living in finity

THE ACT by William Carlos Williams

There were the roses, in the rain.
Don't cut them, I pleaded.
They won't last, she said.
But they're so beautiful
where they are.
Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said,
and cut them and gave them to me
in my hand.

extra terrestrial

my bank is out of town, and i'm financially opposed to atm charges, so i walked into the corner gas station for a pack of gum and some cash back. when it comes to chewing, my personal favorite is orbitz sweet mint, gum i haven't bought in almost two years because miguel hates it but we can both agree on peppermint. i reach for our true blue packaging to suddenly realize that i'm abandoning the state for good in two days, so its very unlikely i'll have to share this gum with anyone, leaving me completely free to chew sweet mint for the foreseeable future until i find a new love with a palette for something different.

but, for the record, i bought the peppermint. 3 packs of it. and it was delicious.

the burden of context

i want to say
"you rest at the foot of the bed,
and i am pained by the 3 feet between us,"
but how can i want you so simple
in the tempest of academia, feminism,
and the like

i could speak of the borders
constructed by language or culture,
how every word and look that was ever thrust upon has built the divide
that privileges me with the pillow
and damns you to the end with the cracker crumbs and wine stains

or perhaps this rolling blue blanket is really the Atlantic Ocean
and ours is a problem of colonization.
is our love really just conquer and conquest?
have i exoticized you to eroticize you,
your brown and savage masculinity some impulsive euro-bred addiction?

and can you just be far away from me,
or are you lejos de, loin de, vom
?
am i hurting us if i can't need you in every language?

is each touch a confirmation of some oppressive discourse?
can you kiss me without joining some age-old conversation?
can you fuck me?
can YOU fuck me?
can you FUCK me?
can you fuck ME?
and be certain of everything that means?

but then

you look at me, see me
and we're somewhere beyond words and philosophies,
our lips meeting above now and history,
and every thought every one ever constructed
is reduced to: skin.

i hope it isn't all a show

oh, but i hope it is, too.

you come back

You come back into the room
where you've been living
all along. You say:
What's been going on
while I was away? Who
got those sheets dirty, and why
are there no more grapefruit?
Setting foot on the middle ground
between body and word, which contains,
or is supposed to, other
people. You know it was you
who slept, who ate here, though you don't
believe it. I must have taken
time off, you think, for the buttered
toast and the love and maybe both
at once, which would account for the
grease on the bedspread, but no
now you're certain, someone else
has been here wearing
your clothes and saying
words for you, because there was no time off.

my grandma started disappearing again (or rather appearing as someone elses)

you, too, seem to have a way of evaporating.

evading me
somewhere in a bottle
or a text message
or my saturday nights

reception

you left the words porchside for me to stumble upon.
and they meant much more than they should.

thank you for the warmth, even if it wasn't love
but instinct

and thanks for watching
as i walked on
saying nothing.