The Day I Was Born

Maybe it doesn't matter, but maybe I wish that it did.

Traffic trickles in clumsy patterns below the main room window.

The colors are careless and clouded. 

There's something so strange to me about the way a bar looks in the morning-

It's basic structure exactly the same, the stools in place and the tile swept up.

But something in its bones is so utterly misplaced,

a shell of its own scene.

You're still asleep and I am cupping a margarita glass up to the light,

observing the cold curvature of neon-

A string of faces close to the concrete are like the beads of a rosary

A prayer that I haven't yet heard enough to repeat.

My lips curl into motion and then recoil.

Today is the day I was born,

years ago in the dead hours of the night,

and the date repeats itself again

in montages and dusty flashes of the mind.

A cracking cone of light beneath your front door.

A lazy morning song of headaches and dehydration.

You kissed me and you told me not to care.

But you're my friend and he's my friend and the two of you

are best fucking friends.

And I don't understand what you mean when you speak to me,

when you coat me in your blue covers and shiver into the lines of my chest.

So it doesn't matter- so none of this matters-

Here, let's all swim together in one big pool of our own chemicals.

Let's jump from bedroom to bedroom, like superheroes

ascending buildings in the midst of a sleeping city.

Let's kiss everything and love nothing at all.

If it doesn't matter, then tear it all down. 

This room and this street and that bar outside your window.

Hand it all to me in crumbs and pieces

and show me it can be devoured.

Because I don't want to do this again,

I don't want to pick up shells and pretend that they don't make me sad.

Just because something can be both created and destroyed,

doesn't mean the acts are the same.

The Portraiture Alphabet

Do you think maybe it's alive in there?
Like a little creature in a corner in a crate?
The whole of the sky bleeds a white canvas and
my parents smile in their miniature ways.
I think it's still breathing, a hint in the chest.
A pause and a frame, but still movement within itself.

My sister stands like she's seen this before,
her matted shoes hugging onto porcelain ankles
and her torso inverted, flipped away,
like she has already envisioned something apart from us.
And then there's me, a cannonball through the white,
plunging through the afternoon with no regard for my own gravity.
And I can't help thinking that I am something apart from us.
I am the trickling ink from a pen explosion,
not the format, or the intended, tilted cursive.
Not even contained in the pocket of the shirt.

My mother starts, twitches her hands,
like she is trying to pool together the mess,
to bottle it up again,
and pause it in frames.
She wanted to write it out in her own way. Within her own margins.
I think she must have felt the way then that I feel now-
like it's all so fucking terrifying.
Like the planes of ourselves keep layering until
they're too hard to sort or catalog.
I think she must have envied the alphabet.
And it's published, translated, understood permanence.

Maybe the two scenes are synonymous,
pausing and playing,
photographing and feeling?
The way a child grins when the A's and the B's and the C's spill into words.
But can still be taken back out again. Extracted.

The paper corners coiling on the picture lend shade to our bodies.
All bent in alternate directions..
My sister's are the only eyes within clear view,
and they shoot through the texture of the canvas,
away from the puddles of the ink, like they are unafraid of forgetting.
Like they see the letters and they see the sentences and paragraphs,
and they accept them all.
and I envy her for that.
I'm not sure if it's still breathing,
I'm not sure if we're still held within the ribs at all.
But in any event I continue to gather up all the planes
in a corner in a crate
and puncture tiny little holes for air.

Urgency

Let’s pretend you are holding a box. A frustrating box. Your fingers claw at its ends and corners and somehow they meet no entry.You seek out sharp objects and you growl out guttural noises and the box won’t open. You begin to stab at it in a repeated dance of arms. 

Somehow the creases of the cardboard make up an endless surface, a merciless platform for failure. Spectators gather and gawk. You start asking your friends to help and they’re asking their friends to help and no one can open 
the goddamn box. 

In this example I will be the box.

Between your fury and flesh lies the repose. 
A fluctuating chorus of fragile heat and hesitant sizzle and
I can’t feel anything at all.

Your hands turn purple. 
After hours of pushing and pulling you start to beg me, demand me, to open myself or at least split one of my edges, to slice myself into reason. The cardboard crunches into a false sense of hope and the spectators continue to look on. 

There is something that you expect, some response to urgency that you think would be more fitting. A natural order- the contents that follow the box, the flow that follows the ebb. 

More hours pass and your questions turn around. Their shapes flip in cubic rhythm. You begin to check your mailing records. You begin to wonder what you mean to find, or if this box was ever intended for you at all. You begin again in your repeated dance of arms.

I’m sorry, I am. But is there another way of saying what has been said one thousand times?
Is there another space to hold our truths as they fall like bodies?
In chants, in posters, in whispers, in letters,
but never in boxes till now.

When the outward voices crawl in 
And the arms above your head lay like figurines at your side,
Maybe you will see. Maybe you will see.

There is a kind of desperation that transcends the push and pull.
That wraps and bends around itself until its ends are endless.
And knows the silent nature of its space.