the words i can see behind this screen

with men
query and
reinvention and
victims,
and masculinity,
and bullying and
psychology of
psychology
condom
modeling
2017, racial
intimate partner
weekly
implications for
masculinity

after a good date with no kissing

is when i feel like a lonely trash
boy on a limb
in a car
just wanting an endless reason
waking up lucky

what i like about good dates
is how afterwards you are giddy with vision
you have seen the best future and cannot contemplate that it will melt

futures always begin with kisses

i don't know who told me this

anyway,
he had rainbow gloves
soft hands
wiry hair
kind lips
and they brushed up against mine

but not long enough to sow a prophecy

after congress adjourns on december first

this is just to say
that i have given up on utopia
far too late, i know
they held a midnight party
and i wasn't invited

you shouldn't forgive me.

of course we will be sharing bread
from bread lines
living in cramped spaces
sharing bed-bugs, too
working death hours together
of course we will keep each other warm
if it comes to that
but you shouldn't forgive me.

good white people
are the vanguard of cruelty

everything is inverted
it always has been
and when i thought i was striving
i was climbing lower and lower

now i know why they write poetry about you

i will try to do this like you
stuffed mouth of oatmeal, homemade sourdough
same teeth brushed in the same way
with the same paste
at the same time
isolation
i will try to do this like you
turn down the volume on shoulder-devil
just repeat: i am fine
i am fine
i am fine
i will try to do this like you
and it will come out sideways
and my limbs will fall off
and my sex will dry up
and my mouth will smell
and at night, next to the air conditioner
i will remember talking at you like the shoulder-devil
will fall asleep drowning, wake up mouth full
of the usual suspects
oatmeal, sourdough, toothpaste, isolation

augury

this means trouble, this day
this means death
and there is nothing to poeticize about it
except that the burden in my heart
is to wish it away
to care for the earth as a motherbird

cannot, nobody can

and this is the work: to keep on working
even in this sickness of knowing
that nothing is enough, not even close

waking up
feels like dying

remind me why we did this again?

sixteen hours

without you
the puddles never dry
they don't even try to evaporate
it doesn't matter, they think
everything is wrong and heavy
what sense is there in running back to the sea

refraction

now that our love is contained
i must uncover a photograph
in which the light
nearly overtakes you
and your eyes
look like i am drowning
no matter how shallowly
you love me.
now that our love is contained
i am forced to confess
that it is true;
under the tides of our love
i would have either
drowned
or swam ashore

yoked

today, hiking at land's end
i wondered where your feet have fallen on these paths
or if in our years of separation
me on one ocean, you on the other
you ever actually set foot in this park
(i have, after all, neglected much of the beauty
in the places where i've lived)

and suddenly i felt what i've stubbornly refused to know
that it doesn't matter
that the cosmos have yoked me to you
not in a spiritual sense
or even a scientific one
but in the sense that we have traveled enough of the same ground already
to change our lives in obvious and subtle ways
that our small differences
our one degree angles
have hurled us as far apart as america will let us go

how strange is it
that even our distance
even our successful un-knowing of each other
loops us back together
like chattel, perhaps, or simply like lovers

and today, when i reached the point where you can see the golden gate bridge
i remembered that you are moving to london
and i watched the pacific waves crashing against the rocks
and i felt you tugging at me
and i kept on walking.

go to london

go to london
with your new boyfriend

i don't care what you do there

go to london
and become an architect
and win the pritzker
and fuck all of the cute boys
that you didn't want me to touch

i don't care anymore

go to london
where i can't feel you
in my solar plexus when i'm sad

go to london
i hurt so much
i am afraid our continent will break
if we try to share it

d

you deserve a poem all to yourself

not just to sing your praises—

how you bathe your lovers

in yes

how the graze of your chin over mine

drags me with you

how you would rather turn to stone

than see me harmed—

not just that

(the briefest glimpse of your light)

you deserve a poem all to yourself

because poetry is beautiful and sharp

and you are poked through

i don’t know anyone who has bled so much for art

without making it

see: you have given your bed, your sex, your love

your looks of hunger

you have been husbanded and cuckolded and used up

and loved, yes, but also valuated and parsed and lyricized

you have born it all

and all of it has been hard

whether you know it, or not

and here you are, unbroken

cat, rug, pounce

another night of inverse sleep in this strange, new place
and my cat is pouncing on our braided rug
turning it sideways so the whole room looks confused and ugly.

in our old apartment, the rug fit just-so
pinned beneath the couch so it couldn't move.
i miss that feeling, precision borne from familiarity
but i am here, not frozen
wandering aimlessly in the valley between happinesses.

i do not know what pushed me from my peak, but
i am beginning to notice that the afterwards is always eternal -
things cannot un-happen, through sheer force of will or desperate wishing.
time fills up space
and no amount of crying can put things where they once were

not even a rug, which in the morning
i dutifully line up with the floorboards
studying its delicate weave and the space where it has snagged a thousand times
hoping to return it to its original positioning.

i am almost successful; the rug is almost where i remember it being
but everything uncanny is measured in micrometers
and the cat will pounce again

orlando

the only safe place to cry
is on the streets
where nobody will wake up
and pretend to know.

not ever new york city

where were you this weekend?
my landlord's face gets ugly when i say
n-y-c
he's not alone in that, we all have our reasons
for instance: the combined smell of hamburgers and cigarettes
july sweating at three a.m. waiting for the j train
bottles of urine on the subway and the street
people under blankets on the street next to people in suits
the way a hurricane can kill a coastline
while one mile inland, all anyone does is drink
but cody gets uglier than that
his big lips dropping down like melpomene
ugly at the sound of ghosts and gay bars
he says "new years eve, 1983
is when he let a guy fuck him in the bath house
and i knew."

never mind that nobody could have known.
some places are so full of ghosts
that it doesn't matter which ones
lenape, homosexual, black
there is always something garish about discotheques on graveyards

arriving home at sunset

it was a joke:
we are a 501(c)3 negative-profit organization
and we need your money so that we can
grind ourselves to dust but not disappear
so that kira can go home at night
and not cry because the people she loves
are tense in their shoulders, faces, laughs
about going hungry for the things that matter

i am driving home in a car with a cracked bumper
and a breaking axle, and
the crack will turn one-year-old soon, and
the axle will snap, and
i am thinking "who did this to the world," and
the black woman by the side of the road
holds a cardboard sign that says "anything helps," and
i drive past her and consider giving my last quarter
but it seems too small
and then she is in the distance

later
as i mount the hill whereon i live
an orange sun meets me and shoots up gold
rays across my windshield,
reggaeton falls onto the warm road from above,
the dust of a springtime afternoon
caught up in the sun and the music and the rattle of my dying car
and upstairs, my room smells like summer salads
and firewood
and i think again "who did this to the world"
because nothing so horrible should be so sweet

and christmas is eight months away

evening setter, sun setting, set-up: poinsettia

off my balcony spills a city bricolage

promises to be beautiful, not lonely

promises to be rainy on Christmas

to drown out being Jewish and ignored

or being in love with a Christian and living with a Christian

and surrounded by Christians who don’t know the difference

between menorah and chanukkiah

though really, neither does any other Jew

who claims to not feel sad about lights on Christmas trees

lights on Christmas houses, chintzy plastic chanukkiahs

on chintzy ‘80s temples.

I could list and list the things that give me distance

soul dysphoria – not just religion, but

rickety tables, rickety chairs, laminate countertops, electric stoves

linoleum kitchens, loose sockets, dusty corners

crying dog downstairs, the band “crystal castles”

but really this it it:

I want to wake up in the forest and not miss the city

to wake up in the city and not miss the woods

to pick mushrooms out of my backyard

I want to love Christmas trees

poinsettias

sunsets, evenings in Providence

myself

inverse correlation

no poetry
painting
or songs
just gentle winds
and long walks
an endless caress
and just like that
no reason for art.
it is better, true,
but it is also quiet.

i killed a huge spider

(it wasn't that large)

its exoskeleton crack-popping

leg by leg

under a bleached paper towel

spider and towel will travel

to landfill,

neither heaven nor hell

(why has nobody told me

that purgatory

is a place on earth?)

painted black

sometimes
i dream that you sing
but only because
i can hear your song
even when don't.

every terrible season

it feels as if i am before you

waiting for the time we meet

enduring summer

sweat

music

drunk boys

next door,

mosquitos.

it feels the same again

i will smile
at my ghost

and you

you will arrive

on the breath of autumn

your laugh rattling the leaves

caught in the branches
where we used to love