I have been busy outgrowing the wars.
I apologize.
With the arrival of my conscience
I have been embracing the hectic and building a tree house with it.

Be careful now,
Some people will never ask to borrow your collarbone,
They’ll just take it and wave like little children do.
Those people just wanna leave you to witness the downfall,
So that they can watch from the sidelines and giggle I told you so’s to the popular table during middle school lunch.
They live for battles.
I'd teach you how to survive their sting, if you'd let me.

It’s funny how some of us never grow up,
And some of us never stop.

No matter how far I stretch my fingers, my hands will never be big enough to extend across 400 miles of graveyard to understand your secrets. Mom told me that when I first met you I looked around your face as though I had known the man beneath it. Previously. In a life that's not my own. I wish that meant something now. Goddammit, I wish that meant something now.

Rewind five weeks
And you'll find me sitting across from my favorite strangers and our sixth bottle of wine
After jumping from restaurant to restaurant,
Telling our secrets through questions only the bold and drunk could ask without flinching

Fast-forward to yesterday and you'll find
20 teenagers only three weeks away from becoming college students
Downing shots of vodka with oreo chasers,
Falling off swing sets and dancing in the ocean
In an effort to make life a little sweeter and summer last just a little longer.

Rewind four weeks and you'll witness a plane ride huddle
Where we clutched each other's hands and giggled out our inside jokes through teary goodbyes
Perhaps thinking that if we held on tight enough
We would never have to let go.

They're just my stories.
But maybe they'll change yours.

Know that much before you push away the nursery rhymes and let fate determine your future

Because, well, it's just so easy to fuck up a good thing.

So explore your truth.
I'll be waiting.

I am always waiting.
But you know that.

And memory?
I've learned that it's far too easy to hid there
With the people who let me.

But I know those people loved me.

I just loved them much longer.
I always do.
I've never been too lucky in terms of reciprocation
But I just can't bare to lose the part of myself they gave me.
So, I clutch on tighter.
Perhaps thinking that if I hold on tight enough
They will never let me go.

Fireworks of sunset slipped through your car windows as we spilled our lives to the music and the haze.
You, a girl cursed with the eyes of a woman, told me I was naïve about life because I still believed in it
It’s an image I hope to have forever etched into the inside of my eyelids
So that whenever I blink,
No matter what time of day,
I can always return to that moment

The suburbs, the alcohol, the wrong words, the loneliness
It can tackle a year and turn the smell of comfort into a warped sense of disillusion.

We’ll never escape this place
But with magic ice cream blends, half a bottle of rum, and a couple ping pong balls
We sure as hell can try.
And we will.

But if we look closely enough,
Past the clutter of lacrosse sticks, beer cans
Million dollar homes
And the dreams our parents forgot about in order to buy them,
We’ll notice how gorgeous the asphalt looks in August
And how beautiful this town can be once we remember all the birthday wishes that came true while we were busy catching butterflies
And all those times we locked hands with our neighbors during a game of Red Rover
Secretly hoping that the boy on the other team would race for one of our arms,
Knocking us off balance and breaking the monotony.

We sure did crash into our wishes.
Miscommunication knows no age.

Rules

First
Marry the springtime and
Swallow the fall
It may feel like it was winter once
But never worry,
Summer always cannonballs back into the gold of our eyes

Second
Remember the street you once adored
And the boys that chased your pigtails
Past the white house on Lenox Road
Just so they could hold your hand over lemonade and cookies

Third
Let your family laugh at how much you move like your father
And embrace the strangers in restaurants who say that you and your mother have the same face

Fourth
Forgive the boys in San Fransisco so that the whites of every man's eyes don't resemble that night

Fifth
Realize you'll never be original
You are the combination of everyone you've ever known,
Every experience you've ever had,
Every shitty night and incredible day you've thrived in
You are everything

Sixth
Drift
Your way through Europe with as many best friends as you can count with fingers
And in Paris,
Write a love letter to someone you've never loved
And send it to whoever needs to read it most
Like the homeless man outside the church on Sunday mornings
Or the little brother who knows that the eldest was just a first draft despite the shadow he created
Or to the three girls that danced and drank their way through four countries in two weeks with their elbows locked in yours

Seventh
Love them,
Love them with all your sins
As you convince yourself that you don't just write
You're a writer.
Let them write you

Eighth
May your life always be like Prague
And next Thanksgiving,
May nothing be missing but the turkey

My doors have been open since September.
I know this—
Because I can feel the weather changing on my bones.

It’s not winter,
But it feels like maybe it was once.
I know this—
Because the wind’s breath lingers on my neck
And in between my toes.

I’ll never let these people go.
I couldn't bear to lose the part of myself that loved them.

He held my hand, silently promising with his ten thousand ladies that our kisses meant something. His lips raced for comfort. I think they found it somewhere between my earlobe and collarbone—between the fear of letting anyone get too close, and the wish for someone to want to.

He kissed the thighs of the wounded with a gaze that made me wonder if men knew how to fake those eyes.

He lived on my favorite side of the seesaw and did almost everything with a joke and a smile. Around 2 a.m. he said he could feel my heartbeat. I wonder if by breakfast the next morning it was a lie.

Give me one small square of an afternoon for that patchwork quilt I wished we had when the grass welcomed our knees and the mosquitoes welcomed everything. Oh sir, I must ask, with a tree growing out of my chest—why me?

Floor it, Beautiful.
You’re too safe for car wrecks.
Bite those nails like Mommy told you not to.
Go tell someone off.
Let beautiful people take your breath away.
Stop settling.

The man with the pretty cheeks can’t help you now.
You are half-caught between Southern arms
And mommy’s firm grip.

You owe happy to that canoe on the lake that listened to your fears.
And the island near by that held your hand to get over them.

Like barbecue summers and graduation gowns
You buzz like last season’s flashlight face
And convenience store protégés
That vomit comedy and then days of silence
Followed up by comedy and more days of silence.
The two of you would be perfect if it weren’t for the quiet.

Keep the quiet.
You’re perfect.

Family

Sometimes, I fall right.
I was eight years old when my chair tipped over
And left me breathless for what felt like hours.
My cousin Robby picked me up off the ground,
Handed me a five-dollar bill and said,
“Not cause you fell…
Just cause you’re my favorite.”
I smiled for weeks despite the bruises.

Sometimes, I don’t fall right.
I was in middle school when my cousin Sam and I went looking for trouble.
We found it.
We stumbled through the front door on a Southern morning.
Two fourteen year olds,
Thinking that squeezing our eyes tight would make us invisible.
We found my Uncle sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner,
Giggling to himself.
“Secret’s safe with me, your mom’s are out to lunch,” he laughed.
He was true to his word.
He always was.
I wished that just once he would punish us,
Just so I could know what his love felt like.
A year later our punishment came.
His suicide made us wonder if he ever loved anything.

Momma’s turning fifty-three this month.
That means she’s been a worrier for fifty-three years.
She can’t help it.
Too passionate, I suppose.
Too much heart.

My dad’s never been that way—he doesn’t worry.
He just dreams.
He’s a dreamer.
I wonder if when he’s eighty he’ll pull his head out of the clouds.
I know he won’t.
I love him for it.
I love him for so many reasons.

I can point to the days that I love him most.
There are a lot of those.

There are the days he covers for me when I’m an idiot.
These days are common.
He asks if I’ve learned my lesson.
If I say yes, he says he won’t tell mom.
I always say yes.
He never tells mom.

My favorite was the day he gave me a copy of his play,
Titled, “An American Family.”
He spent a year writing and editing it in his mind.
He spent a week pouring it down on paper.
Sometimes when looking at my father I have to look away.
I see too much of myself.

I remember my first day of rebellion.
It was Grandpa Lenny’s 80th birthday party at some swanky club.
Tom, Hill and I decided to go exploring.
Moronic.
And exhilarating.
We asked Lauren to come along but she was one too many champagne glasses down.
We knew this—
Because she was reciting Shakespeare, spread eagle on the pool table.
So, we did what any 19, 16, and 15 year old would do—
We took off for the basement through the storage staircase.
Clearly.
We stumbled around that old staircase,
Picking up “treasures” and fighting each other with them.
Nothing was off limits—
Brooms, old china sets, can-can costumes—
All fair game.
I fell over and over in fits of laughter.
We reached the bottom of the staircase in about an hour.
The door wouldn’t budge.
After minutes of Hillary and my struggles and Tommy’s jokes that would make any feminist cringe,
He decided to kick the door open.
This resulted in dozens of glass fish vases smashing to their untimely deaths.
Who says men are smarter?
Almost every guest saw the catastrophe spread out across the hallway,
And if they didn’t, they certainly heard it from the next room,
And likely came running to see what started the earthquake in Upstate New York.
We’d never seen Grandpa Lenny so pissed off and
We’ve never laughed so hard.

The story of Grandpa Lenny’s 80th birthday party is still a crowd pleaser at every Thanksgiving dinner.
The kicker is when we mention the forty guests that came up to us secretly
To thank us for saving them from taking home Grandpa Lenny’s party favor
Of 3 ft. tall rainbow fish vases.
You’re welcome.

When the woman with the blue eyes arrived I created a deliberate silence in hopes to not break the spell that she danced with. Each year she got closer in age to God as brilliance bled into her New Jersey bones. The world was hers for the taking so she took all of it. But her baggage was so full of insecurities that she had to sit on it to get it to close.

She was 18 years old and some days she wondered if she could see the universe from her bedroom window. She hoped this town could teach her everything. Like how to let go.

There were people inside her arms. They were the ones who’d died. They were the ones she’d loved. They helped her spread all the compassion that she kept piled up in corners. They spread it through embraces that never seemed to last long enough to take all the pain away.

The rain carried her home while her arms searched for a forever kind of freedom.

Venus

I stared wild-eyed at a painting of the Birth of Venus
And remembered the first woman who told me
I looked just like it

I wonder how she’s living
I wonder if her ears are ringing as I write this

Yeah, I remember her
She was a free-spirited youth,
Passionate with an edge of crazy
In the body of a forty-six year old Spanish teacher

Her imaginary friend was named bird
And her eyes sparked with the same caged freedom he flew with

She was never very good at standing still
That’s why I took a picture of her
It was the only time she wasn’t weaving her way in and out of history

When sleep came for her,
She fought it
She fought everything

There was never an angel inside of her
She was always inventing her own rules

The only things she believed in were freedom and adrenaline
So she made sure they found her
On the edge of a cliff,
In the place between a plane and the sky,
In the motivated arms of a dangerous boy

I knew her for twenty minutes
During the third, fifth, and eighteenth she told me I looked like Venus
During the nineteenth she said goodbye
By the twentieth I knew I would miss her

She’s the woman who always leaves first

Living in New Jersey, on the boarder of Asshole and Unproductive, I can hear the quiet hum of suburbia. Strangely enough, I like it. Sometimes I forget how beautiful this town can be when you look past the clutter of lacrosse sticks and beer cans. It’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in all of it. It’s easy to bury your head in million dollar homes and the dreams your parents forgot about in order to buy them. It’s easy to hate this place. But it’s worth it when you remember how gorgeous the asphalt looks in August and how many birthday wishes came true during recess when you were busy catching butterflies.

“You’ll never escape this place,” they tell me. I know it’s true. Thirteen years is too long to stay anywhere, but I’ve done it. I’ve endured the green and gold walls in this town along with seventy-one girls…seventy-one women. Somehow, I’ll miss it. I already do sometimes. I’ll miss the comfort in daydreaming about a life far away from a town much too small for me. I’ll miss the smiles and love that interrupted so many conversations. I’ll miss the friends that I loved far too late, sitting on cars outside of Magic Fountain watching our memories in light up sneakers. At the speed we’ve been going, we just may escape the fears.

Uncle Steve (edited)

I never noticed the glimmers of evil hiding under my Uncle’s fingernails. Don’t get me wrong, the construction work and bad decisions were evident, but the evil—that he became good at hiding.

He was so human.

I was born to believe in him. He was awfully beautiful some days. But someone must have been playing with his clocks. A minute would pass and a new year would begin. No time for resolutions. No do-over’s. No second chances. Just dirty work. Just a dirty man too full of regret to consider himself anything more than a boy; A dirty boy with evil under his fingernails.

There was suburban silence in his backyard. Even the crickets feared him, echoing speechless when his feet met their home. I never saw his evil, but I could hear how the pond in his backyard cried when he stepped in it. Handkerchiefs hung from my ceiling to catch every other drop that suicided from their home to mine. I never congratulated myself on the ones I caught. I just summed it up to luck as I memorized how heartache looked on the floor of my bedroom.

My Uncle was so eager to be a bad man. He knew what it meant to fail. He had shoes filled with pebbles and he resented being saved so we gave up trying on a Wednesday in Mobile, Alabama when the wind knocked him down with as much love as a big brother. He lay defeated at the wall where his mother marked his height until age fourteen and told him that with just a few more inches he could play pro-ball. He was 4’11. Momma knows best.

He thought with elbows and fists.

He loved with bullets spiraling out of the mouth like horror stories.

He was one of the drunks stumbling around town too frightening for company. Or perhaps, too frightened. Most nights I watched him pick dinner out of his teeth and wrote poems about how the moonlight worshipped the veins in his arms but he had lost the music at fourteen. There was too much winter inside his life. He let you down if you looked too close.

The big book of life told me he was no good. I didn’t believe it for a second until he ended it all himself, in the same way he entered the world.

Alone.

He quit. The evil, elbow man with pebbles in his shoes quit everything I stay alive for.

He had been kidnapped by bottles of scotch. He was a soldier in his own backyard.
He left an awful silence.

I drank Caribbean suns on a boat in San Juan with a gap toothed smile I never loved.

I thought for half a moment.
I still couldn’t remember how I got there.

I tried to cover the scratches painted on my hips from growing too fast.
The cats put them there.
The smile man kissed them.

Play me.
Play me, Springtime.
It's been done before.

I knew my innocence was left at second base
When history’s ghosts came to remind me that I’ve only known addiction to people
And to quit when the alcohol starts to taste like water and bad decisions.

I could only taste his lips,
Which breathed for more.

He was the beautiful Caribbean man they all whispered about.

He was kind
And I was tipsy.

That night was as intoxicating
As the liquor coursing through our veins and
Whatever it was that made me forget his name thirty minutes before he kissed me.

He must have been born to please.
I wonder who makes people that way.

I took the early morning walk of shame.
He held my hand the whole way.

But the bed sheets wouldn't let me sleep.
Not even for the last hour.
They remembered the spiders I'd swallowed in all my lives.
I wish they'd forget.
I'm good at forgetting.
I've mastered denial.
I shouldn't be so proud.

It was one of those nights only escaping could cure.

Momma

“You have the same face,” we heard for the fourth time that day.
“Nah,” we replied, still confused by the widespread idea that the apple fell so close to the tree.
We stared in a mirror. Shoulders touching, eyes moving back and forth as if watching a ping pong game rather than our own skin.
“I don’t get it.”
“Ditto.”

Maybe

Tonight, Momma’s head is spinning
As she follows Noah and me with her eyes

We must be her memories
Still feeling the crash some nights
With people crazy enough to seek guidance from our heartbeats

Sometimes,
I wish I could get life to swallow me whole
And cradle me in its collarbone
Tell me I’m as beautiful as the boy born before me
And that I’m more than the uncertain metaphors that spill from my fingers
Advertising truth through history’s ghosts.
I sketch my anxious thoughts in the outline of her time line
As she watches us with a slight smile and a swiftly hidden tear

Maybe one day it’ll be enough
Maybe one day we’ll be enough

“Time heals all wounds.” It sounds so close to the truth, but time heals nothing, it just passes. See, if I’ve learned anything from my family, we were destined to crash sooner or later. So as I wash off last night each morning, I focus on the past and my thoughts race forward. History won’t just catch up with me, it’s insistent on overtaking my vision and continuing on incessant repeat. The problem is, I still remember the first boy I ever adored, and the last. They’re one in the same. A Kentucky dreamer with fireworks for eyes and an IPod of slam poetry. I never trusted his smile--I always had to work too hard for it--but I loved the color his cheeks turned when he was nervous, or uncomfortable, or telling the truth. That boy was my summer, and fall, and winter. We wrote poems side by side, the only difference was, he had talent and soul cowering behind a shield of comedy. I fell for his charm during afternoon adventure when he was caught in the arms of the sun and the uncertainty of English downpours. As I watched the wheels turn in his mind, I couldn’t help but recognize how the moonlight looked shining off of the hazy glass of his alcoholic eyes. I attempted to shush the warning signs, but time passed and distance remained. My feet didn’t belong with him. I knew this, but my mind remained reluctant to leave. I tried to separate myself from the pictures that lined my walls, because some accidents you see coming in just enough time to do nothing about them. Like watching your favorite glass bowl suicide to ground, not quick enough to save it from catastrophe. We were both blind to the rules of good timing. I should have realized this when the roles reversed. Once home, he started saying, “I love you” without being prompted. But it was the day he sent me poems that made me question distance and time and stupidity. Timing smothered all possibility. He stood in his corner of Kentucky, and I ran to the edge of New Jersey and we stretched out our arms, hoping they would find a way to wrap around 800 miles of highway and bring us back home to English summertimes sealed with thai-food dinners, sleepovers, and too many sun-filled rain storms to count with fingers. With Southern gods dancing on our eyelashes and too much love to know what to do with, we held on, and on, and on…

People inspire me...

So I write about them.


For Saum:

There's a man with laughter in the creases of his eyes
And yes, she is certainly his daughter
A form of beautiful ripped from the pages of magazines
With a grace inside of her that flies
Holding a book of prophets in one hand
And drunken hilarity in the other

She is lightening and memory and merry-go-rounds

With a perfectly flawed soul worn on her sleeve
She follows the sun with adventure
Speaking the words I wish I knew
Through stories the mouth can't tell fast enough

She thinks in poetry
And I can only wish to some day love with the same intensity she does

It's the red jeep secrets
And moonlit talks that let us escape,
And dig deeper
And pounce on a life much to large for our eighteen years

Oh but she'll do it
Because as the city lights woke her
She fell in love with the world
Floating on electric nights she could only sleep for a moment
Never tip-toeing through life
Or apologizing for crossing the brink from comfort to confusion
As the wind swallowed up the bird's songs and played them like banjos

She is rare

One of those
Who can talk about life like a bowl of pink light
Shining from the valley
That others just call morning

In a school where people grow like weeds
She is the name that comes to mind when I think of how a person should be

One of those
Whose got a fire like I've never felt.
An offbeat sense of humor, inherited from her mother,
A smile that spreads to the eyes, a characteristic from her father,
And a messy, blemished beauty all her own

She is not just words
She is soul

A barefoot dreamer
With Lebanese gods dancing in the sunlight of her thoughts

One of those
Who changes your life just by being part of it
Because home is wherever she is.




For Brooke:

Stripped down to poetry,
Surrounded by words,
She will apologize
For engulfing us with happiness
When all we want to do is watch
The glitter dance on her eyelashes
And that beautiful smile of hers spread
To the apples of her cheeks,
An image so stunning that to her didn't used to feel like home.

But now she's stuck in it.
She's stuck in that smile
Because she deserves nothing less.

Hell, she deserves all of it...
For the compliments that pour from a mind filled with distant dreams
Like a mirror reflecting back all the best parts of her.
For a grace
That leaps from the page and reminds me why I continue writing.
And for quiet confidence
That glows in the silence of every smile she walks by
Echoing the remarkable beauty that she will forever insist she doesn't have.

If you're looking for someone to envy
Stop searching,
She's right here.

Hey Bartender, you've got layers of bad decisions behind you

It's bare knuckle loving
And crying babies
In the back of his bar
Selling alcohol to innocence
And calling it "philanthropy"

He sure as hell knows how to make himself feel golden,
Level with a God
That he insists he never barters with
But truth never really hides behind thinly veiled ugly

There's always an ear left uncovered
When the weather is blushing
Whispering piccolos to children that aren't his
Telling them, grow up my beauties
Make Daddy proud
Lose yourself in winter's layers of loving
And come home safe
Make sure you live within my levels of acceptable
But do as you please,
No one's watching

Poem me

Poem me a Playground
Meet me where artists paint the world prettier than I've ever seen it
I need to re-think my storms
Convince you there are harmonicas in my music
That melody is my tongue-tied birthmark

Someone once told me I could use a little apathy
I feel too much
Get stuck in my rainstorms
I've been dreaming in summertime fireflies for far too long
While the world drowns out radiance in flurries of escaping white
That linger to create grey

You dance your way home
An artist, pulling birds from the sky and painting them beautiful
You color my world childhood
In your paper-back notebook
Pouring passion on paper
Covering grey with a blanket of warmth

What a smile you have, lady
You make those birds itch to sing with you
You remind me of days when scientists and poets were the same people

You make me wish time moved backwards
That feet moved hurriedly in reverse
That the wind swallowed up the bird's songs and played them like banjos

So please, follow me to the playground, lady, the swing set could use some paint
And tonight, I'd like to fly

sometimes i think life actually wants me to stay here
when i see exclamation points in the eyes of my friends
extending their arms for balance
loaning me their alcoholic words
and a light

we're all free spirits and passionate runaways drowning
in the laughter that escapes from the creases of our eyes
and breathes in what the sun pours auburn

by now i could have been drowning
in everything we are

oh but i could be something
when stripped down to poetry
writing a song
to anyone who will listen

and i know, i know they will meet me there
they will meet me where heroes save the sinking
where music flows through the grace of fingertips
and flashes of fireworks illuminate our nights

because we all know
life's not supposed to rhyme
it's supposed to echo sounds of playgrounds at recess
so i hope that when they breathe they think of happiness
and dive right in