compilation

[Incandescence]

1. 1/14/05

i wish you wouldn’t
put your heart into it so much
passing and running
laughing and crying

i wish you wouldn’t
break our smiles with your
stunning perfection and
quiet intelligence

yeah, sometimes you make me want to drown in
a cherry icee and sometimes you make me
want to eat fig newtons till i vomit
and sometimes you make me want to
lap you up and kick you and sometimes
you make me want to hold worn teddy bears when i sleep

flipping and spinning, halogen lights in your eyes and
darkness and ground rushing up and you breathe faster think faster
and grip foreboding ground and pray and pray pray and pray it all away

and still, sometimes your perfection isn’t good enough.
sometimes you have to learn to take things in stride
and that victory is a dish best understood
by the losers.

2. 2/15/05

Somewhere deep-down inside you
there is a core of jaded beauty that shimmers
and refracts the harsh light of cruel words
and gleams protectorate over your eyes.

It makes me want to cut you open and have a look inside
get past calvin klein and rubber sneakers and smell
the real you or stay up all night and read your clandestine
journal entries and savor the little giblets of turn-of-phrase
and sardonic humor.

I’ve wondered oft-times in my bedroom what it would be like
to wrap my arms around your shoulders and slowly
trail down your stomach and let my tongue lick salty skin
and feel your levi’s slipping down your legs and form
small clusters of cloth material where they land.

Then I remember to wake up and cringe
at the aftertaste of black coffee and the rote system
of coursework and sidejobs and remember that
I’ve felt the bend and I’ve made the grind
and my fifteen years of existence have felt life’s
bitterest kiss, but in the mornings, right before
I leave to go to class, I see your e-mails and
they make me smile or
they at least make me think I'm safe.

3. 3/29/05

grant,

there are so many different phrasings
so many different words that I could say to you
and fill your existence with euphoria and
a nostalgia for the now. I could open up
like a book and let you thumb my pages
giving up small pleasures in papery-light fetishes.

you are so deserving of my poetry and short stories
but you don’t use it to your advantage; instead,
you smile when I try to tell you I love you
and you hold my hand when I don’t know what to say, and when the darkness
surrounds us on park benches we can not focus on each other
because nature has left us breath-taken

1
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2
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3

like that, you make me smile. and I attempt to paint
or draw and compose or sing but I’m beginning to understand
that when you smile at my laughter you aren’t enjoying the joke
and when you read my poetry you aren’t reading words and I’m beginning to understand
the importance of silence when in your presence because the words don’t come
and the phrases aren’t there – they are floating off like bubbles in the night.

4. 4/15/05

we were waiting to exhale -
and we could have
wandered down empty alleys
and treasure hunted
for empty dumpsters
so we could lay out
and tease each other
or get up and block traffic
and keep that sucker from going
an extra 2mph
but instead, we found worthless projector slides
and empty cans to kick around
while we waited on unpromised miracles
and the air to fill our lungs.

5. 4/27/05

Fine thread and dangling
crystals and futures leave
you breathless. Wooden box
once forgotten underneath
the old oak tree out back,
it is midnight and you want
your old greenpen poetry to read.

Digging into the earth you remove
her skin to find yourself once more
and to rediscover
sandbox memories
adolescent rages
senior crushes and
treasure hunting

You broke your wings
to remember what it is to fly
and now the feathers don’t
seem to go the same way. but
you know there is no map
and a compass would not help at all.

Choked me with angry kisses
and pushed me to the ground
You made me remember
what my knees are for. You made me
believe in myself and you
make me feel in colors and
breathe in tastes you make me want
to hold you again.

Just remember,
you have shed harsher tears
over depression and suicide
and the dangling threat
of the rest of our lives.

All I want from you is to promise me that you will never die to live again.

6. 5/3/05

Blue and yellow balloons
(the color of graduation)
with wet confetti on the floor,
waiting for you, rainbow ballerina,
to slip on empty vials and come
crashing down into shimmering
mediocrity.

And, for as long as I’ve known you, you
have worn the same boots and your hands,
soft with poems and scratched by cement, are
always tainted soft blue from used sidewalk chalk.
That’s three years I’ve known you, and I think
having sex with you would be funny
because I would feel better knowing
that three year old boots were on my bedroom floor.

It’s not that I actually care that you are leaving.

Well, maybe a little, but it doesn’t hurt as bad
as it does when we closed each other’s eyes
and waited for dark.

7. 5/8/05

There is a folded note in a folded page
in an opened book waiting to be read
by you.

There are many folded notes waiting to be read, actually,
but not just by you – by me – for the scribbled words
hold the answers to more than just heartbreaking confessions.

So last night when you walked across that stage
I held my breath and wrote one last note and slipped it into
your backpack.

Sometime in the future you will remember
to look through your memories, and you’ll see me
standing in the darkest corner analyzing your every move
and falling in love with you
again.

Well we went to a movie and we went back to your house
and I am not a virgin no more, because I am yours [you are mine]
but we are literally oceans apart and I look forward to your scribbled
notes in envelopes with postcards from Greece.


****************
8. A response to Brad

And now I have to start the song over.
We cant go. Wrong can't get. ****ed this time.
Speak up now. Lose or get.
Left behind.

And I have to start the song over again
because your crying made me miss
my favorite part.