People used to tell me I didn't know what love was. That I was a kid, and kids couldn't possibly understand something as complex as love.

But as I grow older, I'm starting to realize. My adult self has lost the capacity to love nearly as much as my childhood self could do. I used to listen to all the beautiful notes that my beating heart played for me. Now, just muffles of ecstasy.

And if not for that little bird that keeps me company. The mild denizen of my faceted mind who knocks on its walls and echoes over and over that "Silence is where life hides the truth". If it weren't for those constant reminders, I'd be pulled into the same river of apathy that I swore I hated so much.

The rests and the pauses were what kept Ravel and Debussy up at night, drunk and thinking and writing the path out of hell onto five black lines before they lost the directions.
And though we are not a French Impressionists, the rests and pauses are yours and mine
They keep us banked here, away from the river and under the twinkling night stars.

They keep me dreaming and they keep me aware.
That I love you.

some illusion has been conjured

to live in your place.

 the view of downtown looked strange today
 a firey beacon cut through the fog
 and filled my head with pixy dust.

 i swear I still was dreaming
 when i saw you in that redeeming sky
 when i woke up that morning to your skin smiling back at me
 when we kissed



and now everything is more real
it all tastes and smells and feels
like it's been roused from hibernation

and the memories of each other like smelling salts,
and a touch of caffeine in our veins
we are slumberless beings
swimming through the nirvana that spans the eternity within us.



and as you lay here beside me
after you'd thrown out your garbage
i pondered the thoughts you must have had
to keep such things around.
and if i would one day be one of them.

But you reassured me with your warmth and your words
that the gem growing inside of you
was only ever touched by those who cared enough to see it.
And That, I could live with.

Then, he just laid there with the hazy rain and the cars pounding through it and thought. How silly, he thought. To long for someone you don't even know. How quickly the independence he'd been building had left the scene, to let the crime of her take hold. His mind fell into that wide hole of her temporary absence and laid there as an anchor of stone. Her words were hardly a bed, but he would treat them no other way. Because some masochistic part of him preferred thinking warmer to feeling it. Because he knew she was feeling warmer now instead of just wishing it. Somehow the cold isn't so cold when your own kindness is a replacement for invisible blasts of ice.
It was the risk of death that sustained his new reason for living. And if he could just fend off the hounds of cynicism for one more day, maybe the angel of hope would come to visit him. And maybe just once he could look out at faces he didn't know and be okay with their blankness. And the stories that lay directly behind would never be told, but maybe they were a flame not meant for him.
All her stories. The ones she once experienced and led him through the same. They had once been her own fires, but now ash. No warmth in them save the thought itself. It was their masochism taking hold again, using thoughts as heat ventriloquism. No, they had to fight it and learn to make their own fire. To remember that they had arms and hands and they could do more with them than just crawl up together and feed each other decadent fancies. They could make the cold go away if they tried to.

And now, it comes down to these moments before us. 

This mere second that holds our lips apart will soon be over. 

And each one after comes as a drop of the Aeternam.

 Just promise to hold onto me in this rush,
and i promise i'll still be holding on to you when we die.

she put down the rosary and stared out the window at a gray afternoon. Her face was dismal like her heart's fabric. Nothing was tugging on its strings as they used to. Nothing was quite so happy or sad as when she was with her (whoever she'd thought of that day).

Orange, white, red. The colors strewn onto metal and brick. Blank as if they were gray. As if they were painted and stationary. The screens, the window. They were one in the same. She was merging into a world that didn't exist and becoming numb to the real one. But neither could offer what she wanted. That spark that sets her off into who she is. She waited and waited and it didn't come.

"Why are you waiting?" she asked.
"Why are you still like this? You have the spark. Why can't You release it?"

A ruminant tirade under the quilt. Echoes off drywall and the hum of cars. She was suffering the unbearable weight of breathing without a reason and speaking without sound. Cowards choose suicide. The brave ones don't have this kind of problem.

She chose mindfulness. The kind that wraps you in the present and never lets go. That kind that dismantles Rosaries and Gelcaps and AK-47s. The kind that finds simplicity in all life's happenings.

And the gray became the crystalline beams of a rainbow. The hum became intricate parts of a whole. Her feet and hands could move, and all she had to do was tell them to. Even in ugliness, beauty was at some point created. The trick was to discover its hiding places.

Back then, we would count our days together: Seven, Thirty, Three-Hundred and Sixty-Five. And Before we could stop to think, we had become the safe parts of each others' minds that slow down our growing up. You and I. we were Us.

But then you grew out of me, and into the city. And I could feel it in the shortness of your breaths and the quickness of your eyes. How your veins were flooded with carbon, and your skin shrouded with whatever heat it could gather. You were becoming more of a line than a point, a blurred stream of your routines spread thin across the minutes. You were racing to become all of yourself in an impossible time.

I remember missing you in those pendulum swings. You were unfathomably quick, I'll commend you for that. Quicker than life. Quicker than me.  But then one day, you stopped ticking and my world stopped moving. And then the doctors started counting down: One-Sixty, One-Twenty, Eighty, Fifty, Thirty, Twenty, Ten.


And so I simply stopped feeling.


That's how you left me. Do you remember? I guess it's silly to think that you would remember such things.

But anyway, I hope you're doing better now. You deserve it.

how do i know what's real?

Define reality. Then see if it evaporates.

Would that our threads run stale
and boring day begets boring night.
how we fail to reset our head-clocks
til the time is expressed as a blurred sumi-e

You know how boldly our growth revealed
that the sun's angles were waning and waxing.
No longer, were they the snapshots of an eternal reality
that we knew as children

We are twenty-somethings on paper
and nothings, really, on TV.
We are trying too hard to be who we are.
And yet, still not enough.

I know so very little of you
because I know so very little of me.

It was a time I should have been sleeping
when I looked up at Selene keeping her quiet vigil on the earth
marking the hours and minutes til rise
of Amaterasu's jubilant fire.

playing hell's games, I turned myself over
to her cold echoed gamma rays,
the siren calling to bring her warmth.

But should I give her the last match in my book.
I would have no more to give
no backup plan, no safety nets.

So I didn't.
we didn't.          I didn't.

And I keep repeating it to myself,
and turning it over,
hoping I'll learn to accept it.

All's Well that Ends.

The bell chimes, the proctor cringes.

already noon, but no one's rising for lunch.

there are but two tenants of this galaxy of a room

she's too consumed with her work to care about him

and he's too consumed with her tests to think freely

She hardly notices the floating paper and passing shadow.

More of an interruption.

The bubbles made a line. Sometimes a zigzag when he was bored.

"Miserable student"

She glanced at the backs of pages, but never paid notice

to the words that happened there.

It was not part of the test, not gradable.

The words were stories of his life, his sorrows,

his crush who was too hooked on looking for love

to find it.

After a while, it got lonely.

to write for someone who didn't listen

while taking notes on everything they say.

And to love people who are too busy

to avoid leading you on.

This is how he learned about the ease of talk.

For in its realm, Three is company, Two's a crowd,

and One is for the painful truths.

when are you free?

Chaos.

Doesn't exist to the unlistening.

Though every speck of dust is truth,

every breath, a choice.

You were a mango. Unripened as I was.

We spoiled so fast in our brown paper bag.

Those sheets that tied our ethylene breath into knots.

And I still remember how black your tears tasted

when i burned it all down before you could escape.

the hill bore the red beacons, synchronizing with the grooves in the highway. But through the frosted windows of her core, they were nothing but a drawing she'd seen often . She had abused herself, turned herself inside-out for them. And they abandoned her for their own fantasies. Perhaps she was too possessive. Perhaps they were her fantasy and she was a hypocrite who was too bitter to move on.

To move on. Did she have the strength to do such a thing? They were her pillars, and she wanted to be theirs. But they sought no solace in her words or arms. They hardened themselves and toughed it out, so why couldn't she so simply replace them with her self-reliance she kept for the rainier days? What was it that made them so necessary to her? And then she realized that her necessity was a type of fear. That their absence would inevitably mean some absence of her own self. The same absence she was feeling now. Empty, numb, and driving the part.

writing is my fever pitch
throws out my faux discretions
and somehow finds such lines and stanzas
a list of bold transgressions.

in words without a fever at all
but full of reason and rhythm and rhyme
of course i'm speaking of yours
not mine.

at times they miss the time they spent
in the queue that never moved.
For action would mean desperation.
or worse, a love disproved.

because, you see,
i am prose, and you are poetry
i fall between your meters and metes
unable to fit your soliloquy

and at the bottom, there is beauty that these syllables do make
when they are free to flow as they will.

without rule.

He had to convince himself that this same feeling hangs in the air even when the leaves have gone. That autumn is not the source of charm. Rather, a reminder of it.

The city howled at the moon as she sat there feeling lifeless, the harsh brightness of the screen drawing her into a whirlwind of thoughts. The kind of thoughts that were never true, but she still perpetuated as a cruel way to lie to herself. She imagined that she had been forgotten by the ones who still understood her. It's not so hard to do when you're depressed, wondering why your friends aren't trying to find you in the same maze they've become lost and alone in. The thoughts become poisons so thick you can feel them crawling into your brain and staining it all a blurred sort of darkness until you've become blind with it. She welcomed them in, knowing they would hurt her. She wanted them to.

"It's less than before", she said.

the city outside never saw light. Always made its own.

"Are you sure it will work this time?"

"You shouldn't be holding any doubts. It's dangerous you know."

He took the candle and went to the other room while she made herself lonely again, as he'd asked. It was the moments of time where she found her safety. The spaces that stand still between the ticks and tocks, the subsiding panic and the following rise. She stuffed blankets into the crevasses of her thoughts so she could sleep on them and perhaps find a way out. More often than not, she just found memories.

But he believed in her. He was the only one to notice the cryptograms because no one else bothered to look far enough. Every time she felt the pain was a lost opportunity to decipher. He cared. He had to care. This was her chance at divinity. His chance to know the truth.

"Are you ready?"

She didn't respond

"Alright. Here we go"

She aligned her back with the floorboards and pretended to sleep as air and copper spun around her. She began to feel it working, moving inside her like a flame dancing in circles. He asked her how she felt, but she couldnt speak. The fluttering feeling was too overwhelming.

"I think it's working," he said.

She felt gravity losing its pull and suddenly there was no up or down. No floor or direction or temperature. And soon after, all that remained was silence and inifinite clarity. But inside, she was calm. She was blissful.

The anima of a spirit has no delineation or detail. It becomes homogenous, weightless, impenetrable. Unimaginable.

Was she a spirit? She couldn't decide. It wasn't her decision or really a decision at all. Whatever she'd become, she remained cognizant of her own existence.

"...a-......are you..."

The flickering candlelight showed his face, incredulous and fearful. He hesistantly made his way into the room. Inching closer to the faint glow he saw where he had left her. A gust from an open window snatched up his candle flame and flung the window shut. It was silent.

"Yes"

Taking this out of my book, so i figured i'd immortalize it as a short story

“Rena. Can you play me a song?”

”Sure. What do you want to hear?”

”Play me what you’re feeling right now. Not the feelings of some old composer guy. I want to hear exactly what you're feeling right now.”

”Okay.”

I slowly walked over to the piano and sat down, taking in its scent, the same as any good piano. That scent always calms me, reminds me of my childhood. I laid my fingers on the keys and closed my eyes, and let the feelings flow out as they came.

The first key was an F, my favorite. It blossomed and swelled like winds before a storm, and sent the heat of our lives away, leaving the cool, sweet, rain; cool as the September night. My fingers fluttered up and down scales, changing direction every now and then. I ended on a long note and focused on it like the last sigh of an era. It sank into me and slowly peeled away more layers. The next layer was desperate and cold and I let it brush the keys. The sound felt dry and black, like walking through a forest, recently burned, dying embers still snapping and hissing. It was the quiet screams of the dead. A thousand restless souls within my own, with power overwhelming enough to stop me. My fingers moved away from the keyboard, but the agony kept going.

”I’m sorry, David.” I said, barely together. “I can’t go on.”

”Hey hey. Don’t cry. I’m sorry I asked you to do this.”

He came over and sat next to me on the bench.

“It’s just…I feel like I can really understand you when you play. And you’ve played more than enough for me to understand how you feel. I’m sorry, Rena. Let’s just go to bed.”

”Okay…”

We moved upstairs to my room and I quickly got in bed. David turned off the light this time and came to sit beside me. My tears had evaporated by now, and I started thinking to myself: David is still here. I shouldn’t waste this time crying, I should make every minute with him the greatest minute, because these will be the moments I’ll always remember when he’s away.

Before he left me, David brushed his fingers through my hair.

"Rena. Someday, when I get back. The three of us will break away from all of this and be free."

"Free...I'd love that."

if you do not feel it

then don't have me believe that you do

pity in love is a sentiment closer to insult

than consolation

Sure, people die all the time.

but each person dies.

dying isn't something you do together.

It's not our voices they control.

They can't police what we say to each other

unless you let them intimidate you.

Our throats are our power.

And I intend to use mine until they've slit it.

that night, in my mind,

i was driving the dark road home

from your place to mine.

the mist that had formed was my solace and solitude,

the place i was most myself.

and i imagined life as a denizen of limbo

finding comfort for the eternal absence

of the goddess you became in my eyes.

when i got home,

i set my stuff down and cried.

what you'd broken was everything i was

but nothing we were.

because you were still there

following me home

holding me while i cried

on that cold couch we fell asleep on.

the mist of solace still floating on the night

through your veins and into mine.

for you, death was just a part of life

it surrounded you, but never became you.

you wouldn't let it.

I saw the turmoil welling up in your eyes

as you gazed at my own, closed,

at the funeral in march

and my tears dropped

from the sanctum of the damned

to your fingers in the living.

Death was always within me

but it would never touch you

when i would get lonely, i built a taller wall

and painted my desires upon it.

then you knocked on the door

and the paintings came to life.

and i was too afraid to open it.

kingdom of clouds

mountains of water

take me away

oh take me home

friends from the past

let's all meet together

back to the place

we're not so alone

inside this cavity,

a jagged caress bludgeons the insides of my ribcage.

my spirit rotten with anxiety,

tired of work, but addicted to escaping it.

and you, with your niceties as broad as the Great Wall.

Blocking the lines of communication at the brink.

We could become a war,

and no one would know until the treaty.

I wandered to the shoreline to watch the water kiss the sun. Never had I seen such a sky. Small clouds hung in the air, like bright crimson jellyfish that rose as angels from the ocean. I thought of him. What he was doing. What the sun looked like from the other side of earth.
"David...", I whispered longingly, hanging on to the first teardrop as the Pacific pulled it away. I lost.

Michelle was a cellist in the modern sense. I'd gone to all the shows that her string ensemble had throughout the city. I remember seeing their first show and gazing at how gracefully their arms held time within them. The music they created involved the entire instrument in every way possible. bowing, plucking, tapping, rubbing. You'd think playing like that would make the sound too harsh or out-of-place, but the sound was magnificent. It was as if the instruments were singing out their gratitude to be loved for everything they were. She told me that when she played, she imagined being in a paradise where every ounce of effort was a means to the same, beautiful end. She became one with the grandest orchestra, that played for nothing more than the rapture at beholding itself.

Music spoke to her in ways that poetry could never touch. Whenever she played, I fell silent with envy for the things she experienced that a poet could only wonder about. But then she would always remind me that i had the power to change minds, shift the tides of the human struggle with nothing but a few words, beautifully arranged. It should be fair, but it's not. The only writers who changed anything lived through hell and sometimes they survived. I was no hell-dweller.

Suggested Listening: Max Richter - Maria, the Poet (1913)

The horizon is dim, but waxing.

the morning, chilly and dewdropped.

i set the toaster and you walk to the porch

where you read the morning like a newspaper.

i have seen eternity in the light between our eyes.

in bodies made sacred by the closeness they share

and the millions of steam droplets that rise from our flesh.

whether friends or lovers in lifetimes to come,

no foe or distance may shatter this,

our breaths as one, our desires forgotten,

the moment our souls became complete.

I'm hiding my eyes, pretending to watch my own steps, waiting for the shadow of the angel of death, whose hemlock kiss shall quench all my desires in sweetest slumber.

But I suppose living should be our lesson in chance.

How we learn that none of this could ever have been written before, for no one would read it.

Or if it has been written, at least we're not alone.

It's so easy to write to the world

So difficult to write to you.

Your face is not pixels.

My voice is not thumbs.

The talk that we're looking for

glides clean from our lungs.

she was a phantom to him. more of a mystery than anything certain or concrete. And he was obsessive with her incomprehensibility. He wandered through her consciousness, lost in the thickness of its layers, forging relentlessly through every glance and silent pause. She would never give him an easy way in. Her ego could only be distilled from constant admiration. It was her high, her addiction, her every being from the moment she decided that romance would be her chemical. Falling in love would end her. So she set traps as he got closer, picked fights, held her silence. This one was abnormally persistent, sweetly coy. A man still in his youth. Passionate. The same emotion she had never allowed the thought of love to gain sight of. But passion is a contagion, a silent buzz in the minds of the close, and she couldn't escape disease.

When he'd reached where she was, he approached her gently, whispering the few words he could find. They'd been playing it so long. they didn't realize that there was life beyond the goal line. They stood in front of each other, her eyes welling up at the ability to feel love again. But his were of no tenderness or warmth. Instead, she found eyes full of misery. A man worn thin by effort without definite end. She had expected the visage of a lover. But a lover would not be so miserable to find another. The game had broken her opponent. Once a man madly infatuated, had become an old soul, numb to anything she could give to him, well-meaning or not. And she realized that there was no prize at the bottom of the box. For either of them. It was a lifeless concentration of all the frustrations long past that left scars. Scars they would trace over and over to remember the particular heartache that sadists find momentary fulfillment in.

And when she tried to find the source of the heartache, she found the same traps she had laid. The same silences and arguments. Except that the bitterness of his spite filled her lungs whenever she walked near him. Their game of persistance had become a game of revenge. And so they parted ways as an attempt at peace, still hoping to one day find the good in each other. Trusting nothing but destiny itself to the reigns of their lives.

A love may be understood, but incompletely.

By accepting that it is far greater than emotion.

Far smaller than a word.

This is where I saw you last.

This is where I once decided to spend my entire life looking for you.

I was blind. I was mute.

A crush will do that to you, y'know.

Of all the voices I couldn't bear listening to

Yours was the hardest.

The sweetest.

"it's just...when i'm with you, I become so insignificant. I feel like just this massive pile of disgusting that can't escape the knowledge of its identity. You leave your words at the doorstep of my psychotic imagination and he pushes them around until they get lost in my bloodstream and singe every inch until i'm made of burns on the inside. And I know you don't mean to do it. You're not that type of person."

"Well, I must be some awful person in your eyes if that's how you feel."

"No, it's just-", a sigh,"I never know what it is that you're thinking. And that makes this whole trust thing difficult."

"I'm ...sorry you feel that way."

"What does that even mean?"

"Well what do you want me to say? I'm sorry for being a cold-hearted bitch, okay?"

"That's not what I'm saying."

"But that's what you mean isn't it? I can't do a thing about how you interpret me. I told you before, I'm not an emtional person. You know me. You have for more than a year now. Everything I think and feel, you've known about. If that's not enough for you, then why are you still with me?"

That question is never the start of anything good. Things may end better off, and maybe a breakup is the right thing to do. But it's never good. This is the question where you start considering what it's like to be single again and suddenly you recall all of the lopsided memories you have. 'You were lonely? No way. It was too much fun to be lonely. And what is this mess I've gotten into and can I call it off just like that? Is it really that easy?'

It takes a sane mind to realize that time is a soil where good memories grow and bad ones lie dormant. That it really is that easy to walk away, but it's a long and painful walk home. You don't want it to end here, not with this question.

But unfortunately there is no good response to this question, therefore I can't end the story properly.

The End.

That you're too fucked up and sick of yourself

to know the way out.

That all's well that ends well,

that is, if it ever ends at all.

These are the things that work us to dust,

that makes dead weight from the burden

until it all becomes so heavy

that we collapse underneath.

Cracks become Crevasses

concrete tunnels underground

keep watch against the waters.

but as they give, we'll rise up from

the dungeons of our fathers

In Manhattan. Somewhere between the 1/2/3 and L trains, a man plays his guitar. To call him homeless would be to silence his song. A man so broken finds no home in walls and a ceiling, but in his flesh and his sound.

You can tell he's from the 60s. Playing just like my dad used to play. With every string singing about the sun of greenwich village or the dry night air of Barcelona. And you couldnt tell which he'd lived in all his life.

love is a lot like fixing a sink for the first time

you learn a lot by breaking things.

I stood before the prominence of my soul

hissing through the salt and steam

that i deserve every last bit

of the misery i'm buried in.

but I'm still not sad enough to be happy.

I wish i could mend my veins

with all the roots in the ground between us.

and send my love through the channels of earth,

the trees and the grass, the sun and the sky.

If only for the entire Earth to tell you how loved you are.

I watched out the window, to the east

where the city lights burned into the night sky above,

a permanent sunrise, an eternal rebellion against the night.

but we should not forget,

the only permanence in the world is death.

for the sun had risen before these lights first hummed

and will continue rising when the wires run dry.

you could journey into that nothingness

to see what only the blind have seen,

a darkness much too strong to carry hope upon its spine

unless by force or by letting it go

you wander to that idea of an exit

follow the trail, by echos, by ghosts.

but slowly you come to realize

you're only going deeper.

and you eventually get lost in it,

become nothing in that dark sea.

And die, never knowing what it is

that you were missing.

or

you could bring a flashlight.

to everything,

there is a romantic answer and a logical answer.

love is where that answer is the same.

When she was 18, she decided that her life would never be fulfilling unless she lived it like a ride that didn't end. So she left home and made a plan to see everything.

And then she did it.

She believed in every major religion, but only until she found something that bothered her about it. She lived on the edges of the earth, surviving on what she could find only to do it again somewhere else. She'd even learned all the ways to tell a fortune, but her favorite one was reading palms.

She told me that a hand was a person's journal. That stories both past and future could be told from it. And that even if I looked closely, I'd never know the traits of a hand's owner. Only the kind of person they were.
"The hand is not a place for prejudice.
In the palm, there is no woman or man, poor or rich
there is only an endless spring of human expression."

But then she told me that her life had still felt unfulfilled and ended her story with, "So here we are", like she'd taken me on a weekend trip to her parents' house. I searched for the usual words, but they were empty words. Words not worth the weight of her story. Had she seen me as I'd felt, i'd have been no more than a speck of salt that escaped onto the table. Did she think I could actually fill the void that the entire sum of Earth failed to?

"I'm glad we did this. I haven't really talked to someone familiar in ages. It's been a pretty lonely set of years to tell you the truth. You think the strangers you meet will be all the company you need, but that's not true at all. You feel so small when you're floating with the wind."

And I realized. That she too felt like a salt crystal. That there was a limit to how superhuman a superhero could be.

Everybody needs somebody. It was really that simple.

you miss too many people,

remember too many places,

too many thoughts.

you've worked hard to get where you are

how dare these things interrupt you.

but they're like weeds

they get in the way of the useful plants

but really, if it's a stronger plant,

shouldn't it be the one to survive?

really, we're all insane.

our words that make it so.

why wait for a sign

when you've already decided what it's going to say?

Link

follow the split down the middle

of the grey matter

where it's all chatter and shit

just a room full of voices

and a mind so sick.

Reverence

Link

and then the sun came to the world

and reached with fiery hands.

to make from such pale face of hers

a green for all her lands.

And all her foulest pains and wounds

he closed and healed anew.

And stopped the dreaded pestilence.

that drew her so askew.

And when her children gazed in awe

at how their mother wept,

they remembered then the loneliness

that they themselves had kept.

With Reverence for Mother Earth

and Love both far and wide

we will remember once again

the human trapped inside.

I went to the bridge the next morning, dressed in my favorite spring dress. White and flowing, embroidered flowers in blue and purple with bees leaving swirly trails of dots. I figured I'd dress up for St. Peter. Maybe he'd spare me for being pretty.