I need to write
I wanna talk to someone
but I don’t know who to call
who to ask what’s wrong with me
who to touch hearts with
I want to write about my life
share the worms in my head
beat hearts together
cry with abandon
I’m scared
I’m scared I’m going to die before I see Chris’s face again
before I stroke my granddaughters hair
before I stare Marina in the eyes
I wanna climb into Carl’s arms and smell his outdoor skin
I want my mom to tell me secrets
I wanna talk to my dad again and ask him if he loves me
I want to lay on the floor with every dog I ever had
maybe the cats too
I want to feel Carl’s mouth wrapped around mine like I’m twenty
I want to be in a pool with all my sisters
naked and free
I want to snort cocaine and dance on the speakers at studio 54
I want to drop acid and drink champagne in Central Park
I want to eat turkey sandwiches in Lithia park under a tree
I want to cop weed in Washington Square Park
I want to run on the beach with Odin
and follow Freya down paths through the forest
I want to sit on my deck on Maui
I want to sit on the roof at 200 west 54th street
I want to sit on the bench under my fathers tree
I want some cotton candy
I want Rosalie to know I believed her
I want my heart to beat steady and strong like a Gloria Gaynor song
I want black hair
black shit around my eyes
a short black leather skirt
a cut up black rock t-shirt
a black chocker held tight around my neck
I want to dance hard at the Crush Club
I want to stare hard at the boys at the Cock Ring on Christopher Street
I want to throw darts hard at The Triple Inn
I want my dad back
that’s really what I want

My skin is different than it used to be.
More used, paved in.
Walked on by dirty soles.
Feet that stomped and tracked the wild in.
Treaded on when I’m pretty sure I put that sign up.
You know the one.
I’m like a coloring book
A kid endlessly scrolls through,
Looking for a blank page
That hasn’t been colored all over.
The problem is,
All of them are full.
I wasn’t even coloring in the lines.
Just ravaging each image,
One then two then three.
I just kept coloring.
I wasn’t even planning for the inevitable.
The end of the pages.
I just wanted to color man.
I didn’t time manage.
I’m no pocket watch,
But I swear I heard the ticking.
I just kept coloring.
Purple because that was my moms favorite color,
Then green because that one was mine.
I let everyone have a go,
Surely that wouldn’t do any harm?
Their colors, my colors, what would be the difference?
They were better at it than me.
Could make my pages be something different.
Something prettier on the outside.
I just wanted to color.
Now,
I am just skin.
A used palette,
Full to the brim.
Softer though too, and I smell different.
I forgot how to color,
Isn’t that wild?
Didn’t even know I was a page.
Now it’s all soft edges,
Endless remembering,
Time management and circumstance.
They all got damp along the way too.
I guess I forgot that
I just wanted to color.
So I stopped doing it,
Not even because the pages were full,
Though they were.
I just forgot my favorite color.
I forgot to look down,
Up, up, up, up, I kept heading.
Thinking there was something new for me
I hadn’t yet drawn on.
But I forgot the colors, left them on the ground.
And life,
She tossed me and turned me and I fell…
The remembering is here in these words.
I just need to want to color…

I always work best under pressure. I create my own pressure by waiting until the last minute. I tend to procrastinate. No need to do something today I might not have to do tomorrow.
I enjoy the details, the curves and dips and paisley fish with Mandelbrot tails. I’m an expressionistic pointillist working with the single eyelash of a bactrian camel.
She says, “Where have you been?” 
Grey eyes nested in fake eyelashes glued to a mask of crackled foundation frisk me with no real interest. The fluid in the air is filled with drifting amoeba.
I’m pinned in the doorway with a fistful of blotter acid soaking into my sweating palm. I can’t deal with her now. If I let her start talking I could be standing here for an hour. And fuck, I forgot to take off the sneakers I stole. 
I should just tell her. 
About the gang and the liquor store. 
About standing in the park in the night screaming for the slaves on the hill to wake the fuck up. 
I should just tell her. 
About Kim’s brother beating his face raw last night while I watched helpless, and their dad throwing a wine bottle through the TV next to my head. 
I should just tell her. 
She doesn’t care about my answer because she doesn’t have a clue. She can’t wait to hide her head back in that book and eat that bowl of raw veggie snacks on the coffee table. 
I should just tell her who I am.
That’s never gonna happen. I’m keeping all my cards under the table. I’m on my own, and we both know that. She set it up that way. I mean, the only two light bulbs that work in the house are the one in the plastic reading lamp over her head and the one in the wire cage over the stove. If I want a bulb in my room I have to go to the market and steal one.
She needs to wake up. I’ve been scamming meals from my friends as long as I can remember. 
She needs to wake up. The cops aren’t gonna keep bringing me home. 
She needs to wake up. There’s a difference between being independent and running feral in the street. 
The books on the brick and board shelves are a world outside my teenage experience. All of them absorbed and transporting me to secret places under the cover of night. 
I’m beyond her now.
She needs to wake up. She was supposed to show me how it all works. 
She needs to wake up. To unlock the doors and open the windows. 
She needs to wake up. To let the air into this dusty moldy place where we both suffer from her asthma. 
She needs to wake up.
There is a giant beetle wrapped around her head like a wig. The bees living inside its body hover in still life, wings screaming in harmony with the electric bulb. A dark crack in the universe is my safe exit. 
Without pausing, I say, “Nowhere”

​Going deep is like getting new candleglasses. I remember the first kraken. I’d camped at the Genesee river gorge before. Played, skipping flat shales on the river. Then I learned about sedimentary rock, and the next kraken saw the cliffs of countless layers, and my shine exploded. Deep, deep kraken. I was seven, or eight. New, sharp, candleglasses.
The second kraken was when mommy’s belly was getting big and dad sat me down and told me about birds and bees. Except he was an engineer, so he told me about vaginas and sperm. I understood it all, except he left out the part about erections. I asked about that. “It wouldn’t work. It’s not stiff,” I said. He said we’d talked long enough. Out of kraken for today. Mommy was abed and I stared at her tummy and my candles got so, so big. Creation in there. A new universe in there.
“Don, what did you tell him?” She hadn’t candled that expression on my face before. Deep.
Sometimes it’s more like getting new candles. I was blind and now I candle.
Christmas, again, seven or eight, knee-deep in Buffalo snow and candling at a bright star with my own telescope. My throat caught, it was so beautiful. Light! Angel wings! What fireworks want to be when they grow up. I ran inside. “Dad! Dad!”  He candled up from Business Week. “Did you focus?”
I tried that. Oh my god. A diamond needle, pulling my shine through my candles into outer space. And space was so big I forgot to breathe.
Age twelve, Santa brought me a book on galaxies. Deeper than deep. Glow-multitudes of stars filled me for hours, and then again. Over and over again. Billions and billions. Stars with worlds. Worlds with people.  Trillions of worlds, for billions of years. Shine orgasms.
At 20, 50, 70, the world is physics. Every thing I learn gives new candles. I candle patterns, balances, connections. More shine orgasms.
I want to be angel wings when I grow up.

It is a recurring dream. He is two or three. He is playing, like always. He runs and hides, but never far, just behind the door, or table. Laughing and smiling, sparkling eyes. 
Peekaboo. 
Here I am.
There you are.
 
Sometimes I feel scared – I don’t see him. Where is he? my heart begins to race, I start running, as mothers do, frantic and crazy. This only serves to set me farther away from him. He was right there, right where I was before I started running. 
He is right here! He is always right here.
Peekaboo. 
Peekaboo - Here I am. There you are. Stay still and you will see, he reveals to me, laughing and smiling and I am smiling back at him. 
In my dream. 
 
He speaks to me now in playful twinkles, clouds, dimes and heart shaped rocks that I find on the path leading to his table. I see you - Peekaboo. 
 
Come land in my hug… you are here and I am here and together we are laughing, smiling, The wind speaks directly to my heart, “this can always be.” 
 
I wake from my dream, the game is over
But I am still smiling - There you are. Here I am. Peekaboo. I miss you
The day begins.
 
Each day like this, I run and hide
Peekaboo - Here is my smile.
Behind it, my hiding place, my door, my table, my broken, shattered heart
Peekaboo.
Here I am, underwater now, bubbles surface and voices scream from the beach
flinging life rafts that land with a hard smack. I grab one and make it to shore.
 
For today. 
 
It is a recurring dream.
He is two or three.
He is playing right next to me. 
Peekaboo. 


​
- Trevor’s Mom, forever 24

words smell of good wine and rare meat
I see right through you
as we sit at a table tattooed with memories
and martini glasses all in a row
cold french fries slither into everybody's hands
eating guitars
drinking daisy's
drifting through life without a pillow
I see faces
everyone I love
best in all the world
buzzing and settling and landing
agitated bees in front of me
holding smiles
photo copied from easier times
conversations miss vowels
a drunken profit
wisdom comes in sips and gulps
hair striped with lessons learned
with unsaid judgements
with glasses shared
I turn my head to see my friend chatting
with his finger
he stares through the reflecting glass
holding onto tears for yesterday
everyone means well
with stories of nesting birds in fluffy beds
I watch and wait to be asked
and once I start I have no idea what I'm saying
nor how I know what flowers intend
and cyclones think
I just do
I can tell by nods and furrowed brows
and dried up sweat
that I'm onto something
so I talk and stroke and cough blossoms
while reminiscing over sawed off trees
bursting into flames
my favorite weeds produce red teacups
I return home to flirt with the moon
and wink at the weeping willow
swaying to the water dance in her head
it’s time to bring tears on my deck
and flip memories on her back
questions comes for a spot at the table
in an alligator’s tongue
I never did trust her eyes
life is a bucket falling into a well
blue curtains sway without a breeze
I cry for many reasons
but seldom for the right one
I took the head right off her
making her grumpy for days straight
impressions have no sense of humor
I left behind hugs on the left side
bosom to bosom
in the place where I forgot my shoes

I’m riding out the storm. That is the story of my life. Riding out one storm after another. Blown helpless across the sea, or planted ankle deep in mud dragging firewood. As sure as I know the sun will come out, sending rainbows through shimmering spiderwebs in my soggy garden, I can bank on the fact another storm is coming.
It’s been uphill all the way, one foot in front of the other. But, I can’t say it hasn’t been interesting. I’m grateful for all the gifts, the wonder, the love, the laughs. 
My memories are all I’ve brought home from the trip. In eternity I imagine they will amount to some sea shells collected at the beach.
In the next thirty seconds, NO, that’s not going to happen. Later today, after lunch, NO.
What I’m asking myself to admit is, “OH Fuck, I don’t, in truth, exist. I could be gone at any given second.”
No, I have plans, that’ll have to wait.
Still, I have this feeling I’m trying to hide, from something that has already found me.
I forget that I’ve known this all along. 
I learned the lesson so many many years ago. Sitting up all night, sketching self portraits, one after another until they litter the bedroom floor, none of them proving my existence. 
It seems the only real thing in the room was the exit. Kicked under a pile of comic books with a bullet in very chamber.
But what’s the point of an exit when I’m already gone. When I was never here.
I will never know that I’ve left the room. I will not enjoy a feast of friends in the severed garden. 
I believe it will be a solitary path, deaf and blind, returning to the stars.
No more lonely than a night at the kitchen table in the company of a blank sheet of paper.
I am not interested in vague spiritualism or the dissection of the universe into quarks and monads. 
Instead I would like to spend my time raising a whiskey to some kind words for my fellow travelers.
While enjoying the satisfaction that I am, at least for the moment, one who rides storms. ​

Something vague rattles the dark, penetrates the singing in my ears, and tips me forward into the room. I assumed it would be the fan slipped its pedestal to bring the fly-swarming steel petals across the bedroom floor. 
Nothing. 
I can feel the slow breeze rapidly cooling my sleep-sweat through damp bamboo sheets. 
I was so very sure something fell. Both dogs are deep stillness at the foot, and under the bed. 
I was dreaming a dream forever lost when it . . . whatever it was. . .  
                    called me back. 
There was nothing ambiguous about it and my heart is still running in the wilderness.  
Sometimes at night I can feel death standing in the hall outside my room. Her fingers resting light on the knob, waiting, listening, checking on me. 
It’s a standing offer, she’s been waiting patiently for my invitation, which to this point I’ve neglected to extend . . .  
And . . . I have to admit, there’s an extraordinary ease and freedom to knowing she’s left it in my hands.
I am extremely careful, and all of my risks are well calculated.
Even on the motorcycle. 
But I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that sometimes when I am sailing the asphalt dragon with music overflowing from my helmet, I shout out “skip this track”, because god forbid I should die listening to the Doobie Brothers.
It’s the only thing that truly terrifies me on the highway.
Beyond the singing in my ears, beneath the swarming  fan, out past the hum of the air conditioner, and way below the doppler trucks on the distant highway, there is something deeper. 
I never know if it’s a hearing or a feeling, but I sense it spreading. 
A vortex slowly pulling everything into the earth. 
The eater of rust. 
I think it’s always been there, and that’s where everything is headed. 
The wind chime will inevitably fall from its wire. 
The cast iron door to old furnace will never open. 
A fleet of ghost ships sail deeper into the ocean mud with every passing moment.
If I pull this nail from the wall it will leave a hole . . . and that is how the dark gets in.
The squirrel in my chest is choking on a nut full of orange dust.   
Ivy asks, “what is it?”
I didn’t know she was awake.
“Something fell”
“I didn’t hear anything”
“Neither did I”

it’s ballet
flipping lightly backwards
whether or not I’m listening
earnestly showing me endings
in quilts and poetry
it’s almost always in the beginnings
where strings get drawn tightly
while we  pretend at paying attention
slowly shoveling assumptions
while playing accordions behind our backs
be that as it may
it’s only fair
that the moon sheds and grows
depending on my pitted sleep
it’s more of a tale than glory
I’m desperately hungry
no not for food
but for the underground erupting
the gift of the serpent
rearranging my rocks
fending off dust where rituals begin
it starts in swirls
leading to spirals
ending where i play my horn
in a  shining Cuban moon
while birds bring ribbons
that circle him wholly
he clears his throat
as they dodge and flutter
him not brandishing mistakes
a look all dimples
a flip of the hand
a start of scent
no not of herbs
but a deep rich intuitive smell
scattering feathers
starting my groin
raising my arms
bowing before glory
receiving his gift
it’s through a single flower
I remember love
the color of my mother’s skin
blowing kisses through our hearts
serving blue all night long
it’s the contrast of etiquettes
that sets my soul a sail
not the words he recites
it’s the way he stares
he came to me through a song
one that only bees can hum
it’s the flags I put up
to tear down yellow
that wears my skin to bleed
he sits in a tree above my head
turning words into rhymes
taming my curls straight
placing spit where I tickle
carving curves with hot iron
it’s he that soothes the beast
leaving only black behind