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.