Or this: You are reading this play that you won't shut up about. "There's this dream sequence," you say, "But it's not even a dream sequence. It's like being totally fucked up. It's very fucking philosophical, but surprisingly well pulled off."
I stare you down until you break down and summarize: "When you die you get to choose if you want to go to heaven or to hell. Everyone picks hell because hell is awesome, hell is like a party, hell is beer and sex and no one has to work or give a damn about anything. Hell is carnal, hell is instant gratification, hell is the best thing ever."
I ask you briefly about heaven. "Harps?" I inquire, suspicious.
"No. Yeah. I don't know; whatever. Anyway, the main character, Tanner or whatever, picks hell like everybody else, but it winds up he's completely miserable. Everything is totally meaningless. Nothing matters. Nothing is real. He says, fuck this shit, I'm going to heaven. Everyone tries to talk him out of it but he won't back down. This is bullshit, he says."
"What about you?" I ask, surprising both of us.
"What?"
"What would you pick, in that world, heaven or hell?"
Something in that moment, in your face and your voice and your hands catches me off guard. "I'd pick heaven," you say, gently, like you're confessing something. "I don't need pointless indulgences. Fuck that."
And then, even though you go on to say about blacking out and being afraid of the coming weekend and hating human inhibition more than anything, I feel (accurately or otherwise) that I understand something, suddenly. Something simple and straightforward but surprisingly scarce. That maybe, more than anything, it is the striving that matters. That when you say, "God, I always feel like such an asshole, but I honestly do try," that is the moment in which I am most in danger of falling love with you.

This was a while ago, but anyway, an old friend, whom we shall here refer to (why not?) as 'X' was driving me home, she turned on the CD player to Two-Headed Boy, and her and Y and Z immediately started singing along, and I did too without really noticing I was doing it. I was staring out the window and not looking at anyone (or anything, really) and I remember I was kind of on the verge of tears but I couldn't figure out why and I didn't want to have a conversation or make eye contact with anyone because I knew if I did I would actually start crying and someone would ask why and I wouldn't have an answer and it would be extremely fucking embaressing, and Y would be sympathetic but then later talk about "plees for attention" or something, with Z and X on the way to a party in the house of a girl who I've known since her pastel-pink preschool days. (If you're wondering, then that--the memories of this girl whining for more juice, of her tattling on me when I played in the jungle of dead trees that had newly been made off-limits-- was the main reason I didn't want to go with them. Also: tired, sick, fed up. But mostly the former.)

Everything was dark and still and Y was slipping into that almost-falcetto thing she does because she thinks she's a soprano, and X and Z were fading in and out and for some reason it seemed really funny to me that I knew all the words and they didn't. And half-way through, about, I stopped whisper-singing and was actually singing, and--this is stupid, but still-- I felt so incredibly deja-vued, like I could feel every moment that I'd ever heard Y singing and every moment that I'd ever been in a friend's car late at night, just little things, things you hardly even notice at the time but that accumulate secretly inside of you, like deposites of calcium, or things that show up later, like secondary sex traits, like vague scars whose origins you feel compelled to lie about. And then I was thinking how I was not going to see Y until who-knows-when. Thanksgiving? And I thought about her house being empty, except for her parents, who would sit in the living room, I imagined, looking at the photography books that her mother had shown me at the book store the day before. And there was a moment there, around 'melting and choking with her hands across her face' when we turned the corner onto the block that I have lived on since (exactly) the day I turned seven, when I just couldn't take it and I didn't even know what it was I couldn't take. And I was very close to saying, "Nevermind, nevermind, I'm coming with you." Because it felt like farewell. It felt a little too much like forever. And I thought, maybe I could go with them and it wouldn't be so bad--would be worth, even, the surreality, the clashing of the two worlds--, and we'd do stupid shit and fall asleep in someone's basement holding hands, and later I'd regret some of it, but it would still be worth it for that one moment of dizzy solidarity before the night closed its fists around us. And I was so thickly, sickly jealous of them, of their endless stories, of even their most discusting anecdotes, of (more than anything) the shere number of hours they have spent together between sundown and sunup.
But then we were in my driveway, and whatever. Because if I stopped to say I'm coming with you, I would have to stop to say it, and I knew that I would cry. So I got out of the car, and facing away from them I took the deepest breath I could and said Thank You, and said, Good Bye, and said, Call me when you're in town.

I waited until I heard them pull in, then out, of a neighbor's driveway to put on my shoes and slip out into the night, to wander as I always have when there is nothing else to do.
~~~~


That one song, on repeat for a while, the sun past and blacker and blacker than black, no reason to breath, blah blah blah, you know the words, know also the ins and outs of petty sins like internet journals. And here, alone in this new room in this new building, in this curious brick castle I hadn't noticed until this year, I am the cartoon wolf running off the edge of the cliff, looking down, only then noticing that I have run out of solid ground, only then falling. I am putting all my weight on my ghost-limb. I am tripping on a stair that isn't even there.

I miss you.

Fuck, I miss them.

It's sunny like Bézier today and this is insult to injury. It is possible I will never see them again for the rest of my life. Then again I might see them in less than two months, but, fuck.

Whoever knew that not being lonely could make you so lonely? It doesn't even make sense. I feel like I am constantly looking over my shoulder. Sooner or later I'm bound to trip on a seam in the concrete. Then maybe I'll wake up.

Fuck.

But you were young, and with this emptiness like you were meant to be a bird, but your bones had gotten bored made no wings. And this is why your sadness shows so starkly in your shoulder blades. They are dull, like nervous knives who have ground their gritted teeth to nothing. Someday, child, you will know the words that seashells say when the animals inside themselves have rotted away. But that has not yet come.

And I'll work this like a worry bead. Until my fingers make the edges smooth. Like glass that knows the sea.

Dear friends,

Okay, okay, I've got it all figured it out.
What it is, is this: it's springtime, so I can ride my bike by the river. At night, there is a crescent moon and just one star. The sky, you see, looks exactly like it did that night in Greece. It was the fourth of July, in fact. Did you know that? Well, it was. Only it didn't mean anything over there. What was America, anyway? Thank god. No patriotic jargon, just cloying heat and the green of the ocean. Only of course I missed the fireworks. How can you not miss the fireworks? The fourth of july does not mean America, it means crickets and friends and sparkling drinks and homemade ice cream and fireflies and fireworks and every other form of gussied-up fire there is.
So it was the fourth of July and I was on the island of Crete and in the sky was a crescent moon and just one star. Simple, like that. Pure. We were on a little train. Not a real a train, a kind of tourist kitsch fake train that wended its way through little moutainside villages, practically crossing through people's backyards and generally making you feel a little bit guilty. But you felt good too, because the wind, because the simple of the sky.
And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, for no reason that I knew: fireworks. Right up there against the moon and the star. Green and red. Quickly fading starburts and muted thunder. Then horror movie clouds made of smoke, and more fireworks.
The coincidence of it all!
The way that I could feel the ocean hitting every shore in the whole world.
And I'll tell you another thing: I thought, and still think, that if I could have kept an impossible promise, it would have turned out differently. How the hell do you catch a firework and put it in a glass bottle? I thought maybe I could rig something up with Christmas tree lights. I swear to god I tried. And you forgot about the whole thing by the next morning, I'm sure, but it's odd, the things that one remembers.
What else?
You guys, I could be hours and hours away from you in less than two years. It sounds fucking crazy, doesn't it? There are schools in Quebec and in Colorado that I might go to. That I really might. I might go where when the sun sets it turns the moutains red, or where it sparkles across the never ending snow. I could be so far away. But this is the only home I ever known. I love this city. I love you guys. I won't forget, did you know that? I will probably still be trying to put a firework in a bottle when I am twenty one in an unimaginably shitty dorm room at some school I've never even heard of. And I will visit you and I will bring you things, crow feathers and picture books about dragons, seashells from beaches. And you know, we'll never grow old, because we'll always be just who we are now, because I'll always love you.
I can follow my train of thought, but I bet you can't and I don't blame you.
People I love have a tendency to stop speaking to and looking at me without warning or explination.
You go cold like a star when you die.
We're all the same stuff as star dust, anyway; it's funny how things get recycled.
So here's the thing.
I've been angry and I've been sad and I've been bitter and I've been jaded and I've been afraid, but I've also been absolutely dilirous with joy. Everything feels pretty bad for a while, but then suddenly you are on a fake train in Greece and there are fireworks and a simple sky, and none of the rest of it matters. What I am going to tell you is this: it is springtime. Look. Look at the green. Green is the best color in the whole world. That's what I think when it's springtime. And it's springtime now.
The city is so sweet, young, green. And now I can ride my bike by the river.

Sometimes, times catches up to you and it all hits you at once: the grapes grown wild in the garden, the wooden castle, the chlorine, the mandolin music, the hotel windowsills, the japenese soda, the fireflies, the belltower, the wonderful tacky band tee-shirts, the knee socks.
So nostalgic it might kill me.
The summer can't come fast enough. I want them back. I want them all back. The ones who don't remember me, I want back most of all.

From time to time I wonder whether or not I'm talking to myself. Now is one of them. I don't mind, though, either way. Just curious.

The ice makes the world into not-our-world, into an alien world. But it is beautiful, so beautiful. The glass trees and the crystal blades of glass everything glittering so hard it hurts your eyes.

Certain things can save you,always: the quiet of a pencil, the suppleness of cloth.

(First of all, I apologize in advance.)

The springtime means Shakespeare and crocus flowers and fuchia crabapple blossoms, means poetry and fake duels with fake cardboard swords on the front lawn of the school. Always.
And outside the world is waking up, blue and blushing.

So, though I hold loyal to the snow, I can't help this. Really, it's inevitable. An ingrained habit. This is the worst of times, the best of times, the time when my father's eyes are brightest and his fingers on his keyboard the fastest, the time when I most wish that I had taken after him and been a poet, instead of taking after maybe my mother or maybe just myself and fallen wholly in love with prose.

And now, for no other reason than the inevitability of Death, Taxes, and Springtime:

~
“The Day the Phoenix is Born”

There are crescents of midnight
Under your eyes
As you drink Sandy coffee
And miss the sunrise.

There is more you meant to do
Than this book of Sudoku
Whose loose, buoyed pages
Have nothing left for you.

There are bent rays of light
Turning red with the night
As you lay down your pencil--
And miss Firebird’s flight.

~
“Mudriver Music”

The day starts early,
Before the sun does.
Then, slowly,
The sky paints each of sixteen windows
A different part of the same rainbow.
By nine I have done nothing,
By noon little still.
The day doesn’t really begin,
Until so to the moon.
Then,slowly,
The violinists play,
Their hands spinning fibers
Of music and wire.
And on the green slopes I listen
For the first birds to sing.

~
The Pear

First, you stand and stare,
head back, neck smooth and bare,
hands curled to fit the contours of your hips,
your eyes narrowed and watering against
the rush of blue morning light.
You see, muddled by mumbling leaves,
a jigsaw piece of freckled golden skin.
so like your brother’s, your friend’s, your sister’s skin—
but not quite so sweet.
Then suddenly the wind works in your favor,
the leaves blow back,
and you can see the whole pear, now,
Familiar: smooth and bare.
The bark is chalky, you discover, as you climb-
loose, crumbling, rocky.
The leaves shift and mumble, make you muddled,
A jigsaw piece of freckled golden skin.

~
“East-West”

The isles are tight and crowd
With packages which display
Fish I have never seen,
Fruits I will never hold.
I wonder what a lychee nut tastes like
What Hello Kitty tastes like--
And reach for an undulating glass bottle
Of melon soda instead.

~

(This one is not my fault. It was for a class. An evil, evil class. The sort where the teacher has you write skits about someone attempting suicide. The kind taught by the yoda-quoting tie-wearing faux-english-prep-boy teachers who are afraid of adverbs. The kind taught by the teacher who shows you two creepy dark sci-fi paintings entitled “The Island of Death” and “Atomic Children” and makes you write poems about them. So. The thing you are wondering: why I am including this at all? I like the first two sentence. That’s all.)

“The Island of Death”

In the touch of her hand,
There are moth wings and dust
In the sheen on her lips,
There is filigree rust
In the sweat on her brow,
There is not half a chance,
In the blue window glass
Muted silhouettes dance.
In the still of the air
There is the lull of her breath
In her dull hazel eyes
Are there towers of gold--
Or an island of death?

Do you remember any of it?

Anything at all?

Just a hint. Just a whipser. Just one morning's rainbow colored sky.

I hope so.

I doubt it.

I think the only thing I really want right now is Jack's porch. His guitar in the backround and his perfect scratchy smoker's voice, rounded and lilting with wine. And Dinease's tinkerbell laugh and tiny feet in bright, bright slippers. And their one-eyed cat rubbing incessantly up against my leg, i's frame so fragile that I'm afraid it will blow away on a breeze. And maybe Grahm, too, appearing out of nowhere with a newer guitar and a smoother voice, but still one that tastes vaugely of wine, noisily making ovaltine and volenteering to watch Jaws with Chandler and I, halfway out of kindness and halfway out of not wanting to watch it by himself. And Jaws. And ovaltine. God. I get so homesick for that place, so fucking homesick. So hollow and lonely and stretched thin with lounging for the chaos of London Ontario and the cold gray waves of Lake Heron, and all of it, all of it. I will maybe someday miss Iowa City like I miss that place, but I'm not sure. I love Iowa City intensely, I love it so much about it; I love, love, love our city--and yet I'm not sure I will ever feel more homesick then I do right now. I have never even lived up there but that doesn't matter. I am so hemmed in by cornfields.

I think the only thing I really want is Jack's porch. His guitar in the backround and his perfect scratchy smoker's voice, rounded and lilting with whine. And Dinease's tinkerbell laugh and tiny feet in bright, bright slippers, and their one-eyed cat rubbing incessantly up agianst my leg, it's frame so fragile that I'm afraid it will blow away on a breeze. And maybe Grahm, too, appearing out of nowhere with a newer guitar and a smoother voice, noisily making ovaltine and volenteering to watch Jaws with Chandler and I, halfway out of kindness and halfway out of not wanting to watch it by himself. And Jaws. And ovaltine. God. I get so homesick for that place, so fucking homesick. So hollow and lonely and stretched thin with lounging for the chaos of London Ontario and the cold gray waves of Lake Heron, and all of it, all of it. I will maybe someday miss Iowa City like I miss that place, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure I will ever feel more homesick then I do right now.

There is nothing lonlier than being in a room full of muscians. Being in a shadowy corner, watching orange gold light pool on the contours of their instruments, hearing their voices so round and raised and full, your own mouth clamped shut, your own fingers still, appreciating without participating in the raw beauty of their music, of their magic. You are the only one who is silent. I don't think they know at all what that is like. They are on another, better plane of existance and you are not with them. And really, they are too distracted to care. And I can't even blame them, not one bit. I just kind of wonder if there is something else, something just as bad, something the same--I wonder if they've ever felt that way, or if they are purely as oblivious as they seem.

There is a single red rose in a blue glass bottle getting ready to leak petals all over the kitchen table. The rose is from the co op. The blue glass bottle is from that lovely, tacky renissance festival. Oh, green hills and cream soda and correographed jousting! Oh, summer-- And winter now, winter in all her sparkly glory.

And roses.

But damn, if it isn't just a little harder than you always let on. If it isn't just barely bad enough for you to write in questions, where anyone can read them not answer. Whatever; you'll delete them later. Whiped clean. The internet's memories don't linger--thank god.

Pomegranites are like geodes. You don't look at them twice when you see them lieing in the sun under a tree, but when they split open it is an ambush, it is silk from a magician's sleeve, it is daimond and rubies. Pomegranites taste better, though, I'd imagine; less like dirt.

The pink plastic curl of a sheet sled. So bright and so slick, and down we go.

That particular stench of chemicals. That particular toss of her head.

Eric's mom makes caramels. They are wrapped in chalky wax paper and they are hard and rectangular and they taste like brown sugar. They are not like normal caramels. They are tougher and daker, almost the color of my hair. I am overcome by a wave of love for these seventeen. Damnit, if this class just isn't keeping me alive. If Mrs. Davis's guilty bright-eyed laughter and cocaine-skinny Jake's blank smile, Eleni's rainbow wooden jewelery, if all of them and all the others aren't the only thing left to get up for.
They aren't, really. But they are the only thing right now.

At City Park the lights are on; they lean over the pond in swooping dangerous arcs like the lantern fish's antenna. The snow is still falling, glittery,glittery, glittery. It just sparkles so hard. I almost can't stand it,the feeling of it's particular blindness is too good to keep up with. I walk on the water. I slide on the ice. I can see the etch-e-sketch lines of a thousand hockey goals, a thousand eight year old prodigy's thousand figure eights. I lie on my back and make an angel, right there. The snow keeps falling and glittering and blinding, it covers me up with glitter and blindness. In the back of my head I can hear Colin Meloy singing; the bombs are fading away, he says, and they are, I can feel them fading. My mother is somewhere nearbye. She came with me and now she is a child and there is a bigger angel near mine and what do I miss, what do I miss the most. The fairy tale childhood of wild green grapes and the mean neighbor's stripey cat. Having someone put sleighbells out on Christmas morning, even stomping fake deer trails all around; or maybe those were real, the deer trails. What do I miss the most. Your fingers. Your fingers, I miss the most. Or elderflower water, which was too expensive anyway but now is gone. Or nothing. Glitter glitter glitter goes the snow and all is good right now.


The apple and the cherry and the watermelon suckers are delicate jewels, shiny and bright. We swallow them whole.

Somehow in sixth grade I was so certain. Maybe it was still being pocket sized and having still gold hair, maybe you just loose something no matter what. Or maybe, maybe not. I never thought I was invincible. But some of you did. And some of you I guess realized that you aren't and maybe that is why this is all so weird and lonely.

Maybe the one thing that will remind of my adolescense is sour sugar, a constant shene of half-off valentines day candy on my lips, a sudden whiff of lemon as I turn my head.

Yeah, and the world keeps spinning. Feel us furrowing on towards spring.