01-08-2018

I saw a picture of a Buddha head being cradled by a banyan tree
And was reminded of the couple on the train from Rome
During hour five of our eight-hour delay
I could not see their faces; just her head belonging in his arms so beautifully unremarkably
His hands resting on her as though she were his own name
The banyan tree, despite its century-old head start, was rather more strangling
And the Buddha rather inferior in divinity

10-21-17

I cannot make sense
Of the words you have not spoken
I cannot make sense of your absence
Nor the tenderness with which you politely walk away
I cannot know
So much of you
And so I search the words of poets who have seen more than I
In hopes that one of them has seen you before

January 2016

みかんを剥きながらあなたを想う
道を間違えた時にあなたを想う
思い込みでも勘違いでもあなたを想う

みかんの油が爪を汚し
サアーっと頑固な香りが吹き通す

4/1/15

I wish to live in a whitewashed house
Perhaps by the Mediterranean
Where everything smells of late afternoon sunlight and nothing reminds me of myself
Where the only ghosts are lovers that once spent a summer there and let a candle burn down and scorch the windowsill
Where enough indulgent asceticism will bleach the voices from my head
I wish to live inside a slightly depressive modern poem
So jaded and self-important
As though the world exists only when we think of it

1-13-15

The quiet days
The momentous days
Impressions of one person and weather
Storms, gravel, waves
Dandelions celebrating their allotted existence
Next to a ragged telephone pole
Waving in the dappled light as we walked by, laughing
Such are the gently insistent memories
Unpredictable, mundane
Such more will come
I have fortune enough to be found by them
And talent enough to keep them
Even foolishly, but gloriously
For hope dies last, as the Russians say

12-30-14

Number our days to give them inconsequential names
Diagram my soul, give it an anatomy
Eviscerated and neatly labeled
In order to expedite it to mundanity
A poor parody of the scenes inside my head
Violated and plagiarized, bleak in its commodity
Make me stand and write and repeat
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human
I am better than human.

12-24-14

As though our daily explanation were buried in the script of a lonely nebula
Singing its comfort across impossible years of distance
Unraveled and transliterated, would it blueprint my heartpatterns
The mathematics of our poetry
Transcribed in inorganic dust storms
Or is perfection too regulated for such trivialities
Is it instead the tainted soil beneath that curates the mundane probabilities
Do I seek homogeneity with the breathless
To reason away my own precipitate breathing

***I wanted to see how many multisyllabic words I could cram in. As it turns out, a lot, and transcribing this now was like eating seaweed salad with a spoon.

To The Strange Little British Men Inhabiting My Pencil Mug: An Ode

Oh, how gleeful your faces
My flat, flimsy companions
Startlingly so, you are
With wide eyes and fanned fingers

Your subjects shall ne'er be
Conscious of your grins
Static til the ink fades and your bodies crumble
For being made of paper

I shall not mourn you when you go
No affection is recognized in your printed eyes
But for the moment you shall live
Among pencils that are more useful than yourselves.

Cognitive Dissonance

In case we've forgotten how to write our self importance
Equations lost in mathematical spirals
Perhaps they're all just patterned lights
Has it been as long as it seems and as far as it is not
To pick up a frame of mind we thought we'd outgrown
Is it tight in the shoulders
My feet seem sturdier now
Finding the inability to be lost in sentimental incandescence
Shall we come to terms with it before long
Reconcile the scattered parts
Until your minds, your hearts, your thunderstorms
All draw their breath in one

Porcelain

As though, by many outpourings, one might be healed
Let us replace one sort of distance with another
One less pretty, perhaps
Could strength and fragility coexist somewhere
Without pulling apart and crackling
Like a poorly placed glaze
Shall we call the cracks pretty
Full of character
Or simply leave them as traces of something for which foolish seems too harsh a word

Almost Reflection

The things you learn to live without?
Touches 
Smiles repackaged and sent to another address 
Love isn’t like a bowl of sugar, we read 
Crystallized so finely 
Cradling loss for sake of inspiration 
Listen to them as they slip into your omnipresent cup of tea 
Dissolve your thoughts, isn’t that your metaphor here 
Say something else you don’t mean, sentimental heart 
Let the sweetness linger 
It all becomes a transient memory

Anne of Sorts

A thousand days of wonder
A thousand days of hope
Ten thousand moments lost and shared
In ocean breezes and scented soap
Eight hundred days of worry
Two hundred days of sweetness
A thousand times refusing to hurry
Ten thousand tastes of bleakness
The months becoming blurry
And strength disguised as weakness

Collaborative Poetry

Anatomy of Starlight

Stand

  Look
Look
     Look
Wait Look Look Wait Wait Wait
Wait
Wait
Wait
Wonder

 Discover

   Smile
                  Smile
                                    Smile
                                            Smile

                                      Confusion
                                    Question
                            Wonder
              Wonder
   Wonder


Stand
                   

                                 

Unfinished sentences

Funny how many thoughts we forget we ever had.
How many ideas, wishes, regrets.
How many wisps of poetry get set aside for being too fragile.
The shells you toss back to the sand for being imperfect.
Stars taken out of our eyes and given back to the sky
We make our skin forget, remember that our voice is alone
No echoes, no whispers.
Smiles like clouds hiding the sky

Take my home off someone's shoulders
Place it somewhere far away

And just repeating

This is good.

Lineate

And we learn to live on the surface

Not the deep blue we drowned in
The sky, the waves, the tides

Not the everlasting green we became
The tinted stories and possible histories

Not our trees and rocks and mountains

Smiles like clouds holding back the blue

Hold your breath

It's the only way to breathe

Hum

On we go 'til tomorrow fades
The music lights and our shadows bade
Goodbye, my lovely
So hasty, child
How difficult you are to save

Respond in me and give no more
For troubles rise and wishes soar
In patterns undeserved, not ours
Belongings end in knots and doors

Trace the stories on the wall
The flowers long since left to fall
In faded wings and ghosts of height
Unfettered dreams and gentle flight

Chiaroscuro

Obscured from sight
Intrepid light
Lost definitions burning

Wings lost to flight
Dehydrated night
In this, we too are learning

Hold tight the hours
Plant wildflowers
Put away the years

Built mirrored towers
Say mine, not ours
Finally count my fears

Random Baked Objects

I loved you, but doesn’t everyone?

I picked your name because I liked its sound

Triangles are square and orbits are round

You ate my pancakes, I combed your hair

And the others stopped keeping track of us

So now perhaps we’ll take the bus

You’re vaguely familiar in that biblical way

Like all weekdays that end with “day”

We sailed away and counted stars

I’d go with you to settle Mars

Cameras lined up in my head

They look at what my pigtails dread

You’re fond of green and blue and red

And patterns filling up my head

Maybe we would build a zoo

With cows that bark and dogs that moo

They can’t bake like we can do

A plate for one, a pie for two

*     *     *

Found this, wrote it a while ago.... originally for a Spektor parody collaboration idea with Sumodude, but I kinda like it as is... of course, if the collab happened that would be cool too.

Angelic

Being

Coruscate

Dancing

Euphonically

Faintly

Gliding

Haphazard

Intrepidly

Jesting

Kaleidoscopic 

Lilting

Mosaics

Nuancing

Orbiting

Precariously

Quixotic 

Remnants

Softly

Tenacious

Until

Veritably

We
Xylophonically
Yield
Zygotes.

Just kidding, that's inappropriate. How about "Zeppelins"?