54

Wow, I feel like I used to have a lot more friends.

 

For Garrett, Specifically

 

the only thing that is interesting about people,

the fox says,

is their chickens

but you

yes you

 

there is so much interesting about you it comes out in blurts and spurts and you might want to get a band-aid for all that

talent, favorite favorite what I like best about you might be the way you believe in an art form

more than you believe in people at this point because cynicism feels fresh and

slick

between your fingers at this point like midnight sand the time you slept on the Oregon beach on a towel and ran the cold sand through your fingers and counted the decaying stars and didn't want to breathe because it was all so beautiful it hurt

or maybe the thing I like best about you the mostmost interesting thing is the despair

you felt at 4:32 in the darkest morning staring at the bright computer screen wondering why the hell you ever thought you could write a research paper

and how much it costs to get a GED and whether Starbucks was hiring but what I think I like best out of all you

out of the thousand beautifully mismatched self-images strung together like broken Venetian beads on hemp sting is the way you did not try

almost-adult

but succeeded, which are very different things despite what the shitty self-help books in Barnes and Noble tell you and here you are on the precipice

of everything a whooshing rushing whirl like cotton and college and beautiful comforting headaches and buying toilet paper on your own

and nothing all at once, just another summer

yes.

It will be interesting, at least, better than chickens.

 

 

53, I miss that confidence

You are beautiful, you don't deserve me- what happened? I don't ever remember being this sad

 

 

For My Death, Long in Coming

 

Hello

I am sorry to take your motherly hand

You are beautiful, you don't deserve me

Heads like mine are bound to go extinct

 

Yes, soon

Formaldehyde, calla lilies burdening my church's altar

My father's shoulders defeated in the pew

But I want you to know this

 

-when i was eleven i stood in the breathing emerald jungle and hung my toes over the edge. below, a punchbowl of sunreflected blue. i took a deep breath, and jumped.

the water felt like featherlight uppercuts.-

 

It's alright, I understand

For such a life, such colors, such laughing, I owe the universe some marrow

This is payback, only.

52, do you ever feel like an asshole for missing the wrong person?

What is Between You and Me is a Zone for Mishaps

This, right now, is the first time I've been alone

In such a long time

It's quiet. I have too much time to think.

 

I'm still not sure if you were what I needed

I'm not sure if we were built to last

(you and I were never built to last)

I never did tell you how I got this scar

 

I want to lick your wrists and carry your notebooks

and just bewilder people

in that way that true love does

 

I miss you, but I think I miss the future more

51, I wish I was a better writer

The friend who this was written for is a much much better writer than I am.

 

As Nikki

Says Nikki:

This is most likely about an older man, but not in the way that girls usually write for older men. This is also about priests. Assume what you will.

1.

You told me once that the way I trod the world is like the period when you were twenty one, right after your cheating girlfriend dumped you by saying that you were cold and shallow. You spent two weeks after that telling everyone in your general vicinity that you loved and value them, and prayed for the Christian orphans in Rhodesia.

I told you I didn't think you were cold and shallow and you laughed.

2.

I was talking to my mother about that and she said it's a family thing. Our men are priests, our women are brilliant and we all live too close to each other.

(my mother told me she wanted to be a wizard from ages six to twelve, but gave up when she realized that the paperwork for doing magic on Americans is endless. I think this might have something to do with her parents being dead.)

3.

Here would be something beautiful and heartbreaking and true, if this was really Nikki. If this was really Nikki, you would now be rendered jealous as neatly as verbs conjugate into the singular possessive. Really, if this was Nikki your sense of faith&grace would be irreparably changed, same as my heart after I met you, Nikki dear.

 

50, this is soooo old

I didn't have a girlfriend when I was seventeen, that explains a lot.

 

Certain Verses in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Corinthians

 

This is the secret defining thing

(and by the end,

you'll know what it is

tho i'll never tell)

 

This is the every look-away glance

Every time I met a her's eyes

 

This the particular peculiar section in the bookstore

That I walk around, beside but never

Through

(have you figured

it out?)

 

This is being seventeen, being so alive in such a spring, being in love and

ashamed

 

This is acquiring a code language

That I never studied, or even asked for

Quavering constantly on the precipice of my tongue

Unsure whether to deploy these verbal bombs

Or just hold the hot words in my mouth.

 

This is never getting it right.

 

(Hint. Toaster ovens, three dollar bills. being earnest, chickens and handkerchiefs)

 

This is being embarrassed that part of my identity revolves around

The who of whose hips I watch swing steady down the hall

 

(You've probably figured it out, haven't you?)

 

This is returning to certain verses in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Corinthians

Till my fingers memorize the onion-skin pages and

Open them wantonly, without intent

And rereading (I can't remember reading)

For an answer, a sensible solution.

 

This is the way I never find any.

48, I miss poetry.

for a old friend:

 

 

best beloved of the fates

 

with some people you can tell.

is it the weft of blue veins on the arches of their feet?

or it might be a certain trick of deportment,

a method of walking to make oneself appear taller.

 

with some people the fragrance of destiny trails after them;

the scent of hairspray under klieg lights.

 

destiny is a funny thing. I am writing of it as a thing of certainty

but more often than not is it is bought with shin splints and hours logged in

airports and studios.

talent is merely interest on that payment, the principal is work.

 

with some people you can tell.

destiny means this could've been written ten years from now.

then, it would have started like this.

 

-I saw Lauren Cannon last on a program tucked into a stranger's back pocket in New York. The photographer must've loved her, just a little , to catch the sureness in those hands, which always managed to convey something beautiful and inarticulate.-

 

with some people, those best beloved by fate, you forgive them their talent.

just for the privilege to watch from the black velvet wings,

her immense shadow projected on the dark wall,

as insubstantial as smoke, as large as legend.

46

To All The Beautiful Girls in San Francisco,

where did you come from? You alight on the seats of the MUNI like migratory songbirds and I imagine you laying in my bed, wearing only your yellow boyshorts that I spy peeking above your low slung khaki cargo pants, telling me about your migration from Middle America. In my mind, beautiful girls, you are all from Illinois.

You are dangerous, distractible, delightful. I simultaneously want to take you home and see what your pretty bones look like under all those layers of vintage clothes, and also ask whether you have health insurance (because I worry about those pretty, pretty bones).

In summer, you seduce me not with the standard sundresses (is it ever warm enough here for sundresses?) and sun tans, but the smooth sure roundness of your calves, which is entirely unfair. As sculpted as the curves of a seashell, one August a particularly disarmingly Zanzibar brown pair distracted me from catching the 14 bus up Mission.

I love you, all of you, without discrimination. I am an omnivorous visual slut. I love the defiantly lounging punk girls in the Haight with their kittens curled around their shoulders, because blue hair don't care but also because I want to feed them pancakes with plenty of (vegan) butter and ask where they nest at night.

I love all the tough femmes congregating outside the Lexington wearing their mother's crinolines like their mothers never did. I love them for their pinup tattoos and ability to cry without their mascara running and throw a punch without breaking a knuckle.

I love the girls in the Mission who walk like a big fuck-you and almost a suggestion at the same time, who let their hair blow in the wind like a banner for their own private war. Girls like that make me close my eyes and think of Death and Desire and wonder if God underestimated both.

I love the rockabilly butch who once waved to me and my girlfriend from the bus stop as our overflowing bus pulled away from Castro Street, almost as if to say hello there, tribe. And I love that butch for hir tattoo on hir forearm that read no blood no foul.

I love the hipsters in Valencia, nervous-skinny and too aware of their own breakable beauty for their own good. And sometimes, I could sell my soul just to watch them smoke outside the restaurant; a slow and evocative kind of death.

I even love the fourteen year old girls in bedrooms across San Francisco, noses pressed against windows, watching this glorious parade of misfits strut down the city streets. Poor babies. Just wait, little darlins.

I love all of them, all of them for being alive and awake, for paying attention, for seducing me by standing on the station platform at the 16^th and Mission BART and also for boarding the train and never looking back.

Come here, my beautiful battered birds. Bring your broken wings, and crooked teeth, your childhood sexual abuse. Let's all go home, wherever that is, together. We can all hold hands in Golden Gate Park and kiss each other with all the tenderness this beautiful, brokedown city can manage.