Empty Is Empty

June 26, 2009

There is no empty bigger than empty.
You are empty, you are empty, you are empty.
Empty is empty.

Do you want some coffee?
It's morning. How about some toast?
No.

Hungry can fuck itself.
I barely feel it.
I would like some tea.
I won't drink.

We're done.
I'm done.
You're done.
Alone lasts as long as I can.

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I found this poem in a nearly empty journal I've been moving around with me since the mid-1990s. I must have written this after a romantic break-up. Obviously, it did not end well. The photograph is from this afternoon.

The Replacement

May 5, 2009

Tell me that I don't live here.
Tell me that this broad sky doesn't suffocate low buildings
between its gross expanse and roads as empty.
Tell me that the people who built this city haven't broken spirits
with their failure at humane design.

We've bred a conservatism of the heart here,
a reservation against larger things.
I was taught to content myself with hobbies.
The pursuit of desire was for people who could afford their own airplanes.
Dreams happened before marriage.
It is a pathetic replacement for living.

I know a building that is decorated with anachronistic sculptures,
where plastic palm trees are wrapped in electric lights and mounted between floors.
They hide during the day, camouflaged by bricks,
but, at night, they light up like signs selling Los Angeles
and shine down on wooden snowmen and a sparse lawn.

I was not born to this place.
I do not owe it some allegiance by blood
or another oratory on the nature of place and the human heart.
Those apologetics are for others who feel the unaccountable grip,
the gravity, of an indifferent circumstance.

That Lie

May 3, 2009

You had blond hair that you said was strawberry,
but I never saw the red in it, even when you held it up to the sun and said See?
I just didn't, and I didn't care to lie about it,
because I thought it was ridiculous when you pouted about that sort of thing.
The vanity of little girls escaped me.
I did see how the ends of your pigtails curled to little points, though,
where you had sucked them into crusted arrowheads;
they bounced against the shoulder blades that stuck out through your thin t-shirts.
All big teeth and glasses that made me sweat in the sun,
I was envious of your smallness, your swayback bum, your simpleness.
When I slept over at your house, we rolled around under tents made of bedsheets,
and later we would stare at the thin light coming through the linens
and talk in hushed breaths until your mother came to tell us to sleep.
We shook out our giggles. She didn't know about our hands under the covers.
Your mother taught you about cleaning your face and moisturizers and makeup,
and you, in turn, tried to bestow these secrets upon me
with the application of blue eyeshadow and lipgloss.
I wore these things heavily around my shoulders like a sodden blanket
and cried when I went back home to wash off the filth,
because you and your mother and everyone else could not see I wasn't like that.
You started liking boys, and we became far apart somehow;
one autumn day we walked home from school together,
and it was another year before we did it again.
Remember how we used to sit in the tree so we could talk alone? you said,
so we climbed the bigger of the two trees in your yard. Its limbs felt harder.
You shifted to separate your knees from mine. I think we'd grown.
Do you remember our sleepovers? I asked.
I don't remember what we did, you said.
Your lie winnowed its way into a point of pain behind my eye.
I climbed down from the tree and thought all the way home
about how I cried every time I saw you before when you erased me with makeup,
but how this time I cried because I wasn't a dirty, little secret anymore;
I was invisible.
I remembered how I used to sneak the ends of your braids between my lips
and break down the hardness of your dried saliva with my own wet mouth,
because some things that seemed ugly or disgusting weren't anymore
when you loved someone.

Crumbs

January 27, 2009

These crumbs on the table
crunch under plates and waterglasses and cat paws.
They have been there for days, weeks possibly.
I do not know.
I cannot wipe them away.
Some have been ground to a dust
that stains the table where a cup overturned.
Some are bound together with stray hair.
I draw my finger through them and cringe.
They are like old men or dry husks or insect shells,
and I cannot get rid of them.
They fall to the floor and stick to my feet.
They are more than I can bear, and, still,
I eat toast.
I am my own curse.