Aladdin 1992


i.

I think that I knew it

the moment we kissed

I’d made a terrible mistake

Time yawned for my heart

(she stretched, pulled her own fabric)

nearly ripped herself apart

(her pity was an act of mercy)

Those few moments extended revealed

(time is a rubber band)

the whirring patterns of faery light

(gravity is a mould)

spidered, webbed, holding reality together

(These are my favorite days)

when I lay back to

let earth swallow me in her sand

(these memories will be my solace)

everyone moves on

we (I) must, anyway

our song; v. a prayer

(that you will make it home alive)

our verse; v. voodoo binding you to I

(so that you will still love me after)

ii.

Repeat.

(Repeat)

Reincarnation.

A reoccurring dream

My worst nightmare

(you – me)

I hear the skies in Iraq are a breathtaking sight

(northern hemisphere)

did you count every star?

(the fortune teller told me)

the creator mapped each constellation

(from me to you)

iii.

Welcome home brave soul

defender of the desert

keeper of her secrets

I’ll hold a ticker tape parade in your honor

10 carnations

(red + white)

wrapped in ribbons

(navy blue)

my gifts to you

I’ll provide the paper; a billion poems

that I ripped apart

trying to describe your perfect teeth

I saw your smile in the waxing gibbous

every month on quiet evenings

One year ago; it still aches

like a new wound (∞)

our relation; my yearning passion

(my poetry; n. dying art)

six pm | *ad nauseum

That 70’s Show ’98-’06

.

.


.
.


i had just read a brief history of time. remember that night? cosmic vertigo took hold of my insides, i quit cigarettes that instant, i crushed my last pack and i declared, to you, that death takes everything.

stephen hawking explained: the universe will have an end just as it has a beginning. so having no more time to waste i told you i loved your face more than any other faces and if there was to be even the tiniest trace of me left behind i wanted it to be the way i felt for you that night.

you blew smoke rings from stitched lips, and i talked in circles around you. bleary and bloodshot our eyes closed. you maybe never read stephen hawking but i know we both ran like bandits from sleep.

I talked about how Robert Jordan said, “the wolves had no notions of time the way men did, no reasons to divide the day into hours” how the seasons and the day from night were all they needed. you had a wolf grin and would reveal a smoldering smile.

earthy smell of marijuana permeated your beard and seasoned our tongues. *omitted, wasn’t it really something? being young and together the way we were. smoke stacked to the ceiling and the lamp glow casted halogen haloes around our heads. don’t you agree how the sun always set too soon?

i’ve watched the stars, since, hoping the universal flow might be reversible. i assure you they tell me nothing of what will remedy any earthly turmoil. especially not that of someone like me, so small and so alone.

though, i love you so deeply when i set my eyes upon you my pupils pool wide as i embrace the pressure of your body’s presence wrapping steadily abound my every bone’s soft marrow: i don’t dare proclaim that your love i know, nor that the love i feel could ever heal a single mortal’s bones. despite all it’s desperation and wonder, the emptiness that swells my soul like a cavity could never be filled by anyone other than me.

when i divide my life into fleeting seasons i recall how the spring loves flowers so greatly, it lifts me every year without fail from the winter blues. yet, the winter still claims every petal and every leaf, eventually. just as my warmth is always devouring the cold weather you breathe. the motions wait for no one, time is a lethal thief.

though my brain wanders towards you and my limbs creek like the branches of trees, fingers empty of your touch like the winter misses spring leaves. i know you were a season and i needed to grow alone.

still the movements of time and her changing seasons, this bitter wisdom that has come from age and grace, nor these emotions that crash like waves cannot keep me from reminiscing so sweetly how we spent entire days and nights: undressed, wearing only one another, or how the sun came up too soon… *darling, i want more time with you.

six pm | *i want more time with you 

Avatar the Last Airbender 2005-2008

i. most magical-beings prefer wild things.

time was where you existed. here. in this space where i have banished your physical form. i print your photographs and reduce you to only 2 dimensions. i spell words, iambic poems, and call the lyrics hexagonal. weaving messages like memories engraved as memorials into the air. symbols burned into my lungs drumming down my throat in heartbeat pattern morse code. pat pat pat the cadence of your character presses beyond its own boundaries and establishes new limits.

bars of sunlight create glitter of dust, but cannot provide magic powerful enough to overcome the grip of this depression. no words can cast a spell over overcast nettled clouds conspiring rain exclusively via creamed coffee eyes. turns them wet and red like koi ponds drowning the sunlight in your ripples.

i have had an eternity to ponder the philosophy of life. i have come to this conclusion: god’s first display of power was to name things. when you kissed each one of my eyelids and named me ‘honey’ i saw my life the way you’d been dreaming it. and so you became holy my blood thickened to the consistency of a viscous liquid saccharine, too morose to pump reason through my veins.

i longed for you. no. more than that. i fought for you. and you are a warrior so you must understand how much you meant to me. i was delicate and focused until you wrapped you madness around me with your lips and i kissed you and drank of it until you grew bored of me and then the madness abandoned me to the quiet.

your body tanned by the unforgiving work in this sunshine. i admired it like Adonis. i saw my reflection in your sweat pools and fell in love with myself in you like a sick twisted Narcissus. like dust in the air the sun made magic out of a thing so common, made gold of a working man’s skin tone. and i—ivory slave to the moon kissed by her beams, spoiled by pillows and pashmina and sleeping until noon, soft boiled eggs for bed in breakfast making love in the frame of our bedroom window. with purple eyes bruised by telescope keyhole making the tiny universe large enough to bite… making me so much smaller. so small that you stepped all over me. too small to swallow you.

Avatar the Last Airbender 2005-2008

ii. i was almost ripped in two, once.

together we were decadence, furnishings forbidden by all ethical code of conduct, conduits of sin: ivory inlayed with gold filigree and no honest man would dare destroy it once it was put together… had we not peeled ourselves apart. pushed awry by the moisture of an enveloping world, God’s masterwork raining on man’s made masterpieces of precious materials soaked in the ripples of rain. nature has no regard for peripheral trinkets like carved tusks and mined metals boiled and thinned and pounded and husked to be a shadow of what it once was. we were to be reclaimed like everything too ornate for utility. we would be stolen like the jewelry we are and tucked away until the estate sale of someone less grateful but more wealthy.

i thought I had it all, that i’d finally held everything…

but my gold-rushed to the coasts of C a l i f o r n i a.

leaving me- ivory with a cold bone heart.

3 0 0 0 m i l e s, from my head on your shoulder.

you are banished from my pillow case.

a scar across the sunset sets the scar across my forehead purple while my neurosis picks at scabs turning towels red. the scar across my arm begins to glow under the moonbeams casting soft hue about the encroaching shadow and i turn on flash to take its picture. the dusk sets the scene for a martian planet without ever having taken off from under the oppressive atmosphere of mother.

i lay down on top of my roof and pray that i might roll off and never feel the falling. gun metal cold of a steely eye contact briskly cuts me without ever having to make real contact at all. i lay here fuchsia in my panties, i squabble with the seconds. i forge a foxhole in your neck nape to survive the nuclear winter. i reserve my american right to lie bare in your arms...

….i delete your number from my phone.

six pm | *all the elements in honey