This collection is just that: a thrown-together set of the better bits and pieces of writing I was able to squeeze out after my graduation from the Academy and before departing for Cleveland. This was the summer of 2001.

Unlike a couple of past projects, “How I Grew Up White” lacks a theme outside of the generally good state of mind in which I spent the summer. Because of this jumpiness, and not due to any airs I’m putting on about the work, I recommend pausing a few moments after reading each bit, terminated with a *. And

Once and interminably often, I find lots of pause looking at your name and address. Once a letter gets started, it had better get sent. It leadens. She could be a ball and chain after all.

Nothing seems to match anything else, which I suppose is gratifying, considering all the unmatched things left to know. Also means, though, that lost things won’t be made up for. There’s never two drinks from the bottle. There are plenty of cans. I’m not often in debt. I’m never in debt. I never know what matters.

I’m haunted by the desirable ghosts of former girlfriends, inextricably misplaced. Imagined memories from before or after now of being a great dancer. Unzipping pants. Desired, all the time. Just how far out of time and possibility is it? I am decidedly self-gratified and self-satisfied, mostly. But neither always. A life of constants is less fun.

You don’t mince, but you don’t clump around, either. You’re nicely self-unaware, though not entirely. You always define my type. There’s no joggling incongruencies. You are a complementary form. I’d like to be the part of your life that cares. I’d like to have you as a bragging right. I’d like to be believed. I’d like to be proven.

The more chances, the more successes. The more losses. But alike complements should become longer-lasting.

she's en mi alma
she’s freeweights, mid-flex
she’s a satisfying load borne
for kicks
fakin out stenographic filler young lips
n’ out soft-serve tongue browned face
half good search over foxy scene
not having to scratch me wide open up
beautiful ground below ecstatic embrace
(cooly ecstatic, not so’s you could tell)
uncharacteristically sugar jar
i never needed to hose her down
and i never want her to look this way for anyone else.
I can be self-confident before and after
but when I’ve got for what I hoped
I’m too damn uncertain
i think i fumbled you away again.

You know, the feeling is estimated. The feeling recalls watching Charlie & Unhee. It watches her squeeze his shoulder. It watches him ask me about things. It watches me begin unsolicited stories. It’s a well-wishing envy. It’s a wish to be an little less full of answers.

Everything presently feels fine, but feels knowing that I nearly had something better. Under this underlying feeling, though, there’s a more humbling one: maybe I wasn’t so close, after all.

Watching her move with such fondness, I wonder how I possibly could have been.

newly seen, but unsurprised
that the bridges from first glances
to somehow more intimate & important looks shared
these means separate casualty from a chord in two parts
sounding however well our friends decide
however well our private thoughts on one another go
leaning with poise back against a driver’s seat
I guess at how well my faked paradox is holding up

your nearly undetectable tan line is nothing
in your life without worry
deliberation just slows the wheels to each new devoted boy
leaning with quickly less poise, I’m thinking of asking
how nice must it be to not have to try and get back the past
I’ve been able to push my trials to the fronts of others’ minds
I haven’t got too many in mind
leaning back with a palm against your stomach
assured nothing doesn’t last forever

easy (also put to music)
You say sorry like you’re British
you long o and laughing at everything i say and
it’s easy to believe in your shallow cunt
it’s hard to take you like this

and you laugh a lot

didn’t know exactly what youre doing
were doing scandalous not really
actually at all
were overproduced
made too much of too little

never know exactly what we’re doing
it’s the long o i wanted
it would be nice to see things for myself

and am i too much

All the flaws in my fair skin have fallen away, touched by a little hard-won color from overexposure to the ozone hole. Before now, the sky had been a uniformly uninviting ceiling, however pale. The air is usually still and there’s a bright white circle that stays on the inside of my eyelids once I remember to look away.

Lately, it seems like more than a couple of inches is too much hair; I go to the barber at the end of each humid month. While New England-style modesty kept all ends covered in cold months, we’re now all close to nudity. Sunny excess and bass-heavy songs whose lyrics are an afterthought blare from noon till the ends of parental-absentee parties. It’s mostly about being the shit. It’s visor and capri season. Teenage costumes are as little an effort to put on as to remove. Sex is easy.

Rough road asphalt and iron traffic lights alike take on the same gleam that gives washed cars a bit of extra clean and dirty ones a little less room to hide. The family man next door’s got a sunglasses outline on his face, but his hairline seems a trifle less embarrassing on a tanned pate. It’s less an effort to meet the hot days’ status quo of longer evenings and little deliberation. It’s also harder to break through the shallow shell that builds around every pretty girl for these three months. Lately, stealing kisses hasn’t seemed like much.

right turn circle
having swum the black sea yesterday evening
i dragged the upper half of my body all the way down Market Street and
closed my eyes rolling into the rain gutter
not watching
the clouds overhead pushing one another over toward tropicana
seems they try to tumble over each other but can never quite catch up
i have a feeling they’ll peel apart before they get there
There’s a hole in the bottom of my foot
where the plug goes,
how they keep me close to home, right along big baked broadway
till the street sweeper’s machine comes and collects
the tender spot under the heartbone
so do you feel up to tonight
do you know there’s no way to tell how long you’ve got
crawling up the bedsheet tonight

it gets later
we don’t start over

The moon makes full circuit as i stand and lean on my feet behind one of innumerable bay windows
full moons bouncing around the sky as the strings of time are
just bigger holes in a celestial colander
pulls on the edges of his collar and sees the rings under my eyes as proof of last night’s vigil
wondering if mirrors can burn holes in ourselves

living sans serif

youve never known half of what you saw

The wind picks up the leaves, carries them around in a few little fall cyclones close to the ground, and tosses them from the sidewalk to the stiffening lawn, and back again. As the temperature drops, the grasses harden from wide, rolling mattresses to crunchy shortcuts. The pages on tear-away calenders count down to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, to New Year’s. The days fall away without conscious change.

Dry warmth is hard to come by. It seems all the fleecy sweaters around are retaining an unsettling moisture. We sweated in summer, but that felt productive for tans. These days it’s a payment to retain heat. Still, I want to nestle against your chest more now that our skins won’t stick together. Even if we’re both hiding in dark colors. And these days, a letter is still more a comfort.

for the girl whose father teaches the excel class & whom I’ve seen three times so far & whose name i think is sarah
take you
i take you and crop down to the best angles
i size you down perfectly to the best gentle dryness and flashes in your eyes
i make your sidecurves just right.

I spoon out a picture of myself for your mind
the best gentle dryness and flashes in my eyes
See me an optimist
here’s hoping the lighting’s good.
looks good on you

it seems to me you must’ve picked nondescript sensuality
as if you didn’t know i liked it
as if you liked my shirts and pants.
you know I’d comb my hair for you if it weren’t for the tangles
You love those too. Your glance translates that way
honest to god
if i could have any girl fall for me
I’d start with you.

Did you smile when you read this

I have to keep away the water running around my eyes. The wind seems a tangible thing, driving itself into my face, reddening and jerking moisture from my angry slits. The snow has a charcoal coating along the streets, mixed with brown from road puddles. It hasn’t snowed any more lately, but it hasn’t gotten warm enough to melt all this.

Not wanting to suffer the same weeping fate, a few fellow students walk briskly as possible, necks bent toward the ground. No one seems to be walking with anyone else, and they all look as though they’d like very much to be someplace else. I can’t remember when we were supposed to be out enjoying the Wonderland. This doesn’t look like enough white to play with.

I recall dreamlike January nights, gathered around a massive outdoor furnace, warming hands and faces, dripping water from snowpants and coats. I remember trudges up sled hills. The biggest change is from the looks on the faces of kids to the countenances around me. Once, we were able to forgive any inconvenience in the pursuit of winter fun. Now, we’ll try and ignore anything outside our window.

rew correspondent
have it out with the mayor nextore
avant-rock loose the sediment settlements in compacted bones
have it out with the sun and shade.

Stake the stone patio
let fall where it may
breeding fresh angles betrays artistry
corrections spill mouth ed ness
splintering maplewood leaves big-piled layer on crunchy layer
splash in a lake or autumn
send work flying

i remember you like i remember the tar paths down my housefront streets
while discovering the warm molding tacitly the black patches
which with what stained fingers never could trace such outlines as you posed
how whose hands were kept to myself.

The cement is a browner color, while the rain seems to have drowned the grass. The wet pavement doesn’t let me see my footprints or my shadow. Class to class, the sky is bright blueish-gray and it’s cool but still out here. Everything seems pre-bloom; the soils look freshly packed and planted, and everything appears under construction. No one knows whether to wear sweaters or short sleeves. Those who’d been wrong change on the walk.

In the midst of this season, it seems that the unnoticed air and numbed-out wetness could last forever. Outside it, these couple of months are scarcely remembered. The lack of snow guilt-trips one to the outdoors, but once there, there’s nothing to do but stay out of puddles and ogle the newly-uncovered opposite sex. Maybe try and start something. All the best sports are still being played inside.

The pictures you take all look overexposed, owing to the unbalance of brightness vs. warmth. That washed-out sky looks nice, though, in its reflections off high-rise windows. The green around the foundation blocks has been resuscitated and seems glad of it. The plants and people squint and wink knowingly, promising better things to come.

bluish
Crosst, uncrosst,
and beauty the first second-fractions barely
each time i look up at you. each time
When i find an unmatching taste between our pasts
tell you how to be more like me
nonguessedly praying to find more in you
pretty pounded every which way stretched and
squeezed-into and working
pretty untouchably delicate
unfortunately delicately upward of here,
unawares.

When it just gets better
when you just get better
popcorn smells familiar
neck perfume familiarly new expression
expressly nervous familiarity tries
on new modes
to read and speak
trying to win keeps.

Might I draw a picture
of how nice it’d be to be with me
with nothing preferable but to be encircled
as I’m apt to do
as would be around you on clear Friday nights
would it be impossible to show you alone for the two of us
would you consider ‘us’?
Me and him, my and her why
having had girlfriends’ worth of prior training
having known how to please a few
and having committed to long-term memory
having known what not to do.

coquettish
kissed me so much my lips went rubbery
and i just canceled our arrangement, wrote a thank-you note
and left without tipping.

had me trying every bad technique to get a reaction
you wouldn’t have been a damning loss
and weren’t.

But you know
i still wanted to be thought of
i always like to be fallen in love with even
building resolve on pinpricks of eyerolling loveless
only-crushes
lovefull demeanor betraying i hope that you can’t tear yourself away
man can’t you tear yourself away
resolve yourself

don’t you tease me
I’m not drawn in
by any sort of sleepy eyes or half-falling out
by anything but my fantasies.

Socked in the kitchen. Driven straight down against the floor with the realization that dryness doesn’t impress you so much. Left completely unarmed in the discovery that I haven’t got anything you haven’t been through already.

Seeing as you tried out these catharses ahead of time, was unable to shape anything with lips and tongue that might break through. Was forced to head to the car ahead of time. Was forced to bank on my touch. Knew before trying that desperation is tactile.

Told friends about your presence. Told them you knocked-out. That you couldn’t be. Mentioned casually that your sign was Polaris. Hoped they’d catch on. Didn’t want to have to expand on how far south I am.

Bankrupt on articles, caught self reading every just-thought as you’d. Or as pictured.

Journalistic intentions put aside, wanted to tell sellable truths. Journalistic intentions left intact, I guess. Found eyes off unfocused bridging any close parts of us. Wanted to take time. Always do.

****

this ed. 8/8/01

thank you raul, ken, jie, unhee, charlie

i wish you knew
you're one of precious few.