There is a little red button in the room with my shrinking cat.

I see in two-time: his infinite now
and my unrelenting advance

I tell him the things I always tell him; I sing him the same songs.
His regal stripes cling to his purr.

I press my face
into the revealed corners of his shape
and sob the love in my bones.

Is this anguish made
in God's image?

He is oblivious to the catheter in his paw.
He is certain of my love.

I press the button.

Grief Grows In Me Like a Tree

There are more people on one sidewalk square in New York City
than there are in ten miles of wine country.

I remember all of us holding New York City, together.
How much we must have loved each other!

Now I hear rush hour honking in the dawn chorus: "I am here, here am I."
The songbirds finish their sacred cantatas, and the last rib becomes the first.

You would charge into the end with a lopsided grin.
You believe in sacred lasts, you
with the audacity of fresh eyes
recite an atheist's prayer and know
you will never swing low.

Was it my heart or my son, the Gods called Icarus?

Look, said Noah, I said choose the one you love.
It’s not my fault you misunderstood. It’s not my fault
you have to fuck your sister. You should have known,
when I said the sacred words: choose the girl. There can be just one.

What do you mean you aren’t going to fuck her? Have you lost your–
well the whole point is to continue, or why the hell get on the boat?
You think what, we enjoy sailing around in this cramped thing
in a world with nowhere left to hold our ground?

You are a disgrace. The world will wash away your history.
Not even a memory of the shape of you will survive.
You should have known what kind of love I meant.

A kid across from me on this L train just said to his dad,
"when we get the dog, I want to give it my homework to eat."

So serious his tone, I think he was saying
he's ready to do what people do,
to take responsibility for being in the world;
he will sacrifice his homework to the dog.

Thank God I won't be in the room
when he understands
what you and I have known since the title.

"Come to the hospital right now, right now."

Lonely at 1st Ave. & E. 24th St.

I remember on my birthday
I talked about the Brooklyn bridge
because it stands out in a dirty city.
I have a friend who hates it here and
he's right, which just goes to show
being right doesn't mean much.

Now it's early Saturday morning,
I'm on my way to the library where
I will help people, mostly people
who didn't keep up. The light in this city
has a relationship with dirt that you'll never understand unless you spend
mornings walking to the subway.

Saturdays at the library there are children,
 "Miss Joanna, I used a metaphor," pause
"or maybe it was a simile." And I Google it because
I can never remember the difference either.

The library is small and the neighborhood is trying, a sixteen years old honors student was shot to death last week and I knew him. The violence in this city has a relationship with a small girl's metaphor maybe simile that you'll never understand unless you try, which you'll never do.

This morning I'm thinking I had better
find some people who know what I mean when I say,
most things that mean something are covered in dirt.

My co-worker texts she's missed her train
The kind of co-worker who only eats fast food, and loves spicy but hates peas
and can't stand pizza anymore because she ate it every Friday night for too
many years on Long Island with her family,
who did not appreciate when she moved in with her fiance before the wedding
but got over it. Although if they knew how kinky the sex was, they would
probably at least complain about it loudly to their co-workers. I text back,
"sugar honey iced tea" which is something she says a lot and I picture her, at
ass o'clock in the morning at a commuter train station in Long Island watching
the back of her train as it leaves her behind and then she sees my text and she
smiles anyway and I wonder, what have we been worshiping this whole time?

Last evening I went to the theater
The kind where you can buy a glass of wine but it’ll come in a plastic cup
which is okay because you’re supporting
the labor of love
When the protagonists kissed, I knew
they were faking, because it’s a play
and also because they had no chemistry.
Still, what the hell were the French thinking? I wonder if it started out
as a trick. Can we fool the world into
touching tongues?
I sort of hope some actors sometimes realize that almost anything is
better than touching tongues, even pretending to.

In a cup of orange mango juice
I poured myself in the break room
A small bug struggles for air
I can’t tell small bugs apart
Juice invaders, subspecies my cup
Anyway I do put my finger in there
And I let the small dude climb up
and I blow on the dummy gently until
he flies away.

The Buddhists, I have gathered, argue the bug’s point of view. Better to
be fully present when drowning in a place you cannot conceive than to
suffer from denial that you are drowning and you don’t know where
you are. I’ll be honest, most days, I take great comfort in being
the master of the finger.

I know that small bugs have no consciousness
but I have an idea that this is the only way to experience divinity,
small and empty of thought.
I hope the bug was all wonder when
a miracle came from up somewhere
and saved it from
the place that smelled like heaven.

But Soft

Give me a thousand words and I will dance along the aesthetic of their evocation.
The light through yonder window breaking.
Give me a man who can climb the vines of my verbiage and meet me up, up, up.
It is the East, hear the maid-sun.
We will luminate from balconies.
Beacons to close eyes, we will hold fast,
raise each other high with quiver and quiver.
Give me the images that gnaw,
and I will lay them to waste with an incantation we will share.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
who grieves for lack of lips.
Give me a thousand words, each one a maid of the image, yet far more fair than she.

"It's the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening." - Ruth Ozeki, A Tale For The Time Being

The cold tiles against my knees are my favorite part of throwing up.
I'm back here again, vomiting Panang curry with mixed seafood.
When my insides confront me, I pray.

I've never been accused of disorded eating, but then
I've never been accused of disordered faith either.
Before you object, try to understand:
if it's a little bit cheeky, it's also about the complexity of all things
and thus, Newton’s cowardice.

Sorry for bringing up Newton;
the truth is I cried in the shower and again in the office.
I climbed into bed and confronted
the cold fish dying in my stomach,
the one that didn't come up with the rest of the seafood,
the one that insists I will die if I lose you.

You, who are tearing down for justice, it is one of our final duties
to be convicted for the crime of outliving our convictions.
You, who will not read the rest of this poem for awhile, it is one of our final blessings
to be gone before your fire examines itself and loses its desire for oxygen.

You, who will take our place, it is one of your final duties to return to this poem because you fear the kids are not alright.
You, who will write a poem, it is one of your final blessings to recognize:
the fire burns both ways, the kids have never been alright.

They have no way to teach you, nor can you show them
the slow maw of adulthood.

GIVE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK

This free market exchange was never free,
how could it be when our mere existences implicate us?

Anyway, it is a lot harder to be bigger than the sum of your parts
when your parts are in shambles, or missing entirely,
stolen by well meaning folks who are simply "giving what they can."
Taking what they want.

You should be better than this but "better" and "this" are not discernible.
I won't stand for just this feeling and I won't bend over for mere fact.

I'd rather be alone than fractional.

I want to say that I feel your absence but I think
I feel the absence of recognition
You make bad poetry out of the best prose, falling apart
halfway through a thought

like you put the “fucked up” in “fucked up.”
or maybe it’s just the “uck.”

Anyway, maybe it’s better sense to pretend
you make sense, that everything is just the lens
it kind of offends but hey it’s something or
not nothing which is better than yawning gaps,
titty slaps, all the people steeple your moments
make churches out of faps yeah I see them too
and true it’s hard to construe the difference
between sin and bullshit penance

It’s no use having a thought anymore
if it doesn’t feel right, it is therefore
a matter of shame.  I learned
this is what tolerance means

I watch my friends from before
steel for a fight, can’t ignore
things aren’t the same, they burned
bridges to build teams.

We put the “ow” in how we
talk about how to be

And your states become algorithms
Fascinated little machines
audio out, audio in
claims and screams