2000-2001

“Into Winter”
to Munir
12.26.01
Burned with the black night,
You carve yourself a cave of light
In the darkness. You watch
The glitter fall and catch.
Walking through the day,
You turn and burn this way,
Becoming something more than you,
Something bright and dark and new.
In the winter you recede
To protect a silent seed
That will grow with the light of spring…

“Your Lips Taste Like Nothing”
12.13.01
I guess your lips taste like nothing,
Because I never tasted them.
If my arm had been closer…
My mind collected…
I would have welcomed every cold morning
In a strange new world.

Into the city square,
I take my pace, out from the subway.
Pigeons fly in one great clatter,
Just like the movies…
Just like the movies,
Everything is magical
And I feel like I’m dreaming.

Here, the ghost of my grandparents
Around each corner building brick…
The footsteps of my ancestors
On the ancient cobblestone walks…
The buildings lean and crack,
But stand a thousand years of weather
Still.
I must hold still,
And take a picture,
And try to capture
My newest love.

For three day, I barely speak,
So fascinated by the foreign world around me.
So awed that I can’t find speech
To capture this overwhelming beauty.
Silently, I promise to return,
And pray this cityscape understands my English.
Here, the roots of the great tree of life…
Of my life,
And all the branches reaching toward
The sideways northern sun.

10.13.01
I locked my heart up
From you because of people like you.
The effort is making me shake.
I twist and writhe and duck and hide
On the inside.
Crack the ice and swim deep.
The good twin was out the day
That you came.

Favoring silence.
You anoint yourself the saint.
I shake my head.

You didn’t see my hand shaking,
You saw
My head shaking.
Think what you will think
And feel free to psychoanalyze me.

We’ve done
I’ve done
Nothing
And nothing wrong.

You lie down in spit to try
To show me what it feels like
What it tastes like.
I locked my heart up
And came home to cry.
I twisted, ducked to hide,
To keep the pain in
And leave the world to glitter.

You commandeer the species
To line them up and shoot.
Wonder why each is the same
When you play your game.

I locked my heart up
So your guilt trips wouldn’t work on me.

The rain seeded your eyes
With painstaking details
That never pierced the eye
Of the needle.
Shouted to break me
But I was hiding.

Never touched my passions,
Nor darkened the doorstep to the darkest parts
Of my dark heart.

I’ve faced rows of blank faces,
Hard hearts,
Cold hands,
And this is how I survived.
You were never so privileged as to
Change sides.

Let me sing it away
Before it corrodes
The armor that is the only hope I know.
You never reached in because
I’d snap your hand off
To keep the beauty unsoiled.

6.21.01
A smile won’t get me in;
I can’t win
With just a grin.
I have to want,
To covet,
To desire
Their beautiful fire,
To the forgetting of me.
I’m like them, but
I’m not like them.
A smile won’t get me in;
I can’t win
With just a grin.
Like a high school clique,
I just don’t fit,
And I don’t know if I’m willing
To give what I would have to give
In order to get.

“Lovers Like Us”
6.13.00
In the silent places,
Where my heart has turned malleable,
Like copper in sheets,
I still conduct sparks,
And spin wires,
To show the world a new beauty.
I find each second without you
Just as impossible as at the start.
Saltwater smearing mascara –
I can’t see you today.

I look for you
Under the eaves for a word or two,
And bleach the time between
With sleep and monotone things.
Still, I turn my ear south
To catch your sigh and breath
Across copper wires.
Still, I crave your mind
And its possessor.
A quarter of a year;
A coin; a token;
An idea to find awe at,
To curl up in the remembrance of,
Still breaking a smile
Across a sober face, at misplaced moments.
With just one touch,
one look,
real or imagined;
Still translating
The space between lovers like us.