The Crush

Boy, the first time you sat down next to me

(in a fucking team meeting, mind you)

all I wanted to do

was teach you the significance of every

syllable of the word

fellatio.

 

Fella, you got it all. I try not to objectify you

but damn it if you don’t

stick your ass out on purpose,

stretch so I can see your tattoo

smile like your lips are delicious.

 

It isn’t fair and you know it.

When we make eye contact

for brief moments

I know that you know that I know that you know

and maybe we should get to know

each other more… intimately.

 

Right, right, but I can help myself. I can resist

you and your chocolate eyes

and mocha skin

and toned arms

and fantastic legs

and tight t-shirts

and….

wait…

what was I saying?

 

Literally dude you are so distracting

and I promised myself I’d never entangle with you

but am I tangling with anyone else? hell no.

I don’t even know if you’re single.

I know you have a dog.

I know you are very strong.

I know the veins in your hands make me want you to bang me up against a brick wall.

 

I know you’ll be the death of me, boy.

So here, to survive a minute more,

in verse I vent the velocity of my ventricles

because I’m

very, very fucked.

 

 

Mantra

I am color and confidence.

I am faking it until I make it, without wondering

when that might be.

I am yoga on Tuesday nights and singing to a full moon.

I am singing to a new moon, too.

I am a lover of darkness and purveyor of the light.

 

I am worth it.

I am worth it.

 

I don’t know what it is, but I am worth it.

I am covered in love and am born from love.

I have love exploding out of me every single day,

coming in waves of light.

 

I am grateful.

My muscles are made of gratitude.

My eyes only see through the lenses of appreciation.

Look at me,

I am alive.

I am still here.

 

It counts.

Writing Through Transitions

During transition phases in life, it is easy to stop writing. The notebook gets buried under a pile of books, packed away in a suitcase, stuffed under bags of groceries. You lose pens. You lose the only pen with which you’re willing to write (for me, its a simple bic ballpoint – black). So you think, I’m tired, I should go to sleep. You tell yourself, The new episode of SNL is really good, I’ll watch that instead. So you go weeks and weeks without writing, when nestled just beneath the surface of your cool self-care is a lot of turmoil.

Transitions are turmoil by definition. A lot of people try to pretend by nature we are like birds, flying wherever we please, but I’ve always felt we were more like trees. I put down roots wherever I go. To rip those up and lug them 2/3rds of the way across the country is painful – emotionally, mentally, physically.

I just moved to Denver. I lived in Washington, DC for six months after my tenure in Brooklyn. That’s 3 major cities in a single year. Suffice it to say, I’ve had a lot of time to think about transitions.

They’re harder to write through than my morning commute. I made this blog because I didn’t want to forget that writing gave me life, made me feel like myself. Yet here I was, sitting idle and ignoring my pent-up emotions during some of the most important parts of my year.

Writing is cadence, is eloquence, is symphony of language, sure. But that is to the reader. To me, as a writer, putting words down on a page is like letting air out of a pressurized container (me being the container). It isn’t so much about what comes from it, but the act itself.

So now that I made it safely to Colorado, I am trying to write again. I am also trying not to put so much pressure on myself that it isn’t fun. Like most things in life, I think its hard to find the right balance. All I know is that writing keeps me sane and 2016 was a crazy year.

I don’t have a lot of wisdom, but I’d say, even if you aren’t a writer, to journal during transitions. That could be a career shift, moving, breaking up, getting together – any change that makes your heart thump a bit harder and your head swim if you think too hard about it. I’ve been keeping notes on post-it notes. There really is no wrong way to write. 

I Will Take Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Turn it Back to Lemons, and Squirt Them in Your Eye

Unsaid –

You never asked.

I never told.

I never wanted to take you to France.

You wouldn’t have known how to enjoy Paris,

enjoy that entire country that was built

on wandering.

Oh, I’ve never even seen you wander.

In all our years together, I never once saw you

without a purposeful step. Even when we walked

in the park you were taking me somewhere. I mourn,

if anything,

the fact that for the past four years I had a direction.

What nonsense that was. You forced me to consider

every step I took when, my whole life, I had been

dancing and skipping

here and there

without thinking about going forward.

10 Actions, 100 Days

Whether you marched yesterday or not, I believe it is important for us all to get involved in our government and our nation’s future. If you live in the US, now is a great time to stay involved on ways in which you can take real action to create change and ensure your voice is heard.

I just signed up to receive alerts from the Women’s March site, and I think you should too:

Women’s March Website

The actions are simple, and the website does its best to provide you all the tools you need to succeed.

If you aren’t in the US, it doesn’t mean you have to be silent about what is going on here. Whatever your political standing, whatever your opinions, however you feel, you shouldn’t be silent. You only get one world to live in, and one voice to shape it to be the best it can be.

A Poet’s Lament

The poet that fills me begs to miss you, to romanticize

what you did and who we were.

 

But, dear, you are coal mines, railroad tracks, 401k deposits.

You were the earth stripped of its poetry, of the flowers that die every fall.

You didn’t want to talk to me about death, or homosexuality.

You wanted to turn us into a steam engine, powering away,

proving its usefulness every single day.

 

I am not an engine.

 

I don’t even have one inside of me.

I subsist on glances between lovers, on the smell seeping out of a bakery at 5:34 am.

I survive because of the way socks cling to the bedsheets as they come out of the dryer.

I feast on the way women do their mascara, and cover their lips in red.

I thrive only because someone in France is crying right now because they heard

Baudelaire read out loud.

 

Oh, what a burden it is on a poet

to not have anyone to miss – no one to love forever.

We need that, us, this genre of citizen that thinks

a watch is only so good as how often it gets ignored.

Kansas

Peering out

the driver’s side window, I understood

that the world is flat and the earth is round.

Mountains are just wrinkles in her skirt,

and the rest has been ironed out.

 

I saw a chapel there, jutting out of the earth, nestled

amongst a lot of air. It was poetry

in its purest form, an expression of the exact feeling

that moves them to write. That moved me

to create for the first and the last time.

 

That chapel,

a testament to the human hunger

for faith in wilderness, reminded me

that my life has always been more

profound and beautiful than a morning commute.

Sand.

The sea may rile up during a storm, lash out

with terrible force, yet by the shore

one notices only the delicate

waves lapping a bit more eagerly.

 

I am the storm and the shore.

 

One cannot have sand without an angry sea

to make it. I shall break into pieces,

let the wind blow me this way and that.

 

The rush of the water smoothes the edges of my frayed heart,

making it maybe not whole again

but certainly more pleasant to have beating

in my chest.

Ever Blue.

My eyes were surprised at the seeing.

Perception and sight merged for a moment and the truth

leaked into me –

 

the sky is just as blue today as it was forever before.

 

I was baffled, at first, that the sky

would shine, the sun filtering through all the dust

floating around. That the sun would bother,

that the trees would bother

to rustle in the wind.