feet
Which seem to find no certain pattern
As of yet.

in the back of my mind on the tip of my tongue is the answer to it all

It seems like the best opportunities spring up in places where you aren’t especially looking for them. In my case, it happened to be a low-paying job as a waitress at an exotic sushi restaurant in the heart of my football-watching, pizza-eating, beer-drinking hometown of Little Falls, New Jersey. Being probably the only person in Little Falls who has actually heard of Japan, it was not hard for me to get this job, even though I was young, had no experience whatsoever, and didn’t particularly need a job. I was just bored.

i just/can’t get you out of my head

Last night
On the dank and hazy street
Of gray and silver
Two aquiline raindrops fell
And I stepped tentatively on
Wondering
When the storm was coming.

some say our life is insane but it isn’t insane on paper

 

Take Back Cool!, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Product Red

 At about 10 p.m. on the 18^th of February, a group of about fifty students, members, and supporters of the activist group Take Back NYU! began a three-day sit-in at the Kimmel Center on Washington Square. The demonstration was meant to be a peaceful protest of the university’s lack of financial transparency and refusal to make public the yearly budget, among other demands. The event got the campus community talking and brought outside attention to the university for several days as students, residents of the community, activists, and the media all gathered around the protesters. The situation, meant to be a nonviolent student protest of university policy, soon became a mish-mosh of different ideals and different ideas about the students’ actions, demands, and manner of execution.

i know it’s all about perceptions/and i accept you as my very first mover

i love this place, but i hate the people here.

but i know this is just a microcosm for the rest of the world, a metaphor; living in manhattan, trying to see the stars is so hard because of all the obnoxious light. trying to hear someone playing a guitar across the street is so difficult because of all the tires on asphalt and truck motors and squeaking breaks and sirens and wailing and and

here, it is never about what you leave behind, it’s what others leave behind for you. where does it come from? i don’t know. it’s here. get fucked up, sleep, wake up, repeat. you live, and then you die. you are no more, no less. why try? “i want i want i want i want”

how self-important you are to think that you will matter to others, because all that matters to the others you want to impress is themselves. we are all alone in this. the people, they love you because in you they see themselves. they love you because they want to be loved, to rise up, to feel better than everyone else, for just a split second; for a lifetime.

how dare you think that you are any better than anyone else, when time only can judge.

“What could he do, live/with one hand tied/behind his back?”

a few years ago for whatever reason i thought it would be a good idea to rip a page out of a french textbook, except i guess i’m not so good at ripping, more so at pulling things apart, and it came apart in a crooked fashion showing the fibers of the paper reaching across to the separated piece. strangely enough, the piece i took from the page had only full words on it, nothing cut off by my oafish desire for the french language. the scattered words, while not part of the same sentences, were probably part of instructions, in english, for a practice exercise. they spelled out, “who is in the things that you do?”

let me digress for a minute just to say that as foolish as it may sound i absolutely believe in fate and karma. so many proven laws of the physics state that nothing is created and nothing disappears; it is just passed on, given and taken, as if we are throwing the same ball around for all of eternity. this doesn’t mean i think that we have no free will–we absolutely have a choice in almost everything we do–but i feel that sometimes things appear in our lives like puzzle pieces or sign posts, that it is up to us to decide what to do with them.

eliot weinberger believes that the act of writing is a reincarnation of past writers or persons in history. in writing, we make other writers immortal because they will continue to show themselves in the text by way of their influence. they are then on the page forever, in a concrete context. it stops time, puts each person or instance in a specific moment, brings the reader back to that moment temporarily halting the present moment of that person’s life in favor of a return to the past. in writing, we cannot help but display those who have influenced us and continue to influence us, and i believe this can be extended to life in general–we are a sum our influences and more, a theory of these things applied to the present. sometimes we don’t stop to think how they influence our morals, actions, goals, way of life, what we say, what we think about, how we perceive the world. this is why you can never understand just one person fully, you have to understand everything that stands behind that person, everything that person is drawn to, has seen, who is reincarnated in that person each day. what stands between the present and understanding ourselves is the gap that holds the collection of souls that we run on.

who is in the things that you do?

in five years time i might not know you.

it’s amazing how we move forward with such speed that we don’t realize what we held on to or what we left behind.

 i don’t think we change. i think we unlock hidden potentials, we have parts of us that we suppress and only let out when it becomes acceptable or reinforced  by some factor, be it someone’s attention or other reward.

when plants are placed in a new environment, they adapt to fit the new environment, expressing certain genes and growing around restraints, adjusting to a superfluous supply of something that was previously limited, branching out into negative space.

sometimes we are speeding ahead so fast that the wind blows in our eyes and  yesterdays become blurred and switched and twisted, it becomes easier to look ahead to progress and to catch opportunities as they fly by.

we grow fast

but we remember our roots.

all i wanna do is

the trouble with kindness

 

today I watched an ambulance

weave through a wave of traffic

trying like a child playing a puzzle game

to manipulate the pieces

and win. But in this case,

 

the prize was someone’s life.

I guess when

someone tries to save you,

from mortal danger

caused by your own foolishness or

 

human vulnerability

you don’t complain

about the way he goes about it,

at least not right away.

Today I offered up

 

my still-beating Pride,

my fractured  and compacted Dignity

to what has been your willingness

to treat my open wounds,

and I could not find

 

the same place, the same genuine compassion,

only the amusement at someone else’s struggle

and utter failure.

Did I mistake the signs

and the flashing red sirens

 

for some other

that just happened to be rushing

toward the same place in time?

I guess we are beyond the point

of civility, stranger to stranger,

 

and instead have moved on

to the dry, parched state

of two people who can sit with each other

stare blankly ahead

and say nothing.

 

Perhaps your ambulance was just

stuck in traffic

stuck in the middle of a little boy’s

game, rigid and plastic,

and trying to get through.

 

Or perhaps it is just me

calling for help in

trivial emergencies,

fear-mongering in times of

only slight insecurity or loneliness

 

solely for the purpose of seeing the white vehicle,

official, important,

with piercing sirens and bright intruding lights,

disregard all laws of traffic

and the others, in their separate cars—

 

all struggling to get by

just the same,

blaring their horns and rushing by indifferently

on this one-way street—

just to get to me.

if you touch me, well, i think i’ll scream.

a work in progress, constantly shifting:

I remember-
And I know all too well now-
The feeling of putting on faded dresses,
Stiff, just-washed jeans
And finding one day
That they don’t fit quite right anymore;

My mother’s reaction
As I try to cover my bulging,
Child-bearing, baby-making hips,
One of shame,
As I tell her, because it’s just too much,
Ma, the button won’t close.

My mother dressed me
Up until I was in the fifth grade
In pink velour sweaters and
Ridiculous, itchy stockings under cheap skirts,
And she always tied my hair in a braid

Which I was famous for,
My long hair tied up tightly behind my back
Where I could not reach or see
Or think about. It was okay this way
For many years.

But I grew and stretched and sprouted
In ways I was told that I would
And I did, awkwardly,
Yet as if I were one seed of a particular flower-
Planted and watered and tended to,
I would always grow the same way as the rest,
I was told./
When I look back at old pictures,
Strange and familiar faces
Smiling (or cringing) at the absent photographer,
Now losing their color and their relevance,
How stupid, how silly do I feel,
How embarrassed

Now that I can see how badly
How desperately I wanted to continue
To wear the clothes that so obviously -so clearly, now-
Were snapping at the seams,
Uncomfortably thrown upon a body
Screaming to get out

Buttons and threads and pieces of cloth
The need to affirm
A need for pink and frilly things,
Pretty, dainty, delicate, a child’s precious doll,
Created in a factory
Destined to burn./
When we were young girls
We stuffed our teeny tiny cups
With delicate tissue-kleenex brand-
And we’d study ourselves in the mirror,
This is what I’ll be, a real woman.
The mirror said nothing, only icily reflected.

And in a few years when we had real tissue,
We threw away our Kleenex and
Spilt over, shoving ourselves into
Teeny tight jeans and halter tops,
Starving ourselves to fit the silhouette on the billboard,
But I grew and I could not help it

But grow until one day
I could not bear the shame
And I told my mother I cannot fit these jeans
And I told my friends, my non-friends, my peers, I cannot fit this image
And I became the absence of what I was
And I took on the awkward, misfitting pieces of them all

And I made them my own,
And I stood for what they would not say
What they were afraid to be,
The girl who waxed and plucked each day,
But wondered, one day, if she should just let it grow like beautiful wild weeds;
The boy who learned how to run and throw and catch

But who wanted just to dance.
I said why she he it
Why not hello how are you
Thank you friend
I was trying to say, why is it still a struggle
To tell you I can’t help but be/

Sort of blind, though my eyes are open,
Like a bird flying against the wind
Getting blown in so many directions
But I still can’t see where I’m going?
Why do I have to wear the pants
Of my generation, size 3, 5, 9,

Always announcing woman, woman, woman-
Why do I have to be that
Woman, woman, woman,
Why couldn’t I just happen to be
(A Female)
A human animal?

We are all just living beings fighting for the next breath,
All chicks hatching from the same white eggs,
Looking to their mothers-
Feed me the meat of the earth
Tell me what it means to live
Teach me how to fly.

But how can we grow
If we are fed dirt and worms?
How are we supposed to fly if
We can’t fully extend our wings?
How can we take off
If we have only been taught to crash?

I wanted out.
I cut my hair,
Bought better-fitted clothing that I thought was
Pretty-interesting, and pretty-
But it didn’t matter after all;
It wasn’t important.

What was important was that
I took it all in
Stoic against the waves that crashed on all sides
Waves which pulled many asunder
As they followed the tide
Followed righteously their projected paths

Like projectiles shot out of a machine,
One and the next the same,
Telling themselves at night,
As they wonder about minute unhappinesses
Though they thought they had it all,
I’m hungry, they think, but I’m pretty:

Why can’t they, why can’t we all transcend it all,
Why can’t we define ourselves
On our own terms?
Why do we all have to grow as dainty wilting flowers
Expressing XX, XY on our petals
Naming ourselves by what we are told; have internalized;

The punnett squares of our lives
Telling predictable patterns
Like math equations,
Our lives all numbers,
Adding up to one thing always
The same sum.

But numbers change.

Sometimes late at night
Walking home from who knows where-
Because we can never remember
Who we were the day before, in this city,
Nor predict who we will be
The day after-

The speeding orange numbers
on the clock near Union Square
Catch me
And I always think that maybe
Today will be the day when I understand.
It never is;

One counts up while the other counts down,
The numbers meet in the middle
To form a perfectly balanced, perfectly sensible,
Mathematically correct paradoxical clock,
One which I will continue to be fascinated with
One which I will never fully comprehend.

Will I ever truly, fully understand
How this clock works? Can one ever
Truly count up and down at the same time?
What about the space
In between?
I will never understand

Because it moves too fast-
Rushing by like the scent
Of lovers walking through our lives,
Subways carrying away
People you never met, people you will come to know
Intimately or otherwise.

Numbers always change.