Periphery

 "You've gotten older," she says with a wry grin, those emerald eyes averting momentarily as she always did when she was being coy.

"Time keeps passing no matter how much we deny it, my dear." I cock my head like I always do when I'm trying to find the right words. And I can never find the right words.

"Always relying on philosophic roundabouts."

"Well, some things never truly change." We exchange a smile, a moment that flashes back to decades before when we were young and there was just that moment. She dips her head, averts her eyes again and takes a sip of her drink. She looks around, searching for landmarks that are familiar to our time together but that time has long since passed...

...

"You two are just adorable! I need a photo of this moment!"

That random friend, just met and strangely now part of our circle heckles me for squinting and grinning instead of a smile. She chastises me and you tell her that my idiot crocodile smirk is a sign of me being happy. Not many recognize that one. We lean together, the backdrop of our eccentric neighborhood and home right behind us. The flash glares off the mojito glasses in front of us but I don't say a word. We enjoy the tapas from our local spot and the night just drifts into those memories so perfect and serene you struggle to remember the details...

... I still regret not having that photo, despite how things turned out...

... 

"Hey old friend, it's been a while." I never expect your calls anymore. So many miles and eons have passed between us that I don't know if we still matter anymore.

"Yeah, I guess it has been. Are you..."

"How are..."

"How's your family?"

"How's you're... ah yeah they're fine."

"Yeah, me too." I don't know what else to say, sitting alone a lifetime away from you.

...

...

"Can I help you pack anything," I ask, clearly lacking enthusiasm. I'm on that tiny little green couch that had been such a source of comfort for years. Pizzeria and red wine-sangria and the gandalf pipe and old shows that just made every moment last as long as it was needed.

"No, I'm fine."

...

I still remember sitting at Cafe Reggio, reading Baudelaire and drinking my espresso when you come up the street from class, fired up about linguistics and looking like the beatific artistic saint with your handbag and your torn-up Bowie shirt. You sit down and just unleash your mind while subtly ordering a drink. I light a Dunhill and smirk as you bombard with passion. The growing autumn twilight doesn't drive us away at.

...

"I don't know what to say." We're at the security checkpoint at the airport, your bags already checked. Theres almost no one in the international terminal at this hour. You always have a knack for the untimed.

"Thanks for coming with me." You look hard at me but I can't keep the eye contact. I know something meaningful and important is about to end. You place over your shoulder at the digital terminal clock and then slowly turn back to me. You keep your eyes down to match my downtrodden visage. "I'm gonna miss you." You wait for me to react.

"Yeah, you too," I say, reticently raising my chin to match your gaze. You flash a pirate smile, the one I know all too well and you softly nod your head. You check on your bag and then turn back to me. There are a million words whispered in a moment without a sound being made. You smile again and you throw your arms around my neck. I match the act and that moment freezes.

A slight tear slides down your cheek and you smile again, steeling yourself. You grab your bag and turn and head off towards the terminal. I stand and wait and watch for longer than I can remember, my mind silent and my senses numbed. You slowly disappear from sight...

...

...

"Do you remember that random pizza place we used to get from for Futurama nights?"

I choke on my drink, laughing on my doorstep as your voice pierces my ears.

"How could I forget."

"They never remembered the toppings." Your laugh in my ears sparks synapses of a lifetime ago but I know they are closed doors. It's just nice hearing my friend laugh again.

"Talk to you soon," I ask after a while. My drink is empty and the haze over city stars is starting to clear meaning dawn is coming.

"Always." 

And the line goes dead, and I am left with those sounds of a city neighborhood. The barreling glow of the corner street lamp feels like a lighthouse of oppression in a moment and a lifetime of an instant.

I wake up that first moment you are gone.

The lamppost is a lighthouse in the anguish.

Constellations

 I think about that morning a lot.

The slowly ascending crescendo of the basic sounds of life.

And yet those moments were everything.

The gulls and gills of Charlestown sung loud while we just lounged and

lived.

Breathed.

Were.

You scream at me as you put your last few items in your bag.

"You're just too much," you say, your body trembling but your eyes resolute.

"I love you," you say after the long, discomforting pause. "But I can't stand you anymore."

I watch as you pass through the gate to my building. I know this is it:  you'll move on to whatever the fates decide but I know that our paths will not cross again. I take a seat on the sidewalk, hoping to see starts in LA  but I'm left with a myriad void,

I look at the curtains, downed to block out the light, thinking of when we put them up. So much had happened before we thought it might be prudent to shut them out. Remember the nudist couple across the the street?

I'm waiting in my car, parked in front of a generational home. But I can't imagine being anywhere else at this moment. You come out through the driveway and the security lights turn on. I see a wry grin creep lethargically across you visage. 

'I see you,' is all I hear. The world softens for that moment.

"You snore a lot," you say with a noticeable sense of amusement as I crack the lids to the day.

I'm pretty sure I grumbled, and you just smiled and came closer.

I watch you pack and I am broken.

"Hey, I live down the hall. Just wanted to say hi."

I stare straight up into the sky. I seek no constellation. 

Hallucingnes

I'm just sitting outside, resting on the the stoop looking up at the shrouded stars of the city life.

    There is a strange silence in a neighbored usually rampant with noise and chaos and life.

You sit there next to me, stoic and silent and sublime. 

    The crucible of those hours hang heavy on your shoulders,

            the rally flag of familial fortuity have been staked hours ago,

                    and the army amasses mobilized for you.

We sit and count stars and discourse the strange change of the tides of life.

You're there. Those tranquil moments where I can read everything in your thoughts by the wry grin on your face...

...

...

... I watched as you took down art that hung on our walls for years. Symbols of stability broken and shattered in the mere passing of moments. The songs we used to play for joy now sound out in resonance of misery and loss. I search for the words to keep you knowing I contemplate in pure futility. You've been gone longer than I can allow myself to admit...

...

...

We're sitting on the back porch, the waning crescent moon perched like a petulant perpetrator of perpetual pain. You say you cannot cry and I cannot say why. I cannot be anything more than there.

...

...

.... And I remember when I was just too much to take. I kept failing and you kept taking those chances...

...

...

    I'm sitting outside my house. The sun bears down on the Charlestown streets and I watch as the neighborhood moves like a calculated game of Risk. I close my eyes, close my book and rest it on my chest. I bask in the blind warmth of a city street and then you call me. You need me. And I am there.

...

...

That morning waking up together. You're arm wrapped around my chest, the morning light intruding in a moment where I felt peace. Where we were able to wake up and face each other and just smile. That pirate grin you wore as you stroked my ear with the blade of your thumb...

...

...

 You ask me to be there, And you are never there. I sit, entranced, ever waiting.

...

...

...

... I watched as I fucked up. I was never right for the moment. I always tried to be there and that was my problem. I was always there and never here...

...

...

...

 I wake from this fever dream, the tears coming without cause, and I ask myself a litany of questions.

Was this real?

    Did I ever mean more than just a doorstop?

        Whatever love it may be...

                It's not this.

...

...

...

 I woke up in a fever, hoping last night was not real. 

...

...

...

I sit and stare out my window looking at the same stars. But you are but a shroud to me, some ethereal mist that has no weight because some never cares. I have to let go of hope...

...

...

..

.

My thoughts of you meaning were but that dream. 

    I hallucinate too much without drugs.

        Go find yourself hope.

These Familiarly Strange Cobwebs

And yet once again, here were are...

    the stranger in my own narrative.

Where did this reality come from? How could so much change in a single year after so much changed in a moment?

There was a time and an instant when desperation and isolation and a yearning to not be alone brought an amalgamation of scatterd souls together for a brief period where we could share our joys and sorrows together.

    The trigger was one of us. One lost and unanchored and without a concept of the next step forward.

            And so like those most insanely beautiful maniacs do, we banded together. We rallied behind a flag of purpose to preserve that which had become beloved and sacred to us. We embodied 'E Plurbus Unum:' Out of many, one. We created a strange summer camp for the genders: the boys camp, rough, savages, riddled with too many people in a small cabin but inundated with fraternity and video games as the common demonstrator; the women formed a sisterhood... one that seemed unshakable as we all struggled together. Tabula Rasa coming, terra incognito for all of us. It was going to be the best year of our lives.

...

...

...I sit here now, a year later, in my own place again, returned to the comforting isolation. I can breathe, I can exist without feeling the obligations of relying upon others and being reliant to others. And yet there is that deafening silence where my adoptive sisters would emerge from their room for a food run or a just to make sure I was okay. The times with their chinchilla were beyond measure.

....

...

Those early days were something out of a daydream or a sitcom. We were a cohesive unit, a diasporic family merged through the bonds of fidelity, the needs of necessity, and the addiction of broken fragments coming together to form something imperfectly perfect.

     The laughs, the tears, the late night conversations overlooking the slumbering streets of Allston. The random moments where somehow we all ended up together. Those were things you could not plan. They were just natural chemistry.

...

...

I spent most of tonight after working staring out my new living room window. The old cotton mill smoke stack stands like a resilient sentinel, defiant to its current insignificance yet beautiful in its imperfection. I watch a couple watch their pup as she sniffs around the courtyard.

...

...

Somehow it never worked the way we thought it would.

Time is a bastard,

and life is an asshole.

    Combined, it was an inevitability that it wouldn't be perfect. But you'd think after a year and a half of running through the crucible together that there would be lasting meaning.

And yet here we stand.

...

...

 I walk the confines of my house, the songs that remind me of so many parts of the past permeating through my head and I cannot comprehend what I can even feel anymore.

    

    After so long in an insulated chamber I was alive again. Those atrophied parts of my already broken heart were resuscitated into life once more. I was saved from myself by this party of absurdity.

        I even let myself get vulnerable.

                It ended as it always has, but this was a chance that reminded me of the reason you take them.

...

...

I'm sitting at my keyboard for the first time in a very long time. To be honest, I don't know if I know how to to this writing bit anymore because it's been so long. And yet like the sailor to the sea, I am am drawn back whether I think its the right thing to do or not. My fingers can't remember how to work perfectly in time with my mind. I am trying to find this part of me again, after a very long hiatus.

...

...

There are so many talks we had on the porch, discussing life and the meaning of it all. And now those conversations are just left mute: insignificant musings that were only used to indulge in selfishness. 

...

...

For the first time in a a long time I'm just listening to Bob Dylan. Live At Royal Albert Hall. The haunting notes of a wailing harmonica bring me both a comfort and an inherent terror: I've felt this loss before.

    When she told me she was leaving and I sat beside the Hudson.

        When I was told I was too much to handle.

            When I thought I was ready.

...

...

...

    I still remain at a loss to the changes of time when it results in the changes of a heart.

...

---

...

    We do our best to both show we are fine, and yet also cry for help.

    Listen to your loved. See the kaleidoscope visions.

       Make it all clear.

Shattered Thoughts

There’s a lot to be said about that which is never spoken.

Those moments when souls have been stripped bare and dragged across acres of salt and all you can do is lower your head, take what could be considered too much of a sip of the drink and then just stare off into the distance.

And yet there’s that power, that magnitude of those unique people you meet along the way… those seemingly innocuous souls who turn out to be the prophet or the saint or the tempter or the torture that you never saw coming.

You are stuck in that introspective moment, locked in pain. You are forced into a straightjacket of the mind and then without cause or reason you notice the look;

not the look of judgement or resentment or trepidation.

It’s the look of recognition. It’s the face you see in the mirror because only that face could understand what you’ve been through.

It’s the look of sympathetic resonance.

It’s the look of the harmony between balance and chaos that shapes the cosmos.

It’s the look of someone who sees just how very broken you are, and yet does not retreat from those vicious shards.

For the most part life is but an unending procession of monotony and repetition and monotony and repetition and monotony and ….

…fuck. See? See how easy it is?

And that’s just it. When did we become conditioned to believe that any of this nonsense would be easy? Life as a definition is the struggle for preservation......

*********************************************************************************

“Should we talk about this?”

It’s a question that goes unasked but lingers like a severed limb. She averts her eyes, a skill she knows so well and knows that breaks me into a thousand shards.

“Hey,” someone else interjects, saving us from the harsh reality. “Who needs another beer?”

“I do,” she says eagerly. Her jade eyes light up as she smiles; she is the beacon that fills a room whether she means to or not......

*********************************************************************************

And just like that,

I am back into a place I never 

thought I’d see again.

This weird amalgam of love and hatred and fear and power and passion and utter, crippling confusion.

How do people deal with this?

At the cost of sounding like a cynic…

is this pain worth it?

I genuinely oscillate between belief and regret.

This is just too much to comprehend: the mind seems like its about to rupture in absolute joy and complete mystery and I no longer have a heading in this fucked up maelstrom called life.

I’m haunted by the past…. scars that I keep wearing and fail at covering up.

And those marks had held me back for so long,

Have ruined so much

that I don’t know how to operate anymore. 

An Overdue Reunion

It’s one of those strange nights.

Nights where you can’t remember when today started, yesterday began, and tomorrow ends.

Early morning stumble to the train, 

the sky grey as the deepest Nantucket fog;

departure after the sun has crept back beneath the view. Luminous dusk lingering overhead.

You walk back into the new true that you call your life;

those now familiar quizzical steps that lead into safety.

You inherently dodge a bo staff flying past your head as your gypsy tribe calls you

“welcome and come home!”

The surreal bliss of sliding down into your childhood chair as laughter and banter and genuine love permeates presently throughout the premises….

I stare into the orbs. It’s a paralytic, this metaphysical prison capturing at a moment’s notice.

The ethanol dances calypso circles around my cerebellum;

the witch doctor’s haze creeps across my gaze.

“Hello old friend.”

I watch as my own reflection speaks to me. He grins and squints and cocks his head the same way I do, but yet we do not look alike.

“ It’s so nice to see you again.”

He looks so different. His face tired, his hair grey, his features softened; and yet, his eyes speak of miles.

“You look so surprised, like you never expected this?”

I try to muster words, to round up the stampede of thoughts cascading through my brainpan.

“What happened, jackass? Your words turn to piss?”

Of fucking course: my introspective self started delving into limerick. What an asshole.

“Yeah, sucks… doesn’t it?” He says this with the inflection of a question when it’s clearly a statement. “Realizing you’re not what you thought you’d be? Tough shit: what are you going to do about it?”

I can only stare back…shamed at my own reflection. I feel as if I have failed myself.

And then I see another reflection. And another. And another. 

A galactic arm of reflections.

I see myself as a young malcontent, expecting nothing but the worst of the world;

I see myself as a child, laughing with my dog Jazzmine as waves splashed against the shore;

I see myself eating dinner in a five-star restaurant in New Orleans with my best friend…simply because she had plans fall through and needed an adventure;

I see what I envisioned;

I see what I could be, for better or worse;

I see who I am, right now.

I rinse my hands and wash my face three times;

buddham saranam gocchami

dharmam saranam gocchami

sangham saranam gocchami.

I keep my eyes closed as I feel the last remnants of water trickle off my face; they catch on my chin with my mask gone.

“It’s alright,” he whispers. I open my eyes once more and look back at me.

“There’s still time. To find your purpose again.”

I take a slow breath through my nose. 

“What,” I say, “no more rhymes?” I grin.

“Asshole.”

“Thanks for the reunion.”

Lost in the Now; Lost Together

xWhen did my words become so difficult to find?

     It's hard to dust off the cobwebs, especially when you've made a subconscious effort to repress them. Wait, no: repress isn't the right word. 

           Bury.

           I have buried my words.

     What was once my greatest escape and means of understanding the world around me have become a liability. They are the warm droplets of blood escaping from a wound that I've tried to bind and hide and pretend doesn't exist anymore. They're scars only I can see that remind me of who I was, who I thought I was going to be, and what I became. But more than that, they're the opening in the armor that prevents me from blocking out the New Orleans style marching band of cacophony and discord that perpetually resonates in my head. 

     The good,

            the bad,

                 the beautiful and tragically ugly and utterly 

                                   inexplicable.

And yet as I keep these impulses at the tips of my fingers in chains, locked away in the dark... I can feel my grip on my own identity sliding away. How do you go so long with a singular purpose only to cast it aside like a soiled towel when you need it more than ever to find that balancing point on the see-saw called life?

     The answer is fuck you. You can't.

***

 It's been such a long time since I've sat down at this rickety little desk to put thoughts to page that my fingers feel arthritic, my mind feels atrophied. This was like breathing for so long and now I feel like I don't know how to take a breath.

    The only way to remember gravity is to just lean out against the cliff and

                           let...

       

                                    ....go.

How fickle this game of 'Twister' is.

     Change comes like the sea and yet things never really change under these quiet skies.

I lay in this room, 

           a place still unknown and yet I'm surrounded by pictures and faces and paintings that remind me of a place I knew as safe and mine. 

     I find myself in terra infirma, terra incognito.

                This tabula rasa carries a lot of chalk lines from the previous lives I've lived:

                        scratch marks of nails dragged in pain still linger just under the surface.

How do you lose track of people you're constantly around?

       A fever dream, a beautiful collaboration of a seven part symphony.

               Beautifully broken bodhisattvas brought together out of bond and purpose and collective bliss:

            a tribe of fallen stars, fitting together so perfectly as broken shards of glass to form something

                       beautiful.

...

...

...

...

      And somehow that mosaic seems so distant now.

               Where is that collective that was once stronger than steel?

    How is it that we're always together yet...

                            ...it feels like another life since we were together?

It's a strange sensation...

      ...being estranged in your camp.

***

Recompense isn't easily found for me.

     But once again I'm taught a truth from life:

                  

                    Words to page.

Solace isn't found. 

     It's accepted.