motto.

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.

impulse control.

admittedly, he has begun to express feelings
of forgetting to write down
the id on the chalkboard.
think of it as a to-do list:
milk, vegetables, eggs,
pick up dry cleaning,
find better ways to cope. at our
core, we are all animals. like darwin
we shall overcome this
by putting newly encountered species
on our dinner plates.
why? it is the unconscious driving approach.
the secrets of the scientific method
are a by-product of digestions. the to-do:
pleasure, aggression. you do it once, you do it
three times. sometimes it helps you escape,
sometimes you can get lonely at sea.
all we can do is adjust, try to quietly shift
with the wind.
even if it means
a split infinitive.

resetting your wrist(watch).

sunday morning, one minute past mass, or 9:31 (which sounds just a little more reasonable). here we go again, the lucky ones to have brumbled past the black-hole hold of the earth spinning round the sun on its axis, we the ones as the closest fists to the sun. we the ones with closed fists, we who won over by thems run over the unlucky dogs again, who's gonna clean up the mess, who's always got caught by the sludge in the bucket, a lucky moment to remember you love the rain. if it's even only a shower. you who never knows the temperature of this water, but will adjust accordingly, even if it always means fiddling with the knobs. could be jet lag, could be old age.

four days in, and each morning i'm brunching.

ago.

the day begins as we end / our dreams
sprawled out on sweaty sheets,
letting go of fistfuls of memories
like scraps of coloured paper
flung off a rooftop,
a thin line
between those things
we celebrate
and those
we grieve.

it takes a phone call
answered or not
our palms face up
or buried in our laps
wrapping ribbons
of our past lives
around our present together,
our palms are trying
to tell us something.

this day is running around
itself / a premonition

glowing like a crimson-lit room
from across an alley, maybe
I was just there or years before
could have flicked on the lights
slipped two-by-two
through a train turnstile
or tossed a cigarette off
a roof,
shoulders shifting
towards or away from someone.

the day ends as we begin
in parallel REMs
asks itself
a shared apartment
or am I him, bubbling up
on a patio in the back
or getting caught in conversations
never spoken out loud,
he texts she texts
LOL whatevers

nobody laughs anymore,
only chats that they are laughing.

sister let yourself cry.
sister sometimes
it takes three days
to roll away a boulder
pressing down
on your lungs, sometimes it’s okay
to walk away from a tomb. trace
thumbprints on your palms
as if tokens from an apartment
you should have left long ago. place
them gently over veiled eyes. sometimes
we walk in circles but don’t get stepped on,
instead bend the days that begin and end
with the same attempts at poking
a needle through thread

don’t wait
for routine, for things to happen
in threes, or love songs on the radio
that wail like elegies wind sometimes shifts
in more than in four directions—
make it easy. start with Level I processing.
how do you feel about that. 4:53 a.m. leaves
rustle but are not yet morning.
mourning.
the second act is ripe with symbolism but unimportant.
for now
get through the night fumbling for quarters.
there are intruders on the premises, there is
nowhere to hide. you are getting stopped for no reason.
ain't no walk thru Buttercup
Park. collect flashlights,
jars, buttons, broken paperweights. who knows what

we really need from the outside world.
stand on chairs. look at the Big Picture. amazing awaits.
ends, beginnings, they all look the same.
dusk, dawn,
we are all still running. us, apartments, maybe
it means nothing at all. believe in things
because they exist, but don’t forget
to grieve. that's deep. us through them—
see us frantically buried.

uptown love song, pt. 2.

let me sit drip sweat with you fam
I am/only as I stand here with you
never abandoned but brought together
under the most unsuspecting
of circumstances
having circumnavigated these streets
draped in superhero capes from six flags
as the only reason
we need
to love
& sweat
& show our tears
made manifest through laughter
on uncomfortable couches
or the unstable steps of the back porch
we swat playfully at instigations,
wipe away the stains
left by real ones

maybe we have never before said out loud
what we are most afraid of,
whether that’s having someone else know
the real reason you haven’t changed ur clothes
wear long sleeves in summer
maybe sunglasses even indoors.

I have been
brought to my knees
by these poems smeared
on the silhouettes of these walls
breathing life into both
familial and unfamiliar
spaces
these poems exist
not as murals or memories
they ooze from the tips of our fingers
trailing every brick & black gate
every peace sign every wave
we muster to make some
kind of connection
our fingers
our poems
our people together weaving
our every truth
into an uptown story to be sung
whether muttered under
our breath like what the fuck
can’t take this anymore
or forced out like a rooftop yawp
that fills every restless lung
every rest of us afraid to speak
the cadence of our in-between tongues

let me tell you brother
I know what it’s like to have ur tongue tied
by years of silence across a dinner table

sing sister
the long low wail
of survival

we poets be
the crack between
a sidewalk and a dock
to leap off even if our only landing
be a lake not even named for this state
of mind

the illest noise be sacred
be our hands clapping together
taking back the rhythm of our hearts
disrupted from one too many times
being told you’re not good enough
this be believing
be the off-key reminder
of the truth we sing of our selves
as uptown we
begin as poems
we breathe
believe
we love
song.