And so,

You died, and so
I can never beat my fists
to your stomach.

You died, and so,
I can never tell you
all those words and words,
grown stale and moldy.

It was so like
leaving again,
on the tenth anniversary
of the first time.

It is not so different
for the hand to take
the blade across
than to dial a number.

or to write out a letter.
I told my wrists this many a time,
and now they are useless tools.
And so, you are dead.

My memories are even a bit stolen now,
and so, you were like a father,
but so what, because you are dead,
so there will be no father talk
between you and me now.

So, you are dead,
you thought the leaving and leaving
wasn’t permanent enough,
so, you thought you would leave
someone new for once.

Not the same women and daughters and
small sons, so you took leave of yourself
For the first time a new feeling.
So, now, there will be no talk,
no sobbing letters.

And so, we will never brush
shoulders, in a crowd, I will never
look up to see your graying mustache and
dark green eyes.

And so, I will never say; and
weren’t you a stand in for my father?
and didn’t you get tired of the role
and run away?

So, you chose to die,
I can’t picture it, the bottle
to the mustache, the blade
in your hand.

No, I suppose I can,
and you selfishly took
all those moments and dreams
and dreams and dreams,
so many I dreamt in a decade.

Why would you steal them
Just like that, just like you stole
yourself from me before.


I can picture it, the hand placed
upon the blade, so like a telephone
so like a pen, writing this letter,
speaking this poem into our ears.

Painful Tools

They say I have a dual heart, you know.
With two compartments, one filled
with clean and wholesome love for you,
and the other holding a love fashioned from
worn out memories and old shadows.

I’ve heard this is a dangerous contraption.

But I am used to painful tools, like the shears
I used to cut myself away from my former life,
and the needles I used to stitch myself
into this new one.

Sharp objects don’t scare me anymore.

What’s frightening is when I can’t tell
the difference anymore between shadow
and truth, when I hear his voice in yours
and find my hands very neatly sewing
your flesh into his place.

Northward

And so, you followed
the girl to a
grayer place.

You, more a thought
than a person, more a
dream than a hand

that touched me
one night in the grass
that tingled
on my back.

You followed that girl
to a place with more rain,
more cold, darker green.

You faced north
and opened your arms
to the blankness of snow.

I am not hidden
in the ice.
I cannot crack

but only chisel and sand
away at
the bone.

*This is a poem from a couple years ago.

My Performance

I will make all the mistakes
I will tell you I miss you and
I’m lonely, and my heart
keeps making this horrible
cracking noise, and I don’t know
what to do about it.

I ensure you will never,
never love me again.
I give up my power
for you. I hand it to you,
whatever I gathered,
from my discontent, from
always being just a little less
devoted than you were.

I hand this to you on a silver platter.
These are my organs.
These are my inner workings.
I never gave them up when we
were together, but now
that we are both vegan and celibate
I gift them to you like raw
and slithery meat.

This is my performance for you,
I break and re-break my heart
with a hammer and chisel just
for the show of it, the way
it explodes like plaster and glitter.
I do this ten times for every year
we were happy and a hundred times
for the years we were not.

I perform surgery on my own
organs. No anesthetic necessary.
I will give you the best
seat at the window, so you can
admire my steady hand and neat
stitching.

I become a side show freak for you
the girl with one arm, half a heart
no stomach, can’t contain anything
anymore.

I write disjointed poems
with no set theme or meter about you.
I plaster them everywhere, flyers
for some hopeless campaign that
catch your eye as you walk
home by yourself and make you
think of me.

*It was inevitable that some of my breakup poems would end up here, so here's the first.

End Up

You spoke words often
spoken before, don’t end up
like me, darling.

If I could cradle your face
in my hand, perhaps
I could bear those words.

As it is, there was a time,
when I said to you,
Father, today I learned

the word empathy,
and how it is different
from sympathy.

You had a lesson then too,
don’t grab and clutch
for a dream that is over.

Maybe it wasn’t
until you said it
out loud.

Poem for Tao Lin

Your poems remind me
of my dreams, mostly
the ones stuck to my shoes
like old gum groping
at my worn down heels.

The heels are so tattered
you can see their metal roots
encircled by white bony plastic.

Last night I dreamt
I lived back in the co-ops.
There was no place for my stuff,
the room was full of old
leather chairs, and rejected
stuffed animals.

I thought, this will do, but
the showers, that is what I
didn’t think about when I
agreed to live here again.

In the dream there was
a dark haired boy,
he kept touching my stomach.
We were laughing and I looked
at myself disapprovingly.

I woke up surprised again
to be back in an apartment
in San Francisco with sore
teeth from the night’s grinding.

I had two root canals this year
and I lost my favorite hat.
I’m not sure which is more upsetting.
The hat is quite important
for its symbolic nature.

A black scholar cap
that makes people call me
frenchy, and I wore it
in France all those cold days
with sputtered rain and the
gray old buildings.

The teeth are another story.
They take your living
slithery roots out, because
they are damaged. Something
electrical, the signal isn’t
getting through, and you
can’t feel cold anymore.

So, they replace them with
steel rods, drill them straight
into the gum. Steel doesn’t die
like living electric nerves.
My teeth will be secure,

And I won’t have to wear dentures
when I’m old, but I will have to
live with a cold and plastic object
inside my mouth that is not
human. They don’t seem to

understand that emotional
attachment. Dentists, they think
a living bone is a bone, a hat
is just a hat made of material
and who cares if it traveled
to France and back, and who
cares if you must live with
a prosthetic your whole life?

*This is a poem from early last year when I first discovered Tao Lin.

He must have gone mad, tearing or clipping as he walked.
He must have used scissors; each little bundle of silvery black hair is about three inches
long, cut neatly.
Every lock a testimony to his existence, a protest against nothingness, a prayer to
loneliness.
He said, I will leave little notes up and down the street to whisper at the toes of walkers,
to keep them guessing how long this manifestation lasted.
Sprawling both sides of the block, they will tell my story, because I cannot write it down.
This might have been a liberation; he was welcoming spring, running, screaming,
breaking some inane traditions.
Or, perhaps she said, these are my last pretty days, and I don’t care, I will show beauty how little I care by letting it blow away in the spring wind like
nothing at all.
These pieces belonging to someone, someone who wanted to grow lighter, head bare to
earth, humble sheen of the scalp, greeting the sky, honest for once.
Who is this, leaving love letters or suicide notes. They left a frantic feeling; this was
an event, this was something that happened on an otherwise ordinary day.
It happened, the sharpening, the discarding of a part of one’s self, it happened like an
unplanned modern art exhibit, where the crowd breathlessly asks, what does it mean?
Like a foreign language spray painted on a wall, some mislead soul scraping from
within to send an encrypted message.
This is the body, so small, so fragile, scattered over the pavement, and it lasts only until it
is swept up by other hands.

*This is an old poem from one of my college classes. I was talking about it recently and decided to revisit it.

River

Doctor says, no more
silence for you.
We didn't think to
warn you.

Of course, you
shouldn't care, as
the drum and the
cochlea are marching
away finely.

There will be those
moments when
you wish to be
so alone,

like the
earth or the trees,
away from others
and sound,

but don't worry
that will fade, as
this constant
high strung
hum of the body,

reflecting the tingling
that is your anxiety,
becomes a part
of your brain.

You see, it is only
a river shooting through
your mind,
through what you know
as time

to something so
far, so dark, you would
never recognize it.