last night I dreamt we drank
rose water until the room

spun

until you leaned over and vomited
white satin and pearls, sun

kissed

your lips until they bled
stains the shade of revlon into

mine,

I whispered, pressed against you
breathing fast on my skin 

He says, “you’ll take her
by the hand, take her
in a hotel bed, take her
to the fanciest restaurant
you can afford. Put on
a dress, a red one, put on
your highest heels, put on
some makeup for godsake,
look like a respectable human.”

He says, “you’ll hold open
doors, order the priciest wine,
kiss her just before dessert,
walk her home by the most
scenic route, call her
once you’ve left, call her
beautiful, smile a lot. Laugh.
Blush. Defer. Smile a lot.”

He says, “if she lets you
take her clothes off, do it
slowly; if she lets you
kiss her skin, do it
softly; if she lets you
stay the night, don’t leave
until you’ve made her
night, made her
morning, made her
breakfast. Steal
one of her shirts, steal
her heart, leave
something of yours there.
That’s how you woo a woman.”

But what if I kiss her
hand in the hallway, read her
poetry through her open window,
write at her desk while she
sketches my profile? What if
I stare at the way her
white shirt catches on her breasts
when she laughs, her
dimples, the art — ink
and scar tissue — climbing up her
arms? What if I write her
letters and what if I think of her
always and smile at her name?

What if I hold her
under covers while the rain
cages us in? What if I
draw on her skin and
kiss her shoulders and
hold her heart in my hands
while she washes off the dust?
Could I woo her then?

Three Thirteen was beautiful. Dark hair, fair skin, slim legs. She smelled faintly of sweet pea and a light waft of cigarette smoke when she walked past in a flurry of floral skirts and pastel cardigans. She was a delicate and shy kind of beauty, too unimposing to turn heads but graceful enough to halt the turn of the earth, to make gravity dance a waltz, and to make relativity bow.

For Jake, the laws of physics were not so obedient; he tripped up stairs and over limbs, inelegant and ungainly. Unobedient as well, to him, were the laws of fate, for the night Jake met this beautiful woman, the night she waved shyly from beside him and they spoke softly and she smiled and said, “Come visit me in 313,” he didn’t quite catch her name.

He was bewitched with this girl, this nameless silhouette, this enchanting figure just a few doors down. Each time her thin fingers jangled her room keys on their little Japanese keychain, he found himself thinking of her a little more often and a little more fondly. The memory of their brief exchange was stored in the forefront of his mind. It aged as a fine wine, just as gracefully as he believed some day she would. The kindness in her smile, the ever-so slight curve of her hips, the way her honeyed eyes had lit up the shadows and the shadows had repaid the favor by framing her charming smile just right, carving delicate lips like frosting roses, sweet and kissable — to him these things were the definition of captivating, of lovely, of heartbreaking foreign words for beauty in romantic languages he could never pronounce but would die to hear fall like petals from her tender mouth. 

 
Yet, even just a few rooms down from the door with the brass placard bearing the number 313, no one he asked on the hall seemed to know the name of this belle, this Aphrodite in kitten heels, this mystery woman with the long, soft curls. Everyone had seen her, outside for a cigarette or leaving her room in the morning, yet no one had spoken to her but Jake, so there remained the problem of identifying her by name, a problem which was not so much a problem as it was a thousand piece puzzle without corner pieces or a picture guide that Jake was determined to solve. 

Jake would not, could not talk to her without knowing her name. He knew she had said it when she had introduced herself, and to ask again would be to admit failure, to lose any chance of impressing her with his charming authenticity. He would lose the appearance of being the man who had talked to her for a reason other than her gently stunning looks, the man who had remembered her name. He would be admitting defeat at the hands of a roguish and poorly humored god, to give up any chance with her he had, to succumb once again to the wiles of fate and continue to drift, absent-minded, down the current of his dolefully unexciting life.

And so he set off on a personal odyssey of sorts to ascertain the name of the lovely Three Thirteen.  

Certain questions pertaining to her character and habits were easily discovered. From the fluttering laughter emanating from behind her doorway, he knew that she was easygoing and spirited; a quick visit to the cafe revealed that she spent $4.25 on a large latte every morning; an overheard conversation in the dining hall determined her course schedule (Sociology, Biological Anthropology, Organic Chemistry, and Dance — all but the latter conveniently placed close enough to his own that he could assure he would be able to accidentally run into her at nearly any moment he desired if he took the right paths between them); and a note on her door informed him that her friend Emma was “looking for you earlier, bitch, give me a call!” He could devise a plan to find her whenever he pleased, but still the mystery of her name continued to evade him.

Even with the new-found information, Jake knew he could not accomplish this feat alone. He flirted with the idea of conspiring with this Emma, whose dirty blonde hair and tall, slight figure he’d seen around the hall as well, but he worried that Emma would warn Three Thirteen of his insincerity and then all would be for naught. Instead he decided he would enlist the assistance of the man in 314, a heavily accented Jamaican film major by the name of Aristotle who he often saw speaking to her in the hallway in the mornings, who sat next to her at dinner one night, and who may have been enrolled in her elusive mid-afternoon ballet class.

Explaining the situation to Aristotle was more difficult than Jake had anticipated. Though Aristotle, unlike his namesake, had little desire to ask big philosophical questions, it was the small ones that Jake found stunning. The problems, it seemed, lay within his own mind, namely in the fact that it wasn’t until he spoke it aloud that he realized just how far he had fallen. He was past the point of mere infatuation; every time she waved at him in the hallway as he passed her on his way to the shower, he drew closer and closer to something he might someday consider love.

Aristotle listened compliantly to his tale, nodded slowly, and asked, “Three thirteen, yeah? I know her but I don’t know her name. You want I should ask her?”

Jake thanked him, smiled, and though partly relieved that the hard part was over, felt anxious at the prospect of having to wait until the next convenient time that Aristotle would run into her in the hallway or class.

Aware that in his room he’d be too busy listening for strains of her mellifluous voice drifting in conversation through his door, Jake decided that he’d best study in the library until he heard back from Aristotle. The library was silent and bright and didn’t smell like sweet pea and wasn’t at all mysterious, so he thought that maybe the book he’d picked from the shelf would be able to grab his focus for a few hours. Yet, his mind wandered from the flickering of the light over his head to the way her shoulders shook up and down gently when she laughed into the crook of her arm, hiding a sweet, shy smile. It wandered from the wrinkle in the pages to the way she walked toe-heel instead of heel-toe when she was barefoot and jingled her keys up and down in her hand absently when she was enjoying a conversation, from the smoothness of her cream-colored skin and the weight of her hand on his arm.

He closed the book decisively, realizing that libraries were probably the worst places in the world for a man in love, and moved to the stacks to put the book back and leave. Weaving between the shelves, he absentmindedly scanned the spines of each volume, searching for the right letters, the SAL he needed to signal to him to stop, slide the book back into place, and head back to his room. But similar to the letters on the page, these letters danced together, forming names, Emily, Laura, Charlotte, Rebecca, Amanda, and he scanned through each one, hunting for familiar syllables that might form the elusive name he had sought for so long. And as he drew closer and closer to the name, definitely an R, but was it an A or an E that followed? he could nearly smell her on the air in front of him, the musty, flowery scent of pressed petals and cigarettes, and the—

The front of his face felt warm as he fell, his cheeks stinging, his chapped lips damp with sticky blood, and he hadn’t even realized that there was another person in the entire building until she panicked, dropping her books, and said (rather loudly for a library), “Oh my God, I think your nose is broken! Did you hit the shelf?”

He opened his eyes, slowly, dizzy, propped himself up on one arm, and nearly fell to the ground again when he recognized Three Thirteen’s golden eyes looking directly into his as she pulled a tissue from her pocket and reached to wipe the blood from his face.
Now, it wasn’t the pain in his nose or the adrenaline of his fall that started his heart racing faster and made his breathing ragged. It was sheer panic that he wouldn’t be able to escape thanking her by name — a name he still didn’t know — and that all his efforts would be for nothing. He opened his mouth to say something.

“Shh,” she responded. “Don’t want to get blood in your mouth, do you?”

And then, “Hey, don’t I know you?”

Jake nodded, slowly, glad for the excuse to keep his traitorous mouth shut, not to reveal the fact that he had forgotten her name, not to unveil himself as the disingenuous monster he felt himself to be. And then, Three Thirteen, with her honey-coated voice, began to speak again:

“We talked the first night we were here. Joe, right?”

I thought maybe she looked like
David Bowie, as she sidled past me in the bar,
all glitter and
sharp angles and a soft swell of
breasts under flannel
and who would have thought
a goddess like that would be nearsighted? but
her glasses looked great on
my bedside table and
I think maybe people on Venus could have heard
her scream.

I woke with my
head
shoved inside
a toilet, spilling
ethereal vomit like
I’d been injected with some sort of
holy nitrate
straight into my veins, a
consecrated toxicosis, systemic venom purging
the transgressions
from my lips
with
acid
bile
transcendant vitriol.

I need a
doctor, a hedonistic
healer with a
degree
in
blasphemy, with a
little case full of potions and poisons
gin and sin and
something to drown out the
virtue
a sacrilegious medication to
desecrate
my
body
and leave me
broken
once more.

the gods have set me
wandering.

an omen, late that
night, whispered their
curse into my lips, 

destroyer of worlds,
you are nothing but a
sweet, sweet poison, a
nectar for the devils, and

won’t you stay a little
later tonight? she

divulged my fate and
held me there, and I
am so goddamn close—

so near to it I can feel
it moving inside my 
chest, the augury, the
end of time itself and

she sat there and watched
as I started to run.

my prophet came to me
bleary-eyed, mad and
shouting, holy and
broken, blind, skin-
tearing, raw-
throated, stumbling,
falling streaks painted from
the eyes of her grimy
mask, grabbed my shoulders,
shook me, bared her
teeth, screamed,
turned, left, and upon
departing prophesied 
one word, ghosting over
the broken skin of
her bleeding lips,

“live.”

I wrote your elegy from phrases found
on the backs of albums in the 
easy listening section of 
my brother’s old collection.

I painted the words on a tombstone
back in the woods behind my house
where I’d swear to god no one
could ever find it. 

I and Shelley, we mourned you together
as if our words came from one sorrow:
your fate and fame shall be an echo
of light unto eternity; I have inked

your words across my chest with
trembling fingers, shaky letters sprawled
across my skin because Keats,
you are my Bright Star—

would I were stedfast as thou art.

The town was quivering with whispers the day little Tommy Hannigan walked into the sky. He wasn’t the first of the kindergarten students to do it, but none of the others had been the son of the mayor. His mother had tearfully told her sister about how they had been walking, hand in hand, past the town houses on South street, just past Main, when his balloon began to drift and she froze up like an ivory gargoyle and all of a sudden he was going, going, gone until the clouds began to cover him all up. Her sister had, of course, broken the news to his weeping teacher, and they had been overheard by the grocery store clerk, who had told the waitress and the bus boy, who had in turn told the entire town but the mayor. 

Little Tommy Hannigan had always had this thing about balloons where he would draw faces on them and cry every time they popped, and his mother never told his father just like she didn’t tell his father that he had walked into the sky. The mayor had reluctantly overheard the mailman telling the milkman on his walk home from the office.

The murmurs that circulated each and every doorway said exactly the same thing. Because they knew about Laura Hannigan and what had happened with that boy from the next town over, and they knew that the mayor and his wife had not heard from her in nine months and so they couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Laura Hannigan hadn’t run away to be with a boy, but had run away to get away from something else. Something had always been off about the mayor and his wife, and something had always been off about the way they treated little Tommy, as if he had some sort of sickness of the mind and they were afraid to let him be seen unsupervised.

Maybe, said the bus boy to the mailman, the sky is a better place for little Tommy Hannigan.

they say
some day, the sky will
burn,
they say we fight, they say
we yearn

for light
despite the lack of
sun,
by which to aim our 
loaded guns.

they say
the world will whimper
closed,
a dying match in a
toilet bowl.

they say
we fear what is 
to come,
but we march on, yes, we
march on.

your neuroses
come and go with
the weather, sunshine.
the varying touch of your
bone-thin arms, looped
around mine in a coffeeshop
deliniates the pathways of
the sun and moon across
the ceiling of your tiny little
world, just a small town, central
Ohio or upstate New York,
blended and smudged with the 
sun and absent with
the rain.

Elsie lies on a couch, her eyes wide open. She speaks at the ceiling. Her movements, though infrequent, are sudden and frantic, her gestures are jerky, and she speaks with a rapid questioning tone, even when making a statement. She moves from one phrase to the next with something halfway between a drunken-sounding slur and a stutter. Perhaps, once or twice throughout her speech, she pauses between sentences to lay her head down on the arm of the couch as if she is trying to go to sleep, but she never quite makes it.

ELSIE: My friend Helen emailed me this story about some World War II Russian sleep experiment the other day. They put the subjects in a chamber filled with gas that would keep ‘em from sleeping and watched what happened. After the first few days, the subjects started screaming until one of them shredded his vocal chords and then they started ripping their skin off and stopping up the drains and covering the windows with their own shit until the scientists opened the door and found them laying in an inch of piss with their intestines spread across the floor and they started begging not to have to sleep and refusing surgery and claiming that they had seen what the rest of humanity didn’t dare to look for. Helen ended the email, “please go to sleep, Elsie.” It’s… funny. That’s not what insomnia is. It’s not a screaming, skin-tearing, holier-than-thou problem. It’s a quiet disease that sneaks up on you and peels your eyelids back so it hurts to blink. It slowly fades, not into madness, not into horror-movie insanity, but into apathy. Into surrealism. With no time to dream, you start dreaming while you’re awake and in the small spaces beween all of that nonsense you have time to think. But you don’t want to think. You can’t think if you expect to make it through the day into another night of staring at the patterns inside your eyelids. Because when you think, you start to realize… Well, dreams aren’t pretty things when you’re really concious of them. Once you’ve woken up, they seem so nice. But when you’re living them… People’s faces shift and locations melt together. First you’re one place and then the walls move a little and you’re somewhere else even though you didn’t move any. She doesn’t understand. Helen, that is. Sometimes I’ll be talking to her and she’ll have tentacles or she’ll be my great aunt Milly. She thinks I’m doing it on purpose. That I’m chosing not to sleep. That’s like… choosing to be gay. The thought of it is just absurd— hmm?What did you say? Oh, sorry. I must be hearing things. I thought you asked me something. You’re starting to look a bit like old Milly too. Look, I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m not crazy. I’m not dangerous, right? I’m not going to start tearing my skin off or anything, right? I’m just going to grow slowly more vacant until I’m gone, right? I’m just going to waste away, watching the dots moving all over your desk and watching your ears twitch and feeling that stomach-drop like I’m falling even though I’m sitting in class, right? It’s okay that I’m not sleeping? My great aunt Milly would sometimes go for days without sleeping; she was a writer. I don’t know if it was insomnia or caffeine but my grandad says that he used to wake up at four in the morning to pee when they were still living together and he’d hear the clicking of the typewriter from up in her room. Maybe that’s what I should do. Channel all of this weird dreamstuff into a poem or something. I don’t want to tear up my vocal chords. I like talking. Is that weird? That I like talking? I don’t think it is. I think… I think everyone likes to hear themselves talk. It reminds us that we’re, for the most part, alive. Right? Sometimes I’ll be sitting in class and I’ll forget that I’m real and I’ll have to raise my hand and say something just to make sure I’m still there. Usually it’s something completely unrelated to class— oh! and sometimes I’ll be sitting in class and my teacher will be talking except all I’ll hear is the sound of a typewriter. I don’t know if it’s the teacher or it it’s me. I think it’s probably me because Helen usually has to give me her notes so I don’t fail. But, look, I guess what I’m trying to say is this: am I crazy? I don’t think I am. I think… I think… I just wish I could go to sleep.

A play in one act.

This is where we used to chain smoke
butts littering the ground -
a collage of cigarette lights
spotting the places where we lay;
mornings and midnights and everything
in between us, we lay.
We and our hopes and dreams who lofted
above us, mingling
with the branches and breezes and
for some reason I found myself walking to the car
without shoes; to places where
some hookers get paid more than
my airplane ticket from New York to DC.

This is my dissertation on fear:


How Nietzsche told us
(or was it someone else? grade
school has abandoned me)
that we may stand on a cliff and fear for our lives
pray that we will not fall, yet
feel that impulse to let go and
jump And it is in this choice that we learn
what humanity means.
We can feel the pain of a broken body, mangled
for the same price as a week’s worth of smokes
or we can stay on the roof with the sun, learn
what pain really is:
a half-full mug of coffee and a leaking blue pen
in a dark room at dusk - and
whether it is anxiety or dread
it grips our spine, cold-handed, in 
eternal reverence, that we may 
never be free of this instinct.

Is it twelve fifty four and am I really
squinting the darkness out of my eyes
to see my painted fingers in the cool light of the computer
or is it merely a lofty dream
still accompanying my midnight cigarettes 
buzzing somewhere around my ceiling
as the summer mosquitoes move in through
the holes in my age-old screen?

How else would you put it?


The tangle of your hair
dirty and smoky in a crowded room
of workers or dancers or somewhere outside
under a tree
in that place where we used to puff away old stories
lighting our tips off each other
so we wouldn’t have to steal matches from the drug store
There were old petals thrown out a window and
sometimes we would burn them too
just to feel destructive to something other than ourselves because
it really was all about cataclysm
of something or the other and
maybe it was all about self sacrifice
or just self harm
when it felt so good to by mutilated
and know that you were the reason.

A ticket from New York and I stayed
frightened to return to the place I once called home
where coffee was a beverage not a lifeline
and matches were used for scented candles in the bathroom
not cigarettes; and
where were you then?


In a building somewhere, a girl cries
and with her an angel without wings weeps over your body
that lies shattered on a street corner
somewhere between Boston and LA
The places you said you’d go and never did when you were tied down
by all the things you said you’d do
And if you taught me one thing it was that we all end somewhere
and if I ever learned anything it would be that
when all is said and done
the greatest thing is to have something to mourn for.