AND IN THAT LAZY CAFE

And in that lazy cafe, whose chief auditory export was the low, dull grind from an old, dull refrigerator, their minds drew patterns in the air between them to create a cacaphony of thoughts, winding and weaving like grown vines holding up the aesthetic value of an abandoned home. They grinned at what they'd done. They'd forever changed Tiny's from a store where people went for coffee into their place to fertilize their conceptual flower bed.

WHEN YOUR SMILE FADES

When your smile fades,
it's like the bleachers
giving way in a stadium
of overcrowded capacity.

LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT

I thought about writing you a poem about the colors reflecting off of the petals of the lavender plant. I'd've used simile and some sibilance to cement the conceit in its place. But it meant nothing to me, so I wrote this:
You,
walking on the dark sidewalk,
so close to me
that I feel the swish
as you change feet:
left
     right
left.

STILL LIFE

The car, leaving a wake of swirling, invisible exhaust, presses us toward the back of our seats, forward down the road. Our hands make warmth of friction, sliding and holding and letting go and grabbing on. When you write those things on the page and when you say those things to me, I become stilled, and I feel the whole of the world, all the people and the winds and the cars—I feel them moving.

SCRAWLED ON NAPKIN: ALL THE RULES TO WRITING:

1. Fucking write. 2. Use commas to push back the enemy & for no other reason, unless the enemy finds pleasure in this. 3. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind and don't follow leaders; leaders don't make you write. 4. Grab all of the people. Love them all. They will all not love you. Find love in the space.

SOMETHING LIKE CATHARSIS

I can't bear the crushing quotidian. I am a permanent emergent. I study my own emergency. I study my own impermanence. I pulse with a lifelike desire to move and not stop moving. I lay myself down and breathe her in when she lays herself down beside of me. I ruin myself with a distrust of cycles and of tradition. I ruin myself with drink and with smoke. I call, at obscene hours, people who don't want to hear from me, and tell them things that I ought not tell them. I demand they write me things. I ruin myself with a distrust of those I love. I can't stand not being wanted. I am wanted. I spend hours doing nothing and chide myself for it. I spend hours using my body and still don't sleep soundly. I break things that matter to me and make things that I love stop working. I build things. I build massive things. I use my words to build things bigger than they ought to stand. I love you. Then I knock them over. I can't bear the crushing quotidian.

POETRY ISN'T FALLING LEAVES IN AUTUMN

I'm scared to tell you I love you because love is something you're supposed to have to thrust your hand into the drain for, watching the switch to the garbage disposal and praying you don't get stuck.

MEDIUM BREATHS ARE FOR TALKING AND WORDS ARE FOR EVER, or: WHY I WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU AGAIN

for Ruby

I made something beautiful today. Using a pen, I wrote across the available surfaces of a smooth, fist-sized rock and threw it into the Willamette. At a cafe on a street that runs diagonally across the other named streets, I drank coffee with an old friend. We talked about the unwavering course of time. Even when you've felt that time has passed quickly or that time has taken its sweet damned time, whether you wish you had another moment to look at his face or whether you wonder when the two of you will be earnest again—the way you were—it's all a singular line that connects your birth to your death.

Talking explicitly about the temporality of existence can be poetic in its openness, its recognition of truth. Talking metaphorically about the temporality of existence can be poetic in its subtlety, in mimicking the covert, yet ever-present underscoring that mortality plays in our shallow breaths and in our deep breaths.

In my drink, a gnat thrashes its legs about in a mechanical fashion. Its wings stuck to the surface of the beer, the bug has no chance of dislodging itself. Yet, it expends all of its available energy—until its blood rushes to its brain and it goes unconscious—trying to get out.