I just want you to be in a trance

too

I wish we'd grown up on the same advice

Wish we'd played in the hallway together.

Teethed on impossibility,

That summered hue of self-control.

I know you don't need me right now

And this feeling will jump again

Like the filament between our backs

when we move in different directions; 

jump like skeins of light sparkling across the

skin of the Hudson. I want to feel

like I felt I did after the strong cups of Ethiopian coffee

I'd drink with my roommate on the balcony most mornings,

talking about the day to come. Love myself like I love

you - when I need you.

A flight long ago

I am an American airport loiterer,

Starbucks sipper, turning my head

Like a hen at intercom announcements,

Waiting for the names of things in my life,

Wishing absentmindedly for screaming children of my own

So I could get to the front of every line.

In my seat now I feel replete inside, an empty slide

of this good day gone. The conversations we could be having lay still,

our knees locked like barbies,

The seats lean back as if to baptize us

In this bruised plum sky.

On Scarcity

Scarcity mentality is seeing the glass half empty and then defending your position vehemently.

It’s when you only buy the cheapest things at the store, even if you know they’ll break soon and you’ll have to buy them again.

It’s becoming attached to people and outcomes because you can’t fathom a world where there’s more than what’s currently in front of you.

It’s characterized mostly by the inability to dream, to consider a life where you’re working with the people you’ve always dreamed of working with, doing amazing work that makes a difference, investing in deep, rich relationships with folks that matter to you.

It’s when you eat everything on your plate as a rule because you can’t stomach throwing things away.

It’s a feeling that you’re not enough, that your work isn’t good enough, that you’re not worthy of spending time with those people you admire and want to be more like.

Scarcity mentality is a melancholy, a sadness, even, that you slide yourself into, and one that takes weeks, months, sometimes years to climb your way out of.

It’s the short-cut that keeps on taking. Ravenously so.

Scarcity mentality is a fear.

A fear with which you keep yourself small.

night subway ride

I’m listening to Earth, Wind and Fire
On the subway and the music is loud
And I lift my hood and take off my hat because it’s hot.

I stand slack against the door.
Casual. Western, even. I wonder
what’s going on for me and then the song changes
To a David Guerra song and it’s true,
I’m listening to a Spotify playlist called
“Songs to Sing in the Shower.”

It’s been my second favorite playlist this week.

I think we’re all just jostling into one another,
Bumping cartilage and viscous in ways we don’t understand,
All being much sweeter than we know.
All showing up as God for one another.
And not really knowing what that means never
Felt so like taking my clothes off, and slowly
Walking into an Appalachian mountain lake at night.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but sometimes,
Neither does the rock next to the buckled little tree
During a blushing dusk.
Neither do you.

It’s worth getting to know more about, I think.
Supremely worth it. So when you enter the room
in my mind, it feels destined for me to realize that these are the days
When I’d write more poetry.

Untitled, Spring 2017

There's a glass of water sitting in 

jackknife daylight on the piano. 

The print of lips faint like a fossil or 

Water damage along the rim. 

The trace of a thought: we're just in our

Bodies, kicking like someone who might be swimming 

For their life.

Flight UA 1505

I’m miles above where they wait for life to come
Take them anywhere else,
Days behind on bills and thoughts about
how different the packages god sends us
look than our dreams,
Seconds into feeling the weight of the warm sand
You’re shoveled onto my chest.

I feel half-born, legs sticking out at odd angles, but
Like I inhaled something and felt my bloodstreams loosen
For the first time with more of me.

I reflect on the fact that I’ve never fought for something before.
Never cut my hair.
Never battled like Sampson with blood
In my mouth and on my name.

Which makes me think - you know when the universe is a black hole and you see
Your own dark matter pupil looking back at you from the eye
Of our storms?

Yeah.

I guess I wanted to care like ivy growing up the your wall,
over the years.

Instead, I ended up sitting next to a girl on the plane who is bipolar
Who has not eaten for months at a time
Who once spent all her savings while blacked out in mania
Who has an arch nemesis
Who had a man stalk her across two continents
Who smiled and laughed and showed me a way to lay
Worries down like I did your body last night, when it felt so good
To be alive

En Route to L.A.

This world of muffled heat

Of so many wild wild things we cannot afford to feel nostalgia for

Like mercury moving in us, liquid rising 

Nothing stirs in this land beneath me

A lone road splits the back of capitalism’s graveyard 

No futures here, folks

You can see where water once ran torrent veins

Cut canyons and opened hillsides 

Like a sutre. You can see how the nothingness screams

Violent inside of men

The statue of liberty

From the southern tip of the city, all I can see
is the back of her head.

reunions

The one thing I forgot at home on this trip

was my toothbrush and toothpaste.

We joke and laugh while playing corn hole, but are scared of losing 

and being laughed at.

Lightning flashes like bulbs behind the clouds across the bay.

I hear the birds for the first time in a year while running in the woods.

And I remember I haven’t written you a poem in a long time, and 

am grateful to call you a friend.