Snowglobe Senryu

"Not recommended
for under 8." Really? Who
else wants snowglobes?

Grandma

When Nina Simone moans, pigs in a blanket with hummus are being served, and my sweater doesn't itch, I know that it's Christmas day in the Phelps household. The only household on the block with a menorah in the window, and last night we still had carolers at our mezuzah-affixed door. My sister Caitlin smokes or breathes outside. She stands leaning into snow piles like albino butt cheeks. My stepmother--Nancy--worries about using coasters on a glass table. And Dad can't give two bananas for the reason today's important. He celebrates the tinseled tree, the stepfamily celebrates the menorah, and I celebrate the rare visit of my dear, dear Grandmother. Grandma Phelps, how good it is to see you.

Grandma is alone. But she doesn't mind. She can walk around with a cane and a banister and nothing else. She can dye her hair reddish on her own (though she chooses not to). She lives in a large home that has now emptied out via death and adulthood. She reads constantly, finding comfort and company in the grocery check-out pulp fiction she buys last minute. She cooks meat 'n' potato meals for herself, bathes herself with a handled loofa, dresses herself in clothes from 1962, plays Scrabble with herself, et cetera et cetera et cetera. 90-something and still independent. Go Grandma.

But Christmas gifts...Grandma doesn't know how to do Christmas gifts. And it's not that she's not materialistic or so overjoyed by the love and comfort of the Christmas spirit and our family getting together that she can't keep her mind on who might like what. It's more her senility, and the oblivion that her age has brought about.

"I hope you like it; I got one for each of the kids' kids." Grandma undulated to my anticipatory pizazz. She always refers to her offsprings' offspring in this indirect way, a subtle though nonetheless scathing distance that's all too evident. Sad emoticon.

I replied, "I'm sure we'll love it, Grandma!"
Bow off.
Wrapping paper tearing...
Wrapping paper off.
"Ooh--a Popcorn Tin. Thanks so much, Grandma. Caitlin and I will have this finished before the night's out!" Cheddar, Butter, and Toffee Loveliness in a spherical tin two feet high and one foot in diameter. How do we tell her this gift is thoughtless? That it's cheap? That it won't work? We both had braces.

Each year for the past six years, a new tin of popcorn. We have since learned to put them in the corner of our basement den and, anytime we have friends over, break it out for all who enjoy to enjoy. "Dude, this shite is stale. How old is it?"

One particularly memorable year I received a pair of socks, a small wooden box, and a toiletries kit. Pair of socks? Always handy; good job, Grandma. Wooden Box? Weird little elephant etching up top, but I can put condoms and mints in it; good job, Grandma. Toiletries kit? Always handy, again; good jo--...oh wait. A clear plastic bag with zebra stripes. Dove deodorant. Nail file. Hand lotion. Nail clippers that say "BOYS STINK."

"Are you sure this was for me and not for Caitlin, Grandma?"
"Yep!"
"..."
"Do you like it?!"
"--Of course! Why wouldn't...I?"


Before my parents divorced, my mother would tell my sister and I the horrors of her Christmas experience at the Phelps household in Fulton, NY. Grandpa would silently growl at her all night long, the rest of the family would banter trifles and trivia with her in order to ignore the distance that was their reality, and she received red gloves annually from Grandma.

"Thanks, Mom."
"Mrs. Phelps, dear."
"Sorry."

So Today. My stepgrandmother Nana received from her fellow wrinkleton in the room one of those Chicken Soup for The Soul books. This was specifically Chicken Soup for The Christmas Spirit. Nana is Jewish.
Mazel Tov!
Nancy received a bar of soap wrapped in an exfoliating techniwarmcolor Alpaka fur. Nancy gave the same bar to Grandma last year. "Regifting is okay," Nancy whispers in my ear with a sneer.
Caitlin received a small porcelain jewelry box with orchids etched on the top. It's god-awful ugly and she doesn't wear jewelry.
Dad received a book (thumbs up, Grandma) and a Hickory Farms sausage and cheesespread kit. He promptly looked at Nancy upon unveiling it, she gave him a pussywhip eye (whuh-psh!), and he handed it to me out of Grandma's sight. Yum. Thanks, Grandma, and Nancy's fascist grasp of Dad's diet.

And then there's me.
Shaving everyday me.
Living on his own me.
With a job that doesn't pay in tips me.

Mine was in a box. Outside of the box, I see Santa Claus looking up curiously with an index finger to his beard. In yellowed water. With yellowed pellets representative of snow. In a snow globe. A snow globe.
"Twist the bottom. Look at the bottom. See the turning--there y' go! Let's see what it plays!"
"Th-thanks, Grandma. I've never owned a snow globe before. I was beginning to think I never would."
Silly me....

The women of my life; Literati Replies

Aniko:

http://mycommasutra.blogspot.com/search/label/Rick

Lisa:

http://ifinfinity.blogspot.com/2008/12/poet-ii-tentao.html

http://ifinfinity.blogspot.com/2008/12/english-teacher.html

http://ifinfinity.blogspot.com/2008/07/anastasia-is-still-alive.html

What We'll Miss (The AfterHours Club)

For the children strolling
silent streets in silent nights
and riding in black
in black on bikes

for those whose initial
fear has subsided
and who'll learn what it
means to regret silence

for the rebelling theys and
professing yous believing
delusions ("We'd sneak out too
but it's much too cold to.")

for the dismal crescendoblue
sky with bats and flies
for the gallant exuberance
of youth and nights,

Leave your distortions at home,
"gather ye rosebuds while ye may."*
The streets at night are yours alone,
yours to conquer, to lust, to take.

*Robert Herrick's "To Virgins, To Make Much of Time."

A Situation

I told him not to say goodbye, after I told him
what had happened before.

Epigram

Time is weaved to provide
comfort to the saddened and
discontent to the undeserving fortunate.

I'm trying honesty....It's different, but I like it."

There are
so many ways to lie.

I suppose pillows and honesties always complement them.

_______It only took a nap and a consideration to
_______bring me to tell you.

15 Word Poem (Living in a Quad)

Why must they scream at this ungodly hour?
A drunkard youth disrupts my slumber now.

Philadelphia and Then Morning Classes

Here I sit, midmorning, the sunlight casting
white sails over my desert eyes by dusty windows.
My neck cracks like a Birch branch under the
weight of an overnight deep-freeze.

I still wish it happened.
I just wish it happened differently,

without this droning fatigue and a broken law or two;
I've too much to do to realize what I've done.

Just Arriving Home

I love watching you love your daughter the way that you can: explicitly.
I love watching you love your daughter the way that
_____________________________________ I would if it were alright that I loved her.
But it's not alright.
And so I'll
____watch___you love__________h_er
______________________and_______watch me love her: implicitly.

In a Mall Midmorning

I just saw an old couple waddle past. They were holding hands. Even with the arthritis, the liverspots, the hair, the hairlessness, the yellowing, the wrinkles...even with these, they're still in love. In love through it all, in spite of it all.
It made me smile to see them. Because I want that. I want a girl to ask to marry me and then I say yes and to fast-forward to this. To hold our hands in public. Waddling in sync. Waddling in love. To kiss her sagging cheek and wrap my scrawny arm around her paining back. All for the glory, the marvel, that it might bring to a kid watching us. The smile it'll bring to him.
When I hold hands, old and decrepit, with my decaying wife. Whom I love very much. Still. Still. Through it all.

Boy and Mom

an evening of stained shirts and strained voices
--waking unbearable--
your breath still makes the loudest noises.


She said "I'm in agony. Just believe and breathe."
So I inhaled and inspired.
She exhaled for me and closed her eyes to avoid seeing.

Sunny's

I've never been a Casanova. The opportunistic surges of urges I've endured since I was eight (when I discovered the sacred Penthouse found street side) have only made me shake hands--firmly and indefinitely--with hesitation and self-defeat. Getting pantsed in elementary school, wearing floods and a buzz-cut in middle school (Thanks a lot, Mom), and being the quintessential acnefied brace-face in high school all pointed to: loser. All pointed to: virgin. All pointed to: wait for college.

So I tried on patience and it seemed to fit, so long as I could bounce my legs in class and hide my cumrag at night. When college came, I was invigorated by the independence and irresponsibility that would soon take over. I had convinced myself then that all my New Year's Resolutions to talk to girls, talk to them confidently, make something happen, would amount to all I'd figured out prior to my arrival on campus. Thanks Jason Biggs.

I had heard urban legends of collegiate sex. Panties off, no sweat. Kiss on the cheek, at least a handjob. Kiss on the lips, piece of cake cunt fuck. Bite your ear? Her face'll be clown mouthed, spider eyed, with spit and cum drizzled in no time. But I wasn't ready for all this yet. I'd leave it up to Ron Jeremy and Frats to immediately corrupt the innocence I once recognized in my female peers. These experiences slapped down the reality of my own premature ejaculation, if not a solid limp-dick incident.

Instead, I merged into the collegiate female territory. Each step quiet and precise, regimented and documented.

1. Pre-shower downwind, post-Axe bodyspray, "waft away, ladies." What man wouldn't want to smell like "Dark Temptation," "Recovery," or even the number "3?"

2. Girls like stronger guys (except for a few on Craigslist looking for their tenor Jack Skellingtons), therefore there were mornings spent wheezing through five push-ups (I was never particularly athletic). The high school hairy, wheyshake drinking smallballers rolled their eyes with perturbation while the mulletdyke coaches sighed at the overshot androgyny I so illustriuously exuded.
"C'mon Smith! A few more! Get that Testosterone pumping!"
"Ms. Humphrey, you've got more testosterone pumping than I do."
"What was that?"
"I said 'Lou gets bored testing on a throne jumping Xanadu!'"
"...You're a weird kid, Smith."

3. Nights dancing naked in front of a mirror to Ricky Martin (shut up).
"She bangs, yeah, she bangs!"
Yes she does, Ricky Martin, and so will I.

So the other night, I realized I wasn't twelve anymore, that my balls had dropped, and that a night downtown would do me good. That night was the night that the fuzzy VH1 Pickup Artist's tips and tricks of chivalry and gentlemanliness were gonna fall from my sleeves with majesty and grace.

"Hey."
"...Hi."
"You're fat."
"OMG I totally want you!!!!!1!"
"I know, right?!"

I went out to the one and only barslashdanceclub in town: Sunny's, 43 Water St. I remember the address just because I thought it was such an odd number to follow 35 Water St. This address belongs to the infamous Club 35, the only topless-only dry-bar strip club within a three town radius. Known well for its scantily clad Pillsbury doughboys and a patron in the back who wears a neckbeard and yips at the girls from time to time.
"Yip! Name's Elvis, sugar. What's yerrs?"

I met a girl named Thera. She couldn't believe I pronounced her name right the first time. "No one ever does," she said. I didn't either. I called "Karen?" But the pulsing music and alcoholgulping company were raucous inside, and I was having difficulty paying attention to the words slingshot from her glossy pink pout.

We managed to understand one another in that moment, however. With the heat of the major chords clogging our earseyesmouthnostrils and the sweet sweat scent sensed, we embraced our novice parentless autonomy in the mutual desire to go home unalone under a Friday 2 A.M.

I was shy and she was tipsy. She smiled at me and--God bless her--walked through perverts, cologne, and whores to initiate something. A rather strong first encounter, she took me by the neck with her cunt stuck out. I played passive ("Let the dolls come to you, man" said the fuzzy-hatted dude). She had gum to cover up the rum. She thought she knew what she was doing.

And she hadn't noticed the mustard stain on my jeans under the blacklight yet.

"Yip!"

She smiled and chewed, coming close to my ear to shoutwhisper "ooh!" and her rendition of the song's lyrics. I wondered who she was and who she had come with. She wondered what song this was and asked me what my name was again.
"Schtick?! Is that like a Jewish nickna--"
"No; Nick!"
"What?!"

We grinded no matter the tempo or mood of the playlist because we wanted that touch. I tried not to appear too white and to utilize those Ricky Martin rhythms I felt in my hips earlier (shut up). We wanted that overt sensuality without the embarrassment or shame of touching strangers known for less than an hour ( and within the confines of the reality that it would be an otherwise solitary solitaire night).

I would later experience similar occurrences, touch the backs and waists and necks and breasts of nameless girls. They were girls so incredulously vulnerable to my anonymous hands, fingers licking and palms pressing. My left and my right were my pioneers creating maps of seas of skin, complexions and smoothnesses expansive and varied. I could never grasp that comfort; where did the readiness to have their straps and strings snapped, their charcoal/mahogany/strawberry strands combed into a sexed-up disarray, come from?

She thought she was being cutesy and flirty when she'd bend forward dropping her head--snap!--and fling her moussed and fingercurled hair back while craning up and leaning back into me. When she came up for air and feminism, her delicate fingers grabbed my hair and neck, and I tried to muster a smile. My thoughts were telling me two opposing notions simultaneously at this critical junction in time (resulting in my mere mustering):

1. Right shoulder: He-Man: "HE-MAAAAN! MASTER...OF...THE UNIVERSE!!"

2. Left shoulder: Steve Urkel: "Ooooh, cheesedoodles! Don't blow your load yet, son!"

But she was petite and all that slithering and snapping ended up amounting to was a dick digging into her back and hair spouting from my mouth.

"Hey."
"Who are you?"
"You're stupid."
"What? I don't even know yo--"
"Shut up and let's suck mouths, female."
"Wha--! But-and I am not stupid!"
"Sh, jus' rub my Jamiroquai hat."
"What are you--"
"Slap my ass. Call me 'Sally.' C'mon, Sugartits."

When this shitty bar in this shitty town was closing at a shitty hour, I thought she could clean us up. I offered my place for a movie (maybe some shite she'd adore like "Must Love Dogs"). I had a shag in mind of course. But she came with friends. Both Barbies and barbacoas. They didn't know me, and that meant each smirk was met with a grimace. So with the same enthusiasm that cubicle colleagues retaliated against their bosses at company picnic tug-o-wars, her friends pullled her arms with zest and zeal.

She said her goodbyes, remembering my name as "Dick." Incorrect again--even in her bornagain sobriety--but I, like so many young men just looking for legs, did not care. "Close enough," I called out to her hips jiving away between her friends' legs furious. And it didn't matter either way. I went home sneering. She went home giggling and telling me to call her without having given me her number.

"Yip!"

My eyelids falling falling falling falling

Quick flashes of ah and silver
from the epilepsied seizureling
t.v. screen
remind me of the wallful
sun
(armovereyesbrightbright)
passing through the trees
when riding in the backseat.

And it's reglowing the fading embers of
my awareness that i'm in
side and in dark and in alone,

and not watching passing trees in
some sweet's backseat some warm
afternoon.

The Journalist (Climax)

Riding on fleeting summer passions
and minds and distances spectacular,

we happened upon our happenstance
aptitude to smile at one another

and hours of learning our otherselves:
pickuptruck vacations and midnight laughter.

"I like when you call me darling." at two a.m.
She woke me up, but I fell back smiling.

And the number of times that
I would call her darling would

dissipate from letmecountthewaysish
to onmyfingersandtoes to notatall

as her knowing me focused hesitantly on
my gratuitous deficits and subtle surplus.

That I am entirely literate, but that that
comes with an equally unabridged ego.

That I know who I am when I am alone,
but don't__when I'm with everyone else.

That I am covered in lust, but still
find time to bathe in romance.

So she wrote me to avoid me when I
became an asshole. Quick and cutting,

"Okay. You can go now." An 'Ineverwant-
toseeyouagain' schtick and kitsch. We'll see.

"I enjoy you."

We touched at our highschool pace,
aware of our hands and lips and how

we made sure that her door was open.
We didn't want to call it sex and we

didn't want to call ourselves friends,
so we took precautions to resist resisting

our resistances. "I'm not easy; I'm fast."
The cool coo lipped before a foggy dryice no.

And it took weeks to break the skin
of her hesitations. With a finger slipped

in and her smiling gasp; with my "I won't"
broken by my teeth on her writhing hip;

with our petting and pressing hardness and
wetness, but still saintly clothed and precious.

So she keeps her halo bright by denying what
I'm trying to caress, and I try when I shouldn't.

We Weren't Put Together to Fall Apart

There is nothing that cannot be
broken.
So let us acknowledge the fragility
of our amnesty.

Tribute to Bogey

Dad named you Bogart after the late great Humphrey Bogart.
He held his cigarettes funny and had a perpetual sneer.
You had paws without opposable thumbs and liked to
lick your nose and balls.

You were black and slim with a soft coat without sheen.
You had grays here and there and a waggedywagwag tail.
Dad used to dress you in bandana scarves and now whenever
I see Anarchists do the same thing, I think of you.

When you started shitting all over the house, Dad was
flustered with your incontinence and thought it best to
put you down. Not for shitting all over the house, but because
you were old and physically dying. 17. Jesus Christ, Bogey.

It was hard for him because he bought you as a puppy and
didn't want euthanasia to enter the picture, but he hated seeing
you suffer more. And there was shit all over the house.
So I came home after school and he told me.

It was hard for me because you were my first death.
You were my first death and I cried a lot. I was going to miss you
but I don't remember actively loving you. "Paved Paradise"
is right, Joni Mitchell. I loved you more when you left.

I wanted to apologize for that. Apologize for petting you
when you came near and rarely else. I'm sure I loved you,
but I can't remember, and don't we only remember the most
imporant things in our lives? Weren't you important to me?

I wanted to apologize for hitting your back with a baseball bat.
You were whatever and I was 6, and Dad videotaped it and barely
yelled at me, and I insincerely apologized on camera as you
yelped your quick "get away from me, dick."

We love __you.
_____-d.

Relativity

Always I see something of
Beauty
in something of
somewhere.

A Difficult Drive

They drove in silence for a long time.
They were distracted by the dead beige of the trees, only scenic as their regular surroundings were of a dead gray pavement.

She thought for a moment. Half-whispering "Do you still love me?"
"Yes." Without hesitation he responds, because he's honest and he daydreams.
"Good. I missed you."
She extended her inquisitive hand to to take his.
"I missed you too." Though in disbelief of the current state of things, he plays along. How long will this dream last? How long will reality be a holding and not a pining?
"Don't ever hurt me again."
"Okay." She spoke with the faintest melancholy, the subtlest sincerity. But it was still there.
In earnest conviction, they went back to their scenery.
Holding hands in the lap of her jeans.

In Possible

I fell in love in a day's time, and ended it just the same.

At dawn, we met and, promptly thereafter, began holding hands without asking.
At noon, we married and laughed at our parents commenting on "our marvelous unity."
At dusk, I grew tired and you--restless. Separated. Among other trifles.
At moonlight, I died in my fatigue, and your weariness drove you to some distant pursuit that I was not alive to acknowledge and congratulate.

If only you were aware.
If only you thought of these happenings
as I did.

But you are.
You are, and have (always) been,
unaware.
As if what we had, and the marriage, and the suburbs, and the kids, and the divorce, and the despair,
was all in the faintest horizon of the past, far beyond our reach, never to be remembered, at times to be repressed.

As if we're friends.
As if we've (always just) been friends.

Acting Out of Irrepressible, Unfounded Aggression

I'm sorry.
I don't know what's wrong.

All Your esques And ishes

All your esques and ishes,
all your silent smiles,
all your news-clipped collages,
all your sexless pouts:
all my reasons to adore.

"I'm insanely happy I
know you," you'd write,
and I'd grin at the distant
possibilities I dreamt in my
distant unconscious.

You'd write from your window
one night "I wish that I saw
you outside" and my infatuation
with Futility began winningly.

"Merry Christmasesque."
"I've got stuff to doish."
And other curiosities that
made me fall in love with
a lesbian, if only for winter.

(What We Conceal in Parentheses)

I (still) miss you.
I (still) want you.
I (still) love you.

The stillness makes all the difference, right?

[This is an apology]

This is an apology (from me to you)
in its barest and most earnest form.

And though men have strong and stubborn egos
(it's called chauvinism), it is an apology.

You know what, and all those other wh's.
So it's up and out and done (and so are we, here and now).

A Silent Entropy Filmed with Slow-Shutters

And the moon stopped.
And the clouds stopped.
And the wind
_____blowing my hair
___________stopped

when the car stopped.
___________crashed.

Living Along Main St.

The tap dripped before I brushed, and I pissed into a porcelain cleaner than my record.

A night of jazz and hooch, rock and crocks, the wrong people called and no one got fucked. Some fucked up, but none fucked. I came home with expensive grease to a wall I was begrudgingly familiar with: illegal greens. And the thing is not the smoke itself, which I could avoid with a bandit bandana, but a lack of consideration for my well being in these few, small rooms (albeit from a passe posse that satisfy enough, but are not exuberant). I was in good company, but no one to make me cum, and no one I missed.

Almost asleep, I'm aware that I will be cleaning a mess I did not make tomorrow. Cans, glasses, packs and ashes, spills and vinyl--the room to entertain has served its purpose with no supervisor seeing to its cleanliness. Damn it.

Dr. Spangler's Challenge...

A few years ago, I took a class with a professor who loved literature, but saw little in poetry. She thought that the form made all the difference, and that no poetry ever really caught her interest, her mind, and held it. She ended our debate with (to paraphrase) "The only poem I might be interested in...is one that is read both forward and downward."

So I tried.

I AM [.]
AM I[?]
[?] [.]

simple, I know, but give me a fucking break.

Conversation

A raindrop fell from my hair that should've fallen from my cheek,
talking as we were.

"What if?"

I don't know. I don't know why I did it. I just saw the blinding opportunity and took it for granted. And you were nothing to me but a pair of headlights. Nothing more--you couldn't be; it was night. I jus' thought t' myself, for the last time, "What if?" Of course I considered family and the future and all that junk, but really--really none of it compared to the spontaneity, the moment, the phantom muse that crawled into me over these years and--with a single swift action, defying all consequence--arose and said "listend' me now." It wasn't a rush. It wasn't a cause. I didn't do it for myself. Or anyone else.

Wanna know why I did it?
Because I can.
Because I wanted to answer "What if?"

Cascade, Ego. Cascade.

Them are the you
that I don't care for.
(So many of the same
qualities, to be sure.)

You are the I
that I'd much rather spend
time taking time to adore
and kiss and understand.

We are the they
aspiring, aspiring; achieving
a half-assed veni vedi vici creed
maybe beginning our resolutions in July.

I am the me
who knows only myself and
am unwilling and fine sitting still and quiet
as the all of my everyone becomes contraband.

Iceland

Maybe if I went up and introduced myself,
my first Icelandic infatuation would reply
"Eg skil ekki."*

That would be rather unfortunate, seeing as
how I've come all this way and to leave without
a kiss would make it all a dreadful waste of my
all.

Sure, the land is awe and the lights spectacular,
but the girls deserve my love as I do theirs,
a foreigner only insofar as our countries are concerned.

She listens to my music and wears my shoes, but her
cold blank stares resound the awful silence that we
could never be together.

So I'll board the plane, kissless and dissatisfied.

*Pronounced (in my Americanized transcription) as "yeargh skeekth ay-kee." It means "I don't understand."

Time to Go to Sleep

_________What are you doing?
Don't you realize how tired I am?
You can't do that when my eyes are so low
and my arms are so dangling.

Because soon I'll start thinking things
and believing things and loving things
and wanting things and soon

______________too soon
______________too soon for you

I'll want you. And you're not ready yet.
Why don't we talk when I'm better rested, then?

Solve for X

Puddles meant it had rained recently. Not a lot, but enough to keep oases in otherwise dry parkinglots and driveways. She was glaring out, her expression paralleling the picaresque gloom of a midwinter scene: naked branches, browning snow, and a sky four shades lighter than the pavement in this town.
It wasn't necessarily that she was feeling down, but rather that she was profoundly confused. I'm not supposed to be staring out this window she thought. And it was the naturalism of her incredulity that eventually brought her blue.
Her husband appeared at the doorway heading towards the room in which she stood. His silence and distance explicitly expressed that today was not a new day. It was not a bright shiny morning. It would not be different. He reluctantly accepted the necessary paces (regretting his reluctance because they had only married months ago) to come within an adequate distance. An appropriate distance. An obligatory close. Close enough to put his hands on her shoulders. Close enough for her to ignore his false affection. And she felt his distance, his closeness, a breath away enough to transition from his bitten lip and triangled brow to a stoic calm and pout if she were to turn around.
"I saw what you tried to hide."
She whimpers in response.
"I--...I can't tell you how marvelously disappointed I am...but I can't tell you that anything's going to get better."
He squeezed her shoulders gently to try and instill what little comfort he had to offer. And though he was aware of her awareness of his falsity, it was an all too subtle attempt to save face for his sincerity.
"I'm not supposed to be staring out this window," no longer to herself, alone.
He took some time to understand how he wanted to say this, but did not think to say anything else.
"I know"
...
"but I do still love you. You must realize I--"

Mary considered herself a mathematician when she first realized her gift.
"I can't believe it. She's-- It's incredible."
"Mary: what is three hundred twenty four thousand two hundred and nineteen divided by four hundred fifty six point two?"
"Is this going to be on our test this week?"
"No, Mary; this one is just for you. I have a calculator here, so--"
"--seven hundred ten point six nine four eight seven oh six...seven. I think."
...
"Incredible."

*to be continued*

InsignifAmericana

I walk awake through waving fields of American
somnambulists
No matter how loud I yawp for them to wake up To Wake Up--
Nothing.

Arms at right angles clasping currencies, eyes and minds closed to cultures
and blessings,
thoughts and smiles upon and come from affluence and frivolities...
Sneerable.

And I wish so squintingly that I could stroll slumberly myself, not
having to pay--
Pay mind to the Them that I don't care for. Pay mind to the infinite
disagreements.

I call the Them 'Consumericana,' ignoring the every and any that elude being called
'things.'
I call the Them 'Insignificana,' growing our country spoiled
bastard,

while Daddy Sam walks out on us with pride and honor in his pockets instead
of on his chest.
I sing now of what he stole--hid--what we took away from our
elderselves:

of Voices
of Words
of Move....ment
of Wit
of Eloquence
of Antici-...pation
of Discovery
of Feeling
of Imagination
of Love
of Conflict
of Humanity...My Humanity--My distant and inspiring humanity.
__________My pride?
Of an improbable humanity? Of all and every and any
that is too pure and too beautiful

to be slurred as 'things.' But I reflect on me and--
I'm human too.
I'm no Dalai Lama, I'm not. I'm not perfect at all, but I'm
no Nosferatu either.

Senryu from Buffalo Show

I heard a girl say,
from two port-a-potties down,
"how do you flush it?"

Them Are The You That I Don't Care For

If I can't have her, then I must have sex.
Those makedup stilleto girls meaning one thing
from this ageless fairness loveliness girl
meaning all things.

My thoughts coursing the slim spectrum
of little more than their curves, colors, and moans,
____her singsong voicing eccentricities, epigrams,
and smiles.

And I remain in a velvet melancholy,
knowing I can't hold her but
can hold their one dimension,
the one dimension.

The one dimension we adore in one another;
sex: the cause of, and solution to, my insomnia.
Sex: the physical compensation I enjoy and
the soullessness I ignore.

And I stand a ruined man, dichotomy-incarnate,
both in love and in lust with the woman of my life,
the women of my life, respectively.
My James Dean* schism.

So long as she carries on quiet or ignorant,
I'll endure a silent and polite cold war and
I'll continue discovering new bodies to
please my body**

while my everythingelse remains
distant and neglected (not by choice,
but by my fate to remain faithful in
futility).

*James Dean was a young actor who starred in only three films, "Giant," "East of Eden," and "Rebel Without A Cause." After the 50's and his tragic death (tragic in its description and in his age), Americana has never been the same. He was both a Romantic and a Sex Icon, assuredly.

** This line was heavily influenced by E. E. Cummings's [i like my body when it is with your].

Only

A break from my studying,
my eyes move lightwards
to a soft and distant glow,
far by foot, farther by feet.

And squinting at this
feeble emulation of the sun,
I question why it is so high
that its light cannot touch our heads.

I think about all the lives
that anonymously pass under
its attempted shine at night,
and how lights like this were around.

They were around around the grounds
of my studies, a place which I am
thankful I am only studying.
"Only studying" I say and heave;

"Only studying" but not
"only a place" because
Auschwitz should never be
preceded by "only."

And the higher the light reaches,
the less we acknowledge the lives
underneath, the distant and anonymous,
the darkandpast hoarding stacking corpses.

Return to Sender

Sitting at my window,
I have seen a scene:
a sun lowered and pulling
my sight behind it,
everything orangeing,
shadowing to grays and blacks.

And with the following black,
I have just finished thinking;
alrights and obscurities,
whats, hows, and thatsfines,
lists and trifles, fights and answers,
laughings and smilings too.

Having just finished thinking,
I'm finished for the night. Ink
drying, I am ready to be sent to
tomorrow. Climbing into my
envelope I fold myself, creasing
at the neck and knees.

The warmth and privilege of
this envelope will not go unnoticed.
The travels I'll encounter
through the course of the night
will not be remembered come dawn.
But at least I'll arrive safely.

Mona Lisa-esque

Everytime she walks past, I hafta rubberneck 'er. She is no striking beauty, no keel-over gorgeousness that'd make me pitch a tent for those legs reaching from the heels to godknowswhere.
But she's no strain to the eye, either. I mean, I don't mind a lot of her. I don't mind most of her.

Her eyes are lightless and curious. They bead like the eyes of a stuffed animal, an inanimate softness with a permanent smile and an absence of thought. And though they don't sink into her marbled complexion (pale, hived, and porous about), they are cradled by the subtle billowings in the wake of the bridge of her slim nose, rouged with the deprivation of sleep, carelessness, and acceptance. Her face is long and worn, 19 going on smoker-50, as if she's got no friends, no joy, and works the day and night shifts just to pass the time. The time of an insomniac; it's somethin' else.

And simply to spite these inadequacies, god made her lips their own. A supple pout, red like an autumn Maple leaf, and looking aroused--engorged-even when she's not. And it's saddening to think that these lips may never have been touched and--at that--so rarely smile, even in the weakness of a smirk. I don't care who you are or what god you follow, you cannot unimagine your imagining of kissing her. And I imagine kissing her, slow and powerful. Slow and powerful enough for each nerve ending in her lips to meet their dopplegangers in mine (being a man of lust and not love). But what lust is carried out gentle and precious? Slow and powerful?

The Journalist (Exposition)

First meeting through friends removed, I stared
and tried to hear her through the roar of the bar.

But we managed to establish names and ages--
dialogue--the climax of the narrative occurring

when she lifted her black dress to show me she
had scriptor hipped, passing black lace panties....

We exchanged decreasingly casual causal glances
when lips pulled away from one another's ears.

We exchanged subtle flirtationsmiles and eyes,
uprooting my hand from my side to plant it on hers.

So we departed the bar, hopped a red train
and set off to debate ars poetica in Brooklyn.

--"So--why do you think I let you up here?"
aired from her mouth like cigarette smoke.

I sputtered "To discuss poetry?" "Maybe," coyly.
She stopped me, mounted me, and kissed me.

I kissed back, mounted her, and said with a kick
and a grin "I had hoped, but I hadn't thought."

It was nice; we sweat, spit, and our bodies came
away with blue bruises and streaking scratches.

...We smilingly whispered poetry on the floor in the
dark hours of that morning at the end of her bed.

We try to recall what we said, why we felt, how
we were, and remember only the sex and regret.

"Anybahdy gotta pen in heah? I'm notta Boy Scout f' chris'sake."

"Faggot, nigger, kike" and the like:
words I've seen carved into white
on tiles, plastics, walls, and boxes
of tissues with knives in order to shock us.

And I wouldn't think to look for hatred and slurs
intuitively in the bathrooms first.
But men seem torn to drive their knives in
or not and consider their silence a sin

because I guess their thinking that this is a must
to write to other anonymous boobs their lusts
of women and hilarity, bigotry and booze
with single, simple-sentence manifestos like "I hate jews!"

And the opinions are grand and the opinions are bold
with the pretentious intention of spreading what's told,
selling to like-minded fools, the young and naive,
who should be so taken by what they read as they relieve

themselves of the burdens of food, and standing in thought
to instead sit and rest for a moment; so deeply sought,
for a chance to abandon our social realities
and in our solitude contemplate those angry misanthropies.

untitled

_We're not together
but
she'll__never leave me.

Anastasiya

Chapter One: Let's Begin in Medias Res....

I'm beginning to think that I'm never going to tell you,
because there are so many ways, too many ways,
infinite ways to say it all wrong...to screw it all up.
To s-s-stu-stutter and stam-mer.
To be too forward, too honest.
To discomfort, confuse, and hurt you,
when all I want and--really--all I need
to achieve the vocalized pinnacle of "spectacular"* slowly and sincerely
is a smile on your face,
a brush of your knee or fingers,
when I proclaim that--
when I work up the courage,
and an impulsive and powerful enough "FUCK IT" to say
"i miss you...terribly. i mean, [take a breath] being with you."

Chapter Two: Let's Continue with Reality....

You're not going to smile, though.
You're not going to embrace me then, trying out your broken Italian:
"Ti amo, mi amor!" or is it "amore?"
You're not going to say what you said or do what you did
the last time I told you, the first time I told you
or showed you, rather, that I like you.
No: that I liked you.
Yes: that I love you.
You're going to feel awful and want to go home.
And I understand, and know and love you too well and too much to say any more. Much more
but do know and remember...
Years ago we spoke of 'unconditional love.'
I've forgotten who argued what point, but it's true.
I'm still in love, unconditionally.
Mom once told me "I haven't seen nor spoken to him in more than
______________thirty years, and I still think about him all the time.
i still love him."

Chapter Three: Let's Realize How Hard It Is to Face Reality....

No last words and no goodbyes.
We say what we must, and move on. Not because we're strong, but because we're different.
And those same differences which once drew us to one another now tear us apart.
But we say what we must, and leave the rest to silence;
we always were comfortable in our quiet adorations of one another.
...and I would like to slide over this silence now, for one last thought.
You must know that I didn't want to lie to you anymore,
that I lie to myself in this facade of an absolute disregard for ourpast,
that you are the subject of so many poems you have not read,
that I have kept all too long a nightmaresque secret to counter yet thrive upon
all the dreams I've had of you...
all the dreams I've not softly described to your still-sleeping eyes and waking ears,
my whisper your alarm clock.
I don't want to kill what we've become
but I have to attempt to resurrect what we once were.
This is a matter of dishonesty and regret
burdening my aging well-being. Am I selfish, then?
Of pulling myself up by my bootstraps and living out my Carpe Diem O.C.D.A.D.D.D.**
and reminding you of how we once defined "True Love."

Chapter Four: Let's Be Nostalgic And Question How We Arrived at Here And Now....

_I gave you petrified flowers wrapped in a blue composition notebook.
You placed a pressed flower, tiny and lavender, back in that notebook.
After years.
_________After memories.
_____________________After love.
_____________________________After we stopped being an us.
And for the stupidest moment, I had thought you were reaching for
a distant me as the flower's petals uselessly reached for the distant corners of its page.
_Earlier some evening, I gave you my company.
I stood next to you glancing when I felt like it and dancing because you wouldn't.
Later some evening, you gave me your company.
You slept next to me, slight feminine breaths that slid me into my own sleep
when I was satisfied with the delusion that

you were dreaming of me.

The first time we slept in the same bed in 5 years.
_Late at night and out with friends, you handed me a pin that read "I am loved". You said you had found it on the ground and that-out of everyone you knew-I would appreciate it the most. "Merry Christmas."
"Thank you, Atheist."
"I am loved." I am loved. I was loved.

Chapter Five: Let's Write Our Serendipitous 'Coinkidink'....

I read to you on the subway.
"...I'm thinking of Anna, I would give everything never to think about her again."***
And of all the books, in all the chapters, across all the pages I could have read,
"I need to see her again, I couldn't explain my need to myself."
these pages sing of this budding relationship, this flowering togethering,
this best kind of love--the only true love of young love: first love.
This fictional account of a wonderful once-us.
"and that's why it was such a beautiful need."
Not knowing why you are my beautiful need.
"The harder I tried not to think about her, the more I thought about her."
Another writer articulating what I thought when I was 15.
What I think now.
"I wanted to call her name, but I didn't want her to hear my voice."
And though you say you don't like it when I touch your red curling hair,
"I wanted to touch her hair."
And as he writes one way of the infinite right, saying what I can't,
I do not anticipate that you'll quote
"That explains why...you weren't at your house."
(I anticipate...[take a breath] a pause.)

Chapter Six: Let's Remember The Nights' Happenings Remembered....

When we were together, I didn't have to tell you I had dreamt of you because you already knew.
_I once dreamt that you had written something
in your curly cursive longhand over a printed shorthand paper, sitting close but across from me at a table. I tried to read it and could only make out
'Rick' and 'I am'
the latter bold and your hands taking mine as I turned the paper and you closer.
_I once dreamt we laid on the couch of my mother's living room, I facing the t.v. and you away, our bare feet in one another's smiling faces.
I murmured and motioned that you turn so that I could hold you. Still smiling, paralleling then.
_I once dreamt I stood in a foreign doorway on a Shakespearean summer day after having read you this poem. You walked up my stone path, your head down and smirking. You walked up to my squint and confusion, wrapped your arms around my neck and kissed me simply and slowly, and grinned at my shock that this should be your long awaited response to this
______________________________________________________droning confession.
_I once dreamt that we're always holding hands, walking through a Gondry**** meadow or going to a Yanni concert.

Chapter Seven: Let's Transcribe A Realistic Epilogue to A Dramatic Evening....

So I read this to you nights before I left the city,
two nights before I left the city, waiting for a time that would not ruin my time there
but would give us at least twentyfour hours of ecstasy should you respond against me.
You had just come out of a shower, and had you sat closer, you would have
dripped cleanliness and tears onto the pages upon which I wrote the poem.
But you didn't drip, and you didn't cry, and you didn't respond. You paused.
Like I knew you would. Like I know you.
"Well, I'll walk you downstairs." An avoidance uttered with the utmost quietude and confidence.
"No, please--the doors fine." I can't tell you how many cracks were in the 3 steps of my voice.
And at the door, our heads dangling from our shoulders for different reasons,
you opened your arms and I kicked the cat and we said
_"C'mere..."
"Yo-you really shouldn't do this....
I'm sorry"
I tried to bend my neck and crouch my towering to breathe in the crook of your neck and hair.
_"I'm so sorry"
apologizing for the reality that I had just revealed and the embrace we didn't deserve.
I didn't cry and neither did you, but I sounded like it and you didn't and I said one final
"Bye." silently.
With Holocaust-knees*****, morphined hands, breathing the depths of a puddle, and my beating
beating heart, I thought I knew that this is anxiety at Love's feet.

Chapter Eight: Let's Realize That Our Conversation-Chemistry is Dwindling....

You texted me. It's an interesting means of communication by which no matter whether or not I respond, I can't avoid reading what my screen presented. I open my phone and there are the words. It's not like a call where I can avoid your sounds, your words, your breathing, your existence.
_"Rick are you okay?"
"Just in a state of shock. i've wanted to tell you for so long, and it's such a relief you finally know."
_"I knew i just didn't know what to say"
"How long have you known or suspected? p.s.: i told you the japanese wouldn't do: i'm hungry as all hell."
We went out for Japanese for my birthday because it was close and I was there and, having held hands for the first time my night six years earlier, I had hoped you wouldn't forget my birthday.
I mentioned it in the text to break the bleakness of our dialogue and to sneer. You chose to write back "Well at least it was free :)"
Days later, on that day, you didn't call but--again--texted
_"Hey mister happy birthday!!!" each exclamation point a sock to my jewels.
"My birthday is the least of my concerns. there are much more significant matters to discuss between us for now. i'll wait for you to formulate your thoughts and call me later."
Then later came.
_"I'm sorry about how i responded to your wishing me a happy birthday. i just haven't been feeling well since i got back and i miss you terribly.
it was wrong of me to be so accusatory, but this post-monday, pre-discussion timeframe is a dreadful limbo for me.
sleep well now."
You called weeks later, we spoke for an hour, and you hung up with a twinkle in your step and I a limp.

Chapter Nine: An Attempt at A Reasonable And Distant Denouement....

And if you had to know about any of the poems about you that you haven't read, or about how I'm feeling, you should know that I know that I think:
"Who Knows What Chance Will Bring and Who Will Sing and Who Will Dance?"
And that the incredulity of my futile fidelity is nothing more than my despaired romancticism.
So I took the only two photos of you I have and wedged them within the words of this poem's second draft. On the back of each smiling you, I wrote "I have to let go."
Those photos saved me one dramatic night in Iceland, but I have since forgotten them.
I have also since forgotten connecting to Lara's****** words: "Why don't you fucking love me?"
And have since forgotten loving you.

Much to your delight, I'm sure.


Chapter Ten: Notes And Citations Extensive Enough to Pay Homage to Eliot And Wallace....

* "American Beauty"--> "Spectacular" film; scene where Lester realizes his lusts for his daughter's friend and his apathy to the potential consequences of pursuing her
** Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Attention Deficit Disorder Disorder (two ubiquitous disorders put together fictitiously)
*** text quoted from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
**** Michel Gondry, Surrealist artist and media director/ writer
***** Photographs of Holocaust victims, emaciated, with frail, shaking knees
******Lara is an Icelandic singer. Beautiful voice, sung in English and Icelandic; collaborated with Damien Rice on one song from "[Th]ogn"

The Journalist (Falling Action)

"But I wonder why you are so vulnerable in
writing and not in person" She may have sneered.

These were her last words before her
caressing goodbye from our quiet demise.

That simple single-sentence manifesto
breaking my Brando bravado.*

And as though I had nothing to lose I
replied wryly, slurring my sussing.

So I mentioned how I've trudged through pangs left
and right, ladies and gents slipping and pissing over;

how my then is none of her goddamn now, or at least
not until we're holding hands but peeling apart;

how she might be "the reason for the word 'bitch',"**
or that it wouldn't suffice, so I'll take "cunt," please;

how we are all vulnerable when we write. Diarylocks
aren't craniums and ribcages, and catharsis is tarrish.

So I drove home like an eighteen-wheeler that
you don't have to be granite to be [called] a man

and that spider silk thread-lined pens fit well into
both couture lace and blue-collar denim hands.

In our last ecstasy I hummed a love for her.
She read the inconsistency of my charmed and charming

voice, and smiled blankly out of pity or ignorance. She
let the conversation slide into something______else.


*Marlon Brando is considered a quintessential "strong silent" type of man, and remains one of Hollywood's crowning epitomes of (Italian)-American masculinity.
**Outkast wrote a song titled "Roses" which includes these lyrics in reference to one girl, the audience of the song's lyrics.

Subway Observations

So much of humanity is defined by its jarring polarization between the comfort in contact and the comfort in distance. Faces are stoic or solemn, mouths either closed in isolation on these lone treks, or agape in a stranger's unconsciousness.
Distance is comforting when it is a possibility, and our only opportunity to delight in our solitude. In this space where persons sit few and far between, we glance and glare at the few others within sight, often out of curiosity and a mediocre paranoia.

I wonder why he's wearing a hoody in this heat...
Geeze, that guy's patriotic!
He looks homeless...do I have change? I don't want to give him my change. What if my cell dies?

And in the morning rush of our working and meandering population, and in the places with the most neon billboards, the metro cars congest like the streets've got the flu. Here, men cop feels (or resist the temptation). This guy is so obviously looking down my shirt, but I don't wanna turn around to see if he's cute or a pervert. Women stare blankly to avoid eye-contact with everyone, and you always stand next to the punk kid with way too much passion for the noise pumping into his ears. Giggles and glares, stoicism and stares.
Here humanity experiences the intimate space and pheramones of complete and utter strangers.
Day after day after day. After night. After alcohol. Too close for comfort?

"This has raged silently all too long, kid."

You keep saying you're fine and that

nothing is wrong,

but I know you better than that,
and I know that this piercing nothing
hoarding us to ourselves instead of putting
us back together is temporary.

Soon, I'm hoping, we'll move past this cold war.

"I thought you were listening, but you weren't--were you?"

This is a mind dying
in a lack of active
interaction.

Inaction in action
in this desperately passive
interaction.

America and I

She said striking "We live in a me-society"
and that I should consider how it's "all about them."

and how foreign I am in respecting
the rights and needs of others above myself.

She said "You need to grow some balls" to my face
which was weird because, y'know, she's my mother.

But she's afraid I'll always give in, smiling and nodding
always, always getting walked all over and all that jazz...

So I compared myself to Jesus, saying
that I love everyone, but I have a haircut and jeans.

And I don't mind being the help, but I am all too often
the only guy to carry an old lady's groceries. Goddamn.

I am the hands all the fucking time, and that
return policy on my good karma is well past due.

But I'm more than an invisible hand (an invisible man),
I am also patient for a pie and a title: prodigy.*

So our discussion ended with tears and iloveyous,
yada yada yada, but at least now I'm proud of my accent.

*DiFara's Pizza on Avenue J is by far the best pizza I have ever consumed.
The prodigy refers to Michaelangelo saying that "genius is eternal patience."

Gazing

Corridored distances, one
two
three rooms the distance.

You wanted to see an artist
and I wanted to see you
smile and think and otherwise.

So we AlbrightKnoxed* and while I
read about popes and politicians
screaming and weeping in coarse colors,

You gazed for hours. Hours standing,
concentrating, peering. Eyes and mouths
agape rudely, and you didn't care.

So while I read about violet
violence in paintsoaked bedrooms
and tossledhair homosexuality,

You saw about it, and wondered
quietly. You didn't pay attention
to how far away I was at all.

But you blinked and owlturned, and I
soon found your smile at my shoulder
thinking quietly, looking quietly.

*Albright Knox is an art gallery in Buffalo, NY. This particular exhibition was for the dark oils of Francis Bacon.

Pissed at the band...A Monologue

"Listen, nobahdy heah's any respo'sible. Y'all gots this complex about the assu'ptions and expectations of othahs. Or, y'all'ah jus' hidin' behind the masks of othahs to say what'chu' want, so that'cha don' soun' selfish. In any case, why don'chyall jus' fuhgeddabadit an' lemme have a voice, eh? This is my band too, y'know."

"We're not talking right now. But I don't know why."

I'm no idiot, but I am (yes) ignorant.
And the confusions and questions
driving my mind from mind
from day to day to day today (I am)
curious of finding responses and A's.
that might come to mean
somethinganythingsomeoneanyone.

And those C's and Q's are only stop-- by my
obscure and countableononehand
securities and alrights.

Children The My's of Idealism

My query an innocence,
young and with brightlight eyes

my asked "Where are my friends?"
and the talldark booed, booming

"What friends? You've had none."
"So the none I had are gone?"

Quick to reply, my confused, amusing.

A Dialogue

*Intended to be recited in a single exhalation*

The other day you asked what was wrong
and i told you i couldn't tell you
and you said why not
and i replied can we please talk about this later
and you said sure I guess
and we waited until later came
and you said later has come
and then you asked what was wrong
and i said i'm going to ask you something and i would
really appreciate it if you could answer yes
and you were hesitant
and i was hesitant too
and you bit your lip and looked down
and i just looked at you
and so then you said ok I think I can do that
and then you waited
and I asked if you still loved me.

"It's not boredom, at least--I don't think."

So I'm just waiting
for a tap or a glance or a pout
that makes you more than a friend, anything.

Anything to show--
because I'm too weak and small and quiet
to just out with out it out this for to out for you...

You'll know (then)
just what I've lied about all this time.
Hiding and lying and trying and being and needing them.

Them are the you
that I don't care for, embracing the
universalities you deny that aren't your unique you.

There Was A Wedding Earlier

Who knows what chance will bring and who will sing and who will dance?
But I Do know what love is, and
___I Do Know what love is, and
_____where it is abundant, and
_________where it is not, and
____________________the pain in knowing that
___I love ohwhatstheuses: rarities, fantasies, improbabilities, impossibilities...but

Who knows what chance will bring and who will sing and who will dance?
______Perhaps you could find them, these
__abandoned celebration decorations, these
unpredictable, irrepresable treasures, these
___________white roses in an alley, these
____________________white roses I helped you carry and
_____________prayandprayand pray that you'll love me...like you used to...but

Who knows what chance will bring and who will sing and who will dance?
I believe the jester could probably dance, and
_____________the princess could sing, and
_________the bitch will no doubt doubt, and
_______________the jester will laugh, and
____________________the jester will fake a smile that
__denies what is, what will be, obsessively, desperately clenching to what was...but

Who knows what chance will bring and who will sing and who will dance?

If The Trees Had Legs

If the trees had legs, their bark would
crack and break, and we could see their
skin behind all that neglect.

If the trees had legs, they could run, and
they'd run collectively to where they're
appreciated. Not here. Never here. Too many humans.

If the trees had legs, children might be
crushed and killed, chafing between the thighs
of an Oak, witnessed by the clouding sky.

If the trees had legs, then when the wind
shoves, they could shove back. They would
stand up for themselves strong and naked

against the bullying blusterings, strong and
naked in front of the onlooking samaritan sky.
The 9th* and the 1812th** will have their day then.

If the trees had legs, all that was once preserved,
conserved for the sake of the livelihood of everyone but us,
could attempt to escape our fools that've made "that was once."

*Id Est Beethoven's "9th Symphony"
**Id Est Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture"

"Check the glove compartment. Yeah--therey' go."

Sometimes, when I'm driving,
with the blur of the street in front of me,
I can't tell if it's raining
or if tears are welling up in my eyes,

my saddened, fatigued eyes.

And when I think of why,
all the cursing and meaningless
scorches and shrieks,
the wincing and glaring of

our saddened, fatigued eyes,

You touch, then I touch,
but not in the same way
so that you turn away
and the rest of the drive is

awkward and silent, too much like

our saddened, fatigued lives.

White Ceiling

Some kids really do stare at the ceiling.
As a matter of fact, I did this evening.

That white ceiling really is quite beautiful

*As inspired by William Carlos Williams's "A Red Wheelbarrow."

my dearest love (15 words)

my dearest love,
I love you like I love haikuish 15 word poems,
only more.

"I don' love you no more"

I

"I want...to be a good woman.
And I want...you to be a good man.
And this is why...I am leaving you."
is what Chan whispered into the mic,
lamenting over untouchables
with silver strands and wooden bodies.

'The song is…It’s just, I mean it’s
sad but...but it’s beautiful too…so--
I--I'm sorry I'm not articulating my.'
was Chantal's gentle and eloquent
reply to my asking 'What's wrong?'
She had wept in the moments I was gone.

'I know. I thought you'd...like it.
Her voice is delicate and wrinkled,
and those chords drone somethin' low'
was the paperthin comfort I covered
her arms with. I kissed her crown,
wiped her lash, and waited for another song.


II

No plans, but its serendipity
made us like it more than others.
It was already a marvelous lullaby, bow against
guitar, metallic whispers on the snarehead, and
the gleaning falsetto of a twelveyearold man.

But when we would wake up together, our ears
stretching arms and squinting crusted eyes to
a single note on a lo-fi xylophone bell,
we knew we were in love. With one another
and the song; It crept into and out of my mindmovies.

So we chose music with a language we don't speak
and synaesthetic colors we don't recognize as our
cut-palm playinears togethering. Now that we're apart,
separated, I can't help but think of her and there,
where we were in love, where I was in Iceland.

*I refers to Chan Marshall/ Cat Power's "Good Woman."
II refers to Sigur Ros's "Svefn-g-Englar."

The Journalist (Rising Action)

Without the kindofs and littlebits,
I almost told her she was beautiful.

"You're kind of a little bit attractive.
Just a little." she wrote to my morning.

And her half-assed sweetness was not
enough to keep my chauvinistic distance.

She thought she knew what she was doing,
slowly shaving my bare barren masculinity,

each razorstroke a call she did not pick up,
trying to teach me something unlearnable.

So I began to submit to her subtle saveface
insecurities like petals to a sweltering day.

I would reply quietly to her two-am texts of
"You up..," a question without a questionmark.

And no matter what she thinks, she is not
Just Another girl to challenge me because of

the reality that too few do. Too few girls
are actually slouching women. So she acts,

and I counter with my equal and opposite reacts,
our arrogance serving as both trench and bunker.

When I saw her again, I didn't know which would
suffice in satisfying our apparent awkwardnesses:

tenderness or antagonism, tenderness and antagonism;
a hug and a peck-- or a smack across the face?

Drive with You

You can drive
and avoid looking at me
by looking out of your side

and I can
sit on my hands resisting actuality
as my phantom hands caress your cheek

and your phantom
smile turns to my adoring eyes
and softly whispers anything beautiful.

Necessity

Hedonists never die crying.
They live and laugh and dance and dance and come
and smile as they lay dying.

We do what is poor for our health.
Why love you, though, why get you off this time,
when I can love and come myself?

Nothing is necessarily necessary, but it's all so
spectacular we'd be fools not to take advantage.

A Flat in A Nowhere

The stars
and
the thruway
and
the darkness that surrounds otherwise
remind me of our wonderful once.

A one time
that
I had with you
that
was defined by the ecstasy of nostalgia,
holding you when we both knew you didn't need to be held.

Our eyes wandered
but
our fingers brushed and stayed
but
our fingers still fell to their own sides
later in the night, and the moment was only the moment.

Euphemism

I call my procrastination
insomnia
to help me to sleep at night.

It gets the job done as
I get my job done,
awake and alive by nothing but hope.

Dima and Anya

With the gentle blade of a single finger, Dima and Anya exchanged petal caresses: he her bare, fair thigh in those denim summer shorts, she his mobile wrist. And, staring at them out of fatigue and fascination, I thought quietly Isn't she his first cousin? Have I ever touched my cousin like that? Certainly not.
Later that evening, she retreated to the bathroom, a subtle smirk of some random satisfaction across her face and with panties and a faded shirt (XXL, perhaps an ex's) underneath pinched between her forefinger and hidden thumb. I marveled at the delicacy of her hand and immediately the word "prim" came to mind. As she prepared for bed at 3:30am, we three men-- a Russian acquaintance, a Russian cousin, and an Italian nerd-- saw in awe her petite and smiling mysteriousness.
"Iee do naught know what eet ease, but when sheh step-pid off the plaen from Moscow, Iee could naught help myself."
"Waddaya mean, Dima?" I asked with precedented suspicion, noticing how our eyes (including his) trailed behind her ass as she exited the room earlier.
He thought how best to respond, and with a finger on his lips, he looked up at me and replied assuredly "Iee haff never met her before five days ago. She ease my couseen, ahnd Iee--," he puts an arm over our shoulders, "my friends--haff indulged een forbidden pleasures...."
The ellipsis is for me, not for him. I couldn't think of how to make out what he said.

The toilet flushed, the door squeaked open, and Anya came out in nothing but the large faded shirt with Russian pop culture written on it. Her blonde down and her makeup off, she was more beautiful.
"What?"
We were all huddled, standing and discussing her (a raucous subject), and then interrupted by that very subject of our juxtaposingly quiet dialogue.

Anton didn't react to her presence beyond turning to acknowledge her.
I reacted with a blink and an inaudible and timid "--nothing."
Dima smiled.

I wondered at that, too, squinting my eyes at him as if blurring my vision would brighten my mind.

Anton slept on the couch after smoking cigarettes he rolled himself.
I slept in the bed sprawled and alone and aware of the floored air-mattress below my side, and the sounds I was hearing on it.
Sounds of Dima coming to bed after Anya had fallen asleep, to wake her up and corrupt her. I heard zippers though-are there pajamas with zippers?

They were gone when I awoke, and the mattress looked deflated. I shuffled to the living room, scratched my head, turned it to see Anton waking to see who was shuffling. We smiled at one another, at our incredulity, and went back to sleep.

Train stories: Hick

A sad woman lost to herself sits next to me, and I don't know how when or how I'll tell her to move, but I know why. Her escapes and by-no-means-purifying catharses are seeping into the senses of those whom she surrounds.
The children one seat back can smell her cigarette breaks in the train car's bathroom (though their mother smokes, so I doubt they'll notice). The Red Dog can she pulls from her bag and cracks between her thighs makes me wonder how long she can go without drinking. Makes me wonder how long it's been since she'd been content and sober.
Her attempts at small talk with me, interjected with coughs and hawks hither and thither, make me question how far she allowed her education to go, and whether or not she's ever discussed more than the weather with anyone. I don't mean to sound so pretentious and lofty, but when you're stuck answering "So how about Britney shaving her head-what the hell was that?," it's arduous to agreeably assert that she's an avid thinker.

A Muslim woman walks past and she had to remark "looka that get-up!" nudging my elbow with her own--boney--as if she were a happy uncle of mine. She is not a happy uncle of mine.
I only smiled and nodded, doing as little as possible to cause any sort of advancement on what could potentially be a confusing and/or prejudiced conversation for her, and phantomly responded "It's not a "get-up," as you say, but a head scarf or hijab, I think, symbolic in the Muslim faith of obedience to God and appreciating women beside thei--you're not even caring, are you?"

She got on at Stop A and--an hour later--left for Stop B.
In that time she downed 3 beers she had brought on with her and pulled five cancerstick breaks.

Sometimes, I love America.

Knock Knock Click Squeak iloveyou Clap

Our love was made in the afternoons since
we had school
before

and could only smile and touch
in passing
notebooks and glances

notebooks and glances in hallways
and separate dinners with separate separated parents after,
after dusk came

and I rode my bike back,
racing against Ma's impatience and her readytocrescendo temper
post-sunset.


And this one afternoon
before
we ever kissed on the lips

but after
we had lay in the center of your impoverished
living room,

harmonizing "feelin' groovy..."
for hours without a clock in the house,
I had left

while it was still bright.
We exchanged our shy goodbyes (the omnipotence of our
mutual infatuation realized),

and before I stepped from but after you had closed your green door,
I hesitantly knocked twice, put my ear to the other side of your soft steps,
heard the deadlock click in

the knob and hinges squeak open, and said feverishly
"iloveyou"
and clapped the door shut myself

with a grin that could light the heavens a hundred times over.

Sunflowers and Stars

I used to go with a girl
that saw Sunflowers in my eyes.
In their iridescence, she could focus on the "hazels and dots."

The first time she wore a summer-nothing,
I saw Constellations in her beauty marks.
"Little Dipperish for your arm and fair chest," I marveled.

A Dusk Raining

Just as the rain may emerge
from a drizzle and static to a
PouringDown and LightningStreaking,
I look on with passivity and a bitten lip
as your sniveling and gaze become
BurstsandPops of SobsandTears.

And we know so well,
so well, it is, that we do know this,
that things like this cannot be recorded.
Things intense and paining.
Too intense and Too
paining.

And in spite of me,
and all the woe I've come to cause,
we know so well, so well--
it is--that I know,
I know how much it
hurts.

Waves away waving to us, but to no promising avail.

The shoreline is the most honest edge,
its messages written innocently by children and lovers,
cruelly washed away by the incessant insistence
of the calming, coming wave.

The calming, coming wave,
running feet from feet away, trickling down and calming
as it comes closer to us, to we--the naive--ignorantly caressing
those massaged messages of ours smoothly away.

And as we walk into wading,
waiting to die with rocks in our pockets,
we think of only "why?" and so end the poem one expected line short.

You and I

You and I paralleled our onlysomanys and
___perpendiculated our otherwises.

But I was no pretention-intention
bound to the position of an antithetical-you.

And though differented and separate, your fingers and my
fingers decided to mingle and caress, and weave like they do

and now no words are needed. For so long,
hatingandhatingand hating until, of course, you and I became we.

[This is poverty]

This is my first prose entry. I've yet to really write something coherent, cohesive, and complete. All of my prose thusfar have been sad attempts at beginning short stories, only to succumb to the lacadaisacal attitude I have that turns these attempts into masterpieces of Flash Fiction. That was a joke.
____________________________________________________________________

This is poverty. This is poverty and winter. This is the attempt to salvage leftovers from three nights ago as a decent dinner tonight and tomorrow's breakfast. This is shitting in a can that hasn't been flushed in a week to cut down on the water bill. This is cold showers where the faucet is turned more off than on (to cut down on water and heating bills).

Step in.
Turn on.
Rinse.
Turn off.
Lather.
Turn on.
Rinse.
Turn off.
Step out.

Easy peasy fucking freezy. And I'm sorry: not cold--lukewarm (I've gotta offer myself some kinda break).

This is Ramen noodles every night and every night sleeping to the smooth rhythms of a disgruntled stomach churning and decaying and mashing nothing but the opposite walls of itself. This is not being able to sleep because all of the sweaters, socks, blankets and hats can't save you from shivering yourself awake. Shivering yourself awake after your fatigue kicks into stage-desperation. This is attempting to sleep next to the heating vent on the floor of my one bedroom-one bathroom closet, trying to scrape a breath that feels like the crust of a burnt out sun. The downstairspeople aren't as tiphungry, or aren't as careful.

Ignorance might mean smiles and dandelions now, but it'll mean change cups and wet socks later.

That breath helps, but it's so shallow. This is staring at a bunch of smoke-black bananas as your last resort for this weekend's meal, a gift from some dismissive and inadvertently generous coworker received earlier this week.
"Here, have a ball. My son bought too many for a Boy Scout Sundae-Sunday...thing."
This is no family.
Junkie and phoneless "friends."
It's not the 30s.
I'm not in the city.
I'm not--...
I'm trying to get by and failing.

If I Say When...

When it happens
(and I hope it's a when and not an if)
we will be ecstatic.

Our eyes will glaze
(with ours seizing hours, no alones notting moments)
and our gaze will run.

War

In honor of those who have suffered the horrors of Hurricane Katrina.

So this is what war looks like.
Sporadic bright whites behind a distant graphite sky.
Days and nights in which the morning and evening horizons
will have no color, only ashly anvils gliding forward.
A ceaselessly downing wall of bullets shooting the earth,
breaking its skin and evacuating its strivetosurvive inhabitants--
if they don't drown, they'll die drying, but at least they died trying to survive.

So this is what war sounds like.
A crescendoing cacophony of lo-fi booms pocking vast grasslands.
Of airy whistles both shrill and groaning and pops and screams falsetto and tenor.
Of near-ear cracks that make you wince and of a voluminous static enveloping all.
And the sounds abound remain around so long as
the defense's steadfast and passionate as the defenseless
offense idles in its convulsing cowering.

So this is what war feels like.
A cold that'd put a blanket of ice to shame.
Sharp stings everywhere like a guerilla militia of bee pricks.
A blowing pushing that'll have your body in a hypotenuse if it can,
and blendering with wood and glass torpedoes if it can't.
A cracking and snapping whip-tail whipping if you're too close.
A subtle and sly breeze if you're too far.

You think this is false, that wars like this are mere battles?
Or worse yet, that wars like this do not exist, do not happen?
Tell that to the blitzkreig conniption fits of our dear Mother.
She is spontaneity-incarnate. She is merciless and spectacular.
She is nameless as a whole but we name her wars and battles.

We live in her home and if we keep kickin' up,
she'll keep kickin' out.

An Observation

So long as the wind kicks,
that leaf is a brief (fleeting) butterfly.

And Though The Horizon Burns Spectacular

I'll walk you home if it gets dark,
but we both know that
you've only just arrived.

And though the horizon burns spectacular,
wailing rain drapes
will goad us to stay in and kiss

until the fire is out, when oranges and pinks
fade to hues of blue, cool and smooth
steam reaching from the street to the jaundiced moon.

Kate

I went to a dance party, and I met this girl Kate.
She's pretty chill, but
I don't know.

She makes me laugh and she makes me think, but
I make her wince and I make her violent.
She is beautiful and witty.
I am handsome and I try to be witty.
She says "Thank you" and "Are you okay?"
I say "I'm sorry" and
"Are you okay?"

I haven't laughed this hard in a long, long time.
I haven't thought this hard in a long, long, longer time.
She is in so many ways a challenge and
I don't know___* if I'm not weak enough
to stand both against and with her all.

I have fucked and fucked and fucked, and have not made love in the longest time.

We'll continue this almostus, and
as she continues being her while trying me,
I'll continue dissecting her while questioning me.

*This is the second poem I've published on this blog that uses a caesura (The first was a Mom one), and it seems the blog spot doesn't understand such rhetorical spaces. The underscore [_] will from this point on be recognized as the caesura. It has merit, and I refuse to conform to the layout of the blog and sacrifice its use.

For A Girl with A Beautifully Vowelled Name

I craved your curves,
lashing hips and tits
with hypnotizing whips
to and fro
to and fro
to and fro
watching the ebb and flow
of your exuberant sexuality
and the conscious confidence
you illustriously exuded.

A girl unfurled in this one dimension,
from this one angle (the one appreciation,
the one hall I always passed you down)
at least.

And the soothing swoons I motioned
into my mind from your phantom glances
and the smooth stares and smiles from
other girls, other eyes, other cunts,
were enough fantasy to pitch a tent and slap
and tickle in it for my alonehighschoolnights.

Appreciation Post-Pubescence

"I'm scared to death, too"
she choked out with eyes

becoming porcelain dolls',
unfathomably gleaning.

I wanted to be the man we were
discussing I wasn't becoming.

But she reigns supremely over me
and my cardboard cut-out bravado.

So I wept lightly, crystalline eyes
finding her gaze a trance... but turning

away anyway. And as I search New York
for a roof and a wage, for my maturity,

I know--or hope--that she wasn't just
babyin' me when she enriched our embrace

with "I'm here every step of the way.
I mean, c'mon:" a smile, "I'm your mother."

Moments of Magnificence

In the wake of hurting my mother (and missing yesterday's post), I celebrate her significance in my life with a double-feature; yesterday's and today's poems will be inspired by conversations I've had with my mother, specific things that she's said that simply exude the utmost wisdom and eloquence.

She is more important to me than she will ever realize, because we are too hard, and the irony of being a shared quality does not suffice in suffocating its evidence in our actions.

"Moments of magnificence"
she said as we left the concert.

It was contemporary new-age shite
where the wrong notes are the right notes

called 'dissonance' and with
'intentions against intuition.'

My mother is not a poet,
but only because she doesn't write.

She thinks in poetry, though,
singing praises like "How could

anyone deny the grace of God,
_______the existence of God?"

as we drive into shards of light,
thin and dim and bright and thick,

jutting down from the clouds
grays and whites riding down

from heights and powers unknown.
And spiting her not writing,

she seems to have a knack for finding beauty
in cacophonies and Western New York skies.

"So What Now, Sarcastic Darling?"

All the times that we have spent
amount the nothing that we've met.
We're conversing conversations on nothing and we're
hopelessly anticipating in our wetime something.

And we're discovering now our dreadful endurances
through awkward silences and bleak occurrences,
and realizing just how distant we really are
without saying it, knowing it, exposing it--how sub-par.

Sub-par, per se, per moment, per word;
we evaluate ourselves in our selves seen absurd
and come to see in so many angles and lights
just where we stand between angels and nights.

Villanelle

I never used to find always, just always found nevers,
but sometimes now I find sometimes,
and all this time I've dreamt my endeavors.

Though I've meticulously pushed buttons and violently pulled levers,
these dreams of mine are by no means mine
since I never found always, but-- always found nevers.

And I shamelessly praised myself for so long as being so clever
that I thought to parallel, when I should have perpendiculated, my lines
and unfortunately it forced me to wake up before I dreamt up my endeavors

And the imbalance of too few pursuits against (all) too many "whatevers"
is as sneerable as mal pane e vino, stale bread and sour wine,
a peculiar reminder that I've never seen always, just always've seen nevers.

And have Thomas Hobbes and Johnny Cash all too often maundered?
Is life "nasty, brutish, and short" enough to've "hung my head" and sighed?
I suppose, since I've never realized but only dreamt my endeavors.

And I still sometimes consider Hobbes and Cash and shudder
at the intricacies of pessimistic possibilities I hope I won't deify,
remembering that I never used to find always, but always found nevers
and that I've wasted my life and my time pursuing my endeavors.

Some Kinda Four 'o' Clock Tragedy

Tonight will be another sleepless night,
my eyelids falling like heavy black blankets
over my increasingly colorless eyes,
but not enough to call "game over!" and hit the sack,
and not enough to shake my legs around and call it dancing.

This has become some kinda four 'o' clock tragedy
where I can't even rest in peace with death by my side,
and I'm too familiar with that old wives' tale that
I'm too young to die, but too old to sleep.
I'm a careless restlessness grinding my teeth against
that age-old limbo.

And the idle shadow of death is the only shadow
in this room since I've made it quiet clear to my
caretakers that I want the night lights on (with the light
in this room as sterile and blinding as fluorescent life should be),
trying so hard to convey a purity that isn't really there.

And though death urges and pushes, goading
that I read pages by my bedside that've grown yellow and stale
or listen to music that has grown all all all all too rote,
I'll continue to gaze at that spectacular white ceiling until I collapse,
claiming a right to insomnia until my last
breath.

A Bike Ride Ride on The Middle of A Night

I was riding my bike on the middle of the night,
a favorite past-time of mine, mind you--middle of the street, too,
because there is an undeniably, indescribeably exhilerating
liberty that streams from the melodyelectricity shaking my head
to my kicking and falling and pedalling peds.

And if the fuzz aren't around with suspicious lights and sirens,
the sounds abounding bounce between my ears, my eyes are blinded
by their blankets, and my arms are spread-eagle like a willing virgin,
I can enjoy the ride, avoiding riding over animals slaughtered by us
(perpetuating the space between), and avoid mistaking potholes for shadows.

What more is how the night masks dayrealities into beautiful metaphors and--
it's just that--when I opened my eyes in the quiet and carless desert of rolling
pavements, a lightless stripmall parking lot with autumned leaves and a glistening
film of shatteredglass rain that had lightly, bluely, softly just fallen,
I looked to see where I was going and--

For just the smallest, stupidest moment, thought I was riding my bike on the sky.

[Snowball fights in the middle of midnight]

Snowball fights in the middle of midnight,
infinite infinity-drifts carved by cars in snow so white,
your mother's eyes'd explode if you tried to show'er.
And someone, somewhere, died before the minute was over.

And being that this is my winter and my youth,
my blank stare (...), ego pout, and scarecrow stroll,
My raisons d'etre, my viva Italia, my carpe diem,
My poetry, it can also be my New York, seeming

so that someone somewhere died with somewhys and somehows
against its will--it oblivious to this againsting--building heavens of boughs
fallen to the snow, and smiling in ignorance at the black-cloaked being,
and everything it left left it before it left everything.

And the pianos are fading while the violins still rise,
and someone's half-thoughts half-awake might sometime surprise
those whom are grieving for its dying consciousness--
"those" only being the beings it'll miss.

Now 'those' grieving beings leave it to be
on its own, in this quiet--'those' leave it to sleep.
But it can't sleep--too restless--and a bright epiphany
blinds its mind; now undenying still dying: it is (somehow) me.

Forgivenesses and Epiphanies

Forgive me Forgiveness, for I've used you too well,
and now a man undeserving, deserting, devotes his energies
to taking action and taking advantage of his privileges.

Sober me up, pretty Epiphany, for I am no good man.
Overcast by his hedonisms and perversions, a
nogood man rapes his no good and cracks open a new bad.

Forgive me Forgiveness, for I've used you too often.
Time and again. And again. Thriving on the sobriety, oblivion,
and goodness of others-- their shallow grudges and dropoff mercies.

Sober me up, pretty Epiphany, for I am not a good man.
But my awareness of this, my irrevocable despair and downing,
are screaming and heard, touching...an-and felt, attempting something and

almost succeeding.

Introduction

English aficionados, I present to you the all of me that I find most comprehensive and appealing. My writing.

I loved to write as a kid, as so many did.
Newspapers, short comics, and the like.

I used to draw monsters and aliens, and always came up with stories behind them. One of them was called a "Moo-Och," and a friend of my mother's gave me 25.00 to draw him one and write a short story about its alien planet.

I endured the "painful realization of my pitiful existence" in 9th grade and wrote my depressive episodes. It was a nice catharsis and I was very emo.

I fell in love in 10th grade with a girl who recognized "we have the same shoes!," poking my converse adjacent to hers. I ignored her lacking prowess in gym class-badmitten with smiley you can do its. She served as catalyst for my decision to write in composition notebooks for the rest of my natural, but certainly not normal, life. I'm currently (Summer 2008) on Notebook #11.

For a while, I heavily influenced my work with the seemingly arbitrary abstractions in lyrics from the likes of At The Drive-In and The Mars Volta (Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala precisely), and experimented with archaics like thees and thous and shalts, but that all ended when I realized I was focusing muchtoomuch on sound and aesthetic than on substance and content.

Upon that realization, I set out to ameliorate my writings so as to cater to both aesthetic and substance, beauty and meaning.

When I was 19, I thought I had found "my voice." I hadn't. But I'm still trying.

My influences are few but powerful, and-for the harshest critics-blatant. E. E. Cummings. T.S. Eliot. William Carlos Williams. E.A. Robinson. W. H. Auden. Lucille Clifton. Charles Bukowski. Taylor Mali.
If you see anyone else in my work, I can't remember them now, or I haven't read them, and I haven't read a lot. Teach me.

I am an English Teacher in New York City, my dream, and I will never have time to seek publication. This is my tech-savvy alternative.

I recently alluded to this entry as an example for my seniors to write a story or several poems based on the following question:

"How does one's sex, age, race, environment, cultural traditions, social status, et al. affect or influence How and What they write about in personal writing?"

The following is an elaboration of my introduction as a means of more explicitly addressing these particular factors of my personal writing.

I grew up in the suburbs, and so I write about both the natural world--the trees, the moon, the rain-- as well as the relationships and experiences that can only spawn from the walls and windows of granite, steel, glass that span such great heights. How depressing it is to miss the sunset because I was traveling subterranean on different colors and numbers and letters.

I started writing when I was young, and have come to realize that each time I write--no matter what my age--, I include what I've learned, what wisdom I've come to understand, into my perception of the world. My language changes with each new word that joins my lexicon, my style changes with each new urge to experiment on the page.

I'm Italian and English with a Jewish stepfamily, and so attempt to include the cultural traditions I'm familiar with in my personal writing. Sunday Dinner @ 2pm @ Grandma's House. Dad trying to teach me golf. Learning what "Oy Kevalt" really means.

Being a man who has often questioned what it means to be a man, I've written a great deal on those pontifications. How did the phrase "boys don't cry?" come to exist? Why are men so fascinated with cars and football and chili dogs? How would I be a different person if I was closer with my father instead of my mother?

I have experienced both poverty and the white collar lifestyle. Where my father often enjoyed spending his money and indulging in boat trips on Lake Ontario, and little Toblerone chocolates when he would return from working overseas, my mother made sure that whatever she'd cook Sunday lasted her, my sister and I all week for dinner and going to the dollar theatre once a month was "reasonable." When I lived on my own during college, one meal a day and wrapping in blankets and scarves instead of turning on heaters gave me a more mature understanding of poverty.

Having endured the poisons and ecstasies of relationships, I have also written about how my mother knows exactly what to say to make me cry, the uber-intelligent, multi-lingual artsy fartsy types of girls I'm into, and, thanks to Paul, Jenn, Anastasiya, and Chantal, the true meaning of a friend.