natural anthem

day twelve

in the bleak morning i will beg you,
i will beg you on both knees
for my final glory to be words
scattered onto the winds like ashes.
i believe that in my final days
i will have no other way
to touch the world.

day thirteen

the heat has dulled my senses,
or maybe a fog in the spring wafted from the treetops.
the smell of missed rain was heavy in every breath,
though your memory corrected, popping
petrichor! petrichor! petrichor!
as if answering for a gameshow.
i think of you, standing on a stage,
not centered, but askew, aligned with a piano
the way we used to tilt our bowties to one and seven.
you wouldn't believe me if i said it,
but your ghost is a chatty fly;
sometimes you sing in my ear and i harmonize,
and you teach me things in my own head--
refrain with the minor six, drop the first
to a flat seventh and let your tongue roll
as if you are always worshiping a god
who never shows his face.
i shut my eyes and try to picture you
but the lines are skewed in the southern heat.
maybe i'll see you in the fall.

day fourteen

there aren't many moments
that don't put an ache in my chest.
it's a place where you placed your hands
and made subtle scratches,
where your voice can still accuse
the chest of being empty.
i can study love, i can write
about almost anything and make the words flow,
but i can't muster the will to use your words--
but i think, tonight, i will try. see,
you sang it almost every day;
i can hear you from the past--
love is an open door with you,
with you, with you. i'm just afraid
that you haven't considered
that the door is a fire escape.

Your second person poems are beautiful, but there's something about your first person poems that make me hurt.

day fifteen

humans made an evolutionary mistake
with the forging of the demon Why.
children should be taught that
wealth and poverty are the god-tier monsters
so that they'll be fully prepared
with anxiety and understanding
when they leave the american home
without healthcare or a solid roof;
babies should know the fear
of debt collectors and tax penalties
so they can grow into well-adjusted
shrink cases. mankind in the kingdom
of serotonin will lead the charge
as the world shrinks inward,
becomes small again like in the Torah days,
and commits to the fight unending
for the peace before day six.

u rite purty

day sixteen

my vocabulary is made of made-up words for mental disease and all the things you tell me at four in the morning. i often think that the ache made by your raw poetry comes from a line of history that begins an eternity ago in africa when a woman left the den to find just a bloodied arm lying in the footprint of a predator. she didn't embalm the remains or burn it so that the pain he left behind would be forgotten, but rather sheared the skin and stretched it into parchment where she wrote in pictographs:

the earth mother took my darling
and all i have left is the rain.

her nieces and nephews would learn about how precious the words were; darling means you make me ache and rain is a condolence when the pain sinks deep. this is important because the ache causes longing, and longing makes the ache precious.

that first poem lived on until now, when we are together beneath a willow tree. it is raining--no

it is pouring, and i write tiny words in the palm of your hand. a droplet smears the ink and you press your hand against my wrist so there are two poems, something of an echo through parchment. and it's vague and blurred and i'm certain you can't read it, but if you did you would call it cheesy--but in your hand there's

i hope the rain
falls as hard for you
as i did

and when we reach the house and curl beneath blankets, i realize that you've turned the words on my wrist;

i hope you fell
for me as hard
as the rain.

day seventeen [rebound from an @Isha title]

i should really stop doing nights. you say this whenever we see our friends, even before the fun--almost as if you are warning yourself that you'll be a bit of a fool. i know your pattern by now, and it means that you'll drink bomb-this and jaeger-that and god-knows-what-this-vodka-means, and a few explosions in you tell your truth. i think

i think a little too much but
your mind is so consistent
ly beautiful hic i can almost
taste your hic hic words.

our friends think this is cute, think we're cute. it's nice, but it doesn't exactly--how could i put it? let me try this.

your words are the sweetest taste
i've ever known,
but they come so seldom
beneath the drink
that i fear they may be ashamed.

i can't tell you that. not when you'll remember. so, for what my opinion counts, you should never stop doing nights.

Lumi, I bloody love you

day eighteen

one day, when the moon crosses the pacific, trailing behind a jet's tail like a dog running free of a leash, i will step off an escalator and look for your face among a sea of strangers with new accents. this will be a remarkable day because i will leave my country in spring and arrive in autumn, and it will serve to teach me how time and heat can so easily distort the distance between two hands that honest-to-god only want to hold one another.

i may not be very stable there--not when you're not around--and i may spend days at a time wondering if you'll come back home after a party with your friends. i think you've considered these things, how they can shave against my firing brain and linger for days, maybe weeks, at a time.

but all this is to say that, in no cliche way, you are worth all the high risks, even if i'm not. you can escape whenever you want, i think--even while i'm holding the small of your back, even when we kiss. each moment is an exit strategy, and all that remains is a matter of which one is best.

day nineteen

beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,
i get it, we get it--the world gets it.
you can repeat this idiom
whenever someone says
if only my nose were
if only my legs weren't
i really don't like my
and you'll succeed in shutting them up;
it's a rule.
but there's such a central flaw with the argument
because a beholder will say you are beautiful
let me kiss your eyelids and in the morning
say i have a girl to honor, i can't do this again
and the beholder will leave because that's
the nature of
of people. it's really not his fault
because the beholder will always feel noble.
i made him realize
how beautiful he is
and he'll think this when he holds her hips,
when he's leaving marks on her neck
because toothplay is just his thing.
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
because the beholder is avaricious,
because nobility is a means to an end.
i'll wake up in the morning and feel the cold he left;
i'll find a mirror and see the hair that shades my chin
and i'll say to myself that beauty left in the night,
beauty always leaves in the night.

that last one.

day twenty

i have counted
because today was my cleaning day,
and i have four scarves--each one
a color plus black, color plus black,
so on and so forth. this blue one
is tied in a knot as a blindfold,
the red one with tiny rips
where my teeth had dug in too tightly.
i've never bought a scarf in my life,
and i imagine that you'll call one day
looking for your missing clothes.
who knows, maybe i can start a collection
and patch together a hyperrealistic heart
of cloth--one that is scarily strong,
resilient to the tug of being undone
and washed to remove the remaining cologne
even if it's been two years.
i could definitely live with a patchwork heart,
one that doesn't change paces in the cold
or lull when my lungs won't cooperate.
if i stitch these scarves together,
if i hide them in my chest,
i doubt you'd go looking
for the fear of finding the heart replaced,
for the fear of seeing it tied in knots
to cover my eyes while you skinned my chest
or where there are rips from the biting.
you're a smart guy, i think,
so you'd probably see the duality.

day twenty-one

let's talk about a piano,
about eighty-eight nerve cells
that make the air groan so deeply,
rolling like the waters of the styxx
in persephone's belly. she and i
could harmonize, and i think it would be beautiful.
and i could ask her during my visit for a taste
of the seeds she stowed away after
the light of earth was sealed from her eyes.
maybe this is fitting for a person like me
who has wanderlust so powerful
that no place will feel like home until there is a trap.
maybe i can taste the seeds once each time i land,
pessac today, ottawa in october--even one day
an island in the pacific no bigger than my home.
but if i'm trying to live my life as stravinsky
ruled his eighty-eight nerves,
i have only twelve landings to spend.
there's no room for recoil.

day twenty-two

you know you've hit someone hard
when they assign a drink to your memory.
i've watched a lot of boys down a lot of shots,
compared their faces while its bitterness burned--
or maybe he makes no face at all because it's five a.m.
because we're a dozen drinks in and who knows
maybe he just can't taste the burn of age twenty-one.
that's all to say, and i may digress,
i've never seen him put his lips to the tip
without whispering my name.
it's an easy mistake, though, i mean
anything he could be thinking starting with a t
could end with one breath. it's my ego, i'm sure,
thinking that i'm worth assigning to a fixation;
but i think of the way i write about you
and suddenly understand fixation tenfold;
i think of the way i still have parts of you tied to me
and i remember the molotov streak of good and bad
memories jammed together. they're so much more dangerous
than just thinking i hate you, but knowing
i don't knowing you're somewhere between
knowing i still have you assigned to everything--
and it's all routine in downing shots: burn and daze,
that's all we'll ever do.