Orion's belt

I'm not always inspired to write poetry anymore because the last year of over-writing and under-reading has stolen my words. Here's some moments worth coming back to.

We're sitting on top of a San Francisco hill under Orion's belt grasping for Blind Melon lyrics with Mickey, waiting for a cab that's never going to come. The capo's come off and his amateur fingers search the frets for the right notes that don't seem to come, either. I want to sing, but I don't know the words, because, I tell him, I have a melody brain, not a lyrics brain.

(This is the guy who rounded up 55 bottles of ibuprofena and throat lozenges for me to appease the not-truly-sick in rural Guatemala, back before customs started checking my suitcases and taxing me for useless placebos for the poor. I haven't seen MM in years, but I watched him learn to speak German from afar. He's that cheerful, amazing, genuinely good, uniquely talented handsome guy that every girl I knew had a crush on, but he's so self-assured, so adventure-loving that he was totally oblivious to it. Much to my chagrin, I didn't recognize him at my good friend's wedding. I blamed his beard, but underneath it all I know my brain has changed. Academia is slowly ruining my social memory functions, my facial perception and retrieval, it's slowly ruining me.)

Xing's melody brain tells his tongue to agree. His camera sits on the sidewalk, lens up, trying to capture those three little holes in the sky with a long exposure. He leaves it out too long and everything turns white. I point my futile phone screen, an eighteen-month addiction I'm trying to kick out of my life unsuccessfully, towards the heavens, and Orion's belt hides in the black.

(Xing I met at a 21st birthday party on Green Street. I recognized his face but again, no name. It evaporated where the turbulent waves of my conscious thought meet the air of drowning in too much. Xing agrees with me that life is quite dull, and this is the most random and exciting thing that's happened to either of us in months. He swipes across his smartphone screen trying to download the uber app. Mickey's eyebrows scrunch up in pity as he realizes how unlivably boring our routines are. He is free and I envy him and don't at the same time.)

I pull up a youtube video of "Lousy Smarch Weather" and we all watch Willie and his kilt catch on fire. I have five bars of AT&T reception up here despite the insistence of the cab company to the contrary. We laugh deep-throated at the genius of the Simpsons and I am thankful that I'm not alone in space.

When was the last time I accepted uncertainty in the midst of familiar strangers?

Blinds up

The best surprise was four warm bodies
(seen better days, curlier hair, more supple skin)
Sitting around the dark wood gleaming with a coat
Of fresh polish and four faces (seen better days,
fewer wrinkles, eyes sparkling with light at the beginning
of the tunnel) reflected back in stainless
steel plates adorned with overbaked chestnuts and too cold
pizza. But the strangers staring in at the bay window
(seen better days, freshly windexed) wouldn't look twice
Because our holy silence is almost normal.

Thank you for small unnoticed miracles.
Thank you for giving Clarence his wings

loves me

Everyday is a shattering
a smattering of petals ripped
from dozens of long stems your former lovers never gave you,
your fingers mindlessly meditating on a childhood mantra,
and now the air is thick with pollen
and bees droning at their targets, missing their guides,
and around you the colors make all the suffering seem worth it,
and you sneeze

before I wasted my youth he gave me tulips in a blue glass
made for sipping, for morning routines, for water enemas,
and those flowers draped over the walls of their new home
like the limbs of a gangly teenager, wilting despite
their sprightliness
and I flashed him dimples he'll never forget

when my beauty was seeping away
I delivered a morning bouquet of tacky carnations and daisies
to a brunette whose smile I'll never forget

to receive is human
to give is to be God

I wanted you to be different
I wanted you to make me God

Lambert

This woman I love told me she is from another planet,
and as we sit in the car, engine running, watching the
suitcases and trolleys and goodbye kisses float by
one by one like snowflakes landing on our tongues
--ephemeral, beautiful, flavorless impressions--
I think I agree with her.

Her eyes are vibrant, her cheekbones tall and proud,
and her hair curly, short, inspires you to cut off your own,
overnight gray from a spiritual awakening that left her
too wise for my kind. We hold hands and my mind feels blank
as one of the travelers--an old friend I've never met--catches my eye,
catches me people-watching, catches sight of my parted lips
and my arrested heartbeat.

She and I, we hug goodbye, our farewell more esoteric than normal.
More unsettling. More eerie. More permanent. Frighteningly permanent.
The wheels of my luggage grate against the pavement and
my heart wishes these unpleasant thoughts away
and she drives away.

He greets me at the water fountain. His dark eyes, the dimple
on his left cheek, his outstretched hand beg the question of why
it's been six long years without more than a smile in the parking lot.
We talk like long-lost brother and sister about Peru, about injustice
(we always knew it would be so) until it's time for me to board,
until it's time for me to lose her.

recovery

The gratification of
erasing false starts
finds you just as unravelled as
any other pleasure

tingling fingers
itching, frozen, honey icicles
threatening to drip over
all of your opus, your corpus, like
naughty candle wax

with every heartbeat he didn't call
you grew a little older and one foot
inched carefully in front of the other
along the slick ice of despondency

what gets elided in the viscosity
is the rigmarole of feeling
dull feeling

No alarms and no surprises

Change is the nature of this fractal self, modulation
to the point that I no longer recognize the real,
no longer distinguish it from the accoutrements I've grown for
the benefit of those who don't give a shit
and when these appendages take on a life of their own
and cease to become vestigial, enigmatic, but essential
for those who love me for what was never organic but
only pruned, manicured, I am but a structure of feeling
a constructed other ready for consumption

Maybe this is the point of a low birth as an empty womb

Privilege, an unchanging self, you are unfathomable
And no less green plastic fibers on a fake tree than I

We are all covered in the maya of ishwara

Steel wires

If your tendrils contracted
my heart would be shredded.
Am I your rhizome too?