Sand. Thousands of grains surrounding the rusted legs holding up the playground swing set. Start there. Start with something small, something memorable. Turning the sand over in my mind, I see the blue veil of memory slide like a lover over the Now. My palm tickles. Grains send waves of pleasure from my hand up to my neck, collecting [...]]]> Turns

Sand. Thousands of grains surrounding the rusted legs
holding up the playground swing set. Start there. Start
with something small, something memorable. Turning
the sand over in my mind, I see the blue veil of memory
slide like a lover over the Now. My palm tickles. Grains
send waves of pleasure from my hand up to my neck,
collecting in electric pools that spark when I shiver.

Denim irritates my knees as I plant them in the sand.
I dip my hand into the earth, bring a tiny fistful to my lips.
I chew the sand contentedly. This is one of the first things
I remember. I wait for my turn on the swing. At the apex
I float. If moments are infinite, and the universe a string
of tethered moments, then I am eternally motionless
somewhere. I remember the windows of the nursery,
the pleasing warmth illuminating stray motes of dust.
I see my favorite toy, a tube I hold towards the light,
When I turn the eyepiece, fractals of red and blue,
green and yellow spread uniformly over a white plane.

Too soon it is nap time. I have always hated sleep.
Miss Harvey tickles my back to relax me. So I sleep,
for a time. Well before I am supposed to wake I climb
over the rails of the crib with blue bars, shimmy down
between the wall and the bed and place my naked feet
on the cold tile floor. I creep to the door, peek out to see
if any big people are looking, hurry to the room across
the hallway. I hate sleep. I hate this room even more.
It is an endless hall of child-sized toilets. One window
faces away from the sun, and only a little light steals
inside. I back away, afraid the toilets will try to eat me
if I turn my back on their menacing porcelain mouths.

One roller skate. I am on a deck overlooking a glen
of pine trees. I remember their scent – sharp, diagonal.
I didn’t know those words then, but I remember feeling
the smell of pine sap penetrate me. I can remember
remembering time spent under a Christmas tree, losing
time in the reflection of pink light on blue ornaments.
I remember the old family cat Tigger belly up next to me.
I remember remembering these things while wearing
one roller skate because my friend Joshua was unwilling
to take turns stumbling across the rough wooden deck.
How do you share a pair of roller skates? Instead of trying
I pick up a splinter and idly turn it over in my palm.

We sat down on a pile of rubble where we stopped to catch our breath after clawing our way out of a maze we stumbled upon while exploring.

Between ravenous draughts of air you accused me of being a stubborn man. I managed, in between shallow breaths to muster up one cynical laugh.

A few moments of solitude passed while we [...]]]> Stubborn

We sat down on a pile of rubble
where we stopped to catch our breath
after clawing our way out of a maze
we stumbled upon while exploring.

Between ravenous draughts of air
you accused me of being a stubborn man.
I managed, in between shallow breaths
to muster up one cynical laugh.

A few moments of solitude passed
while we finished the task of gasping.
I repeated your words with contempt.
“Stubborn,” I muttered,
“stubborn.”

You considered me with set lips.
Your eyes glimmered with dissent
for one painfully brief moment before
you turned away, and went away.

I live now in a labyrinth of words.
Lines of poems settle like dust on stacks
of underlined paragraphs
and blocks of unformed arguments.

“Stubborn.” I turn this single word
over, listen to its resounding sound
as it collides against my empty theses,
echoes through my hollow citations,
rolls around my equivocations.

I know now how right you were.
I am indeed one stubborn man,
unflinching in my desire for a time
I can no longer call the present.

Stubborn, yes, I am stubborn.
I stand alone on a pile of rubble.
I overfill my lungs in a penitent appeal
to time-lost winds, searching without ceasing
for one last wisp of your scent.

Your name is Beautiful, the truest label any human language could give you. I revisit childhood often, and I smile while you thrive in forgotten moments.

Seventh grade – I get a candygram while dissecting a frog. My cheeks burn as classmates tease me, but now I have the strength to be grateful. [...]]]> For Bonnie on her Thirty-First Birthday

Your name is Beautiful, the truest label
any human language could give you.
I revisit childhood often, and I smile
while you thrive in forgotten moments.

Seventh grade –
I get a candygram while dissecting a frog.
My cheeks burn as classmates tease me,
but now I have the strength to be grateful.

Third grade –
mistaking a four for a seven, you delegate
the opening of stockings and minor presents,
followed by their careful repackaging.

Second grade -
you spread ridiculous globs of shaving cream
over my beardless chin, mimicking a routine
I would only begin to practice in college.

Fourth grade –
you chat happily with Mom. The words turn to
white noise through my bedroom walls,
but your ringing laughter wakes me up.

Ninth grade – you stop the sun.
I cannot look at you in the emergency room.
I collect your abandoned bags in the fog.
You sit on a fence and we beg you to return.

You choose to return. Maybe you heard
James say “I do.” Maybe your heard
the children who call you Mommy laughing.
Maybe you knew were still needed, that
your firstborn’s smile would save my life one July.

Your name is Beautiful, the truest label
any human language could give you.

Cut remembers the Owl Moon. Cut remembers the gray snow, the rusted spade which sufficed as a shovel in a toddler’s hands.

Cut remembers the black ice, revisits the thrill of terror as two threadbare tires lose their traction. Cut wants to feel that alive again.

Cut remembers the moldy phrase “missing in action.” Missing in - Cut has acted. [...]]]> The Birth of Cut

Cut remembers the Owl Moon.
Cut remembers the gray snow,
the rusted spade which sufficed
as a shovel in a toddler’s hands.

Cut remembers the black ice,
revisits the thrill of terror as two
threadbare tires lose their traction.
Cut wants to feel that alive again.

Cut remembers the moldy phrase
“missing in action.” Missing in -
Cut has acted. He has acted
and he has been overlooked.

Cut sketches the word “hope”
on his right wrist, scrawls “despair”
on his left. Despair grates against
the small scar left by a sixth-grade failure.

Glassy eyes reflect fluorescent light.
Cut remembers how something deep
within his gut demanded that he stare,
how something in his chest said no.

Cut still feels three phantom fingers
tracing sacred letters beneath his wrist.
Cut feels the first and only fist to crash
against his cheek and chokes down laughter.

Cut can’t remember exactly how or when
the phrase “happily ever after” lost its power.
Nonetheless he races down synaptic fibers
in a quest to find the answer to a futile question.

The closest Cut gets is December 31st, 2006.
He squats and leans his back against a wall
in Whittier, California. He looks up at an Owl Moon.
He grimaces, mutters, “Once again, I learn.”

While we were smoking cigars in the blue beach chairs decorating my front porch, my friend confided “You always remember the best moments and forget the worst when you mourn lost love.”

He may be right, at least generally, but not tonight. Tonight I forcibly recalled a random fight you and I had over the way we play [...]]]> Worst Moments

While we were smoking cigars in the blue beach chairs
decorating my front porch, my friend confided
“You always remember the best moments
and forget the worst when you mourn lost love.”

He may be right, at least generally, but not tonight.
Tonight I forcibly recalled a random fight you and I had
over the way we play games. You said I took them
too seriously. I said you did too. We met no compromise
that night; I fumed over your pride, you brooded over mine.

Is it too much to say I would cede a hundred million
heartbeats to return right now, right here, to that
moment of fractured contact with you? I would, anyway.

Is it too much to say I would forego those rare nights
when I sleep soundly just to lay awake, listening
while my pulse accelerates to an irrepressible thrum
while I held you for the first time? I would, I would.

Is it too much to say I would forget the smell of honeysuckle
just to smell you once more on my pillow? Tonight,
while I lay awake in bed dissecting my past, forcibly
remembering every moment where I pushed you away,

repenting for every misspoken syllable, I would cede,
I would forego, I would readily untether. Whether
reasonable or no, I will never ever forget the worst moments.
They’re better than those other best moments.

They’re better than the first time I smelled honeysuckle.
They’re better than the first time I woke up refreshed.
They’re better than the first time my doctor put his stethoscope
in my ears and let me hear, for one brief moment, the sound of my life.

You speak. You inhale worlds to exhale fragments. Your mouth partitions one from another, finds crevices in which to seed complex divisions like crabapple sprouts in sidewalks.

I watch one shard splinter and shatter. What was once a whole jackknifes away from your lips, its tip colliding with an equally proportioned bit of what was once to form a fractal.

So two [...]]]> Fractals 01

You speak. You inhale worlds to exhale
fragments. Your mouth partitions
one from another, finds crevices
in which to seed complex divisions
like crabapple sprouts in sidewalks.

I watch one shard splinter and shatter.
What was once a whole jackknifes
away from your lips, its tip colliding
with an equally proportioned bit
of what was once to form a fractal.

So two becomes one other, only to
collect other others falling, gliding,
diving off the lips which purse, part,
curse, sort worlds into fragments.
Patterns are magnetic, or inescapable.

It is a benevolent spring. Today’s weather permits thousands of bodies to pepper Miami’s placid beaches. Coral reefs, dying while the ocean’s pH plummets, for now break the Atlantic’s waves into smaller, calmer fragments. Twenty miles inland, thunderclouds arrange themselves in temporary summits above the same Everglades where with a valid permit you can kill the feral boas who’ve outgrown their novelty. Between [...]]]> 3:18 PM

It is a benevolent spring. Today’s weather
permits thousands of bodies to pepper
Miami’s placid beaches. Coral reefs,
dying while the ocean’s pH plummets,
for now break the Atlantic’s waves
into smaller, calmer fragments.
Twenty miles inland, thunderclouds
arrange themselves in temporary summits
above the same Everglades where
with a valid permit you can kill
the feral boas who’ve outgrown their novelty.
Between the tempered water and false mountains
you might find a man lying on his bed,
writing one moment into existence
—- inhale
striking another moment out
—- exhale
waiting for a sound to interrupt
his thoughts. For now, he dwells on
the effort of respiration,
the fate of pet pythons,
Florida’s mountainous cumulonimbi,
the drying out of coral,
the people he will never know.

[brian]

I didn’t bleed. Instead I wept myself to sleep, then slept myself into my pasts. I tumbled from dream to dream, up one path and down the endless next, in a futile search for any self the future left untouched.

Because you change a thing when you observe it, because the future stared straight through me, every [...]]]> I misplaced
the future.
It was there
one minute,
gone the next.
What’s odd,
however, is
the gaping hole
the future left
in my chest.

I didn’t bleed.
Instead I wept
myself to sleep,
then slept myself
into my pasts.
I tumbled from
dream to dream,
up one path and down
the endless next,
in a futile search
for any self
the future left
untouched.

Because you change
a thing when
you observe it,
because the future
stared straight
through me,
every particle
of my trillions
was displaced.
The future left
no thing in place.
The future left
no self alone.

And now that
I’ve misplaced
the future,
I have no
pristine Self
to tell
“Start over!”
I have no
intact voice
to yell
“Start over!”
I have no
untapped Me
to beg
“Start over!”

I cannot
start over.
Instead
I grab
a needle.
I weave
a spool
of words,
memories,
mistakes,
minutes,
mysteries.

I thread
the needle
with these,
improvise
a suture,
improvise
a self
without
a future.

She floats beneath the surface, her eyes closed, her pursed lips whispering bubbles into existence. I cannot tell if she is praying or dying.

My head hurts; I hear myself say, “You know her.” I do know her. Her name [...]]]> She floats beneath the surface
in a pool with obsidian walls.
Her hair flows like electrons:
each strand is a field of probability.

She floats beneath the surface,
her eyes closed, her pursed lips
whispering bubbles into existence.
I cannot tell if she is praying or dying.

My head hurts; I hear myself say,
“You know her.” I do know her.
Her name is Simone de Pontié.
She is a fold in the fabric of space.

I swim over to her. I yell,
“You let me love you once!
Please, let me love you again.”
She opens her eyes, looks through me.

As an observed electron behaves itself,
so the field of all probabilities resolved
into a body of hair flowing side to side
as Simone shook her head, “No. No. No.”

I will not let her speak through me.
Suffice it to say, she spoke. Her words
burned. Days later, I still double over
as I churn over futures which will never exist.

Since childhood, I’ve been acutely aware of any sensation in my body. I remember the first time I noticed something physically “off” [...]]]> that I have pursued an academic career in English literature, I have long had a keen interest in the human body. Sometimes that’s been a good thing, and other times bad.

Since childhood, I’ve been acutely aware of any sensation in my body. I remember the first time I noticed something physically “off” at the age of three. As I lay in bed, I could hear the fabric of my pillow moving as my heart beat. It was annoying: once I noticed the sound, I couldn’t ignore it. I had to get used to the fact that I felt my heartbeat in my earlobe, that I could hear the cotton pillow slip slide in response to my pulse, and that I couldn’t shut down the part of my brain that was aware.

Of course I didn’t have the language to express these experiences when I was three. It wasn’t until five years later, when my optometrist was shining a bright light in my eyes, that I learned a phrase to describe my keen sense of presence. As my optometrist routinely scanned my retina for any signs of damage or bleeding, I asked if seeing the veins on the back of my eye was normal. My optometrist lowered his light and asked me to describe what I saw. I told him, “It looks like a tree with lots of branches.” He said that I could see what’s called the arbre de vie (tree of life) running through my retina, that my awareness was uncommon, but that I was okay – just photosensitive.

I had a label. I was photosensitive. With time I realized I was audiosensitive, olfactosensitive, degustosensitive, and tactisensitive. I was, in short, sensitive. That sensitivity set me apart, made me feel responsible for my body, made me aware of how much the human feels in every given day.

The human body is amazing, but for a long time I lived in the shadow of fear that something within my incredibly complex system of systems will go wrong. I didn’t say might – it will. Whether from trauma, mutation, or age, I will someday break. And then I will no longer be sensitive.

Oddly enough, this with time became a reassurance. I will break. And, honestly, I probably won’t be aware of the fact that I’ve broken until it’s too late to do anything about it. Humans, no matter their levels of sensitivity, are notoriously bad at self-diagnosis. When a doctor finally told me this (after I noticed that the veins in my chest turned bluer when I raised my arms), I began to accept that my sensitivity can be all blessing, no curse. I just have to stop worrying about what I sense and start living in the world I DO sense.

And, when I’m no longer looking inward, that world is a vibrant place.