Steps 1 and 2

Step 1

Mistake me for no one else. Look me up in the foreground when the screen freezes and the tree’s breezes. Look me up in the index, at the after party, in the third row. Look me up just beyond where it’s wet, where the show stops reaching, but the phases and the fog start stopping.

Look me up on lists that YOU made a long time ago, when it was only our fault. Look up at me when you see me for the first time and every time after that is another first time. Look me up when you forget that dynamism, when looking all around is fruitless. Look me up past the crescendo and into the calm. Where the bridge is, I am. Look.

Step 2

Where there’s a ring, but there’s no way there would be. When we are all tall, to the finish line, the crowd grows on the backs of those whose hips pop and knees lock at every town. I look forward to going under, I look forward to the scar, I look forward to scalpels and saws, and pithy little landmarks, to respite.

Forced through a thick layer of garbage (and there was very little underneath), we were very much the leader. We were the tightest pants, we were huge disappointments. We stared, ashamed, but unable to help it. Our teeth were grey, our legs crossed in discomfort, our wives by our sides. We sipped, gesticulated, pantomimed, and have otherwise laid motionless beside tables. The bigger, better shoes, the longer torso, the wrong door, the wrong sign. Do I say something because I feel responsibility? And then I spend long enough somewhere in some place, and in that place I learn the rules and I want to follow them?

Step 3

What did you look like when you fucked my husband? No one is perfect, but what did you look like?

February, 2015

I’ve looked for the prompt, I’ve waited with the best of them, for the waiter. For the menu. For the last time at the very least.

I don’t have your brow. I don’t even have that much sweat. I don’t bray. And I had very little to say in January. For the last time.

I’ve rubbed until fleshy flexes and tenses and changes against my own touching. At the very least.

I wait for my ankles not to be cold, but to still be uncovered. This is not a revelation. It’s not even pretty.

The Famous Person

I wanted to tell the story of the famous person I met who I did not know was famous. He was a writer and a director and an artist and a predator. I told several different versions in several different ways and let my audience guess to whom I owe my nonchalance, my air of mystery, my disinterest in the profane.

In Leo

I am not fodder for or part of a collection of another award-winning story. I am not above being genderless, or so I am told, and must then be too vacant for you. I am not well-curated collections of photographs for public display and dissent for you to earn a reputation for your eye. My face belies my talentlessness. So then, for whom is the bell distant enough to be flat intonations of a grand romance that never had a chance in the day to day? I am prudent enough that I can refer to all my yesterdays as my younger years. And everything I cannot say out loud, my penchant for ruining the punchline, my inability to twist and turn and otherwise weave a decent tale, both my fear of and desire for performativity, I will write it all down.

In December

12/03/2014

The buoy isn’t the question – it’s an entire fucking language. And the salt in the water doesn’t do much for thirst or for hunger. It is simply a sensory experience.

12/17/14

Whatever fence it is, may I never be a story you tell.

12/18/14

Beware of hungry love. Beware of easy confessions.

12/20/14

It’s not my heart, is it? It’s my bowels. And eventually I’ll empty. Time will empty all open wounds. I’ll bleed out and somehow fill it back up.

Because I was wrong, you know how to reach me. I’ve left all of my emergency contacts at home, in the bin.

12/21/14

From W.H. Auden’s The More Loving One:

“…

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

…”

W.B. Yeats: Never give all the heart

“Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.”

A.E. Housman:

“He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?

He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.

I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,

And went with half my life about my ways.”

12/21/2014

Oh have you lost and the losing is convulsive and violent and unrelenting and turbulent. The waves are sudden, nauseating, hateful.

12/23

“Anything I do in my life I can do because you love me.”

12/24

I fell in love with you today. As if sentence fragments were enough. And tomorrow, what is gone is also gone.

12/28/2014

“We could live in Hell together…”

12/29/2014

“Send him to me again.”

12/30/2014

35

Whatever fence it is...

... may I never be a story you tell.

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”

-Pablo Neruda

In November

November 4^th

And now the November you could not have seen in me, or me in Paris. I would not have fit in so nicely, I would not withstand the warmth. I was hiding or trapped in the burning synagogues and mosques, set alight. You cannot know when I moved.

I did not see your show.

Why do you ask? You were not looking for me all night. You basked instead and came to me a month later, in the middle of the night, so I could pick and pull and point out you still weren’t listening. You weren’t looking or listening, but I know you saw something. What did you see?

Take that, take care, sad guitar. Heavy hurricanes, heavy strums. Heavy foot traffic, every movie that never was my life.

How many notes had I written or not written or written and not sent?

I see easy, I see casual, I don’t see the work. I am fine with the conventionality and I beat myself up for choosing someone so difficult. But now I get to think about what’s next. I get to reject racking up more disappointment. I’m not so overboard.

How long did we think this is we or imagine it with someone else? How long did we think this would count? How long were the first three years, the next five weeks, the last nine months in sum in total? Come to the edge and count backward to the second and then the first, to extend it to what date as soon as possible and as long as it still matters.

11/05/14

Rousseau is indeed following me, in life and in death. In music and in writing. The leg shakes, the sounds are all internal, and I hear the release of pressure in my head, in my sinuses, in my flimsy observations.

It is all part of the process.

Sing it again. This time with potential. Because I have not yet had enough of your bullshit and I send a postcard from a familiar land outlining all our successes. And if there’s one thing ________ taught me, that means I told you about our failures.

            Leave the door alone, let it open and close as it pleases, and it pleases me.

            Perhaps that’s what the letting part of letting go is – one big presumable failure overshadowing and upstaging all the small moments of falling fast asleep at the wheel. There was more letting in than that. We slackened the line, hooked up, and sinker. 

Because the body talks back, tells me all the things you used to tell me. Do you remember when you called me because you felt like you needed a hug? I need a hug. And this time it’s not just my libido doing all the work.

11/09/14

Expectation is a prevention measure; codeine is a prevention measure from dusk until dawns later. In between, I keep my head down, but my eyes opened. This is not Paris – I do not see you everywhere.

How many times a day does your heart drop when you think it’s me? Do you feel it when my bus passes by? Do you know when I’m standing nearby or right outside?

11/12/14

I have no way to see you. I have concert tickets. I’ve picked up my own postcards. You will read the postmark date. The city.

11/15/2014

3.5 and counting. This is like a cigarette, isn’t it? I don’t see any immediacy. I can’t see harm. I can’t feel harm, at least initially. All I can do is find the coldest corners of the room.

11/16/2014

I cannot come to you, because you will say no. I’m not strong enough to give you the power to reject me and to disappoint me again. And again. And again.

But come back to me. I will take you back again. And again. And again.

You are not around this city. And I love the way it moves in relation. Don’t you miss your chances and your choices?

11/17/14

Everyone’s asking we’ve got ideas. They are slow, leaky hisses and watery results.

Come back, I beg to bargain, I beg for teacher. Finally down outwardly winding roads. Finally down anthills and apologies to those other guys.

Everyone is asking for you, everyone claws at the messenger, everyone’s holsters were emptied at the door, everyone’s cocktails hiss and everyone sloshes against me.

11/18/2014

My body is not my own.

To listen to the music.

To leave the room alone.

11/20/14

I keep saying my needs are none. My needs are none, as if that would be enough to re-win your favor. I keep saying I have no expectations, but you have me on bended knee, with bated breath, reaching my hand through mail slots to dig out the postcard I should not have sent.

Because I did have expectations. I was waiting. I would keep taking you back, but I won’t run back myself.

11/21/2014

11/23/2014

Have I said enough? Had I, I’m sorry? Were I wolf out on limbs, were I sad public tears.

I saw you enough to know I’d take care of you.

Neither center nor helm nor knit nor raggedy t-shirt.

I was never certain. Only horrible. You won every time, but the winning wasn’t grand enough and I resented you for your success. I had to test out every challenge your love imposed, but accepted neglect with open arms. Don’t misunderstand, you were the attentive lover.

But it wasn’t enough for you either, was it? Although I was too much, I was never much in the right way.

October 11, 2014

In October, I thought you came to share the bed with me, but you went to Paris. It was better when we were alone, but you went with the man of your dreams. I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me worshipping you, it wasn’t our parallel narcissism. It wasn’t that self or partner congratulatory.

Who am I to coffee, to join in the wandering, to walk around with drink, drinks, or heaviness in hand?

To take yourself to Paris is forgivable, to track down my sister is a hook. But not a line nor sink me. To take the man who dials drunk and denounces your entire entirely tenuous circle with me at the beating beading heart to tell you about the kind of love that inspires you. To the evening post, against all of our agreements, everyone gets to see you out. But not me and that was my choice and it came as no surprise so don’t claim otherwise.

Can we unlearn all the known warmth and focus on all the connections we didn’t have? All the ways we didn’t understand each other? All the lapses in thin, flimsy, inspired selves?

I had thoughts about this. I thought about all of this, I brushed flies and feathers away, cleaned up after the rug and polished the wood floors with our sweat and our oil and deeply held beliefs, deep-seated connections, and I’m getting what it feels like when the bottom falls out beneath me. This sense of falling in love is similar to the sense of free falling, like a sudden drop in altitude, in cabin pressure, from roller coaster to consent. To cement to plugging in the AMP. To heavy, hurting, drumming something up in me.

October 18, 2014

I knew that all I had to do was look for you and I’d find not one or two, but zero imaginary paramours to sift through.

The first and foremost visits in just a few days. You will always be missing from here on out, out. Lost at sea, on hikes, on carvings on trees of you and me.

And calling on all content, there were no photos to prove otherwise or likewise or…?

I will lead. I will keep on the push. I will mind all the mistakes I keep on keeping on.

It is as if I lower the guitar, flatly and finally and finely, out of tune (out of time, the super-ordinate theme of no more).

I can’t hear you anymore. I don’t get to look at you. If all of my insides fail to catch up with the descent and cabin pressure drops as well, I put whatever caught my eye in a box high in a closet with jackets and coats with your name on them. What am I supposed to do with all the notes that said all the things I had always wanted to hear and got to hear from you?

I was insufferable. I had too many needs and you were never going to win. I know that. I realize the mistake. So I turn to other men who are meaningless and mindless and I have no expectations and no needs.

October 19, 2014

For many moments, distraction won’t be enough. All it takes is a shift to a sadder song with a lyric that jogs the memory. Last night I dreamt and dreamed that your ear was in my mouth and in a moment of sudden awareness, I apologized for forgetting we were trying to forget all about this. But we talked.

That is almost too much to bear the next morning. We talked! Ahh!

The bass fades away, the harmony is perfect, people rise and fall, but their voices consistently crescendo. I’m that swollen too. I swell, not from pride, but oceans and buoys.

October 19, 2014, Part B

Where are you? I’ve waited for your drive by. I mapped out my new cubicle. I wrote my sister the same letter you did, but the response was different.

October 25, 2014

You have ruined rose gold for me, but not all the bearded and beardless faces. You ruined watches and Naches for me. You have ruined babies and in-vitro and surrogacy and adoption and all the children – I hate them equally.

I’m settling back into that heavy, gilded shell. I’m a lonely prince again.

You’ve ruined the calling off, the calling out, the inevitable proposals, and you didn’t understand any of it. All you have is your power. And wherever the place is you need to be.

Post-Summer Show

I'm sorry if you ever felt like you had to stop telling stories. I didn't want you to.

I had my own stories to tell and I wanted to know you knew, but it wasn't always obvious. I couldn't always tell you cared. You made listening to me look like a chore.

I'm sorry if I ever shifted the conversation when it was inappropriate to do so. I'm sorry for your loss. I'm sorry I wasn't there for you in the way I needed to be, but I'm mostly sorry your best friend bore witness. She didn't understand I was feeling protective.

And I'm sorry I'm not even sure if she is your best friend. But that's not on me anymore.

But to be the one. To really be the one. I tried to track the time, even when no one replied. I am assured I don't need to feel any certain way anymore anyway, that your happiness, no matter how much it meant to me, was never also mine.

I knew you were waiting just as much as me. There are no drive-bys, there are only miles away 20 minutes ago. There you are, but not outside my work anymore. There was one week, then there were three weeks. Now someone else helps me with the repairs. I haven't decided who yet. But there is no need there anymore.  

Last Time

II
After some finality, after finishing breakfast, after you are busy with your stories, yourself, you love you, when I am silent and you are left to solo activity, you primp, you convince yourself I am still in the same room.

Last of the Crises

I

There is some peaceful, personal, active thing I think less and less about, but am followed around and crowded in by.

If I promise to visit, to wear a helmet or a warm coat or a warm loaf of bread, then?

If I promise to find out that fullness, to float up and bloat and bob because of it?

If I fan out the flames, to foment, to do to do to do, ta da!

I see you making faces. I catch you spread out across town, and not a bit too thin nor none too soon. I anticipate every necessary adjustment, every necessary inch of you, every glottal stop, every down and out.

Whisper me back to life and where no one else is or let in, leave it all that much more space.

Room

In the belly of a bellow,

just past the halfway mark of winter,

our coughs and colds are less than daylong

and the heaving beast,

with whistling lungs,

with buckling, splintered legs

and shinier shoe polish camouflage,

creaks to a topple

to a wail of an out of tune crash of

too many voices.

Middle C is now Low D

and all the chords

are majorly mine,

piled in a puddle of cooling ivory,

stalling over sticky smudges,

popped knuckles rusted in place,

gracelessly getting to the next measure,

catching on to catching up,

off beat or rhythm, off key, out of tune,

out of time and town.

The dust alone dries out my voice,

and I cannot sing from the hoarseness

in a chorus, sing

in the absence

of Great Uncle Accompanist.

How did we get this knee deep

in scores, in piles of laundry and picture frames,

in the teeter tottering of imbalanced benches?

How did we get through the front door,

dead weight, wood, ivory, and Allah,

to suck up the space of a perfectly useful dining room

just to close the French doors behind us?

[retry]

How to make this meaningful

and clearly about you -

These are not possible selves you like;

these are not alternat[iv]e versions of me.

These are pictures of impossibilities.

There is dressing up in your absence. There is too old now [for now].

Your skin is not milky or porcelain, paste or paper

or translucent.

(But it IS one or all. I’m choosing better words for you. You deserve).

You are stretched over yourself, your frame of face

and veins

Pointing the way,

Soulless, ocular,

To more gloss.

Your hair leaves no room for movement

Or scalp.

But you are a head in a jar with unattended, buoyant limbs,

Lacking power over their placement,

They float alongside more bobbing and bobbling

As you pass and pinball.

to Yours truly.

Inaccurate Assessments: Part I - The Rant

I debate text message transposition. It is the year it is and I am indeed the least bit technophobic. I have grown into shutting down and out and, like my indulgence, have always tended toward it. I have prided myself on being stubbornly independent. I need no one and nothing, but my anonymous audience. Talking to myself has provided me with the necessary reprieve.

This brings me to inaccurate assessments. I am collecting feedback. I am not a day over 22, I am scary intuitive, I looked so cute last night, and I despise you.

I will be gracious, but I will not be demeaned. Somewhere in some book, astrology reminded me I do not forget any transgression or moment of pain inflicted by another. For me, it is like muscle memory. My body reacts. I will hold onto it for years and fling it back in your face in my defense. I know just the hurtful thing to say to you.

Inaccurate assessments: I am a hypochondriac, you are sick of my illnesses, and I always have something to complain about. I am your most high-maintenance friend.

Unofficial poll: You know one thing and it is that I am always entertaining. I have just as much to complain about as any other smart person. I am unattended.

I may tell you all about it, but I am in bed alone with all my sore throats, my low lows, the curveballs and inability to cope. I never ask for anything, but the opportunity to say it aloud. I never needed you. I have never asked. I am, for your own sake, just a drinking buddy.

I am increasingly aware of the melodrama. I pull back the reigns, shut down a little more, withdraw a little more, dim the lights, step back to observe, and am lonelier than ever. But loneliness has an undeservedly bad reputation. Any intended consequences or attempts to assuage my woes, temper my emotions, deserve a gentler and maybe more supportive approach.

Psychopathology Notes - The Poem

Something ordinary done in an extraordinary way
-Coffee Now = Where are you going? When are you going?

A good paper is a done paper, a done paper is a good paper.

Don't rob Peter to pay Paul.
-Don't rob Margaret to pay Sally.

Stay away from medication-related research.

Breaking social norms
-Failure to launch

As Requested

Welcome, december. jackets and canvas and wet warmth running around the corner of the open door to leave us alone, emptied. that is coldness and there is no single file. whether windows are sneaking in light. and the music is a collection of unfocused noise.

you’re welcome, gross thin feeling of insomnia and the fatness of trying to eat it to sleep. getting emptier. my soft soaking lungs. i pick up phones and know what is left for me at the end of the day.

welcome clothes and furniture and one in the same shifting like rugs, like slippery floors, like socks with holes and cold heals that don’t stick, don’t suction. from the bed, to the floor, to the bed. to the dryer. maybe to hangers.

welcome to where my knees don’t knock, stopped creaking, and moan. where the city is a different kind of collection. and i get bigger, softer. nondescript. i come running to get back at you, prepositions. to repeat odes. to american bento. and garb. repetition, and mistakes thereof. tell me ‘too far’ and you know what i’m saying.

All the Time

All the time. All of it.

we celebrate the games we’ve played and we’ve played them well. We celebrate our celibacy. The first rented room is always the ruined kind. dead flying things, moths most likely, in the lights

face to the ground, roots under rocks, and looking at iron-nickel wondering if i could see its increased gravitation. i'm spending the last of my twenties making flash cards. this isn’t what matters to me, but what distracts me. i have broken down concrete concepts until they’re simple one liners. i use them now.

i put myself out there, in there, sweat into my hangover all over your bed.

Jared thinks in terms of Facebook status updates.

Jared is writing a series of self-help books:

“Jared Gains Perspective”

“Jared Works it Out”

“Jared Chooses His Own Adventure”

“Jared Busts Out a Low C in Choir”

“Jared Engages in Retail Therapy”

Ruled by thumb and the rule of

I wrote this after living in Portland for one year. Now with one year left, it seemed relevant, even if outdated.

my sweat, my sweatshirt, my underwear

my back/pack, rubber/bands, my joni mitchell.

my staples and paper clips and adjustment to the safety pins. my push. my otherwise undeleted. my senate hearings, my weird, my weirdos, my men.

my advice columns and personal ads, my online shopping, my casual encounter, my casual romance, my casual relationship. my restaurateur, food snobs, beloved std.

my music, my misses, my cavities and candy, grammar, work-ethic, and cripppling inhibition.

my intentional misspellings, forward slashes, and self-conscious back/lash. my making of name and losing of voice and operating of phone and paying of bills to budget to back/stroke, to guilt, to guile. my fast/food, my drinking, i throw up, my rack of ribs, my cough and cover.

my shelter, my education, my expense and experience, my jazz and soundtrack, background and brothers. my three sisters, my three sons, my bicycle and impending impotence.

Anywhere

You responded. Social networking sites have made us all think in terms of status updates. 2009 has ruined my writing and made any new poetry trite and forgettable. You think that’s perfect, but it makes sense. I added that to another list I’m not allowed to make.

Then I consider what’s relevant: current questions of great intrigue. Summer and sex are on everyone’s mind, and these questions have afforded me a certain amount of ridicule. To one close friend, my responses are pathetic. Another half-heartedly attempts to assuage my concern. Nobody cares about themselves more than themselves. I am smitten with me. I am the cutest couple.

And I depended on these same sights to see what mattered, to see where everyone was, at one moment. I found myself like the depicted insane in overacted old movies: pulling at hospital gowns, but only because I needed to see my shoulders, screaming slurs at no one, but blurry nurses and the potential for relief: the morphine drip. I didn’t want to seem a seeker, a term Jane had used in our last session. That was about the dentist and it seemed legitimate.

This was too played out, but I was 30 hours in without food or water and could only roll my eyes when she said “resident.” Then my nurse went on lunch and no one could find her or cared to come back to tell me. At some point, Jody was on the phone and I struggled to find the name of the hospital. I was anywhere.

There was an oblong rock rolling over in my stomach. I tried to sleep sitting up. I tried to drink water. I tried to look around, but everyone had work to do, work to go to, work to stay at and I had to keep my hand over my headache. I was anywhere, and I was the only one there, and barely so.