“Our Inheritance Was Left to Us by No Testament.”

-After Rene Char

Our inheritance was left to us by no testament, our sorrows by no thorns, as threads untangle down the tree, one can’t help but feel forlorn.

Tradition has the power to strangle,  authority may kill, and failed revolutions may break the heart,  more than the status quo ever will.

The wages of your wonder may wither into dust. The lust for life you once had, shrivels into mistrust.

In the space between past and future, can you bear to hope for peace? When memories pull at your coattails and your life is but a lease?  

Wow, I haven’t used this blog in years. Fitting, as I kind of stopped...writing much, post 2021? I hope to get back into poetry and maybe even fiction in 2023.

Of Hospitality “[…] Does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome?” – Jacques Derrida

There is no home without door  or window, no home without some way  for the Other to  breach the threshold,  without some way to let the world in, & yourself out— there must always be  the possibility of passage.

What of your heart? —

The way it flouts the force of law, & flaunts the violable borders of its spacious four chambers

The way it commits the crime of hospitality and refuses to name that which is dearest to it.

Who resides there? — Parasitic phantom ordained in a confessional faith that encroaches endlessly, turning a space of love into a settler-colonial project, forcing you to speak in a language that is not your own, turning you from host to guest in your own body.

Is every covenant meant to be honored?

Something More Precious —after Hayley Williams

Sometimes a cigarette is an eclipsed expectation / a way of saying If a slightly charred lung is the price to pay for warm conversation in the cold, I will gladly pay it.

Sometimes a fucker like that man is your stark raving mad accomplice

—in beating a dead horse 

—in fashioning sordid fantasies of a deflowering that leaves you without petals for armor

—in clean wiping out the line between  wrath and mercy

Sometimes he’s just creeping around with no intention to leave it alone.

But if you had seen your reflection, you might have found the story of a wilted woman etched crystal clear into the cracked glass pane /

a painful reminder of:

— being overcome by a sudden desire as your feet bled in golden heels in the graduate lounge

—simmering on the bed above with him in a white undershirt below —passing the archways of Lincoln Centre Theatre,  before sending him a message that read,  Please comma don’t go period

(The punctuation is important).

Sometimes, it’s good to be the bigger person, but sometimes you just want to feel his hands go down,

That’s okay, but if you try craning your neck to reach a window You might finally realize your heart is a big balloon too free to be trapped in a dark and drowsy room.

I’m on the inside, everybody knows what you will say,  Leaves on the ground already came.

Valse Romantique

Just beyond the tracery of filigree masks, eyes reveal a new poetic of relation set in tempo rubato & tempered by

—the cruel sensuality of a moonlit Brooklyn night,

—the caprice of a fairytale waltz dancing still at the satin edges of memory

—the starry heavens above & the moral law within.

If this is to be my legacy, let it be.

I unfold hypnosis to hysteria, bring the moment to its peak, play kingmaker, spin my love into a super-bloom so free & so wild, that strands of his cosmic petals ribbon out into the great unknown.

I really wish I could write something as simple yet moving as Nights in White Satin. I need to reach beyond my current style.

Decantation

A cloud offers me a choice in a cup— I am decanted between worlds, my pigment sloshes over figmented hands, lost in a polarity of spirit.

Can only call it a day when I have ostensibly stirred the cup, pot —turning my heart into a bisque fit for consumption.

The conversation of the I with itself flows nowhere, leaves me restless— if there was ever a time for magic, it would be now

—when the chips are down —when the cards imply   that the water under the bridge runs red with bad blood, and I am so deeply immersed in a beloved grudge, I’ve lost sight of the surface.

So much liquid, so little courage— I am in dire need of a friendship  that can only come from within—

Plato says one cannot live with a murderer in the mind, but is this vindictive Virgo virago much better?

My spite spills over into the hip flask of memory, washing out the taste of times & trains past.

I am roiling in the grief of grasses greener— and the fountains in the garden of imagination have gone quiet on the cusp of the final verdict.  

The Trad Boy’s Guide to Dealing with Sirens

I. 

Entire lifetimes were spent warning you of the seducers. How they would come, those poor, misguided servants of blue deities, to tempt you into ways, truths, and lives that would only ruin you. They could strike at any time: with their low-cut black blouses and expensive cameras. You might find yourself sitting across a kitchen island from one on a barstool in the Heights, drinking Moscato by moonlight. Faced with one of these she-demons in the flesh, you might be cajoled to give up rewards in Heaven for Hell on Earth. Faced with color, you might feel your whiteness more intensely than ever before.

II.

Always remember your humble origins in sin. If the Grand Concourse is Eden after the fall, and Eve is a brown girl transformed by the fruits of knowledge, then know that you—Adam—have been enticed away from all that is good. Think of the apple lodging itself in your throat; the forbidden re-molding the very contours of your body. Think carefully now about the sanctity of marriage. Think about the salvation of your soul from the bitterness of contamination—a bitterness so acute that maybe, just maybe, God’s command to love gets lost somewhere in the taste of it all.

III.

Forget about the women who bare everything for you on glowing laptop screens. Forget about egging on drunken unholiness. Forget about stripping the spark naked. Stash it all away and build a cathedral of guilt in the open field of your mind. Fall to your knees and worship at the altar of lust. In clear tones, advise silly girls not to offer non-committal men perks. They only do so at their own peril.

(You like the fifties. It was a better time.)

IV.

Will philosophy provide you the answers you seek? Fat chance.

Whenever you stray, turn back towards your roots, and allow them to wind through the back alleys of your heart.

It takes a village to raise a child, and a cross to keep him fearful.

Some Kettle

The heart is always some kettle on the verge of exploding onto the brine-soaked tile of the aortic kitchen.

Always some kettle filled to the brim with dark brew & dark magic, promptly deconstructed into stained steel & spells.

Some kettle boiling, blood-bending, committing to memory the intricacies of language & identity, of poetics of relation past.

Kettle Vessel—no, ark—to hold both commencement & commandment—

The beloved organic archive of man & myth vein & veil—

Space throbbing steam to the beat of Time.

I have a professional website now! 

Does anyone have words of advice for how to handle an (almost) quarter life crisis? I have not been able to face the world like an adult, and Corona is exacerbating my already precarious situation in terms of my mental health and  finishing my PhD.

My current journal is almost done! I’ve filled 200/250 pages.

When the love in letters fade It's like moving in slow motion And we're already too late if we arrive at all.

- War by Poets of the Fall

Hell in a Handbasket

In the economy of memory, an abundant harvest is a bittersweet liability— so I bring a basket full of you to the shore and purge what I can.

The remainder of my efforts; a scattering of insidiously minuscule seeds of soul-grain caught on wicker,

—  refusing to come away to drown in the ancient river of Lethe —refusing to let go of Earthly delights; to be sacrificed at the altar of my long-suffering whim.

Wastefulness was always a cardinal sin in your eyes, so you would finish other people’s plates for them—   but I never had deep-rooted qualms with throwing away what only fed but never nourished me.