Thursday, February 24, 2011

reading in between the lines much?

You intercept me at the office, pushing a book in my hands. Frank O'Hara. "You can borrow it for the weekend."

(I don't recall ever asking to borrow anything.) Thank you through a mouth full of apple chunks and broccoli in my teeth and you've left as quickly as you came while I spend the rest of the afternoon trying not to crack the book open.

Frank O' Hara. It's midnight and I'm indulging in the comfort of my bedsheets and I'm waist-deep in poetry. Soaking and wading. An analyst, picking up each word and turning it in the palm of my hand and examining it in the light, feeling it, rolling it around and tasting it in my mouth to decipher meaning and uncover layers and angles.

It might be Frank O'Hara I am reading but I wonder if you've secretly meant it to be you that I'm indulging in on this night.

I'm reading love letters.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Ad-libbing a conversation I had with a friend:

He says, "I think the most painful stories are the ones that go unknown.


"I was on the streetcar the other night, and I looked out the window and I saw this crazy lady just standing on the sidewalk crying her eyes out. She was definitely homeless and definitely crazy, and here she was, standing alone, hysterical and crying her eyes out.


"I watched her and asked myself, 'Who is this lady? What's her story? Did she use to be rich? Was she pretty when she was young? Did she have it all, once? How did she get here? Why is she crying?' And I wanted to know all these things. And I realized how I wouldn't. Or how likely no one would ever know her story. She didn't look like she had anyone or any means to tell. She was homeless and she was crazy."


At this point he became quiet and I push him to continue, "Then..?" I ask.


"Then nothing," he says, shrugging. "Then my eyes welled up and the streetcar started forward and I'll never see this lady again."


At this point, I became the one who was quiet. After a while, he catches my eye and asks, "What are you doing?"


"What?" I say, feeling strangely vulnerable, like I was caught doing something I shouldn't have.


"What are you doing?" he presses me.


"Listening," I reply.


"Don't," he says.


"Don't what?"


"Don't fall inlove with me," he says with a smirk.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

what is it with

my sick fascination with the Broken

and my pathetic surprise
at the cuts I get
from my presumptuous attempts
to pick up the ragged pieces?

........fuck, this post sounds so fucking emo.