Lovers
Charles Blackman
oil on board, 1960
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THE WAITING GAME
I've been diagnosed with a sore lump in my throat
a homesickness,
a lovesickness.
As the long summer days melt—
I still dream of the fading wings of cicadas
clinging to the boughs, seeking recognition.
But first, first, first, first— love me.
For this month, I gave seventeen years
Snouting through the darkness—
enrobed in that second skin [hot and close]
of silence, but for the urgent clutch and scramble
for Longing.
The city nights will fall quiet again
as wrinkled shells drop from the branches in straight lines—
are these seed pods? or dead cicadas.
We've been convinced somehow
to mature in isolation. To grow alone, sing in droves,
die in droves. After seventeen years—
I think I've come to terms with the fact
that there will always be a ribbon
of loneliness running through who I am.
Seated among friends,
crying with laughter, I catch myself
balancing grief—the weight
that bends the spine, with sturdy celebration.
I've been coiling, writhing tight to survive
the lengthening nights. The Dream is a guiltless spring.
When is it time? to wriggle out underfoot,
depart the frigid dirt-womb and learn lightness.
The cicadas sift the loam— knowing what they know.
It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.
N.C.Y.
Office, August 2024
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”The rabbits had felled him. They were swarming around and upon him”
Hannes Bok (1914-1964) - Illustration from Gans T. Field's 'The Dreadful Rabbits'
(Weird Tales Vol.35 #4, July, 1940)
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Leveret
I still have every date from three years ago marked with a surreptitious, private little "L" in my calendar. It's strange to be spending this day with you instead of dutifully mulling over a message wishing you sweets and peace from afar. Now that you've invited me nearer, I want to crawl into your head, listen to every thought, and fill every inch of the space you surrender to me. There's no rush, I think we have as much time as we want now. Maybe I'll be this 粘 forever, or maybe we'll grow into some breathing room. Breathing and sleeping always seemed overrated, anyway.
Happy Birthday, beautiful boy. You make me feel something quiet and intense -- I don't deal with much loneliness other than when I realize I miss your company -- the rare kind we've discovered since happening to each other again. It's some elusive chemistry -- you make me all sweet and dangerous. I swear it nauseates me and simultaneously makes me never want to leave your sight.
To mutual benevolent manipulation and always chasing each other in circles.
Your devoted little rabbit.
N
draft with cake
NYC
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Every so often I read something that reminds me of you. But I cannot play it like it’s love, it is a memory of love.
I remind myself of you who loved me with such tenderness - to the point of tears - and with such a sense of radiant excitement. Oh the plans!
We drew out the rest of our lives together. I continue to make marks alone on materials I am not familiar with.
It took standing outside, on the sidewalk alone to realize that the story could end with us together or apart..
Either way, I would write about this love, his love, for the rest of my life.
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I cannot break my heart over and over, and I’m too scared to watch this fall apart. Even now, we have never been strangers.
I congratulate you on some good news from far away. I wish you the best. I dread the day I can only accomplish the latter.
It has been so long since I loved you happily that I only remember what it feels like to love you miserably. Despite this, I cannot seem to let go.
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An ending to a book about heartbreak
As I walked down that corridor away from his apartment, I felt relief. Each step took me farther away towards an unknown, which wasn’t a comforting thought — but I had held him, laid my head against his familiar shoulder, had given him one last look, a final soft smile — and this would be an improvement from our last goodbye. It wasn’t even a break up, so why did I feel soreness where my heart used to be?
I stepped out of his building, away from our life together, no longer heartbroken - just a little numb from the shock of giving up everything I had ever wanted.
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Intelligent Play
Writing is to confine myself to a Montessori playroom.
Those kinds with the shelves, each space assigned a toy.
They suggest limiting the options to eight– to avoid distraction
and foster concentration. I lack focus,
Ms. Pippet told my parents with a chuckle,
always tempted by the new and the shiny.
Among the toys, there is nothing battery powered,
no lights nor sound– Here,
I am encouraged to engage in intelligent play
to create worlds for myself from this block of wood–
I’ve stolen only one, the rest have been monopolized.
He’s taken them to build his castle.
The spires are strangely shaped, but balanced,
his imagination and small chubby hands have stacked them
so precisely. He is a genius. Meanwhile,
I move mung beans from one container
into another. It’s not much of a creation,
but I love to watch them pile together,
that trickling sound of dried, shiny, skins.
NY 12.12.22
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Mutare
We gain distance from our failures through time.
Shed them, the way mayflies are supposed to
treat an exoskeleton. Worm their way out.
How it must feel to look back
at an empty husk of the fly you once were.
Sometimes I see traces of younger selves
in the mirror. Childhood returns in a bashful smile.
It’s not quite as powerful
as seeing an exoskeleton.
They discovered molting,
to insects, felt like ripping out their lungs.
While you thresh against yourself and your past
it turns out, you can’t breathe at all.
It’s absurd, how painful
growing up is supposed to be.
Now, each time I evolve off hurting
from a hard lesson, I picture tearing myself off,
splitting the seams till they break.
Would I collect past corpses the way
parents do baby teeth, strung into
a morbid set of pearls or carelessly toss them to the side –
drape and bury them in ceremony or
fold them in shame…
Sometimes I am tempted to relapse to old ways
fall back on skins from which I barely survived
an escape from.
I resist my ghosts,
these exhumed selves, to face the day.
NY 12.12.22
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Post Office Blues #3: At the close of the year
Dear B,
There's something about writing you letters you will never read that feels so therapeutic. I wonder if this will be the last one I write you for a while. So much has happened in the last year with us in such short moments-- it's hard to comprehend that again, we are at the close of a full year. As always, I am deeply grateful for the person you are and the process I am undergoing to be the person I want to be.
It must be frustrating, having all these expectations or hopes thrust upon you by someone that admires you-- I know the sensation is what drove me away. And yet, I am such a hypocrite for doing it to you all the time. I am always running from you to protect you from the discovery of some deep, permanent disappointment in me-- that I resulted in doing just that.
It is so hard to close this chapter without reminiscing on what truly made it so breathtaking (both good and bad), and now you are a part of both. What made my college experience so deeply joyous and exhilarating, what made it so scary to return, what makes it so hard to say goodbye. I'm actually also just happy that we've ended the letters and emails phase-- it wasn't an honest form of letting go, it was a way to hold onto you and all the reasons no one could live up to the people we became for each other. Though I am still writing them, I now do so without burdening you, and without the delicious and torturous anticipation of your response.
I am always romanticizing our interactions, and perhaps that's why we can never truly be friends until this phase is over. I'm sorry for raising your hopes and always running. The truth is, I think I am just trying to run towards the place I need to be where I will feel happy with myself, and I haven't found it yet. At the moment, it is not by your side, not next to you in bed, it's the place I'd have to spend the in-between... perhaps with friends I cannot let down in the same way, perhaps in the safety of solitude where I am responsible only for what happens to me.
I wish you limitless joy, fulfillment, and peaceful satisfaction. Thank you for always cheering me on from afar.
NY.
12.12.2022
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October morning light
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Poem about a Poet on the grass
When I shield myself
to write (August, Autumn),
I have nobody
save the ants crawling
over my screen. Uninvited
guests trampling
my meagre efforts
to make meaning
out of a moment alone.
To resist
the urge to transport
myself to distant locations–
I love reading about the seas
I’ve never seen, handling
instruments untouched
What’s it like to shuck?
To lean over a gunwale?
I fixate on the smallest
of details– the dull point
of the knife, the wet, thick blade.
I breathe in the brininess.
Pruned fingers touch the keycaps
differently– I crave the callouses,
the experience.
This quad is my ocean,
I shuck
myself slowly.
An ant is crawling
up my forearm,
Annexing it
for its advantage,
what does it bring home
from colonizing the keys?
I must be careful to avoid the letters
it hurriedly occupies, in case I stamp it out
on accident.
NY. draft in the quad 0922
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Endless layers of rice fields in Bali, Indonesia.
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Ars Poetica
the rice fields bend my back, I Hunch
to fit in a Bowl, rolled myself all my life
leading up to harvest. Trembling
at the scythe
Propped in the corner, the raw
Red hands that shake with me.
We are both tired
of the rough tumbling
crashing into the stained cot
the Cold damp dirt
at the end of a long day.
the crows Circle in murders
with curved beaks, What are the odds
their Cardinal eyes center on me today?
It is a different kind of agony– to bend
at the beat of their wings,
to meet eyes with them
to watch the handle rise with a grunt.
Inside me, concentric rings toil
Sunlight brings us beads
of dew? droplets of sweat
Collect like precious stones.
The magpie steals coins
from the hole in your drawers
to decorate its nest. I wait
to be snatched away, to experience
the Feeling of flight
the sweet smell of escape.
N.Y., dreaming of fields 1022
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Lovers on the grass in Washington Square Park, New York, 1953. Photograph by Ernst Haas.
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