And I fold,
for I see I am folded,
I fold for I see
the way time doubles upon its bodiless plane
an infinite number of times,
crumpling in on its own unknown nature.

I fold the way I am folded,
like a letter mailed to myself,
or to my survivors after I have expired,
detailing all that will have transpired 
since my transformation
(transfiguration)
with the eye of a non-linear God, 
though now I am in the finite Nod;
folded,
the way a water-logged rubber spine
rearranges in limbo,
impossibly bending a back
and neck
to stare between its inverted toes
at an inverted world of gravity
with a sky of a yard and its ornaments
in a view of close proximity.

That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it at all. 

theboywiththearabstrap:

To whom it may concern, 
(though I know May expired yesterday)
to the future model,
to one who smartly thinks to 
“Never trust a man good with words”,
to one who may doubt my motives,
and their veracities,
to the future resident of glorious cities
and stories
all acquired through early years of a life well-spent,
to the one who will not read this,
to one who knows the least of my kiss,
to the one who I have not done the worst by 
(but dislikes me more than all the rest—what can this say?)
to one who I have always only said what I meant:

You are beautiful.
Inside and out.
From the quasars of quarks that quantumly combine
to make a single predilection in your pretty head,
you are beautiful.

I did not tell you this,
or
I did not tell you this enough—
in the timeline of infinity, folding nonlinearly
in on itself, these are the same—
and if I am to be guilty of a crime that you would not accuse of me,
if there is to be a snarl behind my never-spoken name,
let it be 
of an inadequately articulated beauty.

That way, if I ever do discover
some other poet you have taken for a lover,
then may I know that I am lesser,
take my leave,
and go.

But until some more honest man
does pen a way to capture a frame 
of glory
such that the rhyme and meter 
match your beauty same,
then shall I ever only think,
that I am to be blamed for our abrupt story.

        *        *        *

And should I ever see you again,
I truthfully doubt I will be in recall
on a day so distant that I see you again,
but perhaps this is not true at all,
perhaps it will be in tomorrow’s rain 
      (which truthfully is why I write this now— 
       if before tomorrow, I should take my bow,
       the final one, then laid to rest, 
       I should like these words to attest
       to the things I feel, were I to remain)
but perhaps I will see you again,
nevertheless,
and perhaps I will not until then,
when my cheeks are transfixed with the chill of marble
and the firmness of a being undone,
filled, and redone in stone,
laid in earth for his crimes to atone—
ah, then!—
then, when I am descending from flesh
to meat
to bone
and lastly the meal of some worms and roots,
then with your beautiful self staring above
shall I know what it is to suffer
for not holding firmly what should never be let go of—
no, not love, Love—

“Love” is just a way for boys
to sell you on undone zippers,
and I pray you learned at least that from me,
that a soft word in a voice
can be a terribly persuasive noise,
even if I, the proof-in-point-and-pudding be—

but I have digressed far enough,
no more lessons have I to teach your sculptor’s ear
(but by no sculptor bound by this mortal coil,
only angels could lay claim to the angles,
only God can be the architect of that ear),
and these words will not fill your eyes,
as I once dreamed of doing!

No, instead
should I ever see you again,
I should hope that this epithet 
of rosy-fingered, dawn-light filled S________
makes its way to the model’s form,
and makes its way in to your head,
an insidious, but well-intentioned worm,
to cause you to speak to me then.

But that is not why I write.

I write for a selfish and specific end,
an imagined bend,
to do so is to engineer the days of men,
including myself,
and this is not in my sock drawer,
or my wallet;
I do not place this in an empty pack of cigarettes
then store it away where I can only find it 
on the days before I move,
in,
or out.
No, no doubt,
I do not write this for myself.

I write this because I know
that you, with the last things spoken to me
smacking of fury,
disdain,
and pain, could not see
that I acted out of charity.
Hardly altruistic, you can easily say,
but be wary, I may say it first:
I do not aim to justify a place in that world I’d made,
not for you, or for me,
I simply contend that I may not be the worst.

Oh, may I not have been the worst.

A year barrels down on you, 
on what would have been us,
full of the ephemeral filling of time,
that makes us flap our jaws
like dogs or horses with peanut butter between them,
where us, we need merely exist to think that we merely exist,
and I use merely in the Shakespearean sense.

A year barrels down on me,
and all that I was then,
and all that I am now,
and all the places I was in between—
places where I should have let go,
and finally did,
places where with what the future knows,
I would wind up with you, 
winsome youth and beauty.
And now, I probably cannot even call you “youth”
        (although, in the time the rest of man has spent a year
         I have born witness to a millenia from my lofty pier)

a year, and I wonder,
if I had not taken in the homeless hand,
or if you had had it in you to understand 
         (honestly, this will be before my final bow,
          you probably do now—
          the ire was more a testament to how much to you, I meant)
would at the end of this year,
there be some open path before our feet,
perhaps our futures would rise up to meet
our future selves, some months from now.

Or perhaps would I have shown to you
how close akin your brother is to me,
and then again, I to him,
us mariners in murky seas
of white china brown confectionaries 
doled out in spoonfuls like ices, cakes, and teas.

But alas, these are for the future minds to discern,
the inner workings of life, fueled by a heart’s burn,
will unfold to the machineries we make.

Today, I have only these words to say:

What I did by you was wrong,
what I ended for some other’s sake
I will regret my whole lifelong,
I regret for you, the proper other,
I regret for me, my costly mistake.

I have been returned to the hands of my captors;
I am returned unto my own hometown
to get a fresh start on the next pages
and chapters,
of a life I have yet to write down.

I come back to my hometown, to find that it is smaller,
and yet, emptier, than the one I have long known.
My phone is broken, and I am safe from myself,
I cannot call her;
and yet, I look about at this shrunken world,
that saw my hair-thoughts first curled,
the place from which I was placenta-hurled,
this place I once thought I had long known—
and I think,
as is wont of me to do,
on if everything else could shrink,
or if rather it is I who has simply grown.

An older young man once told me
the tale of how once when he
was as strung out as is imaginable,
at his parents’ house taking up
the garbage cans, as best as he was able,
from the curb to the back of the driveway
while listening to how the sound
of light rain is the same as burning shrubbery
(and it is! This occurred, too, to me!)
he realized this was also the case 
for the can’s plastic wheels upon concrete
and the roar of a jet engine
hoisting and hosting a metal cage of luxury.

And sitting now in the rain,
I think that he was wrong to name them the same;
subtlety rules a soft rain and leaves aflame,
and even, to some degree,
the rumble of the wheels in the night,
but there is little subtlety
in the way the blast of a jet keeps a plane in flight.
And this thought occurred to me today,
not because of the planes above,
though there are many of those always,
but because of another sound I love,
a sound high in the clouds so dark,
and far away, which is why this thought grew,
it was thunder, distant, with a roar,
that reminded me of the last time I flew. 

Let us tell the hot concrete
that it must lay still and make our city;
let us tell the concrete that it is a city,
though it is not.
If tonight, we, the human race, were gone,
abandoned all our towers,
found our place in space,
all in the dark and evening hours
before the sun comes up for dawn,
all the concrete that we make our city
         (though it is not)
would stand still, without our bustling,
giving sanctuary to raccoons,
giving the floor to red leaves’ rustling,
and in time our footprints will be forgot
while we take sanctuary on foreign moons
that we have given names of juxtaposed Greek and numbers.

Ah, we fear a world torn asunder
if the human race were to interfere no more,
but dolphins do not litter our pristine shores,
and birds don’t mine for fossil fuels;
a shark needs no midwives for its birth
monkeys need no flame to make their tools,
and still we people have policies proudly named
“Scorched Earth.”

I wonder what they think
I think
of me;
I think on this,
sitting on my toilet,
I think on this on my toilet,
blowing smoke rings
from my cigarette
to rest upon the rim of my coffee.

“I am a fixer of easily fixed things,”
not:

“I am the pinnacle of living beings”
or

“I am of what a flushed raven sings.”

But perhaps,
I am what wisdom brings. 

You’d hardly believe me,
but there’s a young man I can see—
totally naked—
sitting in my bathroom,
on my toilet,
with clumped curls for his mop,
giving off some fume
with his head cocked to the side in a Nod:
he reeks of humanity,
he reeks of all their bodily functions,
he reeks of all their vices,
and fluids,
and he’s sitting in my bathroom,
on my toilet. 

And he isn’t even using it.
His head is cocked to the side,
a half-smoked cigarette,
extinguished prematurely by disuse
hangs between his lips,
beneath his eyes barely short of closed,
he listens to a song only he is hearing,
a song in electron rhythm and faucet drips,
and he’s heard it before,
in these moments of abuse,
and I wish he would do his business elsewhere,
(or better yet, no more!)
because it is inconvenient to me,
and my more welcome guests,
—oh, my selves can be such pests!

I am the voice outcrying
“Marco!”
in the crowds of a theme park.
Less and less do I hesitate,
as more and more things do I start,
and leave for others to finish,
or be left with the finishings and furnishings.

I am just a chalk outline
of flesh and seams of cotton,
who dreams
of being fleshed out
while my fellows dream of being in flesh.

I am little more than
a manifest impulse to start fires
of personal belongings.
This is the way of men my age in this age;
we have soft hands and try to curse tax forms and the advertising industry,
we are princes who name their country a prison,
misunderstandings, mysteries, 
and their property lines a cage,
forgetting we know nothing of the woods,
and never being alone enough to learn. 

If time is taken in a single point
and watched from a constant pier,
the world stretches out
and comes back around
as people come and go through each day,
week,
month,
and year.

And if for an hour or two
a man such as I were to sit
at a party and watch the people do as they do
while I keep time with a cigarette,
I learn through osmosis of sound
eavesdropping, perchance,
of the lives each of them live.
And  I, doing my best to give
an impersonation of wallpaper 
think on the things I’ve learned
and savor
and wonder at the things
the hopes and quarrels,
secrets, habits, lies, and dreams
that walls must know
of us human beings. 

Goodnight, sweet world,
I’m off to dream
of kinder thoughts and sweeter things,
of a world where everything is just as it seems,
and where it seems of so much more,
where specks on cogs such as I
in the sprawling universe of a sphere of gears
have more of thoughts
of a cool, night sky
and less concern for future cheers
in the knowledge that all that’s good
will in its own time come,
as that is how we really should
think of all that is in time to come. 

Heavy and heady 
with thought and red reflection,
I walk about beneath a sky of sable,
biding time until I am ready
for sleep, in a pacing without detection,
for the irises of men are asleep in bed,
where I would be, too, were I able,
but there is much moving about
beneath my snuff-colored, mop-topped head,
blue thoughts of the future,
and white ones of the past,
as I ascend the steps;
and with a knock to my head,
I come to, soon,
and witness an enormous-seeming yellow moon,
sinking into the perse Western night—

and with the overwhelming force of this sight,
of a fattened corn-cob orb sinking into morning,
I come to take each sentiment in stride,
each worry, fury,
fondness, predisposition, and plan,
processed with each next stride,
for like the moon, each will soon sleep,
but each of these colours in my life will keep
a shade of what it is to be a man. 

I have watched with awestruck eyes
fairer fingers than my own
stroking each and every bone,
outlining my knuckles, I realize,
just in time for those same fair fingers
to twist about the messed machinations
I pass as hair, and each moment hovers heavy,
lingers, 
as if the hand were a nurse’s,
and my hair, her patient’s. 

And when my world-windows’ curtains are drawn
in a far too drawn out blink,
I think,
for an infinite second, 
before concluding
that I can not yet deduce
how I came upon such a soft hand to seduce
while sure-footed, dancing about my collarbone,
that same soft hand with each fingertip’s rub and prod
reminds that here, I’m far from too far gone—
and even now, in the glory of a Nod,
when attempting to tap out my own reminder
of how sweet the evening that tonight transpired
in rhymes and rhythms unfit to smack
of the sentiment firm fingers upon the ridge inspired,
I myself can keep in mind,
that the future will bring that same hand back,
and thus the future must truly be kind. 

With fingers tracing the outlines
of the other’s, we lay, supine
as the evening stretches, out, too,
and I lay here with you—
divine—
my locks curling with yours,
your curls locking with mine;
the blacklight glows in the dark of my space
as constellations of freckles adorn your face
with beauty
and character,
neither of which you are at all lacking,
(whereas I in such areas should be found slacking)
as we lay at a cute, acute angle,
with hesitantly spoken words in a dangle
from my lips, soon kissed,
passing the hours with blasts from pasts
that I do not remember,
with sparks between us growing
to flame from ember,
and I am glad to have found such a hand to hold,
glad to share a blanket, though far from cold,
happy to be here in my bed,
ecstatic to lay here, with you touching my head, 
and hair with yours;
oh, for all the balm in Gilead, 
for all the sunrises on Eastern shores,
no better evening tonight could I have had.
 

When I woke on time alone in my room,
           (but far from actually alone)
thinking on how a glimmer of goddess’s glory
is the defense tactic of many a mushroom 
and on how now we—you and I—have a story,
I slipped into the skin of societies
           (clothes)
and went walking the ways we went,
together, with more focus on the proprieties
of grass. And the rest of the day, in the sun I spent,
and thought of the economies of ants,
understood but rejected why women wear dresses 
and why men must wear pants.

And I think it such a shame
that the world will not holistically see
everything quite the same
as the Bodhisattva or me:
how the mere fact that anything
does anything to anything,
is beauty
and that it’s a wonder that our world
has laws of physics. 

This is why I must share,
creating emissaries and missionaries
who understand what it is to care
for everything that exists
because it does,
to inspire a world to think of what will be
in a perpendicular vein to what was,
and in general, to simply see,
when really goddess is about seeing more
than most ever will who have come before,
or ever will again, unless this we change,
to bring heaven’s intellect within our range. 

Couldn’t help myself