Ways to live

Let the sun extinguish and make your own with wax;
dimness is the habitat of nuance. Let the clamor
of intriguing things subside and dry.
Recall that your existence is improbable-
the thousand countless seeds that did not make us
in that tainted moment of creation. We're all dogged
by a million never-selves. Put between two fingers
all you wish to part with; bring it near and swallow.
Know you'll be outlived by every pill. Crawl into
the seasons of self with vigor and certitude.
You'll never see one twice. Caress indifference.
Wrap yourself in every dampened story that you see
until your skin is blackened with imprinted ink.

Ms. Darling

She became a teacher mostly to escape the curse of her first name. Mildred Darling. It had always sounded like a Victorian pun to her. By becoming Ms. Darling, she bisected herself and blotted out a half. The lesser half. That molding, dreadful joke of a name that lived between MILD and MILDEW. She never forgot, standing tip toed at the ponderous, gilded Oxford English Dictionary at her Elementary school library. Looking for her name and finding Mildew, instead. "A thin whitish coating consisting of minute fungal hyphae, growing on plants or damp organic material such as paper or leather."

Ms. Darling had spent her life afraid to be that whitish coating, the sordid disappointment of finding a plastic bag full of clothes wet from a trip to the beach two days past, ruined by carelessness.

But Ms. Darling, now, was faced with filling the shoes of her family name, the part of her identity she'd never given much thought to. Partly because to her it had always sounded like a

Use of terms of endearment can reveal little or nothing about the true quality of the relationship in question, she'd read once. Names were the same. Revealed little or nothing. Yet we carry them our whole lives. The weight of that.

Modus Vivendi

Fireworks sound like bombs but from this Brooklyn
rooftop, although the view is blocked I feel secure. I think it is
the unstrange smell of raspberry preservatives that permeates
the dark-but-not-yet-black unquiet; it harkens back to childhood days.
This is a city built of poetry so dense my senses become dumb
to it, the glare of many million ways to live all strung up,
hung to see. I sip the hipness, destitution, the bony-knuckled
beggars and the mariachi bands. I forget the flat-shoed, cruelly
dressed financiers are human, and hang on every well-starched edge
of their crisply dry cleaned suits, unsoiled by subway seats
(daily buttress of a thousand wearied sitters).
I wish to catalogue the characters and curate ways to live.
The urgency of choice is clearer nowhere more than here.

Truths

Mother’s lipstick tastes of blemishes and mirrors, age thirteen.
I dream of moving to Iran while living in the worst best place I’ve ever lived.
I’m scared of war and bombs and kidnappings for ransom so Newark doesn’t scare me.
I’m socially reckless and hopeless at romance.
Strange half humans roam this city, legless women of twilight and drug laced lopers of dawn.