Ghosting

I don’t know how to say goodbye
I can never find the right words at the time
so I always say “see you later”
even if I know it’s a lie

I hope I become a ghost when I die
so I can stick around instead of relying
on old pictures or poems
to remember me by

if I were a ghost,
I’d watch people walking by, passing through
a whole crowd looking down
and no-one’s talking

overcast skies, puffy eyes
your sound-proofed sighs muffled in flannel
it’s silent at noon
I am a visitor here
I’ll stay quiet and hide
by the streetlight outside
the one with the cracked bulb
and the long shadow in the summertime

if I were a ghost,
I’d haunt those places where
our resonant frequencies were
amplified by pond-water ripples
we drowned in a crescendo of wavelengths
soaked in the deafening dark

I’d return to that place
between the lightning-struck tree and
the dried-up stream for just
a glimpse of
our entwined silhouette
burnt, imprisoned
stained in cement
all tied up with the denim daffodils
in the silver beams of sunlight

if I were a ghost,
I would entranced by 
a floating fleck of dust
so small, but it means the world 
to me, the way we would
waltz around it in free fall
joined at the fingertips
following the threads of your
forgotten fleece sweater 
now wrinkled and creased
and ripped at the seams
hidden under sheets
the color of teeth

my ghost will fade
as people forget
but maybe I’ll stick around 
as I try to remember the shapes
of headlight reflections and graphite shavings
written on wet concrete and notebook paper

I don’t know when I’ll die
but, before I forget
see you later

mouth sounds

one afternoon, I fell into a champagne glass
drum beat bubbles popped as I sank and as I drank
I dreamt I dropped face first into the grass

I spoke a sentence that
spattered and slobbered as it
flipped from my mouth
outstretched and upside down
pulled taut and coiled around clarity
percolating in sticky brown sugar
bubbling up from my gums and
shaking out my rotten, foggy, softened teeth

so now, I swallow incendiary coffee grounds
soothe my throat with the low-hanging clouds
sipping acid and absent-minded embers
remember to remember the generator hum

memorizing a montage made from
from scrap metal and dull mouth sounds

what did the distant cars speak like?
what was the pattern of tongue taps?
where is the nausea in monotony?
the gear-turning, stomach churning fear of machinery?
the mechanics are stumped that I can’t speak

secrets get lodged in my chest
dust coats my fingertips
getting tripped up by smoke
and choked up by birdsong

so I rinse my mouth out with sours
trace the shapes in the woodgrain
count the coffee stain spots in my eyes
tug at my shirt sleeve and try
to speak again

On November 28, 2018, I went to a faculty recital called “Gertrude Stein and Liberty: An Evening of Improvised Music and Poetry”. This consisted of an English professor and a Spanish professor reading Gertrude Stein’s poetry while the percussion professor improvised music. Stein’s poems (for example, “If I told him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, “Pigeons on the Grass Alas”, and “Susie Asado”) are very rhythmic, repetitive, and intentionally nonsensical, which was wonderful to listen to combined with xylophones and drums. I wrote some lines at this concert which became the beginning of this poem.

Another thing that influenced this poem was the feeling of hearing yourself in a recording and feeling self-conscious about how you sound. One time I just heard myself speak and immediately after, I was surprised by how I sounded. One of the lines I ended up cutting for this version was “words follow with creaky footsteps”.

I wrote a lot of this during January-February 2019, and it was cold, rainy, and dreary in Boone, and next to my dorm began some major construction. Where previously was a small field for, an open green space, was fenced off and leveled to in order to build a new dorm. As of February 2020, the construction is still going.

Airplane Triptych

I.

one night I look up to see a plane overhead
a distant dot among stars 
a thing made of eyes and wings
full up with twinkling half-asleep daydreams

I wonder if someone, halfway to wherever
happened to glance down at
a glowing mountain town

tomorrow, when the sky is turned to golden honey
and I’m suspended in a purplish grey
I’ll peek through my pinhole window
to scan the tectonic creases for
landlines and fractal highways
always returning 
to twisting turning 
suburban 
dead ends

II.

piercing the clouds like 
the morning sun through your blinds
I woke up too early

I woke up too early but 
took off too late
to take notes on the way
your face was written in the sky

stuck in this plane full of pencils
lights that blink and stare
feeling claustrophobic while time is stopped 
drinking recycled air

dry your eyes
because a self-portrait is only
what you make of it

watch the world shrink 5 miles below
it can fit in the palm of your hand 
you can smear it on a canvas
watch it run down your arm 
in little droplets along the window
in gale-force winds that shake 
your pen suspended over hazy pages

underneath these cotton-cloud shapes 
are sheets of orange-white lights
gridlocked static signals and 
headache hangover voicemails
from flyover state, great lakes, and
ink-soaked page turns

III.

rack focus rain streak window pane 
parallax cloud layering staccato synth ear pops
panned left to right in altitude pressure changes
creaky adjustment settling into a new shape

I’m not sitting here, but in the next seat over
I’m sitting across the aisle from me 
spinning away into a spiral
curling into myself compressed to a point
sinking into myself thinking to a fault:

death
is a momentary reflection
magnified

what happens after? 
there’s an empty space where 
you would stand, a step to the left

I’m deaf in one ear now
ringing feedback 
losing signal fidelity
a hazy crackle 
a faint hissing whisper
saying why, or why not

blackout poems vol. I

Housepainters

continuously
calculated
days long gone
repair-
ing what we could
damp moldering newsprint, in a tangle of
shutters
pale lavender
faded after
five years
spend money and time
living in
fifteen to twenty gallons of
old, dry wood. Long gone
the days of
housepainters

Treasures

All the while, I
promised never to fall in
love with
watercolor landscapes
raspy, rusty melodies
mirrors, subtle
miniatures
missing a magnifying
radio.
fickle,
cherrywood
frame,
seeming very real

The Huntsman

recall, suddenly, sharply
“The Huntsman”
he
was silhou-
etted against the
woodcut
you
sat at his desk and gazed into
luminous
trees
He was twenty years old