Monkeyshine
A monkey can sit on any limb of the tree.
Where the monkey sits determines what the monkey sees.
This fact frees me up to be you and you to be me
or someone inconceivable until you shake the tree.
A monkey can sit on any limb of the tree.
Where the monkey sits determines what the monkey sees.
This fact frees me up to be you and you to be me
or someone inconceivable until you shake the tree.
This is for the bird that dips away
just before my car hits it in midflight.
This is for the woman with the urge
to turn right on the bridge and resists
the river’s murky and cool waters.
This is for the boy who can’t quit.
This is for the nonbinary person in their car,
dry-heaving in the afternoon heat,
resuscitated.
This is for the lock and for the key,
for the bite and wound,
for those who’ve left,
for those who’ve stayed,
despite, well, everything.
all because that night
after stepping out of the kentucky theatre
after walking the several blocks
up to lyndhurst
and piling ourselves into
adam’s studio apartment-
after sardining ourselves
on a futon – your aunt and I
shoulder to shoulder with beers warming in
our palms and old music videos
highlighting our faces-
your mother fell in love.
II.
first there was digging through
records at pop’s resale store
– at least a row between us –
no words spoken
just a black hole of energy
like were we to look at each other
we would fall out of existence
III.
we had that conversation too
late into the night
we entertained ourselves with other dimensions and parallels
and sometimes I did wonder
if the hand in his was really mine
if the space we breathed together
would run out and leave us drowning
if the earth would stop spinning
and we would just drift together
into some great
unknown dark
infinity
IV.
but that next morning,
the world still bright and alive,
I drew a smiling face in the condensation
on his bathroom mirror
and I knew I would marry him
V.
and let’s say we were right
and there are other timelines
with a thousand replicas of
mes and hims
I hope that in each of them
on march 22, 2014
the grand budapest hotel is playing
at the kentucky theatre
so that I know how to find him
and we can fall in love a thousand times
so that in every single one
of those thousand universes
I get to be
your mother
They go out in the heat
Slender forms congregating under a welcome sun
They have waited for this sticky sweat of summer
For the solace of water, for the evening feasts
I watch them with uncertainty
Blue face lit by the bug zapper on my neighbor’s back porch
With the old war gods Jupiter
Saturn and Mars risen in the east
and the bovine braying
from the weanling field
greeting the subtle light
of one of our earlier dawns,
I awaken to the mosquito
buzz of your insistent
voice, your bipolar self
existing nowhere but in the
increase of bird song
that blazes through this
moonless morning. All my senses
are attuned to the penultimate
creak and rub of the old man
I have now become…a version
of you, sometimes strong
sometimes weak as I
navigate the distance between
us and reach the age when
you knew enough was enough
and deliberately decided to
dissolve your bond with this
life and left without me
June 1st
My lucky day is wendsday
My lucky number is 17
I explain to people
the reasons I am
the way I seem to be
I blame my personality on
star signs
moon pahses
the earths rotation
I text my friend
at 3 am
“Its Gemini season”
she replies
“It has been”
inbox Wednesday
hump day a camel it is
a worthy attempt at humor
four years on smirking
inbox Wednesday
this is prayer
You kissed my cheek this morning.
You are so soft really soft
You are so fucking soft.
I wrap my arms around your neck.
You are so warm.
I am so hard and cold so cold so cold.
Please, soften me like the rain does the earth
Please touch me kiss me kiss me
warm me.
You busted my lip this morning.
You are so rough really rough
You are so fucking rough.
I push hard against your chest.
You are so strong.
I am so willing and weak so weak so weak.
Please, strip me bare like the fall does the trees.
Please grab me hit me hit me
hurt me.
after Meng Hao-jan
I am more than good enough,
more than one hundred words flying a minute.
I answer the phone in a smooth faced voice,
my web woven moon face shining through the trees.
Do you know the taste of super human strength?
Do you know about raw, unfiltered power?
I am a god with a pocket protector & a word processor;
you don’t even know, standing by that water cooler!
**Trigger Warning: Self Harm**
You’d think if I did it “for attention”
I’d cut myself in front of an audience,
not hide the scars among
the stretch marks on my thigh
