Wasting Paper

I can’t think about you today.

That’s the promise I made to myself in vain,

the New Year’s resolution to lose 20Ibs by February,

but my heart beats a little differently

when your name comes up doesn’t it?

as if you set my pulse to music.

Like what gave you the right?

Sometimes I almost wish you knew…the shapes your voice

folds my thoughts into

like cheap origami souvenirs,

but I’m the only one who keeps them

and it all begins to pile up.

You, living your happy, paperless existence

and me left with all the clutter,

but I can’t blame you for that can I?

because in the end it’s all just paper

and by itself I just can’t call that “baggage”

even though it weighs a ton.

I shouldn’t think of you at all today

because every poem is just another piece of origami

I unfolded just to have something to write on

and that doesn’t help the clutter

and it’s not that I’m hung up on you

I just don’t like wasting paper.

Distant Chimneys

There are distant chimneys I knew as a child

hidden factories of char and age

now monuments of rust

the weathered love songs of gray brick

with roofs as close as ivy ever reaches heaven

there are buildings with no names but in the sunset

have soft faces, fixed expressions, wrinkled smiles

I walk by them even now…like old men who still sit outside,

I almost want to wave “hello”

Light creeped like timid animals

and each hour had a feel to it

when we watched the clouds from porches

knew the smell of one lawn from another that…

was just a little different in the shade remember?

black silhouettes of starlings dotted power lines like ash

the final embers of the day extinguished in the eulogy of dusk

suspended in mid air floating just above the wire drifting off…

into a sun that swallowed everything but just smaller than the sky some how

and we were always waiting for the credits never knowing quite whose line came next

and Mom could hardly make me come inside back then and yet…

I don’t remember when I’ve seen the stars last…you?

this moment

I searched for you, waited here ambitious, thirsty, prepared to gulp not sip until the last of you was gone. Then you arrived not born of flames or lightning inspiration but two hands and two feet planted to the ground. You looked like everyone and I felt you everywhere. No heavens opened up and no chorus sang your introduction. Your words inside my head, more like a whisper in the rain “it’s time” you said, and nothing more. And I thought you would come with me. Eyes closed, heart pulsing as an angry train I breathed you in, happy to go wherever you might lead me, but you untied my hands and opened one more door I’d always thought was locked.

Spring was in the rain that day

“I hate this weather” I hear the woman at the counter say, tonging the steam from her plastic lidded cafe mocha like smoke signals.
The sky is gray today with intermittent drops of rain that feel more like awkward punctuation marks…or polite taps on the shoulder when a stranger wants to move by you.
I find it pleasant.
I’m in the right mood for a rainy day with everything in bloom like a thousand rainbow matchsticks burning in a concrete sky
the contrast feels surreal
new life is everywhere…dandelions seep through sidewalk cracks
I forgot what green leaves look like
I want to wander through the streets
I want to get lost in this day, take in all the colors…wear this season like a blanket, but it’s time.
I walk slowly and distracted to my car
splattered raindrops stain my scrub pants, ricocheting off my coffee cup
it’s beginning to rain harder…hard enough to hear, like the crescendo of applause
I stand still for a moment, key still in the car door. Everything feels right about when and where I am…what a rare feeling.

SoMe plaCe CalLed “Home”

The front door always squeaks no matter how slowly you open it. the bathroom light buzzes and flickers 3x before it turns on. we have a gas stove that only turns on if you set it to high and wait 2 seconds. the basement always smells like leaking gas and mold. it takes forever for the hot water to cut on. outside my bedroom window is a holly bush the finches like to fight over – sometimes the chirping creeps into my dreams and suddenly i’m a seagull flying over Yorktown Harbor  i seldom get to see a sunset but once while in the living room the sun shined through the blinds and everything turned orange. at the library a woman in her 40’s works the information desk – she smiles for everyone she sees and types as though her keyboard were a grand piano – sometimes i try to guess what tune she’s playing “Flight of the Bumblebees.” there is a girl who works the coffeehouse on Boundary street – she’s always pleasant and calming the way you think of snow falling over the ocean. she seems to love her work and takes great care with everything as though each cafe latte, every cup of tea where a bird that she has nursed back to health. To me she is like a painter mixing colors together. Her every movement is a smile. Pear trees line my street with small white flowers. the petals catch the wind sometimes and look like snowflakes in the streetlights.

from the 3rd shift diary

Overcast most of the day.
I had this heaviness I couldn’t shake, left over from a draining night..week
I felt off…in every way
And I just needed to breath
went walking to clear my head and it just wasn’t doing it for me today
my steps were weighted and clumsy
I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself – a restless uneasy
feeling like being hungry on a full stomach or
exhausted loaded with caffeine
and my usual route into town – tainted by traffic built up from
highway 64, flooding into town
people in their cars watching me as I move down the sidewalk
soulless music, talk radio, loud talking leaking through cracked
windows noise…noise…
exhaust seeps into my t-shirt as I walk eyes facing forward
random teenagers yell out their window at me as they rev their engine,
jarring my nerves like pebbles in a glass jar
I felt fragile…exhausted with people haha… that’s right me, tired
of people, but I was.
the time is 6:15 when I check my watch “just one more hour of
daylight” I check up and down the bridge for cops or anyone too
curious. The coast is clear…
I pass it on my way to work…a marshland just 5 blocks or so from my
apartment fed by the waters of the James
and it’s not like the picturesque shore…no worn-in trails for you to
follow, no benches where pigeons gather for bread
just red silty soil eroding from an ugly bridge glittered with beer
bottles and candy wrappers but…there’s water to look at here and
it’s closer than the ocean.
Bushes and thorny vines catch my jeans telling me I don’t belong…not
here among the crickets frogs and crawly things
the exhaust smell is replaced by wet grass and old mud that today I kinda like.
I made it to the clearing muddied shoes touching the water’s edge
surrounded by huge stalks of dry, pale golden grass that tower over me
like a crowd of slender silent people leaned in like they were
listening to my thoughts “I want to be like you” they must have heard
me say swaying in unison to the wind with their seeded tassels like
flowing blonde hair. The grass caught my attention I don’t know
why..maybe I was reaching too far for meaning. It was so simple a
thing and yet I couldn’t do what they did…match the tempo of the
wind so well you could almost make out its face to talk to it (the
wind i mean)
And I just leaned against a tattered oak for half an hour watching
these stupid blades of grass bend in the wind like they were carrying
that nervousness and noise away with them…like maybe they were
ancient beings bringing me a little peace..teaching me how to sway