Dream at Night

For a girl I like:

I stopped writing love poems
around the time we started dating.

This was sort of a funny thing, mostly because
you had read my love poems about other girls;
I can’t imagine the wonder of this neglect.

But the playful metaphors I attached
to names I had left
felt empty.

I felt empty, like I had gotten
in all kinds of trouble before you,
and I couldn’t shake that itch
of discontentment.

You were curled up in the fetal position
as you slept. I looked out the window
and for a moment felt like a real New Mexican;
I wished for rain to come.

I emitted contentment and you could smell it on me while you slept.
Like a vulture I picked at things I had once felt for others
and released a sigh.

:]

We write love sings in C, we do politics in G, and we sing songs about our friends in E minor!

If there wasn’t blood,

there was dust that flew from the earth
that I had cut with the heel of my shoe.

Nothing like a lonely cigarette;
I had time to watch the sun
peek shyly from behind a tree
whose genus I could never identify.

I passively watched the way the bike
tires settled on the pavement during
red street lights, and also I watched
the shapes I had made in the sands
of the earth fade as the wind blew by.

Of these contentious moments, concepts discussed
like those in a classroom, or the darting of
men’s eyes from skirts to their shoes -
I had found nothing contentious in the
bustling of citizens whose lives seemed
far more complex than mine.

This thought passed like the burning
of the cigarette I had scarcely attended to,
and I was left on the cusp of a beating sun,
and cancerous constraints.

Ode to Loneliness

We were pressed by the pads of our fingers,
looking for a match; from this we scanned for solutions,
and our differences were laid bare.

I laid my head against the cold glass of
a coffee shop, somewhere on a mountain
we could scarecely identify. I frowned.

I remembered what loneliness felt like
from the precipice of childhood memories,
and nothing seemed to fill this gap.

I am a child, dissected and molded,
and I am lonely and wanting for the best.

To Scientists,

Objective Scientists;
lovely poets are wondering
like your students would, where it is
we store these thoughts in the brain.

That is the question though,
writing on the topic of a science I
know nothing about,

“Where do I keep my fond memories?”

Disc drives, file cabinets and parking spaces
are not analogous to when I evoke dead relatives
from slumber to remember
“the good times”

That’s what I call them anyway.

So as poets derive metaphors from quantum mechanics,
astronomy, biology and the like, you must contest
the poet as a fraud. They do not know where
these ideas come from.

Modernism

A glass ceiling would imply I could see through,
envious of the other side.

I could break glass with my fist.

This is a dark room, unlit alleyways
and monsters in my closet.

We look up at the ceiling made
of blue skies and minimum wage,
shelters made of academia and
failed PHDs.

I’ve learned from those who come before me,
but I was never told our
fears impacted nothing outside
of tension headaches and pain killers.

Well, it comforts me.

We peeled open the doors of a small taxi cab,
and from the filth was tragic events,
the metropolis of the metropolitan and
hungry bugs squirming at our heels.

I wrote a love poem, about rats and
Chinese restaurants, city skies and stars.

I wrote a love poem about you and
wrote on it my name and then wrote
on it things I wouldn’t say and then
wrote on it drawings of atoms in a molecule,
but I am uneducated.

Untitled

We were brought to the attention of ourselves
as the eclipse was introduced to itself.

We stared

until it passed by and then
we were anonymous
like the rocks and sediment
who only knew their own layer of earth.

This set of empirical data
was a composure of colors
that found itself an idea
we could stomach as a whole,

so we kept gazing at where it had left
a mark in the sky
(a hole in my retina)
until our many legs
continued to crawl onward
from nature’s meager display.

The Feast

I had finished the last
cigarette that night.

“China Wok” was the choice for dinner,
and my anger towards his decision was noticeable
by even the koi fish in their tanks
who would look up and glace with
a morbid curiosity.

We were not seated,
but picked our seat.

Musty sandalwood stench poured
in from the kitchen along
with the shrieking of dying chickens,
(or the owners wife, just the same)
and a small golden Buddha smile,
as though we are the canvas for
such an establishment.

We are offered a buffet of the rancid,
wholly inetable by modern convention,
but like pigs we devoured
(the clean; the unclean, as Noah would put it.)
until our bellies protruded.

We protected our pressured round stomachs filled
with the stench
that would rise to the backs of our throats
and pour its rot over our tongues.

Notions of intent.

Her earrings hung like keys to things
I had already seen;

my sickness held feelings I had already felt,
but something about your smiling face
was momentousness in my notion to forget.

Money exchanged hands,
I felt a full stomach.

Silent,

car ride and computer usage -
lay in bed, lay in bed.

Empty bed,
I miss the fullness of an
extra heart and set of lungs,
and you,
holistically.

But you didn’t come with.