Tea

I wasn't into it
until I started to
intuit its small tastes.

Originally disgusted,
until I discussed it
with my China girl,
who helped my palette
tumble, whet, blossom
to          a smooth curl.

Now I foresee four
seasons of tea: spiced,
iced, steaming aside rice.

Set Your Watches

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Set Your Watches

Inspired by Maira Kalman’s painting, “The Sun Will Explode.”

Set Your Watches.

Unless you are Jesus, your father makes love to your mother

So that his infinite spermatozoa penetrates her

                    finite ovum.

You are a zygote.

You are a fetus.

You are an infant             unborn.

She requestsDEMANDS pineapple AWHOLEPINEAPPLERINDLEAFANDALL IDON’TCAREIF IT IS 11PM TOHELLWITHYOURBOWLINGGAMERUSSELL!

PINEAPPLE!                                                                                                            NOW!

You are born one sticky greengold hour, hospital windows glaring “Glory Hallelujah” on a secular child.

Set Your Watches.

Your father and mother Kodachrome, Kodak, and Polaroid your

plush chubs; cartoon boom boone on pots, pans, boxes

you find more pleasurable than the toys once housed within. 

You play for hours in quiet steel dark.

You and your sibling get along well. ENOUGH! Well enough for

pillowforts, tears, giggles, backtickles, picturekisses, warnings

            and punches.

Your first death began your rites of passage

Your                                                 rites of spring ing            into A-Ha Youth.

He is a good boy.

He is a mutt whose make you cannot now quite recall. Lab? Terrier?

You weep in your father’s lap, holding as tears tear out. Finally:

almost a man.

Set Your Watches.

Your first kiss is a summertime monument of naïveté and hormones. She likes your Barney The Purple Dinosaur tshirt. Where he is eating children surrounding.

You ask politely. She nods. You taste

Lust, love, butterfly tummy flutters, and her Capri-Sun tongue discovered.

You say the words “I love you” in the dining hall after 2 days.

Your miscellaneous memory making moments memorialize the truth and beauty of your First You, the You you Now Know and call your Own.

“To Be Alive” and glowinthedarkstars pinned on your hoodie’s arm mean something to you.

You experience experiences stretched between stupid youth and graceful independence, riding your bike in the middle of midnight, middle of the street.

You sneak out over wet leaves like plopdown stars and nod a solace that you did You right.

Your first depression. Sadness. Blue. Heartache. Malaise. Ennui….

Whatever.

Whatever you call it, y-you do not care. The only peace you find is in playing one song you play one. two. three. four. five. six. seven. eight. nine. ten. eleven. twelve. thirteen. times in a row, then sleep.

                                                sleeep.

                                                                                    sleeeee.

Set Your Watches.

Still feeling 17, feeling print not script, feeling bumblebee dance and swerve, feeling alone and facing a wrong way, maybe; it may be that you are eventually, finally, unfortunately, gleefully                                                                                    an adult.

You are not yet ready to just call them once a week from a tattoo without tasting their cooking. Nor now yet ready to see friends rare, rarely, rarer.

See friends now not.

Friends now not see.

Now see friends not.

Not now see friends.

Never.

And you do not know any answers to every question

about legacy and taxes and selfishness and smiles and smiling and the death of you

and the death of Earth and the death of Sun and the death of the depth of your sadness, while you shuffle—off.

You instead take pieces of peace parsed by stars unseen and omnipresent illumine.

You know that you live each fivebillionth of each second with breath refreshing and

grins galoring before                        setting your watch.

Set Your Watches, mindful of the now no more time.

Set Your Watches.

Returning after some time....

For my first post in a few years--work and graduate school will do that to you--I'll write a thought I had after glimpsing the moon just beyond the lip of my apartment building, looking up from the desolate courtyard.

Something having to do with the futility of looking for stars beyond the immediate presence of our lamps' light.

Something concerning a simultaneous disgust for the city's inability to host the same nightskies plains and forests appreciate and wonder for our ability to harness light, any light, all light, the light the color of sunrise and home.

And a question about how many other New Yorkers ever look up?

 How many other New Yorkers miss looking up and seeing something as much as I do?

New New Yorker II

Literature was before us,
Sex is between us,
New York is around us.

Take this essay,
those poems,
these blank pages

to know your new home
and love it like me,
New New Yorker.

To ooze and writhe,
I between your legs,
eyes between poetry.

To explore the
anything and everything of
your thoughs, your life, your All.

New New Yorker

New New York Yorker:
Hold your own sweet coast
sunkissed hissings before kissing
wakes you from dreaming of home.

And once awake, see humdrum
rainfall clouds call to say
"Stay in and sleep; know these
streets beneath later." You will.

You'll see them then in the sunrise
glow of streetlamps glisten listening
to your flat state fast pace and telling
you to jump and twirl and crack the flat
with ecstasies and yawps of Here! Now!
The subtlest glamor you've known.

So many arms reaching So high.
Your Manhattan. Your skyline. Your Home.