some days i feel as if everything happens
to compress me in the most delicate and painful way
that I have no choice
but to cut myself open and release
whatever-the-fuck
in alarming and cathartic waves
that cleanse me so turbulently
I am brought back to the shore.
I have written the same poem a thousand times over.
My best friend doesn’t know how to be selfish. I have to remind him. Get your bike fixed. Take a bath. Schedule that dentist appointment before you turn 25 and go off your parent’s insurance. No, you don’t need to buy flowers for her this second, get more than three hours of sleep first.
My best friend likes to wear vests for every occasion, eats infinite slices of garlic toast, and listens to eight different genres of music a day. He’s never too busy to pick up the phone. He’s seen every superhero movie at least twice. Can identity your Myers-Briggs type within ten minutes of meeting you. Will drive seven southern hours through the night to your home (and sleep deprived, total his car on the way back) to spend Christmas evening together.
The first week of college, time slowed down when we first shook hands, as if my body knew before my mind that this person would be crucial to survival. Then came a drunken Mario party, the first of hundreds of two dollar breakfast specials at Fat Jack’s, wine and poetry nights where I spilled red, sometimes staining pages, and he finished all the drinks I abandoned.
Christianity ran in his blood. Two simple rules; love god, love people. I was a heartless heathen, my chaos broiling in the Florida sun. I showed him marijuana, took him to his first punk concert, convinced him to study philosophy with me. He let me pocket his wooden cross necklace. We spent our days driving circles around Lake Hollingsworth, strolling amongst palm trees (avoiding the oddly aggressive march of Lake Mirror’s swans), holing up in the angular, isolated pockets of the library with piles of books, listening to everything from classical piano to hip hop, diving into the infinite, numinous, existential riddles that so keenly fogged up our vision.
He denies this, but I feared my dark heart had swirled with his good one. We developed alter egos, Felix and Faye, began an ongoing, sometimes written, “fictive” autobiography of intoxicatingly unwise adventures. Smoking hotel rooms, playing with knives, trespassing onto roofs– you name it. We took turns breaking the other’s heart, wrote gunshot poetry and short stories. We took a history class together and I watched him become taken with political speeches. His favorite was Machiavelli– he wasn’t manipulative, just misunderstood.
When we parted ways each summer, it felt unnatural. We wrote each other stacks of letters, from Germany, England, New York, D.C. After college, going through withdrawals, I started a traveling notebook that would rack up thousands of miles in postage stamps. Stories of bike crashes, snow storms, Icelandic travel plans, pearls of nostalgia, raindrops of hope, collected as we unfolded the pages of our hearts.
When my jungle heart was most cold, I ambled alone by the Myakka River, weaving through Florida’s lush and tangled trails– more lost than ever, clutching the same wooden cross I pocketed between my fingers, squeezing, fighting hungry mind and dehydrated visions, hand outreached and scraping an empty future, a turbulent reflection.
The cross didn’t budge under the pressure. It hadn’t since it was made; even if it was to burn, it whispered to me in gold, the symbol would remain— a soundless strength, primitive and powerful. A dense simplicity that points me to a path. Life is a bottomless well. You can fall in and struggle to swim, or draw from it, water the people surrounding you.
I’m still selfish in a lot of ways. You’ll never catch me in a Church unless someone is getting married or recently died. But when the path before me fades, that cross emerges and whispers to look the meaning of love in the eye, share what scraps of bliss you may have.
This is how my best friend has changed my life.
I dream of every trip
I thought about but never took.
All the jagged cores of Earth
I could have roamed, like a corkscrew,
the bottles of wine I could’ve
sipped in the arms of a stranger.
all the moments I could’ve escaped,
the sphere of mourning a lost love
and saw our connection of flesh
the way it was:
a cockeyed and hopeful
melding of greed and alcohol.
I’m trying to put into words
how it feels to breathe
alongside the ocean and
consider all the change.
I’ve wandered, so long without discipline,
on a simple mission for truth.
To map out what’s boundless
and keep my head above the flood
of this unbelievable world
and in my deepest of hearts
I think it’s unlikely
I’ll ever know how it feels to be anchored.
You see my foundation is not
weight, but a storm. Sweet survival
and relentless tides, swaying
with incomprehensible gravity.
Tomorrow, I’ll discover why I was
wrong yesterday. I’ll feel shame
until nostalgia licks me all over
in a sheer form of warmth;
I am only and all
what is youth and discovery.
with a snake for a spinal cord,
I weave through the professional world
of cubicle ant colonies,
flicking my tongue for the taste
of queen.
hickies stashed beneath my blazer,
mischievously scented thighs,
in economic speak: the most sensible
return of investment. here,
in the dripping maze
of monotony
I mean business.
within one microcosmic glimmer of perfection
could anyone truly understand the ship wreck which is my mind?
like a moon whose shadow wanes as it grows,
i run away from the puzzling shape of humans
like a fish out of water
but on steroids.
A poem a day
For the times you’re away
From what could be
Miraculous love
Somehow, the rain becomes a flood
and you, the trigger of the pulse
of my whimsical world
are muddled beneath the steady
cadence of rain drops + umbrellas.
i’m left to wonder
over the pyramid of time
when we lived, embraced
the rain with open eyes
and let it wash upon
our dirty and broken
young hearts.
forgive me, i’m trying
to treat an addiction that burns
with an impulse so strong
it once carried me like a parachute soldier
across the ocean, through farmlands,
into a cacaphonous and glorious muck. new orleans, where the passion is so endless
it’s frightening.
without you, i’m a ghost walking a tight rope.
a movie without a script,
free to stumble and fall
without consequence.
although she doesn’t yet know the strings,
she walks along the beach every morning
at seven o’clock sharp,
never looking for seashells,
always singing about the sun…
old toes barefoot on sand
in a crisply washed, fruity sundress
that billows like a kite
cheerfully anchored to the shore
with books of poetry
and index cards of homemade recipes
and fourty-minute phone calls with
strange aunts who live in Michigan
she cannot sing well but joins
the ukulele circle every morning
along the beach, and she’s taking lessons
starting this June to learn how to play,
but I swear, somehow she already knows
its sunny rhythm.
spills into the empty marketplace
of my useless poems.
i am dizzy with the illusion of love,
its whispers of fear,
my heart shudders to recognize,
it remains scattered, yet coalesces
like a hive mind, within the DNA
of a billionaire’s multitude:
where i’m unchartable and rigidly anonymous.
The Flipped Pendulum 