shoegazers

set in a painting, swept in brilliance and ready to peel, they fade softly in a moonlit apartment. warm blankets of dust and light fall on his shoulders while he writes–finding his meaning under piles of the past, searching and scratching and scrubbing it down.
she watches, moved but not moving. she wonders what the next three months will mean, and who will occupy his table when they have turned to ghosts. she communicates with fingers and eyes that he doesn’t quite catch, even when he tries.
even when he cries, he loves her, wants to make it last in final days and across breakdowns and continents. he  eats his dinner on a couch they’ve shared before. a record spins familiar. it’s possible that he feels her uncertainty but some things, like heavy weights we can’t explain, go unmentioned on nights like these. with the songs of our youth and piles of the past to crawl through, with dinner to eat, with fingers to study.
there’s another one that’s wandering somehow in headphones and soft skin and the smell of new shampoo. she admires his taste but is weary of his self-awareness.
she’s weary of most things these nights, and thinks of europe and things more certain like the stories we wrote in our innocence. i try to remind her of the things we have gathered, i show her images of triumphs, and florida boys we’ve married in our minds, we talk of how we used to  talk and how unbreakable we were, right after we broke. but it’s not easy to rid our bones of it all. heroin heatwaves and hospital beds. of the pictures that have stained our skin as they melted away.
across city lines we hold onto each other as we shake it off. we teach ourselves back to life with songs that crash and boil in our blood, and we stitch one another back together in unheard laughter. there are new landscapes to hold us.
we can’t stop the ocean of sun that drains the colors from the living room, but maybe that preservation is not as important as we once believed. she holds him as she falls asleep aware of their slow disappearance. but she isn’t afraid of vacant walls; she looks for herself in empty spaces.

being where we aren’t

tell the story of somewhere else
of someone my age, younger
think of holes in shoes and supper bombs
think of bathing in rivers
not to feel liberated
to get clean
forget your mother pulling sheets up to your chin
it’s hard, i know
but think of someone else
pulling a shroud up to his chin
her son, their name
lost in supper bombs
and holes in heads
tell the story of some other town
grass on roofs
snipers on roofs
orphans with searching eyes
growing up missing
think of things you’ve never seen
think palm trees on fire
think blood circling sewers
think holes in buildings
morning bombs
just for now forget homework
tell anyone who asks that you got lost
somewhere else
tell them to think dead silence for survival
think daughters as payment
forget home
think homeless
think bittersweet train ride
goodbye forever
safe now but orphaned
think shit scared
think faucet eyes unending
think other
tell them the story of not now
of salmon like blankets
of indians and trees
tell of time before melting
forget summer as peaches
think painful
think sweatshop for shoes
think fever and fall over tired
tell the story of someone my age, younger
think of life as surviving
pay with body for food
think no brothers and sisters
forget baseball and snick
think slavery for scarves
think cardboard for beds
tell the story of somewhere else
don’t shine it
don’t cheat
tell it bare boned and raw
tell it yelled out and fierce
tell the story of somewhere else
tell it like it’s here

chronophobia

every room i’m in crumbles when i close my eyes
every memory sits on dusty shelves while the sky turns to fire
i watch oceans boil from car windows
imagining the trees falling like blocks
just days before i know they will
it isn’t fair to spend all my time in fear of clocks
wondering
waiting for the suspension of being
that initial crash when we realize we’re done for
have i rationed out my love enough for these final days
how can i tell my mother that this is the end
she tried so hard to keep us safe
will a newborn understand how sorry i am when i weep for words she’ll never speak
i cannot waste what little time there is
but i can’t ignore the ticking
we’ve confused with alarm clocks
we shuffle off without thinking
shuffle back and sleep off what we think is the daily grind
but every little boy breaks my heart when he smiles
every animal cries out my guilt
there’s no way to apologize to the land we’ve slaughtered
not that we’re trying
not that we care
but every wall i see is cracking and burning
and every train veers into the river
i can’t help but smell the burning of oil, of bodies in streets and blood circling sewers
where can we run when we’ve mined out all the caves
there are no more safe mountains
no valleys to sympathize with us
there will be no more birds to carry us
or fish to gently swallow us whole
but as the rain melts flesh from bones
the black rivers will surely be happy
to take us under
i see us drowning
i see no salvation
on this earth

fade-in

there was often a song
you,disappearing
there was always an absence
don’t take it back
i couldn’t stop the ocean
you,as an iceberg
there is always a place
me,appearing
you,always
you,returning
we were right to collapse

unlearning my education

They taught me to use active verbs and be a passive listener. They taught me to memorize without question, to speak only when spoken to, to cross my legs, curtsy, and say God Bless You. I learned “i before e” and how to elegantly sip tea, but nothing about class tyranny or lies or the potential of anarchy. They taught me to fear Bosnia before I knew where Bosnia was. Their lowered eyes taught me to cite my ancestors from Italy before Iran. Even before the threat of apocalypse they taught me to be ashamed, to trust all the wrong people and pray for all the wrong reasons. They taught me to look forward to chicken nugget thursdays and multiplication drills and I never learned that Fridays could mean solidarity at punk shows and organic vegetables until I was heavy with American grease and useless numbers. They taught me that family meant construction paper hearts and not bruises. They taught me that “Will you go out with me? Circle Yes or No” was the hardest part of love. They taught me that it wasn’t ok to wear shorts before I started shaving my legs, that girls with bellies should change in the bathroom, that an Italian nose and Iranian eyes made me exotic but not necessarily desirable. That I would have to compensate with grades. They taught me that it was cute to join Environmental Club, to make birdhouses and plant trees, but in the real world, bosses hire female soccer players and jazz dancers. They taught me to hate, before I wanted to. They taught me to binge and purge, to bleed, to bleed, to bleed. They taught me to direct my rage inward, to find my faults and correct them through self-help books in the library, through basketball intramurals even though I was too short, through in-school counseling, through self-hate.
What they didn’t teach me saved my life. They never told me about the power of poetry. I didn’t learn about the disappearance of salmon, the devastation in Darfur, the complicity of my country, the lies in the books the lies in the books the lies in the books. I didn’t learn I didn’t have to learn their numbers. I didn’t know I could teach myself about self-help through music, through that power of poetry, those Friday nights of solidarity at punk shows and spinach pies. I didn’t know I could purge the heavy American slime, spit back the numbers, and dissent.
What they didn’t teach me I learned in higher places. Like grimy basements and abandoned barns, with stereos and duct-taped couches and all the ex-patriots of American schools. With banged-up guitars and fisher-price microphones we taught ourselves back to life. And with handwritten pages stapled together, passed from punk to disillusioned punk we taught ourselves about class tyranny and lies, about the potential of anarchy, about our own government’s complicity, about ourselves, about each other, about this nation’s hipocrisy. And we taught ourselves into revolution. We taught movement and breakage and stomping feet and melody. We taught the numbers of community, of death tolls and positivity. We preached with exposed bellies and coke-bottle glasses, with three-foot mohawks and lisps and pigtails and afros and unshaven legs, or shaved ones. We spoke through bass drums and yelled until our voices broke like the windows we dreamed of smashing. Like the windows we taught ourselves to smash. We drove the dying remains of our parent’s corollas and marched across state lines and police barricades in  the snow and sweat to unlearn the decades before us, to join hands with The Poor they tried to tell us existed only on pages of textbooks.
And with our new education we stitched ourselves back together. We sewed a tapestry of memory that the next and last generation will read about in tattered pages, handwritten and stapled together, past from clenched fist to shaking fingers as they try in turn to unlearn.

oh, election!

I have the right to choose
Between shit
And mudpie.
Between a car wreck
And drowning.
I have the right to choose
My leader
In theory.
I’ve been told that behind one door
Lies salvation,
But both doors are open
And it seems to have left.
I’m the cynic.
I’m obstructing progress.
You give me the “lesser of two evils talk”
And I walk away,
Still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.
History is bloated
With shit and mudpie.

dnc/rnc

I bought a $50 ticket to a $10 show and let the music replace the sirens for an hour or two. But where were you? I took a break from the job you never showed up to. Pay attention. It wasn’t so much to ask, was it? Pay attention–it’s what they’ve taught us from the start: a clever ploy, a decoy, a bird’s toy while they clip its wings. They distract us, they trap us in plastic, attack us with attractive actors and acid, slow us down with low-grade activism, they’ve cracked us. And now we’re silently protesting in Civic Park. We think we’ll make a difference if we don’t attack the cops. We watch each other get dragged by the neck, infected. Perplexed, we wonder if we should still stand still. We shouldn’t! We do. Another badge, another punk with a broken nose. It goes on like this forever. And still we never remember, we show up next year in Denver. We surrender, again. And all the while we’re claiming proud claims of victory, of dissent and street credibility. We buy the t-shirt. We forget. We mistake bombs for fireworks.

ugly reminders

Some things deserve to be forgotten. Like people who assume that not bragging means you have nothing to brag about. Or like embarrassing things we’ve all said under pressure. But not like that brilliant poem I thought of before falling asleep–even though by morning it was gone. (Even though by morning it had left me with a film on my brain and the roof of my mouth.)
And not the feeling of freedom that childhood offered, despite the irony. And not the faces of all those people we met who never had the privilege of that merciful illusion. Junior High we can bear to forget. But not Junior’s funeral. Or Erich’s or Al’s or Genie’s or Pranay’s or Uncle Chopsey’s. Not Jake’s or Pete’s or the poor Morey’s. But I can’t tell you why.
I can tell you why I’m so angry. But I’d like you to guess. Guess.
And if you can’t I’ll be even worse. It will all get even worse than this.
If you can’t find a reason to be angry in this then we’re already worse off than I thought.

men without parachutes

maybe there was always a foreboding

in the way we threw those helicopter buds in the air

and watched as they spiraled to the sidewalk

careening 

like men without parachutes

like blood down a drain

did we know then

how appropriate the crash was?

could we sense

somewhere beneath young bones and fresh skin

that this is how it would end?

or were we really that innocent

before The Fall

Want Goo Goo Dolls Tickets??

Hey everyone,
Sadly I’m being forced to sell my Goo Goo Dolls tickets for the NY State Fair show on the 22nd..
If anyone wants to buy them from me for a really inexpensive price (I just want to give them to someone who’ll enjoy it as much as I would), feel free to visit my ebay listing or email me if you want to work out a deal (I’m willing to go for a much lower price if you have some goods to trade).
The ebay page is HERE and my email address is stormintheforest@gmail.com

Like I said, the show is next friday, August 22nd at 7:30pm at the awesome NY State Fair in Syracuse, NY. The opener is Gavin Degraw (not my bag of beans, but maybe you’re a fan?) and I promise you, if you haven’t already experienced the incredible energy and emotion of a GGD concert, you must! So if you find yourself facing a boring friday night next week, grab a friend and spend the day at The Fair and the night enjoying the best performance you’ll ever see.. (Excuse my melodrama, I’m pretty upset I can’t go)

Hope to hear from you, love

until we know our distance

when we get younger, we’ll be weightless

we’ll run around impatient

we’ll be scared but we’ll fake it

we’ll make it back here

with bruises on our hands and on our faces

on our knees

we’ll know our distance

we’ll know our fate then

but until then, boy, don’t waste it

we’ve all been zombies 

haven’t we?

fucking each other up

and over

and roughly in backseats

we’ve tangled our feet with glazed eyes

and strangled cries about being too aware

that something’s wrong

we miss it

and when we get younger we’ll miss this, too

no one tells you that you can miss the missing

as much as the kissing

and tangled cries

and freedom of zombie nights

yeah, girl, we were happy then

as dead-end kids

riding the swings through thunderstorms

and picking thorns out of each other’s tan arms

and, yeah, i know it got sour

when the holes in their arms turned much bigger than ours

but, boy, now that we’ve seen the face of this place

we can rest easy

sleep easy

twilight calm

because we know 

we’ll only grow young from now on

Real

to everyone that has emailed me or commented about the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Real” mp3 i uploaded, you are all very welcome. i guess this song is receiving some recent attention because of the olympics so i’m so glad more people are taking notice of the band and another one of their amazing songs. hopefully everyone is going out and buying greatest hits volume 2 in the next few days and contributing back. 

again, it was so nice to hear from other fans and just plain appreciative people from all over the world. so thanks for all the feedback!

much love

we can still be orphans

I’ve never been one for making deals or begging but if you would give life one more chance I promise I won’t let them hurt you. We can find a beat up engine for a couple hundred bucks or just strap our backpacks to the front of our bikes and we’ll ride until we can’t smell this town anymore. We’ll find the open fields where we spun around in circles and drew peace signs with our bodies in the dirt. We’ll drink from the creeks where we held hands on bridges and talked of drowning. We can sleep on every cliff where we thought of gravity. And flowers will be ours again. We can pick and choose and shy away with smiles and overlapping fingers. Forests can be home. We’ll pedal until we can’t find powerlines to stripe the canvas and until no sirens interrupt our beating silence. I promise I won’t ever let them find us again. But you have to keep your side of the bargain and keep breathing for a little while. 

I can’t blame you for hiding behind smoke from the end of the world.

sing-along dirty-kid foot-stomping wide-eyed unrelenting feel-good folk-punk music as my raison d’être

if the ggd saved me in my childhood, than this other band has been my bandana-clad guardian angel in the past 5 years. i’ve yet to find a situation, experience, conflict, or emotion that they haven’t provided a song to accompany and because of that i’m both grateful and perpetually inspired. during my dark year these songs alone saved my life, literally.  there’s no possible way to overstate the benefits of sing-along dirty-kid foot-stomping folk-punk bands on my mental health. 

 

here’s one of my favorites and a link to download it:

Oh,Susquehanna!.mp3

defiance, ohio — “oh, susquehanna!” (printed with all due respect but no permission from defiance, ohio)

We walk at the paths at the banks of the mighty Susquehanna, with our feet made muddy by your tributaries that trickle their way to the Chesapeake. It’s like we follow I-83 down to harbor cities with strip malls and tar-mac, people swirling and teeming. It seemed so exciting, but now it seems like such a blight. I grew up near Kentucky’s Mountains of Zion, and all that was there was some old cemetary. All I wanted [was] to be able to walk to the store. Now I don’t live there but there’s too many stores, some apartments, and a Sunoco. And I wonder, what did they do with the bodies? Oh, Susquehanna! And I miss that place behind my house where I hiked and climbed and played, where I ditched this noisy century or just hid out from the decade. M-I homes thought it could stand to be updated, forced it all into a grid until it looked like the funny pages. With every trace of life, it seems, confined within a frame, the faces move from day to day but the strips all look the same. And the punchlines are resoundingly unfunny for those trapped in this architecture of easy money. And I feel like this could all come to no good. The kids who populate these culdesacs will never know what stood beneath their cookie cutter houses: fields and streams and woods. They’ll sit in cars and wait for mom to drive them out of this boring neighborhood. Oh, Susquehanna!

5 out of 6

sometimes when i’m bored or curious i sit quietly in bathroom stalls and count how many people i can hear leaving without washing their hands. 

you’d be surprised.

love/intrusion, diagnosis/disorder

It wasn’t the moving, I could have handled that. And no, it wasn’t leaving behind that house or the one after it, or even the dog in the backyard. It’s true there are nights when I can still smell it, the barn that sat back behind the covered porch, behind the garden. Some nights I wake up with the feeling of hay stuck in my hair as I sit up. Smiling, I shake it out and end up shaking my head at the awkward illusion. There hasn’t been hay in my hair in over two years, I tell myself night after night. But yes, the smell of that loft is still clear. As clear as the spider webs we watched forming above our heads in the shine of that one lightbulb and the Moon. The door was always open in the loft, even after the snow began to fall. It never mattered how cold it was outside. And beneath us, through the rectangle of wood that swung out over the yard, there were always two horses. No one ever thought about it really. Two horses and a dog.

And there was the attic. The five of us, four boys and I, moved a stereo and a couch up the stairs. He put up cheap plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that made our every weekend neon. Our nights were always electric. And even still, the Fall always smells like pizza and must to me. Real stars didn’t shine as bright for a long time until I told myself that I can’t compare those nights in barns and basements and attics to the sky, I can’t hold a memory in front of my life. And I moved on.

But not before the new house. They left his dad and dog with The Barn and the attic. His mother took him and a futon and an heirloom couch. The couch moved into the new basement where we found new sounds to fill our nights, but with his angst, he brought new smells. And my winters of snow angels in the golf course behind the old barn turned to cold days of second-hand smoke and late-night consolations; his doctor said it was up to me to keep him from suicide. No one succeeded in keeping him from anorexia, bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis, overdose after overdose in the following year.  Somehow in the middle though, I learned to love the newness: the new bedroom with a futon and a ceiling fan. The new basement with its empty bottles and graffiti. It wasn’t hard to fall in love in those days. And we all did, and spent our Friday nights in lazy postures writing on the walls and singing old songs that meant everything. That was all that mattered, and it’s funny now how none of it really matters.

I thought it would be impossible to leave that second house behind. To leave his mother without warning, though she had warned me to save myself before. Maybe, I often thought, if I had known that one night would be my last, I would have taken the time to cement it in my brain for good. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. We watched Fight Club and ate pretzels and said goodnight, not goodbye.

I can still remember pulling out of the driveway that last night. When I think hard, I can smell the sour summer air, recall the weather, hear the sounds of cars on the other side of the woods. But those parts are dim now. Mostly, I just see him. And not all of him really. Just, very clearly, the eyes. They were clear blue when we met. The bluest blue you can imagine, not ocean blue or sky, but bright bursting Crayola blue that sucked you in. After the move, they never lost their color, but the whites around them turned veiny and red, bloodshot. And the shiny black pupils were always too big or too small, depending on the night’s poison. On the last night they were too small–the needle he used just before I got there had sucked the black right into its chamber.

It wasn’t always just the eyes. In that last image, the one I see clearest when I think of him, there is a mess of black hair, spotted green and blonde, a result of careless dye jobs. A nose perfectly shaped, like his mother’s, straight and narrow. And the shy mouth, two lip rings, self-inserted, and a set of pure white teeth that would have surely needed braces had he cared enough about his image to pursue the matter. He was tall, too tall for me but not imposing. At seventeen he weighed 100 pounds, bones protruded from his shirt when he sat. You could trace every vertebra. He could wear my pants. None of these were flaws to me. Not even the holes in his shoes, newly burned from red-hot cigarettes, or on the knees of his torn black jeans could have made him seem less than perfect. Only the bag he hid under the speaker in his room, only the syringe in the shed.

Looking back it was easy to block out the leaving. It was simple to tell myself the smell of hay and innocence and Fall nights in barns, winters in basements and attics and golf courses could never return and that I had no business holding on to something so inherently fleeting. I convinced myself his parents were ghosts. When I drove by Larchmont and later, by Harrigan I taught myself not to look, not to even hope to see the car that drove us around on late nights when I would lie to my parents to sneak off to shows and highways with him. I didn’t even cry when I went back to the silo we used to climb to look out over the ruins of that burned down building. I didn’t cry when they sealed up the entrance and trapped all our memories inside. I let them stay in there forever. It wasn’t hard to find something else to do with my Fridays and Saturdays and in between every class in school. After he dropped out we just stopped showing up at his locker. I threw out all the notes and dried flowers from our first walk in the forest, our last Valentine’s Day.

It was easy to accept never seeing his father again too. We all hated the man, knew it was his fault that everything came crashing down. His fault for cheating and lying and putting his son’s head through a wall. It was his fault that Charlie had to get away. No, it was easy to let go of all that.

So if I could so easily turn away from buildings, moments, seasons, dogs, why couldn’t I let go of a ghost? Surely, I could at least loosen my hold… But always, nights and mornings, he comes rushing back in a flood of two blue waves. The bluest, hardest blue to have to face. And once my own eyes connect to them, I know there’s no escaping the rest that washes ashore: the breathless laughter, the singing voice, arms moving lightning speed over a beat-up guitar, the smell of soap and smoke and skin, the jokes and serious conversations, the slow rhythm of breathing on a sunny futon afternoon, the plans for a crappy apartment when I graduated college and he made it with the band, the dreams of something better, something far away from here, the sound of a quiet voice over the phone just before sleep, swearing that things would never end, that when we woke up, everything would be alright.

 

 

He was a castaway at the age of seven

They put his head through a wall so he built his own up

Growing higher every year

At sixteen he can touch his fingers to heaven

 

He stains his town with the ink of veins

They split up and left him a futon, took his dog

Sometimes he seems him on weekends

Chewing grass, father and canine

 

And each night he stands at the edge

Sees his reflection and thinks of gravity

Considering the last safe place, he’ll step back

But always each night, back where we met

 

And there’s a hollow line right down the middle

Dividing love and intrusion

Diagnosis and Disorder

And the rest of us are always there to solve his riddles

 

There to support the skeleton boy

Fingers tracing spine and jutting clavicle

Mind racing to keep up but never quite

He’s never quite here but we keep the light on

 

“Just in case,” we tell ourselves

In case he finds the last safe place or better,

In case he asks a stranger for a quarter,

Comes riding home with a smile

 

I knock on the concrete every so often

Sometimes he’ll stick his head out and let me in

Mostly he remembers the times before

Remembers what happens when the gates are lifted

 

But sometimes, alone, he’ll take me through

I can still see the other side in darkness

Because his garden is always in bloom

Its always summer on the other side of the wall.

 

how long do you look for the lost

it was like trying to save an ice cube from a flood. and i was swimming, swinging arms and fighting to keep my eyes above the current but i couldn’t and when i looked up it was gone. so i made a boat out of dried flowers and wrinkled letters, stretched out smiles and that strip of balsa wood you gave me. and i reached out my tired hand and tried to sweep you up into a cup i’d made from spider webs and orange leaves and skin. but you insisted on floating along on your own. 

and so i kept on rowing and you just drifted away. and there’s just no way of knowing where you’ve been melting all these days. but i hope it’s sunny there. i hope the weather’s fair. and in case you ever wonder what you’ve missed or miss the way we wandered through our lips, you should know i’m traveling on and there’s something pure about this. 

i’ve left a trail of shedding days in case you ever choose to follow.

stray

i’ve been staying up late nights thinking about things like energy and personal freedom. calculating hours i’ve wasted wasting hours of sleep but not for not trying. sometimes i just forget how to talk. because it’s such a shame how we can never find the words to describe the things we see in the dark–the things that keep moving, like stray cats and the homeless, like wrecking balls and cranes. no one has the time to listen, anyway, to desperate explanations and irreverent revelations. so we’re faking all our audiences and falling asleep to the sounds of crumbling buildings. and cats.

do strangers find you charming?

a stranger paid for my bridge toll last night. and another held the door for me today and waited patiently with a smile as i approached from a mile away. and though neither act was epic and i’m sure neither stranger thought much of it, it made the whole world a little warmer.

mild prostitution

like kids hiding knives in their teddy bears while their parents hide guns under the mattress. and no one’s saying a word even though they all must be waiting for something. and isn’t it all just mild prostitution? the way we shimmy to work dress our best right up to the bloodshot eyes. we bend real low to say thank you while they sign our paychecks with our childrens’ blood. we’re going backwards in overtime. and we seem to like it.