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.