Muse

A knot of words lay stark naked
Somewhere that was nowhere
Along with the rest of the scrap 
Claiming to adorn the world

People thronged in gullible clusters
Making brash evaluations
Many were hard in love, lapping
Up inexpensive romanticism
Bespectacled scholars drew up
Lavish summaries and bestowed
Yes, bestowed upon me honours
Of repute and fine print.

I stood amused, clutching the phone
As you put on your socks, kind
But carelessly dismissive of how
Good things happen to bad people.

Wasted Cigarettes

It is almost cold and almost midnight

And I am on a low balcony pockmarked

With cigarette stubs, making small talk

To another unwitting, almost bored stranger.

We are speaking of how I have never 

Quite learned how to smoke. He notices

That I have some trouble holding in the

Fumes and nursing them in my alveoli.

And we laugh about how terribly funny

It is, because of all the toxins that I have

Hoarded in my lungs, like the condescending

Whispers of success stories and the 

Deafening screams of selfish anxiety, like

The towering masts of unattainable futures

and unrequited affection, the wispy blanket

Of cigarette tar would be the least poisonous. 

Father's Day

We are stuck at a traffic light

The one under the flyover they are taking forever to make.

The car smells like 

Cologne, home and starlight

The plastic wrapping of the barbie dolls 

The first time we listened to "In My Life"

The unitary method sum I got woefully wrong

The note inside the hardback origami book which says "For baby, '93"

The day we craned our necks to watch "Dinosaur" at the Rex
The night you got me my first, beautiful fountain pen that I lost anyway, but you forgave me.

Every time you have dialed the long distance call and I did not let you hear my voice quiver.

Every time I have breathed sharply hoping I would be, even a differential closer, to being you.

Every time you did not say you were proud of me, but I knew you were, I think I did.

Every time I have tried to write this but ended up howling myself to sleep.

I imagine we will small talk about the crumbling city
And merge into the sweaty, patient crowd
United in our awkward, dispassionate affection.
And this is enough, this is bliss, this is us. 

Chessboard

For the third time that day, Julio was walking the length of Walnut Street. The drunken tramp was still ladling obscenities at everyone near 18th, and a very non-committal protest had broken out in grounds of the university near 33rd. But it was the first day of summer and the joggers near the Schuylkill trail were breaking into the running shoes they had bought at full price. Clumsy tourists flocked in mild disappointment near the Liberty bell on 6th, and children fumbled about in overalls  at the train station near 50th. But it was the first day of summer, and there were holiday rainbow lights perched on the window of the tattered apartment of a girl Julio used to see a few months ago.
He walked across Philadelphia like it was a juvenile grid of roads and people and dogs and rickety buildings. On few days the city walked with him, but mostly it was too tired.

Julio drove a cab for money in the evenings, all the way into midnight. At the brief training program by the cab agency, he was instructed to be warm and cheery, ask for music and heating preferences. He was instructed to sympathize, apologize and organize convenience for his passengers. Julio did this by crushing the remains of his cigarette and rolling down the windows.

He had moved to the city as an apprehensive grad student, trying and failing miserably to cultivate an aura of effortless ambition. Stumbling through his classes, eating cold pizza and drinking inexpensive beer by the river, he fell into a liking, if not love of the chessboard city. Then he met the girl, Anna, found himself in fatal obsession with her freckles and open toed sandals. For the first time in his life he would wake up and want to kiss her on the forehead, tickle her while she picked her avocados. He surprised her with flowers at the coffee shop during her shift breaks, read his favorite children's stories to her in bed. She was pleasant but not overtly remarkable, but the manner of their meeting in a second-hand book store, the unfolding of summer with drinks before and after dinner, made Julio seize her like all the poetry that would walk into his life, singing of destiny and happily-ever-afters. He did not absolutely believe that, but like all cowards oscillating between the pits of cynicism and clouds of euphoria, he held on tightly. He did not exactly tell her that he might be in love, knowing fully well that she would laugh sarcastically if he did.

This went by in a few blinks, and it was not surprising when Anna, an ambitious girl of twenty three, slipped out of the city in the last Greyhound to New York, to look for a job while she lived with some friends. Julio did not exactly ask her not to go, he stared blankly at the ceiling as she packed. You need to be more put together and grown-up, she insisted. You have talent, you just needed direction, she insisted. I never meant to hurt you, she insisted.
Over the last days of summer, Julio drank excessively, exchanged wads of money for poor quality marijuana at the fringes of the city, bothered strangers with loud descriptions of how Anna had broken his heart, how Philadelphia had broken his heart.
He also found his bittersweet excuse to drop out of school, completing the final chunk of a painfully cliched story he would never write.

The years that followed were slow and comfortable in their monotony. At the brief interview for his driver's job, he dramatically broke down and rendered a version of his break-up. His passengers would be treated to similar renditions, though they grew violently tragic or sweetly nostalgic, depending on his mood that night. In the theatrical ones, Anna had left him for an ugly millionaire, leaving the humble engagement ring he had given her on the dresser. In the lighter ones, she had been cheating on her husband with him, and he had discovered their hideout. Their reactions were varied; some of the young people would shift uneasily and avert their eyes, trying to talk about the awful heat wave they were expecting, while the more sensitive ones would cluck their tongues in mild sympathy. The daintier older women would gently pat his shoulder and wipe a tear while their solemn husbands would ask him to get it together and move on, because he deserved happiness.

Julio went to bed in the early hours of the mornings, fuller and rounder from sips of pink wine and feedback he had garnered. He cut the calls from his mother, who was harried from her own divorce, living her days frivolously and bitterly. She texted him with details of more respectable jobs she could get him, which he deleted. He cut the calls from the few friends he remembered from college, consciously trying to forget every stray memory that did not fit the story of tragic lover/loser he had weaved. He dated sparsely, every girl leaving his apartment angry and hurt. Around midday he awoke and greedily ate croissants from one of the bakeries where he believed he had sat across from Anna, tracing his fingers over a spot she had probably laid down her glasses, and making sure the servers knew. After that he walked across the city he still accused of betraying him, looking for the direction he was determined not to find. In his seeming insanity he remained calm and steady, fulfilled by the unhappiness he wallowed in.

It was his sixth ride, the night was still young. He stopped the car while one of the skinny girls retched by the bushes. "She used to drink too much, Anna. One time she broke the heel of her shoe and I had to carry her all the way home.", Julio was telling anyone who would listen. He heard a nearly passed out girl ask her boyfriend if he would do the same for her, and smiled with what he believed was a pained expression. The drunken party was dropped off at a holiday inn on Spruce, and they fist-bumped him gratefully.
One girl remained in the cab, fiddling with her earphones while Julio tried to look at her pleasant, unremarkable face. She seemed quite disinterested in his story. When he pulled over outside her house, she came up to his window and tapped on the glass.
"Goodnight Julio. It was nice seeing you again".
He looked down at the name on his phone and burst out laughing. 'Annabel Carter', it read. He was still laughing when the lights went out, one by one.
Julio had forgotten, or perhaps never really known Anna's full name.

Cheerless dusk through dusty shades 

And lodged on the floor of my closet 

I unpack a box of Lego blocks

In blindingly cheerful colors.

The instructions are bold, concise bullets.

I build an unkempt room

A bitter morning when I

Memorized the unremarkable ceiling

Dotted with lonely fruit-flies.

The instructions are cold, apathetic bullets.

I build a dying forest

The brittle twigs rage against 

Ashen leaves that have turned

Enemies after petty, pathetic quarrels.

The instructions are faded, yellowing bullets.

I build my memory of home

The cool tiles and sonorous walls

Forbidden liquor under lumpy sweaters

My mother rereading Jane Austen.

There aren't enough pieces for that one. 

Deer Crossing

Winter

I had known her for a while. She had dimples on both cheeks, though the one on the right cheek sunk deeper than the other. I wasn't in love with her. I only noticed because I liked to look at the way she laughed. I wasn't in love with her. But she would smile wide once, straighten her lips and laugh aloud till there were tears in her eyes. I wasn't in love with her. But we didn't have a car so I insisted she put her right hand in my left pocket. I wasn't really in love with her. But she woke up to wildly graphic nightmares and we disabled the fire alarm and smoked cigarettes while she described them to me.

I don't think I loved her.

But it was colder than usual that year and New York was a giant glowing icicle and we walked gingerly on every avenue, going into shops that smelled like candy and marijuana. 

I was in business school. Abigail, let us call her Abigail, because her name isn't really Abigail, scoffed when I told her that. She scoffed again when we were at the foot of the lighthouse in Montauk, watching the cold sea trying to crack open stoic, brown rocks. 

"This place, doesn't it make you want to melt into it? To be one of the maroon pebbles, just an inch under the water. And you still want to wear a suit and work from behind a glass window. "

I was irritated.

"It isn't the worst thing in the world, making some money. Maybe I will make enough money to buy a house in the Hamptons"

"Well I could never do it. The best lines I write are on kitchen towels when I am hungover"

Abigail was a poet, did I tell you Abigail was a poet? I mean she fancied herself a poet. She was all the idealistic, whimsical, impulsive dreamy crap that I envied. 

"Abigail, it's a fine evening and we are twenty three. But you don't really know what you want, do you?"

"Oh, but I do. Don't you?"

I think I blushed, even in the cold air. I felt viciously uncomfortable.

"I mean, nobody has got it all figured out. This was a change. And I like New York. I like you."

She rolled her eyes. "I can't picture you in a suit. Maybe an ill-fitted suit."

I clenched my fists. I couldn't be in love with her. I was so wildly jealous of how every hair on her body had found freedom and decided to stay in it. 

We stood in silence, till the sea engulfed the sun and the cold seeped into our hearts.

New year's eve. We went ice skating in Bryant park. When she fell on her elbow we decided to sit down by the stone fountain. They had turned off the water. There were children all around, whining and blowing their noses. An impeccably dressed gentleman asked if I could take a picture of him with his disgruntled date. 

"Do you go to college here?"

"I do, sir, Columbia." 

I could feel Abigail fidgeting beside me. She disliked new people.

"I had a cousin there. He dropped out though. Went on to become a poet."

His date snorted loudly.

"He wrote those poems that don't rhyme. A real hippie."

I could not stop myself from being utterly petty. 

"Yeah, do you know anyone who is a poet these days? Like, is that a real job, even?"

I thought Abigail would roll her eyes and preach to me later, loudly and drunkenly about the wastefulness of my halfhearted pursuits, and how I was just malicious of her freedom. I thought Abigail would stomp the ice and I would catch her as she slipped and sigh as I listened to her rant. But she didn't do anything. I heard her crying in the shower. When she came out I asked her if she would watch the Amy Winehouse documentary. We didn't really talk that night. 

The evening before she left, we had cherry wine sitting beside the heater, and she gave me a blue tie with a handwritten note. I wasn't in love with her. But we effortlessly belonged in movie screens. I couldn't be in love with her. I attributed it to the snow and the city and youth.

**

Summer

My wife and I bickered all the way to the hospital. The air conditioner was out of order and she hated rolling down the windows. It upset her hair. It also upset her that we did not spend much time together. I loved her sometimes, when it wasn't so hot in New York.
We lived in a sleepy hamlet now, where families of deer crowded behind the barbed fence. I sat outside on summer nights and looked at their delicate gait. Sometimes when we were driving, we would find them at deer crossings, staring at the two of us, calling us out on our quiet insecurities. My beautiful angry wife and I. 

She told me she hated my guts and my headphones and the coffee rings I left everywhere. She told me everyday when I did not have the headphones on. 

I did not mind. I wrote about it. My beautiful angry wife. It was comic sometimes, tragic sometimes, always familiar. My readers sympathized. One even wrote me a heartfelt letter about how I should've stayed with Abigail. It was amusing. 

I stopped the car and played with a tie discarded on the dashboard. Blue silk. My wife gathered her things. I loved her sometimes, in pieces. 

"You really should get your life together. I need you to meet me in the middle. I can't fix things for both of us. This isn't a real job", began my wife, Abigail, the nurse. 

"You're just jealous because I know what I am doing."

I turned up the music as I watched her stomp away. 

For A

I watch the train curve around 

The bend, my feet almost trot on 

A reflex, the steel rails brace me 

To turn icy and shake it off,

Another tradition, for me.

For us.

I will clean my room with 

Headphones on, I will even hum

To myself, I will stop and reminisce

At every cookie crumb and sweater

Another tradition, for me.

For us.

I will wear my noisy boots and

Walk alone through polished halls

The cello and piano will not quite

Startle me, not without your whispers.

Another tradition, for me.

For us.

It is easy, I know, to move weightlessly 

Alone, ghost towns do that to you, how

When you finally decide you are ready to

Roll the window up, the sun has set already.

Another tradition, for me.

For us.

I have an eye and an ear for pretty things

For inky skies and loud lovemaking, 

I miss it though, us thinking the same things 

At the same time, not having to speak.

Another tradition, for me.

For just us.