Your hands

A wooden crate, a wheel, a handle make sounds of rainstorm
for a baroque theater in a Czech town, featured
on a morning travel special. How fascinating and far away,
and unstoppably displaced by other information. Ads
lean on the beauty, on orthopedic masterpiece,
on the unfathomable satisfaction through simple and unrelated means, and even
voice of critique and disbelief is claimed before you have the chance to think it.
The latest advertisements are self-aware, you see, and function on a meta level.
But trade is what we do.


Outside there's grass cutting through earth,
and tree heights competing for the sunlight,
angiosperms, delicate organs and fierce stems all on display,
their blood of substances that nourish, derange, kill and enlighten.
A well-established habit, a cup of coffee
is quenching overmedicated wonder. All falls into place,
your microscopic agony subsides, and caffeine fulfills you.
In the evening, it will be the properties of wine
and new inhabitants in castles of your eyes. The nebulae,
the supernovae, the radial arrangement of smooth muscle.
The windows to your immaterial yet highly guarded acres, fertile with self.
And overtaken for a moment by a grape, then wheat, then flesh.
You are a person to love behind all this, despite all this, because of this.
A distinguishable pattern embedded in the rock of everything,
endowed with agile perfection and miraculously, will.


The thicket of symbols is as dense as this summer air;
you can move your hands around, and drag logic along with humid Lorton.
Particulate, like pixels in a damaged video download —
cascading squares hopping about a strange attractor —
our thoughts grow circular. But kernel process, love, stays untouched.
Symbols cannot deform it, poems—relay it, customs—
confine it, chaos—degrade it, wishes—embalm it.
Your hand is warm, pulse and meat, and mitochondrial pre-history…
and feeling, intent gesture. Your hand is warm, care and breath, oxygen flow
with no syntactic sence, trickling throughout your body. It beats.
You are warm. The angles of your eyelids speak endearment. It is sweet to see.
Calm looks away… at those horizon edges
egging you on daily. We sigh at instances, two occurrences enmeshed into what happens.
Cosmic blinks, we take a second to unite and decompose,
we take an eon to make up our minds and come about into coherent form.
But like roots that have become their path, we're ours,
and nothing can undo us.


Some would declare the fact that I say "us" means something subconscious -
such scaffolding of theory; advice columns to market, medication sales.
Those substances that nourish and derange, enlighten and extinguish:
the very pigment of a feeling clasped in common sense and served, seasoned
with molecular derivatives, but mostly, simply words.
I wish they'd leave my words alone, the "us" alone,
us alone, uninterpreted, uninterrupted, unexplained,
amid the roots entangled and fungi in embrace, exchanging selves,
vines ascending upward, kudzu disseminating its engulfing being,
spider-veining urban growth and economic noise, and architecture
eroding into its stature as heritage, a symbiont with the graffiti caked into cement,
the bones, the real sounds of thunder, the ceremonial and the practical, delightful, blunt and nuanced,
waring, stripped of meaning, repackaged, reinvented and unearthed and left alone,
and under fog, risen out of stardust and doomed along with all,
your hands holding mine, offering me you.

Domestic disturbance in the halls of Vishnu and Lakshmi.

Stand guard. Words have become unmanageable, sticking to every surface like dough that needs flour. In my mind, in my cunt, on the edges of my breath. The culture, the generational wisdom of the cells comprising my body, the lone needs of sentient and desireful organisms drowned and integrated inside the totality of me who has no idea how to answer their prayers, their pangs, their birth and death circulating in my bloodstream. Do I care for them? Am I their savior?

Release. Release, let go, let live and let be. Watch the sunrise and sunset so slow and majestic. Watch the spastic flies move like you have to be on coke to keep up with their biorhythm.

It’s July now. I am sitting and aging in a place named July.

Stand guard. You may collapse under pressure of such infinite beauty. The connection you feel is a word you seek safety in, but the truth is uncontainable.

Let go. Truth will fill you. But you’ll never break.

Does it matter? The cells that make me don’t know how I feel when your eyes eat me up, intense, magnetic. Do they know why I cry? They know they need some protein to survive. Do I know why they overwhelm all my governing bodies with petitions to handle their grievances, firing spasms up and down my traps? The Lesbos isles in my fallopian tubes, filled with an army that explodes into wailing and weeping every time they mourn the loss of their sister, who is flushed out of existence; then the next, then the next: body ossifies into it’s own rituals. Let it break… Let it break! Let it invert through the pain to the other side.

Stand guard. Pain is bad. I’m a bad god if I let my constituents suffer so.

Let it go. Release, breathe. Thought a spec in eternity, an instance of patterned twitching of something abstractly described as particles. My reality is such: breath, voice, sight, sound, smell, touch, love, rhythm. No further liberty is there than an instance of being, without a struggle towards anything, beside you. Storms of adoration stilled, droughts of doubt and yearning past, concerns forgotten. The way is the way. We can simply watch the sun.

Stop though. Through your love you want to create me. Am I in need of any more form than the infinity that limits me already? Count the beings that make me, their mouths and their greed. Do you love a monster with infinite minds, one blood emerging from the sum of all – and emerging boiling, for no reason other than that you decided to exist alongside my soul, in such beauty. Why torture me with your sunsets, with all the joys of you, when I can extinguish all into a dot of simultaneity, wherein there is no place for you to stand beside me and watch, for you won’t be apart. All one, all painless, all at once.

Let it go, love. Feel breath as breath, and love as love. Feel solitude as solitude. Through your love you want to destroy me, but we will come back to this conversation at the dawn of every Age. And we’ll forget whose side is which.

Tomorrow will erase this, you can count on it.
The walk through the narrow hallway like a ghost floats through past
invisible to Richmond in the endless swallow
of PBRs and aggressive twitching to the dj's pulse en masse.

dirt-tanned regulars and their pit-bulls
pretty girls in pretty dresses with crusted eyeliner and forties bottles
tiny shaved dykes with enourmos square glasses in summer dresses
tall tall biker boys tucking their hands in the straps of their backpacks for alcohol supplies watching over the crowd
baby faced freshmen intently sucking cigarettes in a rehearsal of rough times
She's a busy city that never cleans.
She has a place for me... somewhere amid the piles of dorm furniture and Old South knick knacks from the sidewalk sale reigning half-packed half-unpacked
my favorite meals and a stack of old essays.

moss over brick
window pane molding
my old windows
away from the house down the street we had carried a rat playing dead in the trash can
i made coffee in the kitchen
my bed had my scent
couch is sold


church bells ring old and true 3 pm
She has drugged me with sun
ready for strolls, a cat on each porch, She is mine for the day.
She is mine for the night. She is mine for a sentence, the damned tease.
Then road.

Tired Fall

Walking hunger paths, not on puddles but on reflections in them,
stroking the disconnect between us as though it were soft to the touch,
I watch, my eyes swelling in emptiness,
and eruptions of holy vulgar wants settle captive, as I answer
in a haiku of politeness that reveals nothing.
You don’t hear the tremble of my breath in my greeting.
I do not touch your heart with any particular sentiment crafted into my words.
My heart I try to quiet.

You sign on, you sign off.
A name in a list.
Where is the force still pulling me to the certainty of what was real?
You give me a caress to imagine, and I fall into false memories.
Where you’ve touched there is still the sting of a happened life
that won’t let me reason my way out of this maze you took me to.
You have never left, yet it is all I know.


There are calmer days when patience is a smile.
Leaves cover Richmond streets in heaps of tired Fall,
covering,
covering…
I’ve walked here, mindlessly, time and time again,
arranging days into a string of consecutive and reasonable deeds,
but always looking for someone’s eyes to pierce the lull of forgetfulness.

There is dirty snow dragged along the roads of proud Moscow
extravagant in her bright dress damp with exhaust and puddle water on the edges,
trampled by the stressful, spat on by her smokers.

Stores and hospitals. Old soviet factories. Tram tracks in the white.
There is a fur tree my parents planted
growing still, lean and green.
There is the aloe plant blooming where an avalanche has swallowed a city in the sierra.
There is desert breath stirred by the crowding combis in deranged Lima,
all colors muted to grey and hunger.
There is the coffee cup I drank from.

I am looking for piercing eyes.
Most eyes are asleep.
You sign on.


Have you lived more than I have?
Have you yearned less…
Have my hands warmth enough to give a day that’s simple?

Leaves have covered my building. Red and yellow buried the street, made my windows church-like. There is the smell of burning seeping from the houses of the wealthy, where chimneys aren’t clogged with concrete like in the houses rented to college drunkards. Wealthy houses smell of nice whiskey.
The Fall swallowed my street.
You sign off.
Leaves keep falling. Covering, covering everything the street has been. My heart isn’t quiet and my hands are burning.

A Love Poem

May the sun and the earth care for you.
May the rocks and the wind and the noise,
the rhythm and the leaves,
may they care for you.
May the stars and your steps
and mistakes of the world
care for you.
May the dirt and the rust
carry you through.
May the fights of the ones you don't know,
may the stray dogs' paths
and spring allergies,
machines, and fingers of the ones I've not known
and the dread of those I have
carry you.
May the wine and the past,
the eternal seasoning of things
and wasted spices,
the traded everything
and the misgivings of attempted love
and mathematics,
implicit in nothing,
care for you.
So that I don't.
May you take it all.
Races and cut hair,
ancient lands and feminists.
Take the food shortages, love.
Take the kids that torture insects.
Take the unborn and the lies in arguments.
Take the abstractions,
the reductionism,
the wrath, love, the sense of sight.
Take the grandparents' treats.
Take my fear.
Take my song.
You are of the world.

To Pablo

You could not have made a better sanctuary
than the ages of you
all tucked underneath.
From the darkening depth of them in a stolen gaze
to the glimmer of still childish eyes you look at me
all years at once.
I suppose I could see it in anybody
if I stopped looking for it.
And I’m sure if you saw me
playing in the sandbox with plastic Soviet toys
in a playground,
in the South-East Moscow,
outside of the apartment buildings and before my English lessons,
when I still took English lessons,
before the first Mars bars had been imported
or western cartoons on TV, or advertisement,
and before I liked to draw with markers, because soviet markers weren’t
as exciting or colorful as the ones from Poland that I had later,
before I liked cheese, because there was only one kind of it around,
before the time I can describe with memories and not conjectures,
when I was four or three—
you’d know me.

Except warfare of days, which make boredom
such a flattering leisurely wealth in comparison,
has brought troublesome skill to you.
You can look at me ageless, corneas icing over quickly with glass,
and I can no longer tell if the shimmer in them might betray stalling tears
or the gloss off irrelevance.
You look blind underneath that distracting glare,
with no life to remember,
no moment I’d know could only be yours had I seen it,
like that photo you have of yourself as a kid,
with your eyes cupped in the shadow of your hands,
to hide from the camera.

Fatherless Sons

This is an ancient pain. Ancient and frothed into the insides of our stomachs,
awake, carved into where there are no scars that tell a story.
You hold me like I’m a kid
But your hands are stroking up and down my legs,
and I can feel your heartbeat aching
to deny what you say,
to overtake me, warlike and whole;
fling into an existence that might season
slowly, like tendered flower gardens and winters
that expand as though there
is no expansion to return from
or run.
On to find out what is this pain you give away
to me you think of leaving. When at the time it seems so easy to return,
Reign, like a paradise falling on,
the ages you’d been drying out.
This is the pain that crusts people
into wooden statues of what once was their charisma.
Go on, turn your eyes away,
A boy that wants to
not be angry
anymore.
You hold me like you never let your mother.
You hold me like you squeeze a pillow when you nap aimlessly.
Like you hold a rock you want to throw at every window, but don’t.
You keep it, always.
There are bags of them inside your muscles.
Your back remembers how you sit when you don’t want to cry.
And mine does too.

February, 2007

The Sentiment of Soothing Return

Crowded in the screech of Soviet metro I
stood intaking the absorbing lull.
It rocked me gently to the long forgotten standpoints,
to the starts of what has been concluded,
hovered me between the state of holding on to
a metal bar with one hand,
a beer with the other—
and an indeterminate motion towards
a memory of standing
in a gentle rocking,
bulleting through the immense Moscow
a million times before…
recorded in the bones that still make me.

I could have taken ages of this.
People around me stumbled in and out of their hell to stand beside me,
stuck together
with a viscous demand of unquestioned
adjacent realities.
My old friends stood telling me stories
and catalogued the stations we passed and streets
with orderly gossip.
Moscow was village like, aged
by the ease of endless fateful encounters
and ligatures of unabridged confessions over wine.

I could have stood there by you, on an ugly balcony of soviet sleeping district,
watching over the rain collecting on the roofs of stores
remodeled now to sell imported cell-phones
and other sleek,
top-of-the-line electronics in demand,
... watching over the puddles
people jumped across on their way from the metro station.

Metro was always so conveniently close—
in walking distance from the playgrounds
rebuilt over the fields that took my early wars,
in walking distance from the rooms where you and I would stay
with lights turned off,
from schooling, and from pets and their version of Moscow,
from nighttimes that encrypted motions of us,
younger, from room to room, mid-flirt;
and from this singing I could hear from the apartment now...
just like the kind I used to share with you quite effortlessly,
the singing that was mine
and now, as I hear it
kept on like a heritage,
it's anthropologically curious….

There, by your side,
you and I not speaking of the years we spent apart,
I could have stood for ages,
watching a cigarette fall down eight flights to the ground,
because you’d taken it out of my hand
and threw it, telling me I shouldn’t start.


March 6, 2007 (Edited November 2013)

Worry Long Gone

You didn’t say much to me afterwards.
Summer was rotting forgetful
and delirious, and
your silence was
a windmill of mad mares in gallop on my diaphragm.
Riding them insane, circle after circle,
was the sound your steps never made across the battered carpet of a Friday.
Amid the scrolling Heinekens and after-work salsa droned,
shots downed, and fertile laughter, all in dance like valkyries clubbing,
the sound of you coming closer
I didn’t hear.

Ten thousand women raged inside me. I was all wall.
You talked to girls. They said your name,
They said your name again.
And I no longer had a stomach.
I had no neck.
My sides were callused effigies, the ache evolving through a timeline of styles.
And hour upon hour I walked between beguiling looks,
and drinks, and grinding, cheating couples, sweethearts apart, flirts and skirts, love trailing on the thighs.
I watched your arms and counted the advice of every bottle
and in eloquent avoidance of dialogue
I mazed my way into the car.


You stumbled into the backseat,
talking to everyone with words, but not to me—
And dying of your leg so close against mine,
I listened to you
say nothing of my comments,
Watching suburban lights stroll by discretely as to not interrupt
my hurricane
with images of families sleeping.
Then you put your head on my shoulder.
Dead agony suspended in half whisper,
All I could feel was your cheek.

The Honeydew Discrepancy

You know that words escape me, kind of, lately.

Things of awe have succumbed to breakfasts and dinner plates, roach traps in the corners of the swept up floor, utensils for cooking and drawing materials.

We have collected quite a jarful of beer bottle caps and jokes about the IKEA catalog on our coffee table. Laughed amid the teacups and lips the quintessence of reality so desertless.

The burn of things just isn’t as dire as in the more unbearable times. Perhaps because the fires are calming to an end, and a rain is to be brazenly in the colors of children’s cartoons, wherefore joy is a bold season, and scars have no guard from illusion. There is nothing to say that undulled innocence cannot be born into this garden of ours. There is nothing to make such brightness false.

Spring cooks us with the freshly picked sun through a morning window.

The nights breeze through warmly, as though walks are just walks.

I have cried for nothing but pollen in an indistinct while. When the seasons reversed I cannot quite place. This all happened discreetly, without much tribulations or fanfare. Old decrees my body lived by released into a painless renewal, with much politeness authored by no one so as not to disturb the thickness of this noon, the old heartburning tragedies glazing over with our molasses life.