a collection of poems written from fall-winter 2024

who are they the children of?


My absence of discipline
Reflects
My difficulties with self-love.
I need to recontextualize discipline
as an act of self-love.

Modulation

Appreciation. A discipline of self-love.


a candle at the vigil

Hear the ringing
in your ears
as the grief
of the world.

Feel the sting
of autumn air

Everything moves
at its
proper
pace.


Kicking Glass

Blood Stains
Dog Hair
Cream Tile
Caked Dirt
Onion Peel
Walk Walk
Cover Toe
Blood Stains
Paper Towel
Foot Steps
Black Plastic
Trash Bag
Walk Back
Drop Hay
Fumble


A prayer for headphones

May I walk down the street
Ensconsced in sound
So I may hear
My own thoughts
My own taste
My own love with the world
I have created for myself

May I ignore my neighbor
Put plastic, rubber, and foam
Between the conversation
The interaction
The exchange
On my way out the door


Nowadays

Sitting on the wooden platform
I hear a voice in my head
the one that finds
in each movement
an affirmation
love
for
myself
I think about the cycle of breath and self, that each momement I breathe in, I bring into being my self.
“That’s what its for,” a dancer remarks,
as if mocking my need
to put into words
what can be expressed in movement.
A trickster trans girl
mocking in that way that good clowns do,
where you find what’s already known.

And maybe I feel the pull of someone
who feels in a similar way to me.
I feel clumsy and excited, the giddy
of knowing I might slip.
And how far to fall
between becoming a girl
falling in love
or falling in love
with myself
as a girl
in love.

Not to get
Too caught
Crushed
But to feel
Like the sidewalks
Stumbled between
Writhing bodies
At the electric distance
Where I am far enough
To lose the space
Between our feet.
Laugh, Trip, Stumble


Drunk

Jade refracts
Kisses fall
Uncovered sleave
Dance once a week
What if I want to fuck you
And figure out our connection later
I’d dream
In nights spent
Dancing
Losing myself
In your breadth

Drunk on the B Train
Crushing Orange Line Beers
Grand Street Bound
Too Slutty
Too Smart
My words caught in my mouth
Fell asleep
So long ago
Erica on the train
My concrete brain
Everyone at Columbia
Looks at me
Like I’m a faggot
They must be So Smart
To Notice.

My biggest flaw
Is that I don’t
See
My own
Beauty

Drunk on the B train
Writing poetry to find
The rush of my glance
Meeting yours

Drunk on the B train
I refuse to leave
I kick my feet up
Spit My Beer
Fuck You
I am a faggot
Fucking women
Fucking men
I’m the shallow pool of spit
We bathe in
We breathe in


Pull-ups

On the railing
The J train rattles by
Yawning autumn
Against the Williamsburg high rise
Nourish the cramped kitchen
Let the smoke flow
From the haunted toaster
Spitting flames
Half past
My forgetful face
Pressed against the grimy scene
Bike by
Stop
But turn around


Your Polaroid

A photo of us
From an Asheville bar
Fell out from my journal
I hadn’t noticed it
Tucked between the unwritten pages
Long past my structured notes
About why we couldn’t be together
But I remember wanting nothing more
Than moments alone in the booth
Than the timer ticking toward flash
Then the press of your lips as the shuttered closed
On a photo of us


A Mouse
curled up
on my kitchen floor
writhing
almost like a dog
rolling on his back
almost, but not.
The pained spasms
of an unsure foot
and me
with a broom
trying to help him outside
or at least
remove him
from my sight
compassion
or my selfish desire
to let live
what will die.


A score for four ppl
1) Think of your name
2) Now think of another name
3) Discard the first and second for a third.
4) Introduce yourself
5) Take your partners name.
6) Go through your day with a new name.


scratch, jest, ride, drink, advance

This is of a place, spiraling through the circuit party at market, maybe too many drinks and joints along the east river

This is the movement in and out of the ID card to track my movement in and out of campus

This is the cash register being chased, the pursuit of some things or experiences that might make me feel like I’m moving

And I am caught in the movement of modulation, cycles, pusling tangled webs, root systems stretching underground, relations and relationships, vibrations and ethics, qualia, sense and sensation, the interwoven web of things that maybe in the last instance cohere into a structure-in-totality.

I do not have the language of freedom.


How do you hear a place?
Take out a sheet of paper
close your eyes
select a place that matters to you
try to focus on the sounds of the place
Can you hear them?
Where does the sound exist?
Pan
Echo


Dancing, an image

The carpet gave too much
with my step
not quite finding
the rhythm
of interlacing hands
of jumps and crashes
“i thought about dancing with you”
what a terrible thought
to betray in hushed confidence
after your friends passed the bottle that smelled of biting and pins
i took your hands
that drifted through the air
like a ribbon, twirling and unfurling
set free into a ruin of thread
Unearthed, Unearned Confidence


There’s something funny

To seeing your ex
In other people.
At first,
The Fear
of an unplanned encounter
of a flood of emotions
from hands gliding through a mullet
from plucking the hat off to find their face
the fading ache
of nights grasping each other’s form
of finding the momentary embrace of a bathroom stall
a handheld walk home
among the snowflake shadows
But now,
the resignation
of dyed haircuts stretching down into braids
of electronics recycled into sigils, wrought iron, and moss
from the fumbled assemblage of self
From youth becoming a whisper of presence
Among the faces in the crowd


“Mansions”
There was a moment of truth
In the afterglow of spurned affection
“Don’t try to make it work
If its not your end goal”
Children of divorce, drinking and dancing
In the after glow


Liminal notes

Lost between
the devil and the cloud
a pretzel and a carrot
my classroom or my desk.

Before Sunset,
a name escapes
falling asleep
on the benadryl periphery.

I’d walk in the cold
I’d bike in the snow
I’d sweat in the greyhound
my skin
pricked by frost
wet by snow
sticky by seats
all to curl up
in the space
in between.

Embarssingly, I saw megalopolis immediately. I was so underwhelmed that, despite drafting this review on my way home from the theater, i forgot to post it. Now, into the void:

What must eric adams be thinking? the feds seized his phone. The standard corruption now receives higher scrutiny. No one in new york is surprised by a crooked cop. I feel like celebrating his downfall. Look what they’ve done to my beautiful boy! And what better way than w/ Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis

The old man has lost it. He sold off the vineyard; he’s widely derided as a creep (but, as wild card mayorial candidate andrew cuomo will tell you, he’s just being italian); he either used AI or fabricated negative quotes from critics himself; he wanted eitehr a live actor or an interactive ai to burst into each theater; he’s set for a disasterous opening weekend. The megalopolis lore can go on and on and on.

But, maybe like adams, coppola is a man out of step with time. A provacateur clinging to a way of transgression that no longer exists, like adams craving the corrupt mayorial lifestyle.

At the cold play concert.
35th st, lily’s crepe $13
I don’t think megalopolis was good enough or bad enough. It lingers, like a pervy old man, trading in women.

The central conflict between Caesar and Mayor Cicero is shallow. Should we let things be terrible like they are now or should we work together to make things better? For all his musings on time and consciousness, I’m not sure Coppola has more than an interconnected psychobabble. Am I for one love psychobabble, but his doesn’t feel lived in. Caesar is design, a revolutionary break, but not so much taht family structure or the institution of marriage would be uprooted. In fact, the film is predicated on the trafficking of women. Wow from Caesar to Cassius; Julia from Cicero to Caesar.

Julia’s characterization is particularly flat, morphing from party girl to muse/therapist. Wow, delishishly played by aubrey plaza, climbs to renown and riches through Caesar and Cassius. To her credit, Plaza gifts Wow with a trickster ambition. She’s hyper-sexualized and turning the performance up to 11.

But Driver’s Caesar, the genius revolutionary, is unconvincing. His charisma feels off, like someone selling their vision through how unhinged they are. He tries to present himself as an uncoverer of natural reality. Like the discovery of time and the conceptualization of consciousness, megalopolis is now a part of life itself. But when more of the movie revolves around the relationship between Caesar and Julia, the whole magic of his ideas is lost, replaced by a drab romance traingulating the death of Caesar’s previous muse/therapist/mother–wife.

Coppola’s depiction of sigificant otherness rehearses a tired script of male genius and female inspiration. The liveliness of gender, relationships, and identities–those things that would change if the megalopolis is to be–is never explored. Instead, we are presented with the megalopolis as an enormous macguffin, a magic make everything better, liveable, and just for free, for ever (?)

The supposed conflict of the film is between mayor Cicero’s preservation of the status quo and Caesar’s insurgent cosmopolis, the implications of either’s worldview beyond shallow mismanagement/corruption and untested explosive change isn’t made into interesting story beats, particularly because so much of the film circles Caesar and Julia.

The design of the world of New Rome is exiting. There is still a flash to Coppola’s worlds, even if they can swamped by rehashed psychadelia. The special effects are idiosyncratic, giving them a stylized feel that only has the edges of butgetary restrictions.

I think Eric Adams and Coppola suffer from similar problems. They are so convinced of their entitlement to the city, as an object of exploitation, that they trick themselves into thinking they own it. Adams delusional bid to trade favor internationally a reflection of his own ineptitude at being able to help the people of new york city. He can only enrich himself and his cop friends, turing the other way as they shoot off wildly in the subway.

Coppola’s delusional ownership over the city energizes his Caesar. Caesar’s genius of discovering a magic material that allows cooperation and a better quality of life is all framed around himself, his singular artistry and exceptionalism. Caesar is a stand in for how Coppola views the director, a revolutionary figure able to show a different way of living together. This humanism falls flat immediately because of the pervy old man, his flattened view of collaboration that emerges from a singular, authorial genius. Such self-indulgences can never understand how we can better world together.

a collection of poems from summer 2024