1
yesterday i think i’ve left
the fire on under the coffee
the image of it burning
lingers
without the
ending-image.

later, when i’m out
charlie calls me, tells me
yo-yo just called, said
there are firefighters
in front of your house man!
like fifteen firefighters
in front the house right now man!
but then said wait, it’s another house,
it’s not your house,
and I told charlie I dunno I’m sure it’s fine
and forgot and got home
and forgot.
this morning, flicking dandruff
from my head, I notice all my hairs
are singed at their ends.


2
lost my last journal.
that hesitation to start anything again-
you must know how it is.

think i left it at a bar
i was playing at last week.
can’t think where else it’d be
but i’ve been trying. been trying
that a lot lately- remembering where.
it rarely works.
quitting it’s a feeling a lot like
the tripping awake feeling,
but without the pleasure.

whatever the falling is from
is something good. it
executes over a wide plain.
it’s not just happening right now.


like my last journal i lost my hat.
but not like it i found that again.
a hollow win.
it would have
been better for it
to have stayed lost.

that would have been the light way,
the thinning way
of exuberant forgetting.


*since writing this i’ve gotten the journal back and lost the hat again.
the bar sent it to me in the mail.



3
here’s something that’s going away:
going to the city to see a movie
on the A train to west 4th, glad
that guy in the suit got off, he was
giving me the paranoia. clinton washington
he got off and i was better for it.

someone’s peeling me off.
i’m coming away from this here,
doing my normal thing.


4
it takes such a time
rifling through the months
one by one by one
looking over your shoulder
for someone who might catch you remembering-
this wastes the most time.
it takes so long.
it takes getting on the train and waiting
until everyone leaves the train which is
as hard as it is easy.

finally it’s fine to save.
finally everyone is gone.

sometimes you needed a certain number
of gold coins to save your game.
sometimes
you needed trinkets
gained by violence.
sometimes you could just save your game
anytime you wanted.

*seth’s mom walked between him and his screen
and he pressed z and his erased his game. all that work.
he was so crazy mad he went into the kitchen and took a knife
and tried to saw through this glow stick that happened to be lying around
from the party at school that we’ d been at that day.
we weren’t really close friends. we were maybe eight or nine.


5
we talked
on the phone once
when mac and i were in san francisco,
in a park, drinking and watching people.
he called and we talked for a minute.

three months back from that trip.
that’s not a long time to be home.
not long enough yet to flip the calendar page.

the calendar is buddhist themed.
i like the bodhisattva with the swords.


6
on the A heading home
dozing in glee,
everything getting further from me.
this is one of the good feelings.
this is where the guy
i thought was a cop
got off before.
we misread the listing
and missed the movie.
walked to another theatre
and missed that one too.

(big turning point coming up-
a closeup of our heroine’s
pale face skin. there we see
the tiny shorn bits
of beard left after
a hurried shave. this explain’s
everything. they are only letting me think
i’m a woman.)

next stop broadway junction
the loneliest stop. uh oh-
today is mother’s day.
the train platforms float
in their light.

when i tell him which way the L is at
he pumps his fist
and rides the escalator up
out of my life. this stop
seems so sorry to me at night. i get guilty
when i come here. the doors creak
and make those sounds and
i wonder about the bumps on my gums.


7
here’s another one that doesn’t belong:
a mess of flower petals by the turnstyles
at utica getting out the A.
they’re wet and saying
“you’re coming away” simply.

orange and yellow,
i recall that it’s mother’s day, but that’s not
the memory i wanted.


about three and a half years ago
the jurassic technology museum
culver city, los angeles, check it out.

well for one they have an exhibit of round things here,
at the sister museum here in hartford, vermont.
they have a display called
“the relics of the glory days of the railroad in white river junction”


drove a long way yesterday and felt
creaky and mean like
normal. the question feeling
as old as the answer, like normal.
why do mothers get all their milk
back as spite?

the little bad ways of sharing:
no one else would even notice
when i pry you open
and push the bits of my rotting
feeling into you





8
dreamed of you a second ago
you looked different as you always do
but this time you acknowledged it. you said
i’m three people
like it would surprise me. you said
i change
i’m only pretending to love you.
well
i’m only pretending
like it would surprise me.

9
read a romance novel today
over a woman’s shoulder
on the train. she sat at the edge
of the long bench
i stood in front of the sliding doors
one of her two sons was small enough
to sit with his knees on the bench
facing the window-
(this was my move too- at a certain point though
you stop being able to see out that window)

in real life the lady with the two sons
looked up and caught me reading. she didn’t
look surprised. i thought she smiled
and had to remind myself
that i never saw her mouth move.
even now, i can imagine what her voice sounds like.



10
i love lurking elsewhere-

but later.

there’s you now.


11
first warm day in so long i find myself
running down the street feeling naked
there’s the repetitions of shadow
from the light coming through the leaves
and there’s the gnarly roots coming through
the sidewalk. i’m running- this time i never
forgot how to run. i’m noticing them all going by.
they’re familiar to me now.

i’m bouncing a basketball in my left hand
and noticing the sun patterns and the roots
and the people while i’m running. my left hand is streetside
so i must be in florida for the trees to be like this.
i’m running and the ball’s getting tough to bounce
gracefully- it keeps coming back up wrong. my run
is getting arhythmic and loped- clearly i’m losing control

i think to stop and look down at the ball.
it’s the wrong shape- not a sphere at all,
and it’s got none of the lines that run in patterns
where players put their fingers when they shoot.
it’s different- it’s like an organ i’ve never seen before.


12
at the end of the dream, you ask me to bring you another blanket
and, i believe, some water. i feel resent clutch in my throat:
others will be cold- I’ll be cold.


13
of course the huge grey rain today
clearing you from the whole gutters.
can’t say who you were
but you were walking with me yesterday, aching
belly and skin day, when i went
in the pressed street
to the park on rochester.

by a tree alone on a hill
we saw a chicken with it’s head separated.
clean otherwise- i suspected ritual.

we saw a man who ran across the grass
on all fours and tried to climb a big tree
from a thin bough way out from the trunk.

we knew the body-grammer
but never saw his face.

later, i tried to draw the chicken
and got a curse put on me for it.

even later we were dancing in the city,
and even later, when i took the 3AM walk home
from lefferts the jews were throwing a raging party
on kingston. the men danced in the middle
and i noticed that a drone was flying overhead.
i had forgotten if you were still there or not.
many girls were standing on the milkcrates
and watching.


14
just watched that cheesy biopic of philip petit
on the bus back to new york with my sister.
the happening of that walk
between the world trade towers
still exists as a dream-fact for me.
when i try to turn towards the reality
of it’s having happened
i cry immediately.
what is it to be philip petit?

at an open mic in greenwich village
a syrian-american comedian told us
a joke about jerking off to a snow globe
with a picture of the planes hitting the twin towers in it.

i don’t understand anything well.

15
yesterday i spent some time indulging
in the time-fearers fantasy
of a long list of everything.

keeping lists always points to what’s being
left out of them (as in, keep the light’s low
in a dirty room).

but you can also end up with something
you didn’t in the first place. this is a nice way-
someone slow and stupid dreams the present anyway.

mid-november now. everyone thrown around
by the big politics. feeling of cusp everywhere.
after the hug in the street,
the return home to guilt, to the questions like
should my list go forward or backward?
does it start at the beginning or the end?


(a mirror image
without a mirror:

the other side’s as real
as this one. the water
fountain works fine,
the kids are human beings.
the mirror
is a park fence)

(image of chicken carcass
ravaged by weather
returns. you
have stolen all the dead birds
i’ll ever see)

16
leaves outside the door on prospect
smash together in the wet
like when i took dxm at city-as
for my halloween costume
and lost my mind by the park outside
looking down at the wet yellow leaves.

the season was earlier then.
i see the soggy leaves through
the little window on the door.
i think of leaving and feel
bad for only wanting to
stay inside forever and wither
warmly. leave or stay? the one trail
is always different- today
it’s full of soppy leaves. tomorrow it may be
dry and full of new friends’ faces.

the other trail is always the same.
it is a big yawning hungry mouth
and you’re walking along the tongue
like a dirty hallway rug and when you get there
and you see the teeth
and you see the mouth is yours.


17
walked to the bank today after sleeping late in reflection of the long night.
feel a yearning still there for company, a woken up curiosity towards
the bodies around me. the night was long and i remembered it
as i walked to the bank today in the afternoon. it’s a bank
of america. i wasn’t feeling too bad walking on eastern parkway
over to the bank on utica. there were lots of people, it was the afternoon.
the little public library was there across the two broad lanes of traffic.

at the bank there was clearly a situation.
when i walked in everyone unfroze
and kept doing their normal thing.
i’m thinking back into that room now
but having a hard time of it because of the circumstances draining out now
of the room i’m in now which is a 3 train car manhattan bound.
i never knew what was coming when he opened the door from the next car
when the train pulled out.
keep in mind it was yesterday the thing at the bank went down,
and that this train is leaving the station directly underneath it.
i’d seen the guy before with the hungry eyes by the turnstiles waiting to hop it
or for someone to swipe him through. words bubbled unevenly out of his mouth
and no one looked up and i didn’t look up.
guy to my right who’s now already gotten off smiled into the black window glass,
checked his denture fit. there were maybe six other people in the car. the guy i’d seen
at the turnstiles takes a few steps forward and puts his hand on my shoulder
and asks me for some change and doesn’t mind looking at me in the eye.
i look back into the eye of the man with his hand on my shoulder
and there’s a little spit on his lip
and tell him no, real quietly.
i don’t want everyone to hear.


18
to the right of my house there’s a building made of brick.
some other white people moved in there.
i understood these things better
when i was a kid.
the building to the left of my house is slatted
on the front like my house but the slats
are blue and wider. they’ve set up some kind of cat
hotel in the gated-in area out front of
the building to the right.
two big plastic storage boxes, one on top of the other.
holes cut out and taped where it was cut
to make the edges dull for the cats.



19
is there enough coffee for a second cup?
she asks, her voice rising on the ultimate syllable
like a shy kid’s.
the house is dark, half-awake. bodies
make shapes on the couches. i engage my habits
and think of what i have to feel guilty for.

i think there is, yeah, i say over my shoulder. should be a little
left. there’s maybe a half cup’s worth.

she comes over some nights.
brings wine, rolls weed. puts a movie on
and falls asleep. i don’t know where
she stays most nights.

that time
before the lights come on,
is always full of reminder. i step lightly
like when i was a kid, awake
before my parents. i make
the coffee in the dark. the dark
is grey with the little light from the kitchen
window. the window faces another building.
the light has to go through the alley.
by the time it gets in here
all the movement’s gone.


now’s usually the time
i look yesterday in the eye, but sometimes
i’m so young and nimble
that yesterday doesn’t even notice me.

my mother always said
one time when she was a kid
she was taking a bath and she said
this moment i will remember forever,
and she did,
forever.

i remember her telling me about it.
since then it’s come to my mind a lot.
sometimes i too try to remember this
for the rest of my life.

later she told me that the real story
doesn’t involve a bathtub at all.
it involves a pencil eraser.
she was holding it
and remembered it
forever.




20
that’s ok, it’s just a year-
a something since then.
if anything went down (and i’m sure it did-
you can’t just ignore organic sounds like that),
i must have been a few traincars up from it,
having snagged a corner seat, dull scanning
comfortably, head lolling against the metal
no reason to try and sleep, save the pleasure
of the falling-there moment and
its stretching out…
this is a st. claude bound train,
ladies and gentlemen,
coming from st. claude, folks.
don’t mind the smoke and mirror game
in car three, nothing to see there.
this is a st. claude bound train,
next stop the BPL, the local one
on utica with hardly any books.
next stop, the library and shame.
stand clear of the closing doors
and of feelings of reluctance and nonchalance
and the words “until” and “since”,
and of anything involving turning pages
or leaves.

the light’s settled on my head like smoke.
i drift and improve everything i see.
it’s one of those things
who’s name is its body.
i read the body
and it says
there’s only one moment of real interest
but here it lasts
a time that’s like forever.
the body flits away
on cricket wings
into the peoples.
they’re getting off and on too quick
to grip a feeling. the bodies flicker slow.
old lightbox, old handcrank. chemical smell on the hand.
no one sitting by in the corner
where you sit. everyone’s shut their phones off.
no one is sitting by
the corner where your forever is and the cops
don’t randomly check bags. here is just the place
to find forever.

once ani and were riding the L
from lorimer into manhattan. we felt the bump
pulling into 6th ave. something off about
the timing of the doors opening. about the way
people moved on the platform,
some scuttling quickly away from the end
of the train, some inching towards it.
we went towards it. i wanted to see them and we did.
the head was full of blood and exactly
in the space between the train and the edge
of the platform, as if hanging by the chin.
probably all the neck and backbones were pulp.
the eyes were wide open through the blood though.
the face was that of a young arab man.


21
i get out the 4 and run across the platform
into a 3 which has just pulled up.
the 3 will take me straight there. somewhere
in this action there is a dream from years ago.

an old guy who’s face
i’ve already forgotten does the tissue and note
thing in my car on the 3. until now
i’ve only seen young women
panhandling in that way.


22
why now the dream
of wild gross catharsis,
the puncture-pop and ooze,
lotiony white cream
from these awful blotches
all over my legs,

ani saying no don’t do it!
there’s nothing there
there’s nothing wrong with your legs.
but she’s wrong-
there is something wrong
with my dreams.

the cold is deadly now. people don’t
smile back at me now on the street,
on the bus. good. i need time to listen to this.
i need a long bus ride with mother’s wearing
headphones while their kids cry and cry,
and old men sleep shamelessly
on their seat-partner’s shoulder.
the bus will go south
and make three or four stops over the course
of the night. i’ll take hot water from the gas station
make ramen, buy a beer, go back to my seat.
the last time we stop
in the early morning, a couple hours out of town,
i’ll notice the air smells different.


23
subway ad says
i meditate to stop
counting my likes.


24
hangover finally turning on itself
burning down into just a little glint of pain,
the glare off someone’s teeth, and a synthetic
fluidity.

certain words appear and appear:
simulacrum
gesture
the chess term en passant
something flies by
in the periphery
a bird or a phrase.

never did know how to spell it.
the soft-beaked
mechanical birds
sing songs
like softened versions
of bad memories.

my memory is exquisite now
in the hangover
but not in the way
that i expected.
it’s just that
i keep recognizing people accidentally.


25
going north to see my friend in washington.
got the overnight bus in oakland,
had some whisky and some writing to do.
felt like i had something going on then. i remember
the break we took early in the morning. there was
a convenience store where passengers got coffee or maybe
ramen or a plastic-wrapped pastry or some shit.
there was an old pay phone booth too.
the air was misty.
my friend’s become a boy since then.
took hormones. i haven’t seen him in a while and i miss him.

26
there’s that block on west peachtree
where you catch the megabus.
you get there half an hour early
and wait for another two or three
for your late connection
buy coffee and peanuts
from the vendor in the truck who’s always
posted up there, or pepper spray, condoms, headphones,
a taser- whatever you’ll need for the ride. you sit on the ledge
under the big concrete awning over the marta stop
and watch a thunder storm come in
with an old lady waiting for her alabama bus
smoking endless cigarettes, and you make the small waiting talk.
hopefully you’ve got some liquor, hopefully the bus
comes soon. i think there’s something going on here-
the memories get clogged in the gutter, the rain
doesn’t wash them all away anymore. they just pile up there
like hair in the drain.


27
animals of my future:
tigers with psychic eyes that inflict guilt sensations
octopi with LED skin who’s whole body reflects your past
as a defense mechanism
crows with mechanical wings
programmed to take tiny important objects
from peoples’ hands just at the key moment of use
crickets set to saw their song at deafening volume
only when you’re ready to apologize.


28
warm winter day,
rush on out to shoot some baskets
old chinese lady out for a brisk
constitutional- I can’t wait
‘till spring
when they’ll do tai chi
on the court in the morning,
big group of getting-old people
moving slowly together.

29
you’ve ever been walking around on the beach
or in the woods, just looking around,
and you see some beautiful glint
and reach down with your wide little eye
but when you pick it up it turns out
to be just a shiny bit of plastic wrapper
or a bit of a broken bottle,
just some piece
of commercial shit?
that ever happen to you?
what did you think?


30
subway car door opens and in comes
the best music: a kora through a shitty battery powered amp,
ripping the murmur. everyone in the train car
instantly sees a color they did not know existed.


31
there’s that part in the r. crumb documentary
where he talks about drawing urban settings
and the moment
when he really noticed
all the infrastructural clutter that’s always there
in the background.
well,
me too.

32
computer clock set to december 2014
7:05 pm.
for some reason
this makes me very sad.

my tape machine broke a couple days ago.
not sure what the exact issue is
something with the motor
something to do with the way
that two objects relate to one another.



33
after the landlord serves notice
i find that a peak at 840hz exists in my room.


34
earlier in the show
he’d fondled the towel:
turned that side of the soft sculpture
toward the audience
so they could see the grimy
pink curves of it, and ran his hand
tenderly through the creases.
everyone felt turned on later
but had forgotten why.


35
i steal a 25cent copy of the crucible
from the bookshelf at my friend’s house in dc.
don’t know why i don’t just ask to borrow it.
out of character for me. there’s a BDSM club
across the alley called the crucible.
later, in another part of town, I hear a woman
muttering to someone invisible to me
it’s witchcraft, it’s witchcraft the way all your sports
athletics, your athletics and your athletic performances.

36
megabus employee rises up from the lower seating level to snipe
the man riding for free. i always ride on top. what i noticed this time though
was that i also always choose the left row of seats.
man in the orange vest of authority says loudly this is montgomery.
i was wondering myself. all i saw through the windows was generic
vague night, the indistinct shapes of buildings, the road’s curve
half-lit by street light. i want to step out and walk a moment
because i’ve been here before and know how good it feels
to take the same walk twice. i wanted to go find
some familiar things. this is montgomery repeated the attendant.
you gettin off here. and a quiet voice full of yawn and coy deflection:
what you talkin bout man? i’m going to new orleans man.
authority-man proceeds to tell the guy in a voice loud enough for all up top
to hear that they’d let him on the overnight in atlanta after he’d missed
his earlier bus that day, contingent- and he was emphatic on this point,
repeating it multiple times like he had a fixation with the word contingent- contingent on
the man’s getting out in montgomery. makes little sense to me, it’s not like
the bus fills up as it stops throughout alabama in the middle of the night.
but authority-man’s pity apparently stretched only as far as montgomery that night.
the guy complained his phone was dead so he couldn’t produce the reservation number.
there was no indignation in his voice though, and i knew he was arguing by rote,
just saving face. i looked at his face
trying to tell how he was saving it,
if he cared what the other passengers thought of his stand,
unreasonable, but admirable to me anyway. i liked that he chose
not to appeal to sympathy, but to just baldly stick with his lie through to the end.
when i looked over he’d put a charlotte hornets baseball cap over his face
and was feigning complete nonchalance. the attendant had called the cops.
everyone just waited. i asked with zero hope if he couldn’t just borrow
someone’s charger for his phone and he asked me for a cigarette
so we all just sat there and waited until the pasty cheerful cop arrived.
he was an obsequious fucker and employed only one threatening phrase-

“we’re having a good, calm conversation here. let’s keep it that way”.

the thing wound itself down with machine-like predictability. couldn’t have gone smoother,
really. considering that the hornet’s fan had dedicated himself to his story and had
tethered his pride to it by this point. he took his pride down off the bus and
into the vague darkness and we pulled out back onto the highway
and left him on the side of the road there in montgomery.


37
saying that doesn’t say it
saying this doesn’t either
but missing some of it in reprise
can’t be any worse than the whole of it was
to begin with. it’s less of itself now,
less of it there to be
how it was.

why is adam playing that guitar now in the trailer
while i’m outside fixed on getting drunk
and forgetting something
in order to make room
for something else?

why’s he doing it after we saw
the car burned under the bridge?
we should be out forgetting ourselves.
i swear the burning car was a false omen-
it meant no harm.

this place keeps waking up different next to me.
i hear it grinding its teeth on the pillow
and i know it’s anxious even though
it’s so beautiful. things with lifespans are anxious.

why’s adam playing guitar in the trailer
while i’m out front getting twisted and the firefighters
are heading back to fill out the paperwork
and the ladies at la fogata,
the mexican place on elysian fields,
are already home for the night,
having never heard about a car burning up
under the bridge, never seen the fire
licking out the windows.


adam had said the canal steams sometimes
but i heard the explosions on nearing.
‘this doesn’t have to be us right now’ we thought,
and pulled a u-turn. this doesn’t have to be me right now,
i think.
actually this does have to be me right now.

after getting how i wanted to be
i went out to test my theory
about the meaning of the burning car
and its windows and the slack faces
of the onlookers standing on the levee.

i had an idea that if i left adam and adele sleeping in the trailer
and took a walk back to the bridge
and got one more glimpse of that car
i might get some answers.
people have always sent messages with smoke.

bobbing past the gas station
i deflected an engagement with a long-haired kid
who slid out of the murk and tried to take me back there with him.
i knew he meant me wrong
and let him slide off myself
and went down toward the bridge with my fixed purpose.
coming within seeing distance of the tunnel
with my burnt car and my answer in it
an SUV slid up next to me without any tires on pavement sound
because i’d done them the favor of turning the streets to water.
out slid the long-haired kid and
he moved without walking to the curb, floating easy on the surf.
a friend got out the other side and stood as anchor.
the weapon flashed before me,
a big six-shooter, right for a pirate.

i felt something snap into place
and pulled out the wad of ones from my wallet,
handed it to him, told him it’s all ones.

my friend matthew once told me about seeing a chiropractor.
we were maybe seven.
there are little bones in us that get out of place sometimes,
start floating around the plasma, visiting the murky corners of the body
where they shouldn’t be caught dead- behind the knee,
above the hip,
below the ass,
crimping the style of the bigger bones
that belong, too big and well-connected
to float freely in the plasma anymore.
what the chiropractor does
is locate these little deviants and herd them back home,
mostly to the spine or neck.
matthew was someone who was sure of everything he said
and said anything that came to mind.
he had long curly red hair like my man with the six-shooter.
they slipped back into the soppy night and
told me to walk over the bridge
where maybe they’d have followed,
but i fell back down the street the other way
to adam’s place on royal
all my bones in their right place.

38
i was sitting where i am now- the series of miscommunications had been perfect.
not a single phoneme heard properly. i thought adam meant the break in the fence
when he pointed and said hole. i was sitting where i am now
and him next to me. but what he meant was a gash in the wall of the house
behind the fence. i hadn’t looked far enough away.
the kids take hammers to this one particular spot. no ready reason why.
of course this is it’s own form of perfection.

times like these i get so jealous
of those lithe vicious kids.

they get down into
the neat tight spaces
and through the high windows
giving each other a boost
getting scabs,
getting in trouble,
never having fucked
or forgotten someone’s name.
don’t get me wrong-
the name forgetting thing is double-sided,
and i don’t mean to be pessimistic about it.
it’s just that they look so much like they are
and i’d want to devour them
if i had any strong impulses at all.


39
lonely gas station at three am
bright inside
and outside a light rain and darkness
goes out over the hills and chases the cars down the roads.

stepping out from under the ceiling above the pumps
i feel the rain.

i’m back in my seat now
and we pull out without announcement. i think the sad thought
what if we’ve left someone behind?



40
you can sit at a table on a roof
in a city that’s not you’re city
at a birthday party
sometimes
and think about the recent news
of an old friend killing themselves,
and of another who died
in a plane crash. You’re memory fails though-
what was his name?
Well, he was a family friend, really,
not your friend, really.

someone can sit at the table
and you can be introduced to them
and they can have the same name as the one
you can’t remember. You tell them later
of this coincidence, but don’t include
the part about the plane crash.

making connections
they say, with their accent,
and grin.

you can sit at a table at a birthday party
and think of the news of an old friend’s suicide
and think of when you used to know her
and of the gap between then and now,
now being when she no longer exists.

you can think of your poor memory too
and wonder how much of your quickness
you left behind in the syrup-drinking days,
and think maybe that’s what did it,
that maybe it’s just the brain
that’s not working, and that’s why
the party isn’t working. You can think of
your dead friend and your memory
and at the same time feel ashamed
for never thinking entirely of others for a single moment.

How much irony’s involved
is up to you


mom told me this important thing
that she lay in the bathtub one time
as a kid, and thought
i’m going to remember this forever now
and did.
of course she was my age.
i was young.

now she says
it had nothing to do with the bath.
it was about a pencil eraser,
one of the pink ones.
that’s what she remembered forever.


41
losing the sense of significance again,
we pass under the highway signs,
the names that mean my future
and the names that mean
what won’t be my future.
something’s happened to the signs-
they don’t mean longing right now.

riding my bike the other day though,
back at home, i felt something like longing.
it was right when i made the turn off of troy
onto bergen. i don’t know why.
bergen is a wide street, but one-way.


42
i’m stealing your experience:
step out the backdoor to get real and alone for a sec.
i know what kind of place this is because all the cigarette
butts on the ground are smoked to the filter.
to my left there’s a man walking slowly toward me,
face burning and spent like after sex,
behind him the glow and spitting of a burning
wood pallet leaning up against a power-line pole
the flames jumping towards the electric lines.


43
i want to run into you at a rest stop off I-90,
see you crossing the linoleum floor
with that grace that makes each bit
of floor you step on yours.
you haven’t noticed me yet
and i think you’re acting just like yourself.
you must not be one of those molting creatures
that leave shells on all the trees they lean on.

i don’t want to run into you.
i want to find you
like something in a tide pool
to look at from above.
i want to watch you pausing,
deliberating over whether to get a coffee or not
and then not really deliberating
but just thinking for a moment,
stopped awkwardly in the middle of the floor,
everyone circulating around you
without noticing you.

when you notice me and we talk
it’ll be in the bathroom
and the air-conditioner will be blasting
a thick white noise that covers our voices
so that only words spoken at certain frequencies
come through, but they’re the right words.
i’ll get into your car
and forget how i got here
and the rest of my life
will start now.





44
when did i hear it said yesterday?
maybe in a newspaper article
i glanced over at mom’s house.
“regret is the strongest feeling”.
of course. i’ve known this forever.
as a kid i’d make up regrets
just to touch that feeling’s power.
i would let dad put the token
into the turnstile just so i could want
to have done it myself. i’d ask mom
for a piece of this candy
just so i could rather
have had that one.


45
the mage doesn’t see anyone she says she will.
the part of her with excellent sense of smell
knew she never would. she leaves people waiting
alone in diner booths and movie theaters.
she leaves people to face their own reflections
and wonder about the golden rule.

a real mage will always disappoint you.
whenever you come close enough to her
to ascertain the shape of her relentless commitment
to the golden rule, you shudder, step backwards,
and consult your friends who reassure you:
those magicians, you can’t trust em.

your friends don’t believe in alchemy.
they don’t really believe
in the golden rule.


46
i don’t wanna forget those two guys.
don’t wanna forget their faces,
the way they softened for each other
on the plaza benches by the bus station.
i can forget what they talked about-
mostly have already, and that’s not
why they were there with each other
anyway. (the part about the blonde guy
finding his estranged father in london and the part
about the gypsy who gave them the weed
they were rolling come to mind, but for what?
you can’t put the leaves back on a tree right?)
the heart of their talk wasn’t the talk.
they spoke a hash of spanish and english,
neither knowing the other’s first language,
and the slow rolling conversation
served the same function
as the spliff they passed
as the bread the blonde man was tossing to the pigeons,
as the ball the kids were kicking around the square.

there are details here
but i don’t think they’re the right ones.
i don’t think they’re the ones
that explain the love.


47
up again before the others,
creep around on padded feet,
make the machines gurgle,
crack the door to peek
a sight of the gagged outside,
the few early worms padding away
to work. someone slips
into a big slush and yells FUCK
phonemes so sharp in the blank air
figures so well-defined
against the grey snow.
you can’t handle this exactitude right now-
close the door, but quiet,
so no one can hear


leaving a dream
i saw through the window
that the park across the way
is now covered in new grass
and that the trees have gotten their leaves.
spring’s dropped pretty quick this year,
i thought. well, it is march…
the truck moved then
and i saw the snow behind it
on the grey ground
of the park.

48
a family of mennonites come
through gate A at 3 am sharp.
tv monitor says cleveland wins,
completing the biggest comeback
in playoff history, tied
with the 2012 los angeles clippers
vs the memphis grizzlies.
i’m doing the alertful dozing thing, waiting
for my bus to come.

49
there’s an empty platform
at hoyt and schermerhorn
that always looks like someone’s
just left it. sometimes,
when i see someone coming down
from the mezzanine, i catch myself thinking-
were they just over there? did i miss
someone doing something new?

i’m coming back now
from seeing my little brother’s play.
it was a coming of age story
that ended in tragedy-
a pianist having his hands crushed
in a piano.

the platform isn’t far
and i always think
i could jump that, in a pinch
land in a dust cloud,
the first feet on that platform
since the beginning of time.
i’d creep around a little, hyper-aware,
and then i’d be the one
who just left.


50
walking with a tight buzz
in my walk, containing my buzz,
like i’d lift off if i chose
to run, but i choose
to contain it.
i kick a dead lighter
on the street.
green, the cheap transparent
kind. it happens so quick
i don’t see the movement
of anything for a second.
and then it’s skidding off the curb
up ahead.

there’s the problem.
it’s happening too fast
and you just miss most of it.