letters from july

-

I’ll try to smile sometimes

but then the absurdity of being here catches up again

and what I thought was “now”

turns into “would have been”.

-

I drink gin with the same vigor 

as I used to drink water

when I was a child.

Have my father’s alcoholic genes

finally caught up with my brain?

-

I tried learning about your future,

but you were only the product of past.

-

You shield children of yours from true sun

and dripping water of the upstairs AC unit.

you are a bird

but still more human than many.

-

Summer arrived with 

brightness

golden heat

blooming pomegranates

and sandy swimming suits,

Abandoned on the railing

of an old Brooklyn house,

in the exhaustion and haste

of lives lived fast. 

-

I write for people

who'll never read.

-

You know what really hurts my heart?

You talk to me like I’m only in your past.

but I am here

I am here now.

I am always here and always now. 

-

I’m sketching our rain again.

-

I’m not as fragile

as you imagined, 

not as broken

as I thought.

-

Take me wherever you took all your thoughts

after getting rid of me.

-

Hunger is more all-consuming than anxiety.

you’ve just learned how to avoid it better.

-

I take stupidity as my only god-given talent.

-

Collecting fingers in my mouth. 

have more?

-

What a stupid idea to share them with you.

all strawberries came to be for me!

-

Toys were your friends

and my gifts to loneliness.

-

Laying on the skin of dead horses,

I could smell wilderness of thoughtless speed.

-

Hands are my vision and hair is my balance. 

-

You were a payment for whatever I didn’t pay for.

Well worth it.

-

I might look like a ghost, 

but I have feelings like a living boy.

-

You know nothing about writing, 

but you lived in a careless, romantic,

Bukowski way, 

drunk and smitten with your own existence,

this world belonged to you.

you were beautiful for that.

-

For whatever reason,

you appeared and my life again started. 

-

I’m running through the phases of my life

like halls of the Met - 

drunk with beauty 

and ever shifting love,

never lingering too long,

scared of the closing hour.