I’m thinking about the fact that when it ended, all I had to give back to you was your umbrella. I’m thinking about how cruel the concept of a goodbye kiss is. I’m rolling between the nights I felt the world ended past your torso and the ones when you remembered that there were more important things.

I’m realizing it’ll be awhile before I find poetry in this mess.

But if there’s anything, it’s that we are young. We are crash dummies. We are idiots. We believe in everything. We believe in things that fall apart. We believe in doors that never lock right and ringtones that make us laugh and we think, for a while, that if a problem makes your eyelids heavy, but no-one’s there to see it, then it doesn’t fucking matter. I believe in this. I believe that we mattered. I believe that I am in one long traffic jam of heartbreak car wrecks and if I’m a crash dummy, at least my limbs will reattach. At least I can save someone in this demolition. 

These are the years our hearts can take it.   

            My younger brother has a tattoo on his bicep of a cross and a ribbon and my dead cousin’s initials. The ribbon is orange for leukemia and it loops around the cross like it’s hugging it but in a way that looks tougher. My younger brother got his tattoo in Omaha because he was too young for it to be legal in Illinois. He showed it to my aunt and uncle at their house in Florida and he wore it around Michael’s bedroom and in Michael’s pool and in Michael’s car and on Michael’s boat. He didn’t wear it the night I went to get a glass of water and ran into my Aunt crying over Michael’s funeral book. Terry, are you okay? I asked her and I realized it was a stupid thing to say. And she looked at me and said that Michael knew me the best and he remembered me the best and did I even remember him? I vouched to write her a letter with all the things I remembered about my cousin and all the stories I could think of with him in it, so I asked my younger brother to help me come up with some. AJ, what’s your strongest memory of Michael? I asked and he paused for a second. I can’t think of any right now, he told me. We hadn’t seen him for so long. You can’t think of any? I asked him. AJ paused for another second and then he shook his head without remorse. I thought about pulling those damn initials off his arm.

—-

            My friend Austin has a tattoo written in a different language but the letters just look like blocks to me with gaps in between that are supposed to mean something. I asked him one night what it said and he explained, but I was drunk and so was he and I’m not sure he said it in English. I’ve been afraid to mention it again, but sometimes, when I ask him a question—about his god or his country or his mother’s surgery—he’ll just point to his tattoo like that’s an easier answer and I’ll just chuckle and say “I should’ve known.” It’s worked for so long because it’s not a lie. I really should’ve, by now.

—-

            Melissa has a tattoo on her wrist to cover up the scars because god fucking damnit isn’t that the reason we do anything anymore?

—-

Read More

The kids who drink wine from the bottle and talk about Kierkegaard. The ones who smoke weed and understand counter-culture. The ones who sit beneath trees on the banks of a river that was dug out and sustained by suburban horticulturists. Sitting there, discussing the essence of mankind: naturally good or bad or what is natural and is it all just fucking relative anyway? I don’t know, drink more. The cool ones. The ones that waited until high school was over to even try to be cool. The brilliant fuck-ups. The misunderstood geniuses who will test psychedelics to find a new plane of consciousness, even if they know they’re more conscious right now than most people are, anyway. The smart kids who can live in the moment and still be smart. God we are so fucking cool. We are here, with budget wine and books we’ll cite but have never read. Us here, with our majors in ancient history and sociology and our assurance that it will all work out for us because we are clever and we are special and we can be rebellious and still be prodigies and we are damn proud of ourselves for that. God damnit will somebody give us a movement? We are moving because we are bored. We are bored because we think the world is so much more simple than we are. We are bored because we have it all figured out. There’s nothing to figure out. We are finally those kids.

Alex and I take a midnight subway back to the suburbs. This one is full of concertgoers.

             But they don’t interest me as much as the cowboy.

            There is man talking to a woman that he clearly doesn’t know. He’s average height, just above average weight, probably about 50. He’s dressed completely in animal pelts. He’s wearing a white cowboy hat with a gold star in the center. His boots are covered in snakeskin. His skin isn’t wrinkled, but its buried in scars. There are a million white dots around his knuckles. His knuckles clutch a cane. The top of the cane is carved like a lion’s head. He’s completely incoherent. The woman is teasing him.

            He tells her that he’s a cowboy—that he’s rich. He’s stolen from trains. He loves white women, or more particularly, one white woman. Her name is Doris. He’ll kill her if he sees her with another man. He has the pistol to do it. She stopped loving him back.

             “Well,” the woman says, “if you’re a rich cowboy, there should be plenty of women who would love you.”

             “I don’t want them. I want Doris.” 

            I stare down at my water bottle. I hope he doesn’t start talking to me. I wonder if any of the things he’s saying are real. I’d bet anything that Doris is.

             The man keeps rambling and the woman keeps goading him. He sticks to his story. He pauses mid sentences, sometimes. After one long pause, he asks her for permission to leave the train.

            “I can’t tell you what to do,” she says.

            “No,” he asks again, “is it okay if I get off here?”

             She doesn’t answer.

             Then he asks:

            “Is it okay if I commit suicide?”

Read More

I’ve have saved someone’s life and I’ve had people save mine. I’ve read The Alchemist four times and the first half Ulysses, three. I’ve written poems I love and poems I hate and stories that weren’t quite as true as I thought they were. I’ve pretended to like a lot of music and I’ve been healed by Billy Joel. I’ve lost someone, and I’ve loved someone, and I’ve stayed up at night worrying that I’ll lose someone that I love. I’ve abandoned religion and I’ve created my own. I’ve hated the human race and I’ve embraced it. I’ve been afraid of drugs and I’ve done them. I’ve had sex and I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve climbed mountains and buildings and jumped out of an airplane. I’ve become a million things I told myself I wouldn’t and a million more that I never believed myself capable. I’ve learned to abandon my sense of envy. I’ve made myself what people need me to be. I’ve forgotten who I was to begin with. I’ve learned to like myself in that. 

I’ve never written that novel I said I would write or understood war outside of the movies. I’ve never loved so badly it was irrational and I’ve never kissed anyone I’ve cared about. I’ve never been comfortable with my body or convinced that I was beautiful. I’ve never acted older than my age. I’ve never been satisfied with what I’ve accomplished and I’ve never thought “that’s it, that’s good enough, there’s no need to do better.” I’ve never felt embarrassed for crying. I’ve never cried in public. I’ve never sang the national anthem at a sporting event or been on stage alone. I’ve never enjoyed black coffee or been outside of the continent. I’ve never punched anyone in the face or gotten into a fight or even had an argument that lasted longer than a day. I’ve never been quite sure enough of myself for that.   

I’m not quite convinced that I’m doing this right.

            My father says the key to parenting is collecting sad stories. I tell him I don’t like the idea of law school; he tells me the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

            It’s midnight on June 30^th and I sayI want to travel. I want to write. I want it to help people and I want to see the world and I don’t want to study for three years when I could be out there mattering.

            My father thinks that this is wasteful lifestyle.

            My father sells paper cups for a living. 

            My father likes to lecture, but when he does, he sermons. He hides sternness in stories. He says he has story to tell me, tonight. It’s about all the things I haven’t thought of yet.

Read More

because it reminds me of the way things used to be but it doesn’t explain to me whether or not I’ve changed for the better or for the worse. I remember nights when I used to sneak out to meet you at the swings and we’d walk around the lake a few times until it 2 in the morning. And I would live for moments when you’d compliment me and not talk about her and then we’d argue about something that didn’t matter because we both thought we understood everything then. 

Last night the streetlights were out for a long stretch  so I decided to keep driving until they came back on again. I drove until I forgot where I was and then I saw the park with the giant hill that we road our bikes to a few times. I sat on the rock where we sat Indian style while we’d look up at the sad, suburban stars. You would tell me how much more beautiful they were everywhere else and we’d talk until we got tired. One night we came to watch a meteor shower and we left without seeing a single star fall. We had the mosquito bites all over our legs to prove that we’d tried. 

You used to talk about staying out all night and watching the sunrise, but we never did. So last night I just sat on the rock shivering until the sun started to creep up and I closed my eyes and thought of you how I used to think of you and it was lovely for a moment. But it all wore off once the sun was in the sky and I found my car and went back home to sleep. 

(Note: I’m sort of at an impasse right now in regards to whether I should call this fiction or nonfiction. Most of it is true; but you have your lies and your exaggerations. It almost seemed more honest to include them, because it better communicated what I was feeling to a reader than the limited nature of what DID happen. But I feel dishonest calling it complete “nonfiction.”)

Sitting in My Brother’s Bar, Noah and I were experiencing pilgrimage. Everyone else was just annoyed. It was 8 in the morning and we had taken a detour into Denver, extending a seventeen-hour drive for a chance to sit in a booth that once hosted The Beat Generation.

            Jared drank a Coke and Alec drank iced tea. Eli got away with ordering whiskey. Noah and I didn’t drink anything, except for the air that had once touched Neal Cassady and the realization that we had finally run away.

            After a year of being bored and worshipping iconoclasts, we were restless enough to take off to the west. We painted “we’re lost, don’t find us,” on the side of my car and then filled it with five people and two weeks worth of luggage. Noah had family east of Denver and they had a cottage in Rockies. We had money left over from graduation and friends who wouldn’t refuse a vacation. We were hoping that the mountains would change our lives, or at least, change the way we’d been living them.

            The plan was to meet his family for a day, and then take off for Arches in Moab, Utah. We had rented a pueblo and we thought we’d live with the red rock for a while. After a week in the desert, we’d find our way to the mountains. I had never seen mountains before.

            Talking in a bar where they celebrated Cassady’s birthday, sitting in the chair where Allen Ginsberg once sat, I was drowning in unabashed poeticism. Caught up in the atmosphere, Noah and I decided to cheapen our trip to metaphor. We casted ourselves Beat Writers, floating back On the Road after 60 years away from it all.

            “Eli is Cassady,” said Noah immediately, watching the boy get up for another drink.

            We certainly idolized him enough.

Read More

All of my stories are still about other people. I’m bored so I run; I’m running from the fact that I’m boring. You had a tiny spark of chaos in you. Is what I did with Elton really so different? A part of me knew he was lying. There are some ways in which I refuse to be like Thomas. A love story between two porn stars. Samantha is manipulative. Two men who worship you. I can’t think of anything more poisonous. “I have an over-capacity for love.” I wish I could abandon my morals like that. I hope she knows that as soon as she sleeps with him they’ll be over and she’ll deserve it and he’ll realize how empty it all was and he’ll deserve that. Men want women who are used to men moral law wanting them. “I win.” human consciousness even in this you need to win. “She needs me more now,” “she was awful to me then.” I hope you’re very happy together. Frame it as a philosophy lesson. Agnosticism is not a stance on theism. Atheism is agnosticism. The ontological argument. Thomas and I are all language. Teleological argument. Connor follows my laws. Cosmological argument. Eli and Layla how have you been there? What makes you explode? You always started it all. Omnipotence. Sometimes I think I am. Let’s just forget it all. Grab some Gin, talk to Ptolemy for awhile. I don’t want to go to heaven, I just want to know what its like to ascend. Falling makes me nauseous; space is cold. Tell me why the horoscopes survived. The earth is not the center of creation. It must’ve been nice to think ourselves special in that way. How come poets never write about biology? Why is chemistry so much less sexy than the stars. Society convinces us that every time we’re having sex we’re being used. Society keeps telling me that I’m thinking about you too often. Society keeps telling me that I’ve become the teenager. The accusatory one bittered by frequent conversations with society. Henotheism. There are many gods and we choose to worship one. I wonder what I’ll look like when I’m old. I’ll wonder if I’ll care when I’m old. Can I be old now? All of this is exhausting.

I hate money because money likes to laugh at me and take those objects that I want and make them farther than they appear. Caution: because I’m looking at it through the side mirror going seventy miles per hour, it seems like its almost perfect. But money likes to dangle every fishhook of a dream just a bit too far away from me and I will jump and scratch and claw for just a chance for it to scrape against the side of my mouth and sever everything apart. Oh money, all the work I’ve put into you so that you would respect me. All my ivy dreams that you fed with words like “financial aid” and “just apply” and all the acceptance letters from the schools with gargoyles that made me feel like I could be someone important. And all of the plane tickets and train tickets and Pico Iyer novels that I stare at, jaw opened up like a fish, because my college fund is in stock and running out and studying abroad is too expensive and I’ll be damned if we give up our prescious prescious money to let you take off on your own. Money, you laugh at work and crumple it up with the metallic image of pristine dollar bills.

Money, you are the reason for all of the “I can’t live with you the rent’s too high”s and the “can I please work more hours although I don’t sleep anymore”s. You are the reason my boots have holes in the side and I had to punch my own holes in the belt that was too big for me and my coat has lost its buttons again and I had to tie my backpack straps together because they’re as worn down as you make me. You are the reason that I didn’t end up at a top five college and that I won’t end up at a top five grad school and that all I want is to sleep and wake up in a pool of maker’s mark and eighty dollar dresses and ticket stubs from Rome. Oh money, I hate you because I don’t have you, I hate you because I want you, and I hate you because if you ever gave me the slightest bit of attention, I’m quite sure I would hate myself. 

My mother often told me of her childhood home in Council Bluffs, and the few luxurious years she lived there before her mother got pregnant again and her father left. I’d never visited her hometown, but if asked, I could model perfectly the two-columned, double-doored entryway; the ridged gingerbread house roof; and the 12-foot pool dug underneath catalpa trees, always covered in leaves. My mother’s room faced the sun so that when she moved her bed next her window, it would wake her up in the morning. She was young and the only reason to be awake was that there were hours and small bits of life you knew you were missing while you slept.

            45 years later, my mother traveled through Council Bluffs, driving past her charmed home shrouded in happy childhood nostalgia. But when she stared at the double-doors and the pasty columns she said she felt that they were profoundly changed. The color and the upkeep were the same, so was the foliage surrounding it. In fact, the house looked largely untouched. “Maybe the light hit it wrong,” she told me.

            Or maybe it had moved 15 feet.

            We don’t spend a lot of time thinking of Pangaea. We know it’s the reason the United States doesn’t touch Asia and that we were largely static until the invention of boats. But every year the ground we stand on moves 4 inches and every second we’re splitting apart.

Read More