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