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.