The Philosopher In My Life, Who Speaks In Thoughts And Sits In Inaction Which He Poses As An Intellectual

There is something so shameful in trying. In putting forth the effort out in the open where the onlookers look and dig their forks into my darlings. My creation dies in the end, regardless. Whether they relish every morsel or idly masticate while their eyes are drawn to the street walkers, just like all that came before her, my idea is eaten. And I am left alone to wonder if a piece of my soul had any flavor worth talking about.

What would she know about me? Me and the outsiders never spoken but a few words to each other.

She knows enough to ask for you by name. Your real name.

Who is this girl anyway?

She didn’t say. Just go talk to her and get her out of here. I don’t like her sniffing around the den like this.

If you don’t know her name can you at least tell me what she looks like?

She was a mousy little fuck, insisting I don’t take a message and she talk directly to you. Brown ratty hair, looked sick. Real puffy face.

Oh my god.

What?

It’s the girl from last week. The one I, almost robbed.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I’ll take care of it.

Take care of it.

I just said that I would!

I mean it. I do not want to see her here again.

You won’t!

Ode to the Red Boy

I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.

I am fickle with happiness. They say you don’t know a good memory is happening until it ends, but I do. I’m acutely aware of how precious the good times are—pair that with the odd feeling I get of being watched by my future self, having dealt with the deaths and tragedies that growing older brings, seeking refuge in the past. I feel anxious knowing it will be over, and that no matter how deeply and fully I cherish the strong legs beneath me, the wind on my face, my parents by my sides, it will end the same. All happinesses are doomed to be memories. And that bitters them for me; when I am at my happiest, and my smile is wide as it is earnest, I still taste the rancor in the back of my throat.

My skin prickles with heat,

Dropping doves on laundry lines

My heart leaps hard against my ribs,

Shelving sonograms in my mind,

Oh dear. I am in love.

There are versions of me you’ve never met. I carry so much hatred you never see. It’s like an ornate blade, you could mistake it’s hilt for jewelry on my neck. But it’s there, in the slit where words come out, to silence any iteration of me that could offend you. Any glimpse of a possibility that I could hurt you, I instead hurt myself. I’d suppress and push down and erase and lie a thousand times over if it meant you were pristine. If you could leave this world untarnished on my filth, leave me filthy. Leave me nothing but your memory.

Fires burn in the shape of mountains, mere miles from my porch step.

The vegetation cries in red and grey.

My feet in my front yard grass ground themselves there, against the peeking patches of dirt hiding beneath the stiff yellowing blades, as if nature itself is afraid to look at its destruction. I cannot look away.

Our dry seasons get drier, rain will become myth, and water legend. I wonder when it will be my turn to record the destruction, to tell others of what happened to me, and not hear of what happened to others. I wonder if that day will be today.

I reel back from the sunlight every time it caresses my cold skin, cooing in vein for me to love it back. Nothing can bring me to it. I have been burned before. I have been honest and I have been present and I have walked in the damnation of the daylight and I will not make that mistake again.

I will make it again. I will make it again. If only to see the sky, I will make the awful trek from hidden to known, again.

Taken by salt water taffy, bring me to the childhood I never had

Out of fear of being exposed, I crawl and grovel and claw at the shell of my old self, desperate for a morsel of comfort, of old. I find I’ve done nothing but destroy it’s memory and starve my newest iteration, in a form of betrayal only one as indecisive and stagnancy-drawn as I could pull off.