train

when you're on the train you think you can look at everyone's eyes and know their life
scruffy man with the basset hound face, are you sad? you're eyes are sinking
girl with the leather boots and flower tattoo, how long did it take you to get ready this morning? you're eyebrows are painted on
homeless man with the bike standing next to me, can you stop running over my toes? i know you're homeless and I feel bad about this but your backpack is too close to my face and it smells weird
conductor, can you stop this thing from screeching? can't you tell my head is pounding?
old man in the Russian hat, I like your hat.. now stop staring at me!
sleep sleep, hold your bags
see your reflection beside the window
hold your breath
catch a glance
fake a smile

memory

I was in the back of your parents car as you sat next to me rubbing the hair away from my neck. Your brothers were sleeping a row ahead of us and I was scared that we would wake them. The salt from the ocean was lingering on our flesh and when you kissed me I could taste it in the cracks of your lips. It was two days after my birthday, and Cape Cad will never to this day be any better. I wish I had jumped right into your arms but I stood there with my feet planted in the sand. Two foolish feet stuck in the wet sand. You looked me up and down and smiled and I smiled back because we were so damn young. Your hand moved down my shoulder to my bare arm and our lips intertwined so quietly and tenderly to ensure that your parents wouldn't hear or see. Your brothers stayed sleeping, and we kept kissing gently in the back seat with your hand moving down and meeting mine. It was dark, and shortly after our eyes met I fell asleep beside you, your arm around my waist. Once we reached my house you walked me into my damp basement and we made out as I leaned against the furnace. This was our freedom, but I missed your sweetness. I live for that goddamn sweetness.

I think that Joanna Newsom may have written some of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard. Honestly, I have been moved to tears many times I have listened to Milk-Eyed Mender or Ys because her words are just so incredibly stunning and her voice and the harp show so much emotion in each album.

I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror

And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour
The butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours
And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines
Come on home, now! All my bones are dolorous with vines

And what's it mean when suddenly we're spent
And tell me true ambition came and reared its head and went far from you
Even mollusks have weddings, though solemn and leaden
But you dirge for the dead, and take no jam on your bread
Just a supper of salt and a waltz through your empty bed

poetaster

in the heart of darkness
always exists a solitary contentment within me
its not happiness
just an balance of sorts
where I find myself smiling
and settling
and breathing

all that I write is just a reaction to life
its not planned nor pertinent
its not a reflection of what surrounds me
but rather what is within me
pulling the weeds out of my mind
and replanting them here
where some can grow
and others diminish into nothing

by and by I know that in the end of this life
i'll see myself wrinkled and old
standing in front of a mirror stark naked
ugly and puckered
and let loose a grin
because underneath it all
i am happy

poem for a stranger

i hate all that you don't say
and the words i do not speak to you
will grow in my chest
like a sapling on a train
foreign and suppressed
no whisper of the sun
will greet our cheeks
all we'll have
is a shared glance
out of a train window
i guess it's enough

are you drunk?

drifting to sleep on the couch
i'll never know if all those times she was just tired
of wakefulness
or was it that she just had too much wine
(perhaps they were linked rather closely)
sometimes she could smile through all the bullshit
i'd be kind, for i understood her wasted potential -
her view was tainted and out of focus
until eventually she saw nothing
not even her own body in front of her
making friends with the darkness;
reaching out and procuring
another wine glass full of sleep
she rose each morning like an aging flower
wise and beautiful, fragile and forgotten -
and broken, stuck to mourn her own living death
but her dreams live on!
floating sweetly in and out of the drifts
between each cushion
just a tish...

excess self

i am a two hearted dream
from the bottom of a boiling pot
to the top of ever-rising steam