new composition

tender, the tips of your fingers graze the curves of my jawline

and crawl, parallel with silent slides of sweat, down my neck and rest lightly

on my shoulders before

slipping under my shirt sleeves and softly undraping me,

as you compose the first notes of our new night's duet.

as my fists clench tightly, your hands' sordino strides along my skin meet

my collectively crippled limbs and you lay me down and lull me,

with tempts of tongue-touching-tongue and breaths-setting-over-curves,

into a let-loose-and-love-it mood

and the beat starts off slow.

your pulse throbs thicker than other undertones

and the tempo keeps steady while your lips, licked, sneak down, heavy and

tantalizing, teasing me slow and easy,

adagio.

you and I, one in the same, l'istesso,

lock legs and press warm skin to warm skin and the rhythm picks up as

my palms sink into your back and

your fingers trace a damp-dotted-line of sweat beads to

the thin line of stitched seams separating you and me.

and again, our pace, allegro, grows quicker with each note played louder

forte, and with each beat hit firmer, and

the score, all parts showing, enlivens our music to a symphony con brio

as our bodies flow together in a heat-struck harmony

through the steam-ridden air encompassing us.

con moto, our pounding exhalations move closer to each other

until brilliantly,

the intervals become smallest,

half-step,

breath, half-step,

breath, and again, half-step,

we breathe in unison and crash, as one, into our climactic rush

and we hold our strongest urge longer than needed,

fermata, and then let it go

and our breaths slow down, legato, smooth,

as you conduct this piece to descend to a rest with

one beat of silence,

quarter, and another beat,

silence, until we reach our grand pause and we both

stop.

suddenly, subito, our new night instructs our silence with an unsaid

"tacet," and we wait to play, again, our sordid song, dolce.

Twenty Years of Solitude

“How much longer do we have?”

The same question, on a loop, slips from Gatsby’s every orifice as he waits for a more pleasing answer. And the responses have blended together, no matter who takes upon himself the responsibility to provide Gatsby some sort of temporary solution to his now nearly-twenty-year problem. But in his fixed state of legs languidly crossed and head slightly tilted, he sits in one secluded area of the barren wasteland that used to nurture and shelter him – until he turned seventeen.

The others – Agathos, Nick, and Holden – separate themselves from each other as Gatsby has done with himself; they all possess their own damp, dark areas to which they confine themselves nowadays, because, what else are they to do after living together, chafing one another’s “lives” with fractious remarks and attempts at fratricide? They are brothers, after all, and even brothers hate each other after being trapped in the presence of each other for unbearable lengths of time. And this time, in particular, has stolen their once-collective glow and replaced it with a wan look of “I’m scared but can’t show it.”

Faintly, their existence ceases to pursue vibrancy as days pass in a seemingly timeless mind-trap. The monotonous drips of comatose dreams from skull walls lull them into their own sort of vegetative persistence.

“It’s been a hundred years in this sonofabitch and I’m sick of it here,” and the complaints never halt to evade Holden’s lips and fill the fragile and limited cerebral air with vehement stupidity.

“Actually, it has been merely nineteen years and three hundred and sixty-four days,” Agathos rebukes, as his tolerance of repetitive gripe grows weary.

“For crissake, who gives a damn?”

“Apparently you do.”

“I never said that.”

“The intimation was all anyone needed.”

And the rebuttal continued until Nick finally got fed up with the others’ genuine disregard for the futility of such a quarrel.

“Would both of you just be quiet?” And Nick’s question echoed in the hollow cavern of a dormant thought-shell, crusted over and dust-covered for years upon years. But the truth is there is no easy way for a group of four denizens in a cave-like dwelling to completely avoid temperamental issues among themselves after being born into said abode from the imagination of a geriatric’s unconscious mind.

And it is only natural for each of them to feel the need to isolate himself from the others; Nick, Holden, and Gatsby do, however, ostracize Agathos more than each other because of his complete difference in belief and attitude toward their “life” as a whole.

In their nineteen years and three hundred and sixty-four days together, they have figured out that where they are is not right and that there is something beyond the barriers by which they are all encompassed. Nick, Holden, and Gatsby, though, have adapted to a joint belief that their entrapment is pure punishment from some ulterior force while Agathos believes in the power of words. And while he believes in the power of words, he also has gained the theory that there is even more power in dreams.

“A dream, you see, is a culmination of those alluring moments – the wonderful and the enticing, the horrid and the frightening moments – of the everyday that, through words and through the sentiment of the contact into which we come with our surroundings every second of every minute, enthrall our very beings,” Agathos claims with unaffected conviction.

“Digression!” exclaims Holden, scornfully.

“No, actually. There is no digression whatsoever. In all of your uncertainty, Holden, of letting go of your innocence, remind yourself of where you are and what you’ve experienced, because there is no way of taking back what you’ve unconsciously given up without the slightest notice.”

“I agree with Holden,” says Gatsby with a bit of confidence.

“You do? Well it would only make sense that you do since you, like Holden, are stuck on a fine tight rope between your younger years and your potential maturity.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Agathos,” Nick contends with a bit of apprehension.

“And Nick, your fear, even in your heartiest endeavor to hide it, shines through your translucent cloak of whatever is engraved in your brain. Remind me, please, what that is again.”

“I’m scared… but I can’t show it.”

The once-collective glow was not merely replaced by a frightened look, but rather, fear entwined itself with the minds of the inhabitants in their light-lacking residence and tore them down to incapable dead weight.

“What scares you, Nick?” Agathos asks with a clear look of concern painted on his face.

“A lot of things scare me.”

“Name a few.”

“There are too many.”

“Name three, from the least scary to the most.”

“I’m scared of the dark.”

“Mhmm.”

“And I’m afraid of dying.”

“That’s understandable.”

“And I’m afraid of myself.”

“Of course. But you see, Nick, why on Earth would you be afraid of something that doesn’t exist?”

And in the eye of a Wink, faintly, the dream had passed, as had twenty years of Rip Van Winkles life.

Eight-sided Red Warning

Thick pretty smoke-stacks chafe the faces

of stand-alone city youngins

kneeling on side streets with their knees in mirky drain water

on the dirty asphalt, circling a dented stop sign.

And next to a sun-worn mural of Jack Kerouac, burning fumes

and sugar strips throw a film of

distortions on the eyes of the already-blind

censored minds of middle class America.

It's 1964 and the times have changed. The music just got good

and there's this thing called freedom.

That's the word on the street, and it used to only ring a bell

but recently there's a beat of a drum never

heard over these boxy radios, never seen on TV shows

and it's not left to anyone -- no moms, no teachers,

no dads, no kids, no beavers. 'Cause now,

that makes no sense.

And the only thing that works is a four-letter word --

B.E.A.T. -- and it spells out recovery in any light.

And people love the smell of unwatched life, even through

the choking smoke clouds intoxicating

the air with high hopes and fingers shot higher,

like a bird with new wings, flying over things

as crazy as kids praying to an eight-sided red warning

beat in 'cause someone wouldn't be stopped.

no goodbyes

"this isn't goodbye"

and last night I hoped those words were truer

than anything you've ever allowed your lips to let go for my ears to

steal from others' reach

"don't forget me"

and in your eyes I saw those words

drop your heart on a string and around your face were sayings like

"things like that don't happen for us" and

I believe you

'cause every time your tongue curled and your mouth moved

to push out your soul in verbal execution

I heard nothing but the look in your mind

and you know

I believe you

and I believe the letters on that second-to-last page

because they came from you

and you've typed to me a thousand times

"I love you"

but the way your fingers gripped the pen and the obvious force

you put on the page means more to me

than silly uniform font faces

'cause in your written statements

I see your own face and it reminds me that

some days, you're all I need

so please don't let this be goodbye

the sugar's gone

run down, they once stuck to your roof top

sopping wet of sugary coatings that used to taste sweet in my mind but are

dry now and flaking around the borders of crowned molds, gilded

and losing their shine behind

firmly locked soft gates, of an off-rose shade, that gently caressed

my unattached ear lobes that night in your car while you

slurred candied whispers above the incandescent small city,

with a view from a vacant parking lot.

too many times our silhouettes tangled together under shadows to

the same rhythm the background melodies hummed in the rush of

our second sentiment.

and the way your voice sounded -- velvety, in that desirable sort of way --

tamed any quick beats of mine and aligned in a spiral with

my dying uneasiness.

but the flavor of your tone sat unpleasant on my tongue,

so I noticed the sugar was gone

'cause your words hung dry in the friday evening air.

haz mat

I'm most

surprised when

your toxicity engulfs

me late in the night; it's pitch

black outside and lacking light in here

while your warm exhales suffer to survive in

the heat-lacking air that wraps us up with aromatic

enthrallment.

and your most

recent installment

of should-wear-a-warning

love laments -- that you use to

shower me as the beginning of your

overpowering guises that, as I said earlier,

surprise me most in the darker hours of life -- reminds

me that the enticement of your existence is nothing other than

haz mat

that, as I have

learned, one needs a

license to possess and trans-

port, but as you have proven, there is

no requisite worth-proof to transpose the flow

of my quick cascading blood, rushing through my

palpitating veins, with that hazardous material you like

to call a love lament.

That Time Between

Stationary sideway steadiness

drips into languid limbs

slipping down wrinkled blankets and tumbling

over soft edges along with subconscious unreadiness to

abandon full awareness and sink

into unsure weights of mind states.

Limp legs hint at lethargy in the way they lean into

sheets, feeling like heavy anchors pulling body down

to Earth after restless

release into the dusk-covered

room, under thick atmospheric waves like tides pulled

forward and into invisibility without full reflected light

to expose its decision

on its placement.

Distanced lid shuts and shudders

and re-openings shut out the

mid-grey air shifting over the listless contours of mellow skins,

twisting in meandering lines along with shallow breaths

in that time between that

can't be named.

Drifting in and out of stable clarity and testy teases of time leaps

drops a dizziness into the leisurely state of unawake and clouds

the already hazy craze

of undecided mindfulness.

Unfinished Painting

A few days to go and this picture's almost finished but I don't want to keep painting it. These brushes slide dry against the thick-coated canvas and the scratches of bristles on clumps of thick paint over stretched cloth aches in my ears when combined with the heavy iron ticks of the clocks on every wall. No timeless studios lacking the tools to continue. There's not enough of me left to keep up the pace with this stopwatch running out of digits to display that remind me, with burning red fluorescents, that tomorrow's their last day. And these muscles are tired lately in my face, so I'll glue a smile on. But eventually, like these last nine months, that too will fall and slip behind us on wet grass as they walk across the white wooden stage, right to left from our perspective, end to beginning from theirs.

And sometimes I wonder if I can put this piece in the trash and pretend it never started, so there can never be an end. But why throw away something I created without regret, but with the knowledge that one day I'd be finished? These layers of paint coat layers of paint coating layers of paint coating layers of life I covered with more memories that could never fully hide the older first thoughts and inklings of beginnings beneath this thick translucency. But I fancy this sort of thing. The swinging feet in an apprehensive audience, well-masked by crows' feet wrinkles and full-teeth grins, slow down to the pace of the heaving hearts of unready mothers and unwilling friends who can't let go of those sharp clean-cut boys and girls in white dresses. But one of these days, we have to let go and one of these days I have to finish this work of art. I thought it would be done 'cause tomorrow's their last day, but we've got one more year and I'm sure a few more layers upon layers of life won't hurt.

I'm Holdin' On, Holden.

My night, under opaque wraps, collects my candid questions --

unkept before the walls crept back up on me and

crammed my thorough thoughts

into sufficient suffocation and disallowed my dislocation

from total cerebral closure --

and covers cognitive wonders with a dense fence-like stone cure.

The clean-cut cold sheets, tucked beneath the bed springs

spring my curiosity through layer after layer

of teeming tides of blockades and prohibition

but someone sits at the edge of the road, just before crack

drops to cliff and he catches my despair, tangled in the rye, and

before my inexperience allows me to cry,

he hurls my candid questions back my way and continues

my disallowance of detaching myself from purity.

But despite his baseball mitts, he can't catch my verbal fits

so I scream, "My wants can't be blocked forever and Holden,

I'm holding onto my life for the sake of avoiding strife with you but

celibacy of the mind can only lead to our true demise."

He looks me in the eyes, scared he'd been outdone,

so he tries to run but the cliff leaves him hanging and

I reach for his undemanding hand that swats my offer

with a backwards hat.

But his fear subsides in his recollection of his misinterpretation of

a silly old poem that led him to believe he could catch our innocence.

So wear your hat straight, Holden, 'cause in the rye,

you're not the groundskeeper, but keep your ground and

catch yourself before you fall off the cliff and lose yourself

in your selfless tantrums and your disregard for your need for wondering.

Let me break through my caul, 'cause it's burning of decay and

I've overstayed my welcome in this amniotic gate, devoid of vitality,

and I like my life in my own hands, so I'll tell you now:

I'm holdin' on, Holden. Get a grip and hold on, yourself.