Fragment

herbal in the end, erased, the
basement and the bunch
of lavender hung
upside down
and dry
we

are
heading out
on time to beat the
traffic like we can't remember
Monday's not the day to go back home but should be.

Look. The panic's gone. The mania, the joy. 10 years of feeling normal and for what?
It's late. It's February. Leap Year. Tell me if you're not ok, I dare you.

Deja Vu

Baseline, old haunts,
while walking in a new place found
the same place as my early memories
bald grey trees, tiny gorge
the people walking slowly towards

a celebration!

Ah, but then, my head a
mossy topiary fell with
foam core chipped along the ground
my twiggy neck my trunk the pot
what hath my melancholy wrought!

31

What am I doing.

Amazed by the speed of sleep

my father says he's afflicted

only with nostalgia, while

everyone else's depression takes

a windier shape, while mine is

generational but not from him or

is just dietary or is not even real,

is maybe also just nostalgia.

Do you ever just mean to get

the classic meal? I want to be

getting classic meals and also

really be on it, be a good person,

fight for justice and clams casino,

iceberg salad and remembering to vote

in local elections, a radical marriage of

Do you want to be in a radical marriage of

in it as like an idea that's part of it not

like a half of it. Even to say halves is not

radical I guess it would be a radical marriage

of classic meals and civic responsibility and

ALSO of generational depression, and that's

the radical triangle; there's no radical line;

It's three points or you're dead just regular

a 31-year old woman with a modest salary

in a big city.

Files

Old computer waiting to become more sentimental

tonight could be it, with snow outside, remembering

Januaries more than other months, Januaries and Julys,

The J's, old computer, what a word for a poem, obscene

U, lists of people in pictures, thinking of a computer like

a perishable basket, a non-living thing in my house that will

die in addition to the five living things in my house that will

die, and the television and all the appliances and the deck

and the roof, if a basket dies who feels that most deeply, who

has ever "felt" the "death" of a "basket," me if that basket, holding

things that have no where else to be held, is a computer, waiting

for the wave of care that's yet to begin, with snow outside, in January

Loading

Database of the present password reset
momentary separation of self from datapoint
a blip in the constant catalog and you're
behind forever; I need a space for the machine to fail
for everything to fail for a moment
so I'm not cataloging the last moment, the moment
before for the rest of my life, until the blip again
and then it's two moments and so on until there
is no present at all.

Waiting

Minutes until too late and then what, clock-watcher?

I'm three pages into a folder called "emotional reading" I'm

staying sharp.

A motion detector flips on and after it's off I remember I didn't bother to look.

What moved?

I was standing under an overpass again feeling my own motion unprivileged.

I actively waste every day.

An old woman with long white braids was waiting for the bus and then on it

when I got on later after giving up, getting nowhere faster than she was.

This is just about motion and stillness

and age, and justice. It's about planning.

It's not about justice. It's about inertia.

Why Bother

Cold like failure
technological fibers
cold because you hate yourself.

Do you hate yourself? Do you have long underwear?

Too wadded wet with disuse (somehow)
too hard won't die
less effective self-destructive
you let yourself
too cold
you're not
a mountain-climber
explorer
you're just

wearing the wrong clothes to work you probably eat high fructose corn syrup

wrong shoes
shit scarf you
try please just
try

Three Day Weekend

Unremarkable weekend I'll never remember
but live the longer for it, maybe
thinking I've held out so long and finding I'm right on track,
the same track, at a loss for astrological excuses
but still where everyone else is just because
our cycles have synched up, everyone I know
is a female roommate in the life events sense.

My mother is fighting with a friend
from high school he still loves her
but he disapproves and this is revelatory
in that it's always been true and in being
true for 50 years is maybe the big lesson
unless something else proves true longer and this
stops being true you never know what the big
lesson will turn out to be. She remembered why
everyone hated her one semester and 40 years ago
she had forgotten. I am almost 31 which means
I don't know the big lesson, thank god I am
too young in poetry years, I hope to live
long enough to remember something about high school.

Matt is crawling around on the floor I can zoom
out and think we've both lost it, I can zoom in and be
totally unaware and I get zooming so fast I can't focus
on anything and that's how I get from Friday to Monday night
with nothing to show. Once upon a time I had a whole
other vocabulary for talking about disappointment but now
I'm just going to say it. I think we should all work less but I'm
afraid of how little difference it would make.

Stayin In

Carnage carnage carnage!
I have one thread and it is local television
connecting past present and future
we all cried this week but I cry every week
I lost another goddamned hat -
I connect with past selves by a breadcrumb trail of
lost hats
I have two threads then, tv and hats, one the latter is personal
and one the former is communal, such carnage
this week and every week! I don't want to stay up
late anymore I'm tired of always feeling sick
and losing hats, crying next week and every week
having only two threads and essentially no hats
and certainly none of the sentimental hats
but that's my fault for having sentimental
hats in the first place.
Hats in the first place!

Trees

The liveness in my home is assured by the wind;

trees grown beyond an early vision 

past shade and guardianship to 

burdensome monsters called beautiful

like living inside a cathedral that might blow over. 

So each sound is impending doom;

a brick to crush the cat and a leak

to drown me in my sleep. So we are all

alive in here, live animals become cosmic

transported violently through space, so

Question

Six years ago I think
I hit upon a certain way of feeling
specific to Queens but possibly
extrapolated to parts of New Jersey
and maybe cities like Wilmington
or Albany but also with a European flair
and a Young Adult moralist edge and an 80's
art world feel (just barely) and this thing of
when you're all hanging out in the kitchen
of a place with no foyer just like
laughing and the light's not too bright.
Does anyone else know this feeling?
I think there's something wrong in it;
I'm fetishizing someone I shouldn't be,
I know this, it's wrong, how old
are the people in the kitchen? They get older
with me, interestingly I'm not there, everyone's
cool in a teenage way but they're forty now
then I'm walking alone under an underpass
it's cloudy, I'm making plans for later to
see a show, in the world with the kitchen
and no foyer it's summer and there's not
much to do in town but it's related to the world with the
show later although I think there it's Fall or
a warmish spell in late winter. I had this feeling
for the first time in months just now and I wanted to know
if I was in good company.

Sense Memory

Write one-handed in bed like this always.
Remember what it's like to close the door to your own room.
Unpredictable grief.
Remember other winters buried in bed;
I always only remember other summers, a disservice.

How old was Falstaff and how old's that in my years now;
does it say, do I betray my ignorance?
If I wasn't so sick I'd drink a sack of sherry.
How old will old be when I am the age that is?

Remember to tell me if you're ill,
you promised me today but we have so far to go.

Drop

are the animals going crazy

with this weather. Well. 

I heard the squirrels are getting fat

"it" goes down by 30 degrees tonight.

"It" kept me alive last night, the air

and I'm always surprised to feel "it"

change, a time-lapse like a bud or

water filling a void. I have a pile

of clothes to clean but my hand skin

won't survive the folding. Can you

imagine? I always say, if I were so weak.

Do I leave my merriness behind, soon?

a known liar still loved is loved all the better,

but what if the weather keeps me 

too close; what if I

am going crazy with this weather. Well. 

Errands

Today I went to two big stores.
Or, it was three. Three big stores,
and two fairly large before. A sunset
meditation like real
January style but in the company of live lobster,
sheet cakes, clearance clothes. January health
style, winter fruits are what, citrus? January
citrus, the size of these stores unreal
acceptance of the wait, no one complaining
I worried about the less beautiful of the grocery stores,
I identified with it though I'm sure
I don't politically align with the CEO of Stop&Shop
I wouldn't know because we're no longer reading the news
I can hear my news in the store
I can live via radio
I can stare at live lobsters now that
I am a grown person

Snack

There is no good way to separate hunger from any other feeling and if you think there is you're lying.
To separate hunger from any other feeling, you're lying.
You're lying if you think there's any way to separate hunger, from any other feeling.
My outside-in emotions start with the temperature and travel towards the gut.
You think you're lying. My emotions are all outside-in. I consider hunger external,
I consider hunger an emotion.

Straight Home From Work

Dream-fulfilling onion cooking
one time a long time ago I asked
someone I no longer know to tell me
what to write a poem about and he said "garlic"
and I did. My wild years.

Tonight I am at home. I'm not often at home
on the couch, the pod of life
I turned the tv on and now I'm ageless
if the cat has cancer it's my problem
if it's warts that's life

I heard my mother's voice
in a home video, before my birth and
she had that woman's voice they had
she doesn't now, will I have a voice
that reflects decades

It's not a question it just is. I am at home.
How many of our mothers had that voice
in their wild years, whose mother's years
were wildest, what is the most
important thing to make a play about

I'm asking for a friend. What matters now
the choices are rage, joy, fear and outer space.
Is outer space anything to me without my anger?
Can I pick just one or would I rather none?
I would.

Fat Cat Tuesday

place-based stuff is all the rage.
Art, theater, food, books, buildings, feelings, illness, neuroses, fibers, images, dreams, relationships, paperwork, fireworks, laws, design, you can get a grant for all of these if it's about where you are. Stuff is the word I have left to connect me to reality, not "objects" not "things," I can't care about things or objects that are about where I am, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to live my life as a tourist on a working vacation now that it occurred to me to do so this morning. This is a place-based decision that I hope to be able to fund.

Not even frostbite at all

letting a body get too far into feeling bad like it's imaginary,
the body and the bad. And then the bad-feeling body creeps
in and starts speaking and won't stop, getting further into feeling bad
and showing it. Are these the only words there are, at the end, so
blunt and small? Who's going to quit drinking this year? What is it with quitting.
I want the body to feel better but it's feeling bad is justified only by feeling worse.
Did I hit my head? Am I a child? What is worse than not enjoying a whole day.
It's the world's greatest failure. Then if the body's feeling bad it might as well be the world's
greatest failure of a body. There might be worse, but do you know them? Not really.
If my success or failure is tied to my ability to enjoy a day then will I be a bad parent
or be bad at my job or jobs? Is it me I/we are talking about here? Is it the weather?
I am so overwhelmed, guys, I have a million ways to plan and they're all terrible.
How much power do I have? Bad or good? I'm really talking about me, here
but I'm not me talking.

Space

As a person unaware of space commenting on architecture I

become even less aware of space; the distance from me to a word

and why I can't read it or whether it's safe to drive or cross the street

or if I'm about to embarrass myself or if I'm making it up because

having been affected by a room it's plausible that no one knows

when to cross the street or if it's safe or what the sign says but

I am just too afraid of depth.

New Year's Toast

A glass of water on the ground;

last night I moved a shoe imagining

my own true love would trip on it

organized many glasses of water, for myself

and him for I am weaker-gutted than I was - 

I spent the night awake, at the window

or cutting my toenails, like any day but later

so grateful for the marking of the time and

looking for new words in 2016 to mean grateful

for I've been told that one is done. A glass of water, 

shoes, the bathroom in the middle of the night, a window,

toast, orange juice, my own vulnerable feet and other feet I love,

things to trip on, beholden or pleased or indebted? Obliged, thankful,

a toast of water, late morning.