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1:30 a.m. I am questioning my existence.

You are not a question.

You are an answer.

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on having a boyfriend with OCD

He was always turning the lights on and off,

opening and closing the door,

counting as he went: thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.

Eventually I had to tell him that if he kept opening the door,

we’d have a whole bunch of house intruders

before the night was through. He responded by trying to kiss me once,

then ended up kissing me twenty-three times, then once more

for an even twenty-four. Then he had to redo two of them

because “our mouths hadn’t been quite aligned.”

Some nights I’d wake up with the moon soaking the bedsheets,

listening to the sound of him repeating the word “fuck”

over and over: he’d stubbed his toe on the bathroom doorway

but couldn’t stop swearing once he’d started.

I fell back asleep after staring at my pillow

until the floral pattern burned into my eyelids,

dreamt the two of us went to an opera but instead of beautiful,

tremulous voices rising high into the air,

two sopranos were singing “fuck” to the tune of La Traviata.

He apologizes the next day, says the new medication

made him feel like shit all the time so he took himself off it;

I respond that it probably made him feel that way

because it was working.

Two days later the ambulance comes and takes him away;

he’d accidentally cut one of his wrists with the steak knife

chopping carrots for stew

but couldn’t have just one cut wrist;

he had to have two.

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Winslow Homer | The Undertow | 1886

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Hamlet at the counter, art by Harry Bliss

From the Literary Starbucks book, available in stores May 17th, 2016

Pre-order now at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

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Jackson Pollock, Artist at Work

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The Day You Were Born, Whoever You May Be

The day you were born, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers.

A tsunami rolled into a village off the coast of Thailand,

a suicide bomb detonated in Kuwait,

and a woman who thought she had no other options

wrapped her newborn baby in a towel

and threw it in a trashcan outside her apartment building.

The day you were born, Hurricane Katrina

ate entire houses in one gulp and flooded miles of land.

A teenager at her wit’s end jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge,

another one pulled the trigger for the first and last time,

and The Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean.

But also on the day you were born, someone blind began to see.

A man paralyzed in a wheelchair took the first steps of his life,

two women kissed but didn’t care if anyone saw,

and a divorced couple fell in love again.

The day you were born, a toddler discovered what the stars were

as a homeless woman ate a warm meal at her best friend’s house.

And each day you were born, countless tragedies were happening

all over the world, but so were twice as many tiny miracles.

One of them was you.

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the only kind of exercise im into is running away from my problems

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God bless the rage in us. It’s how we know each other.

Terrance Hayes (via michaelleepoetry)

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Blind contour drawing my left hand

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