we were frozen

we were frozen
when you touched me
just rewinding
lately bloomed.
we were nothing
gauzy creatures
meant to go and come
again.
we were blades of
dewey grass then
right before we fell in
love.
now we're more
aging acacias,
moving slowly towards
the sun.

beethoven's fifth, by text message

beethoven's fifth is dearest
to my heart in early morning
when the vibrating green mass
on the nightstand
(no monster, no zombie)
is crying that i see what you
have to say.
and they are insignificant but they
are words.
sleepy salutations to pull at my
little heartstrings
at five AM and cause unusual
palpitations, through the shiny
charging screen that keeps us
near while so far distant.

ballet for the blind

the reason i remain still in this pure unruptured state
far from swamps of mild distate and horoscopes gone all awry
lies between the bitter agonies and cloudlike bits of bliss which
snuggle deeply all about the creviced crackings of this street.
have you seen them? grandoise warnings
frocked and flavored harshly, sweetly,
placed on steely unread street signs guiding we who cannot see them.
we, these marzipan creations flaunting feet and heart and hands
firmly planted where we've started, out of use and laid aside.
here we shake our resolutions to this crudely fashioned crossroad,
swinging carefree on the faultline into which we fear we'll fall.
and we will. and when we do so we will cease to show our weakness,
only pestering the heartstrings which depend on such dissention
for survival. so we'll shiver in this foaming, shaking water
where we wait for safety which we surely know will never come.
this is us: we faint as wilting as our substance now is washed
into the sea who will devour every meter of this street,
playing heartstrings lost as harpsichords, to quiet unheard discourse
in the crossroad. this, the waiting room, a ballet for the blind.

healing

we are at odds again.
we have darkened the sun with this dissention.
this whiplash salvation,
some kind of lopsided equilateral triangle of
Salvation and Affection which strangles
and suffocates,
preserves and heals.
now that we have all burned down
to caulk dust in the grass,
we will heal.

oxford sun

steaming scorching sun melts
the aching sky with pitiful hissing
drops that spill dischordant
blue onto the sprawling fibers of
this field and it burns.
the way you carefully place your
stuffy brown oxfords
into my precise size 7 footsteps is
enchanting but i fear that you
feel much too much
much too often for me.
you might be alarmed to note that
i'm falling quite madly in
love with another boy whose oxfords
are classy and tan
and whose footsteps are centimeters
away from my own
in the English room now as you
fidget nervously and try to conjure
up something clever to say to me.
pulsing throbbing star pulls me in
too closely and complains that there
isn't enough time here in this
turbulent orbital while dodging angry red
fire ants and never-satisfied black holes
to sit quietly on the whitewashed porch
of a Nantucket summer home having
deep conversations about Shakespeare and
laundary detergent, and things
of the imporant sort.
i've found that my taste is quite earnest
and i wish that you would stop
writing me poetry.

i'm peeling off the dull grey layers

i'm peeling off the dull grey layers that you've plastered on me
and revealing the flamboyant vibrant hues and silky pastels
that were so slyly hinding underneath my complaisant hull.
i'm realising what you've been doing to me, and understanding.
this, the sudden urge to scream bursting from silent facades
like a tulip from the dusty shell of a chalky pistachio
leaving behind paper thin layers of complacency
in the molting skin of the shriveled creature who had eaten my soul
and refused to release the quivering thing from its pockmarked hands.
i am changing while you are away. i am becoming more of myself,
constantly reshaping and refining with pickaxe and sledgehammer
and sandpaper fine as sea salt. paper shavings and wood chips
fly from my willing canvas as the fears chipped from my heart.
where have i been before? all this time i've hidden from this lifeline,
this pulsing throb of love and anger which so captivates?
your eyes are piercing but they seek not truth, only velvety lies
which build walls of uncertainty brick by brick only to be destroyed.
do you realize that i could leave you this instant?

where there is silence

where there is silence
there is a thought unsaid which is slightly less compelling
than the the silvery sweet canopy of rest
which is the quiet of two dormant lips.

my heart that is pandoras

i fear that you contain me within a cardboard box
where i crouch, smudged-faced, with a musty parcel of wood
which is pandoras'.
locked inside, i pried it open

and out came every fateful fatal pause
and unuttered thought
and every unbreathed breath and the black ink spilled.

clouded grey my stark white hands, and the world it roared
but it was a beautiful sound.
but with the rose colored bloodstains in checkerboard patterns
and lovethirsty hearts in a coy, cloying state
there came a horrible, wonderful, terrible beauty
with melancholy opera and the crushing force that is
an indomitably vulnerable spirit.

pushing aside the soggy paper flaps, the cardboard captors,
i stepped willingly into the world in which i belonged.
daisies poke smiling heads from cracks
in grimy asphalt, presenting sunshine to the dark
inside of a silent shut eyelid as i should.
where my soul would be broken,
and it was beautiful.

i am not

we're on the top of the world and it's getting uncomfortable
fidgeting nervously atop this uncanny pedestal on which
i've been placed like an oversized and greatly commercialized
shiny, plastic doll with a shiny, plastic smile
which i am not.
you've told me to emote

today is luminescent.

i don't really know if i've done something differently than before but there are several thousand multi-colored rodents which are rumbling and tumbling about inside my abdomen like acid rain caused by years and years of careless human driving habits and STRANGE THINGS ARE HAPPENING. yes, he's a fountain overflowing with all things that make you happy and you let him be himself so i'm very merry happy for you but i don't understand why he won't let himself sweep you off your sweet star-studded feet and run away together forever to a scallopped roofed house somewhere south of portland where it rains just enough so that the two of you can snuggle by the fire with a basset hound and your rare hungarian cat with the spiky tongue.

you're listening and we're talking but we don't hear a word each other is saying because we're temporarily preoccupied by televisions that sound like squawking birds and slightly distracted almost-lovers and in the middle of all this that started several days ago when i almost allowed myself to fall in love i discover that the most terrifying things in life are usually the most meaningful from a tall boy with blonde hair who i've never spoken to before, and the reason i feel so luminescent today is because when you give yourself away freely and throw your major organs to the sky to rain down like fallien angels on sweaty and unsuspecting passerby you're really just smiling and sliding your hand into the previously unoccupied spaces between a lonely strangers' fingers, and everything must and will turn out the way it's meant to be because otherwise the world would fall off it's axis by means of inferior logic and the human race would be extinct anyway, which would make all my little discrepancies like ashes in the bottom of the carbeurator in this car which will take me to my future, whether i want to go there or not and show me things that i've never wanted to see or expected to be possible.

our world is strange and full of tall and shiny buildings that glow like the inner light which is supposedly showing through my sweatshirt today, the one with the piano keys, and even though TV hosts and antisemitic facebook friends use bad language and sometimes forget to wear socks with their sneakers the world will always go on turning and be a beautiful, marvelous place no matter what is done to it, with an unending perserverance no matter how hard we push and tug it back into its former place setting like erring spoons and forks on a placemat at the dinner table which is our dormant concience. i will light the candle of hope, and we will cross the street in utter darkness into a strange restaurant at which unsuspecting waiters hand you the menu from which you will choose the course of the rest of your life, and we will do it together, and you can bring along your friend and i'll pick up a stranger on the way, and we'll do the unexpected together in a deserted cafe east of Boston's urban district on a sunny spring day in April. the future is here, and the future is mine.

4:17

the sky is exceptionally blue this morning and your eyes
are the inside of a pearl. today you are a speck of dust, a leopard
who has lost his spots. you are the way the sky
lusts after the sun, seething, never failing to break his own heart.
now the sky lets forth its tears in a provoking show of fire

and water, just as you fall at my feet after your sun has snapped
your heart into seven or eight ceramic tile pieces shaped like the clay
heart you gave me on st.valentines' last february.
but i will pat your head, soggy as the tearstained grass beneath my

shoes as i give you my anorak, and make you face the water damage
leaking from the celing of your heart just as i'll face the poor, dejected sky's
petulent teardrops in the form of half-soaked chalk children on the sidewalks

and a provoking squelch in the left sneaker of a man in aisle four
of the supermarket: and i'll buy you tissues and cheesecloth to wipe up your heartache.
the time is 4:17, and i beleive that i'm alive.

i'm here with this letter

i'm here with the letter that you almost wrote me,
almost describing to me how you felt;
how love could be sweet & heart-wrenchingly bitter
like these circumstances you almost were dealt.
you almost declared that you'd loved me forever
and you hoped i'd remember when i heard about
how you almost took ten times too much medication
cause you were too tired to wrestle with doubts.
i almost was destined for love and blind foxes,
but then i was transferred to cold cuts and tea.
you ran from the nightmares and lullabies corner
into the room's center square, where you found me.
you're just like me: people say that we're bad news.
if you value yourself, you'd run from here fast.
our bones were broken here between these church pews
looking for something which was made to last.

the happy bug

the happy bug,
he bites me every morning.
the alarm clock glares
at my shiny, unwashed face
like the masses of
unhappy and disgruntled teenagers
in the sophomore hallway
to whom my happiness is
a bloodthirsty mosquito,
buzzing quaintly in their ears, refusing
to be swat down.
i keep the happy bug
in my pocket all day,
to give me a pinch when i frown.
dissheveled, angry girls and boys
with acne scars and broken hearts.
today, i chose the happy bug.
you chose insect repellent.

the sky is crying this morning

the sky is crying this morning:
fat silver tears,
or perhaps, sweat.
i am sorry the sun
has broken your heart.

she is

left handed,
puts nutella on the wrong side of her bread.
she's anti-establishment
and anti-slavery
and anti-bacterial.
a foreigner wherever she goes.
a perfect, shiny soap bubble
escaped from the bath of a petulent toddler.
trapped under a smeared container,
in a country where the language
is slowly becoming unintelligible.
the subject of a thousand love songs,
sleeping alone.
winning the world twice over,
describing herself as "utterly unremarkable".
holding tight a large square mirror,
clenching quickly her tiny fists
to make sure she is still alive.

ode to Trident.

sugarfree delirium!
my masochism drowns in effervescent
red and white:
piquant, like a raspberry in which are stabled
indefatigable manchurian soldiers,
marching valiantly with
squinched Asian faces accross
the rugged terrain that is
my upper and lower laterals.
oh, sugarfree Trident!
you are modest with your charms
as well as with your potential for causing
severe mandibular melancholy.
you promised me a brighter smile
but not a broken jaw
and a night appliance.

fundamentally, sister

there's ten feet between us
and an octave of silence
my sister told me that you didn't
know left from right
and took two steps when you should take
one
and its always best to trust ballerinas but
maybe i disagree

"one brain is more useful
than a thousand broken hearts",
she says and clicks her tongue

i stopped by the synogogue
and cut my finger on a piece of glass.
a rabbi and a bleeding, black haired
optimist,
we could found an empire
or plan a revolution.

band practice

my english notebook has become
trampled on the floor,
and caroline's weimeraner chews languidly
on an unsuspecting spatula.
our bassist is a surprisingly good
Cher impersonator
and the guitarist is the rocker
and i'm the one who spurts continual sunshine
and can hit the high F on a good day.
it's 1 AM and i feel perfectly gelatinous.
rather like a plaster mold is propped
against this cabinet rather than i,
and a tall man with bulging knuckles
is filling it with strawberry jell-o.
it could be mr.thatcher,
but he is in the living room watching
the nanny diaries.
laura is curled up on the Gibson guitar case,
as if she can sleep in between mandolins
and electric guitars and singing as loud
as i possibly can.
the back of my head gently knocks
against the cabinet,
redundantly thudding.
i wonder if the neighbors are awake
because of the incessant drumming.
the bassist groans in mock frustration
and i lean against the speaker,
and remember that i should be a lawyer
or a doctor
and change the world like i'm s'posed to,
and do as i'm told
like i'm told to do.
but right now, the microphone pole
is prickling and scratching my vertebrae
and i remember that i was made for this,
no matter what anyone says,
and whether i like it or not
i've known that all along.