remembrancy

i have been gathering raw fabrics
sweatslick dancefloor captured
in flashing photo light and
trophies tagged and perused;
a lock forgotten on the car door
left open like i left myself,
the autumn freeze and hallow's
bond calm, deadening

memory of the slant of your neck
a life paved like smooth cobblestones
curtains made of paisley,
dark light's filter hardens and breaks me again.

will i flex now, folding into sheets
the frankenlike monster covering me
rough stitchseams held by the thread faded yellow
feverish in the lamplight i'll sew swathes to my skin
dip the needle, hot, into my bones until the body
itself clings with no strain.

i cannot--do not want to--take back what i have done.
and you, for scattering me like all the rest, become another part of the tapestry.

you can try

in the meantime, may i hold your hand?
i want—could i know,
memorize the fingers
turning the pages?

the cold would give us a run for it
days spent like money
turning leaves, leaving friends
lighting cigarettes lightening the mood

at icy twilight, as close as i could
in the basement i thought i saw
skin-stars under your pores
i close my eyes to hear

and here i breathe in the light
inhaling bright smoke
as oxygen.

night air-- clear crystal
driving through the dark and
finally breathing like i mean it.

cory

the name means “hollow”
half dark and carved out
a secret, holy place
echoes like the warm red
moist sequoia’s bowel

two glass lenses chide
and diffuse my searing eyes’ line
mild-mannering my appearance
a “clark” until you grasp and
discard them

met you just before autumn’s reign
when sky greys and the wind frays
our words’ edges; i am only half awake

and i am not empty, but keep the
sacred place bare and untouched
like the name’s secret

maybe this time there’s no scattering to the icy wind.

instead a facile, placid winterfall
could touch the place to prepare it
for the winding journey of a new and crisp
trail of footprints

seven verses of note

in the blank glow i hide, watching him scraping his shoulder-blades against the rough skin of a tree until bark and back are blood red.

the automated brewer on at 7:00am, chocolate-creamered coffee awaiting us when we awake. a roommate’s father explaining the nub of a gas pipe. i’m no good at proving it: i want you and no one else.

tonight and all nights he believes in the visitors who will fondle the space under his pillowcase, driving him crazy with their absence.

Wednesday: Kidney stone removal.
(note: upgrade from diet 7up to lemonade. aspartame will be preferred)

counting the sounds of crickets in the dark; stroking the damaged piano keys; clacking in a dorian mode as a tree cracks and falls outside the house.

for his: accent, inability to stay, lion t-shirt, lip ring, neutral milk hotel, hands, one letter name, Macedonian food. for the softness of his kiss.

procul recedant somnia, et noctium phantasmata: hostemque nostrum comprime, ne polluantur corpora.

lunar eye

sometimes i can see in the dark

where no strand of moonlight
escapes the tangled trees’ grasp
i collect that handed over by blank palms

i step into olive green houses
i wear new, clicking shoes
i climb staircases creaking
and within sleepers’
eyewhites open and are pressed against

blackened air. i sleep in a bed
warm with chalk-white skin
and three-dimensional light let in,
a third dimension all my own,
uncovered, the spiral finally
uncurling that hidden from the light.

uncut, the stillness vibrates
and i am glad for the sleep

i reach out to
read your goosebumps like braille
instead meet the throbbing, lowest
heart. where the light
makes a secret of all but flesh,
white as a moon.

to pray

sunday, i find myself again
staring out at the congregation
too-short robes barely hiding my Converse

when i'm watching you in the greenlight
i'm dancing every moment at once
all the friends i ever danced with
i am re-memorizing them all

especially the slow and tear-blind dance of departure

mark me, licking with your tongues,
and open my heart with kneading hands,
i promise to try.
i hold no delusions.

this sunday i know, finally
to thank you;

to pray.

because, for all these moments,
i cannot speak and
i explode with gratitude
to those rocking back and forth under the lights

we are sharing all of this, this
terribly important love

reddening

among the chinese paper lanterns i am washed. everyone has come wearing red, only to rid themselves of it. bodies will mash and slide together—
cheek against neck; thumbnail grazes waist
—to redden the skin itself.

but i have come in blue.
buttoned only almost all the way.
hands reach for my chest and unbutton me
one by one, cherry fingertips fondling the small, holey black discs.

i thought myself protected by relative sobriety and general naivete but before flinching i am lip-kissed. over and over again. pressed between them and my blue flag is gone. all glistening with sweat and then i, too, am red.

blackberry in hand, andy somehow stands still
whereas i feel unable to stop
grinding impatiently, i wait
until

mouthsopen/chestsbare/soundsdrowned
headsmuddled/friendsgreyed/pantsdowned/
tongueswet/glassestraded/lightstrobing
and one eye winks.

cartographer

yesterday i saw the ground wound
there used to be a snaking tree there.
solo in an urban desert,
a bulldozed city block,
it caught the
busker's songs trumpeted to its shaking leaves.

and here is the table where Will sat
textbooks in tow, believing in bohemia.
here is where i walked with Frieda that morning on the green leash.
here is where you stapled single sheets of poetry.
here is where my stomach wrung itself out, having seen Michael.
here is where they pricked our fingers and licked our blood with paper.

here is the art gallery with the painting speaking, "SORROW."
here is the movie theatre where i cried to a friend, now a stranger.
here is the parking lot where John lived on the tenth floor.
here are the crosswalk's white lines and white light that used to mean i was safe.
an amateur flâneur, i draw mind maps and mark exes.

the tree is gone now,
close-shaven to scoop craters out of the city's face
and build an expensive new zit,
ready to burst.

evening infused

the sun is out of sight
behind everything as i walk home
i take a different route, moving between a new row of houses
immaculately dressed in white brick and stone, twirling flames
in gas lanterns. they flicker at me above the sidewalk.

nothing is black and white
just a big grey area
she says. but i can't really figure it out,
it's all only in color to me:

winking lime fireflies against
burning sienna brick
star-white townhomes,
inside whose frames i see rich gay men drinking cocktails.

i am struck by the fact that nothing is ever really beautiful
unless i draw it through my beholder's eye. i am struck when
i realize this is what daodejing means; to enchant the everyday.
and i am struck when i know that writing it all down is how i've been doing it.

did i write all these because i believed i could capture beauty?
the effect is the same,
but instead it seems
i wrote to infuse magic in the mundane.

and maybe hardly anyone understands.
but i am daring
to create my own colorful and
mundane world.

blood test

the tiny waiting room is crammed with hope
dark eyes flickering up and down
forms filling themselves out, everyone invisible
with heaviness.

some of us will have it.

there are men and women
gay and straight
stopping blood with swabs
understanding that these, ticking by,
may be their last few minutes
of ignorance.

i touch your arm. something undefined is started between us;
we must take care of each other, one way or another.
one by one they call us by number only and we re-emerge eventually, half-smiling.

all eyes in the room search our faces for signs of the outcome as we step outside.
i can only think of how much i want to leave. how much i don't want to see
them betrayed.

make me want to be

today is the fifth week of all this
and each week you have marked the time
with tiny gifts--
crimson roses, blue bears, black books, and skittles
everything a rainbow
all starting with a yellow lily

it was all not to forget the countdown.

i never got you anything
because i don't think we should have to
i would rather pretend that things are endless,
sighing into one another with increasingly blurry edges
like double apple smoke

i wish i could write down the way
you have made me feel for five weeks
simple and annoyed
smart, unsure, and full
scared, patient, young,
connected, cared for, alive

thinking back on it again
it seems like a lot of time
and not really enough.

you started out by giving me a flower
but that's not the only one you gave

every day of the past thirty-five has been a flower
and has made me one, too
to bloom into someone new
to show me the immense beauty of that which is fleeting
to make me "open again and again,
without knowing how."

and for all that, i couldn't be more grateful. thank you.

we don't have much time

eighteen days left in my undergraduate career
a few more after that and he's gone.

all of this hasn't lasted long
so it's easy to make it ideal in my head:
he was the one to touch the darkness with the lily.

first kiss at the twilight-reflecting pool,
rain-cooled and huddling on the floor of
our locked room, bright windows
blank eyes staring in at us.

bunk bed sex like it's freshman year
this time on the other end of things
battling dorm room claustro-
and your roommates' homo-
phobia
we make mine "uncomfortable" because
we take a shower together.
good thing she didn't walk in
ten minutes ago.

don't need to forget but the day is coming
when i must, once again. it is funny because
it has never been me or the other who wants it to stop.

yellow

we part ways in front of bobby's apartment
the black takes you warm, arm in arm
and i don't look back

where do i find this beauty?
is it in the sharpness of your rejection
and the bite of the blue wind who walks me home?
the subtle sounds of his lips touching your forehead
or two hands clasping? my child-like confusion
at misunderstanding all of this? most of all,
i am embarrassed at how i blinded myself.

does something shine in the way
i could kick myself for still vying for your affection?
unseen purple bruises to color my skin.

no.

it blossoms,
the head of a yellow lily
brightening the night

where i am a masochist, opening out--
it is seeded in the lining of the repression
that disguises me in the skin of a grow-up.

shapeshifter's memoir

maybe i'm not cut out for this
i lied when i said i wasn't afraid

the past three months have admittedly horrified me
jr's where the man checking the ids holds my hand in his for too long
apex where it smells like
sweat and alcohol and frustration
cobalt where no one really looks at you
if they look in your eyes
it is only to see their own reflection
fishing for validation

it's like trying a bike for the first time
falling and scraping your knee
you always remember the cut of
the pavement, how it stung you

maybe that's why we
try and try harder not to fall again

i am scared to ride
because i could get hurt or hurt someone
because i could be misled or mislead
because everything makes more sense when
i am a giraffe, gawky and graceful behind a fence
too many rules and too many things to avoid

will i someday have the courage to be unashamed of my wounds?

night poem

meet him at a bar
where i'll stay sober

i feel separate from my feelings again

find out they've decided to be exclusive
for all it was, i am not jealous
i am supportive
i am happy,
a capable friend
familiar feelings like home

again he uses the word mistake
but i know now he doesn't believe it
because if he did things would have been easy
black & white, at least to start

but i do think he's making a mistake.
maybe it's not the one he thinks

i opt to walk home
i need to take nothing in, give nothing up
just gulps of cold air to make my eyes water
only when i'm so alone am i cut enough
to touch the thorn of lucidity

unfinished poem

on his last night in the house
he'd ordered pizza and i brought movies
trick, dreamcatcher, the craft.
bobby unexpectedly bailed
we put in dreamcatcher and
i relished in the fact that i no longer felt
awkward or self conscious, only calm

mouse silently climbed on me more than once
his eyes dark pools of question
i guess we all felt like hugging and touching
it was nothing more than an answer; one answer
and not the one i wanted.
the rest is not ready yet--smoke expanding slowly
perhaps to take prominence as a flame
or only to warmly smolder

the night was neither glowing nor special
it was just us
his chin against my back,
hand come to rest below my chest
the fresh, cold air spoken into the bedroom
whispering something
i had to write down

from "instruction manual"

i don't really know what he wants
or how he feels but i must do what i know
and all i know

is to put my feelings outside of myself,
fortified neither by sarcasm nor potential regrets
and shaded as little as possible by insecurities
it's been so long since i've done so;
feels almost like i'm violating myself

then we see what happens to them
whether he takes me up and accepts
what i believe to be my heart
or sweeps it casually away,
scattered again like snow to the wind