1. |
Ausonia Plaza
03:07
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Unredeemed and ill,
From Breed’s Hill to Charlesgate on the last day of March,
We spoke for hours but Coolidge Park feels like another life.
Regret and shame,
The corners fold back, the pistil sags and bends.
A vernal frost folds into the wake of the year.
Despite living here for for years,
I feel I’ve never seen this city before,
The harsh sunlight in the unsheltered plaza of stone.
Ausonia
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2. |
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The day that I saw the body of a half-foot dragon fly
at the base of the stairs like a sign from a revenant god,
I was coming home from the laundromat
where the machine ate my quarters and detergent and spun my sheets cool and dry.
Sucking on ice cubes at night,
the smell of Tic-Tacs wafting through the air.
Coloring book walls in every alley like a knockoff 90s West Berlin.
Kowloon buildup,
A mile high.
Concrete and blackened feet.
From my room I see it all.
A 30 pound bucket of rocks,
A ficus, bromeliad, and Boston fern,
A stupendous leg of granite discovered standing by itself.
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3. |
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Dead white sea worm on the beach when I was nine,
Turgid, blighted, and bleached,
and glistening against the odds.
An annelid or some shade reified by time.
Among the hot gray rocks, I’m sure
It almost landed underfoot.
Like a fig tree, dry for a while.
Calmly bleeding, forty.
Cool white form in foam.
Lye-white eidolon in the bottom of my mind,
From the beach near Mobile to the steel mills.
Like a beast from some great tale,
But casual as a pigeon in an underpass.
I didn’t set foot in an ocean for a year,
Unable to forget that leviathan.
Were you a lie or a myth or were you real?
You made my memory a reliquary.
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4. |
Calumny
01:54
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5. |
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Setting down feet on School,
I wonder why I can’t see the world from here.
And I realize Audobon’s out and the sandwich shops are closed.
So I walk north to Irving park,
Lined with coffee shops and bars
We used to drive by every night on the way from your place to mine.
I walk north towards Sunnyside,
And despite the cold rain and salt I feel I belong,
And that everything might be okay this time.
I walk north towards Lincoln Square.
There’s a dead pigeon in a planter and the chicken shop’s sign’s burnt out.
And I realize,
I’m using the notion of home as a distraction from the multitude of ways in which I’m constantly letting myself down. And finally, the walls and windows of the house I built for myself come crumbling down as I realize I can’t hide and that what I was trying to hide from was some fictional externalized notion of otherness that caused all my problems while idly, innocently I stood by.
A warm wind wanders in.
And I’m struck by
Jaundiced snow slung low from streetlights so tight it hurts,
And a nagging regret whenever this time of year comes around.
Some things never change.
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6. |
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Caught on a fault line for the first time,
Startled like a tween by the absurdity of being
As I consider life in the confines of past fears,
Pacific mountain battery or a death blow to a fig tree.
And I stop.
Icily maligned in the lamplight,
Circling but staid like a compass on a carousel
As conjecture and hope dissipate like steam in
A love that’s good and pure and stands on its own.
And I stop.
Caught from behind this last time.
Walking down Turner St. puking up my guts.
As I consider life without the soft touch of fig leaves on skin,
The sneetch-yellow star, or a death fit for a prince.
And finally, I stop considering.
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7. |
Blue Moon of Kentucky
03:24
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Under the canopy on Transylvania Parkway,
The only stretch that feels like home,
In a world of meaningful numbers
I spy 2 1 4 3 1 4 6 0 6 1 8.
If [¬ (A ∧ (¬ A ∨ (B ∧ C))) ∨ B] must be,
I can't intuit like the best of them.
I stare at the mirror in the guest room.
God, it looked just like me and that's the truth.
In an assault on the mysticism of the everyday
I eat a subway sandwich in the parking lot of a gas station.
I see a cat with ears decaying.
And I think 4 13 7 9 0 2 2 1 5.
If [¬ (A ∧ (¬ A ∨ (B ∧ C))) ∨ B] must be,
I can't intuit like the best of them.
I stare at the mirror in the guest room.
God, it looked just like me and that's the truth.
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8. |
Die Da?!?
02:22
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Selig sind, die da Leid tragen.
In solitary hours of the mind
It is lovely to walk in the sun
Passing along the yellow walls of summer, Son of Pan
The color of turmeric, a golden hour, a honey moon, or a slug
Knees up, four, three, criss-cross, pull, right knee, three, two, criss-cross
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9. |
The Enviable Course
04:13
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Hot flashes all through the winter
And on a hot night in San Francisco,
An old Mercedes cloaked in dew
Idles by the stoop while frantically I write to you.
An inbred dog shitting in a planter,
A strange man trying to tell me riddles.
It all flies in the face of the weight of this.
The city’s aware I’m unfit for reconciliation.
Nervously, I fumble through my lexicon,
But all I find is tropes and regretful ramblings.
There’s nothing to say to change the way these years have gone.
There's no way to clear the fog from the window.
Just the blinking of lights, the calm before a landslide.
The eternal fear of the threat of impending backslide.
The enviable course of the life and death of a mayfly.
The comparable fate of a fig tree in bloom in Bethany.
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10. |
Perfidy
01:18
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11. |
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First day, loose cascades from the palisades.
Reflecting on Lake Michigan, October 18th.
I recall my brashness is just an acquired trait.
Off Morningside, the picnic bench and news on the radio.
Soap smells giving way to salt on moving day,
Rushing between your house and my car on Wellington,
Blushing, I admit my foolish tendency
To mythologize and canonize my warmest memories.
Laughing about the girls on the ferry boat,
The fake Navajo blanket on the ground in Avondale,
The dumplings on Archer on the first snowy day of the year.
Being as sentimental as I am, I couldn't throw away
the receipt from the parking garage at the airport,
And I carried it with me still at the end of the month.
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