> tapioca world tour

Anarchist kid on the train thinks
everyone should die

but he smelled the flowers on the hill tonight,
felt the orange sky hugging his skinny arms.
Something drives him on.

The city smelled like the sea today.
Night smells like life.
And in strangers’ livingrooms, the walls express
such a clear happiness, it makes me

remember to breathe deep
and walk slow, and not sleep, and recall
with renewed clarity the effect those early
years we shared had on me.

Everywhere I look, someone is loving something.
The grey sea, the green trees
keep us, at the very least, believing.

Now, this thick air, the sound of breaking
mufflers and someone’s rattling keys,
the way the train saunters its dirty way
to a bright platform

makes me realize nothing has changed.
Good comes, and comes again.

It’s still. Bugs are dying in the walls. The moon
is shroud in a clouded mourning and on the street,
a gun or firecracker blasts repeatedly, though
I prefer the latter.

Good things always get better
and, when we lay down together instead of eating dinner,
I counted the patterns on the orange curtains I brought you
from the other side of the world. There was a breeze.
You soon snored. Behind the window’s shadows, a new summer sun.
I took a mental photo of that moment so I can stare at it

every July, or high tide, or in the beginning
of every new life I try on. When it doesn’t fit,
I call you and cry, and the wind stops spinning,
and the free birds fly.

if “evil is an illusion of material sense”, it makes none; tonight,
i want to run over the train tracks near what’s-his-name’s old house,
just to feel the asphalt and the metal on my shoe, & to breathe the familiar
uncertainty: that frequent possibility of a train coming out of nowhere
save the slate sky, the pivoting moon.

perhaps all of us die too soon.

rather, perhaps we lose our sense of life like an unecessary habit
or a sweater, or an error, and, like a great train in a desert
we board onto something new. i’d like to keep this sight in view,

and run by the paper factory at eleven to remember how it smells –
the stillness — and watch it gently go about its business, trembling
with each impending speeding locomotive in the night.

I don’t know what it means — your new set of knives,
the wide sky and the old sea soon to be below your window
which will remind you of how a city’s not supposed to be
but is: both full and empty, all at once.

Yet I remember the era of patterned socks and bugs
crawling around our kitchen. You must remember
the smell of the rooftop, wet streets and the sounds the train made,
warning of its approach the same way the future screams
before it attacks.

Now you’re a bloody mess and I’m worse.
Now you’re a kaiju monster, I’m on the bleachers with a camera.
I’m on Manni’s bicycle. Now you’re dancing to the same song and I’m
staring out my bedroom window to the dead fish in its
dying pond. Now it’s summer and we’re both unemployed.
You’re an almond croissant. I’m wine on the wall.
You’re a dead bum in the driveway.
I’m an ambulance.
I’m a quesadilla and you’re holding Jonah and we’re both
singing hip hop, hip hop, hip hop trying not to notice
how serious everything really is. You’re in a blue car.
I’m in a blue car. We’re finding the fort, finally, up a hill,
we’re finding a parking spot, we’re shouting a boy’s name
out the window with no idea that years later, he’ll hear.
I’m a mess. You’re a riot. We’re behind barred windows.
I’m a big yellow rose, you’re a red wall, we’re in
someone else’s living room in New York City and the whole place
smells like smoke and confusion but I call it freedom
and you giggle and we drive

all the way home the same way.

it’s friday & freezing

we had our heart-to-heart in the alley, finally,
the bruised sky making no excuses, its few stars
content to hang around alone and as
they burned against the night and you spoke i thought
well, it’s about time,

because it is and you should know that,
not that it’s ever easy. you should know that too.
in another place and time, what would i do?

Tonight we wrote haikus, the kids and I. We picked words at random out of National Geographic to use as the theme of each poem. E. is 7 years old, and I. is 9. Here they are in all their glory:

LAND

such a big place, earth.
land is always evrywhere.
never stops, no no.
- [by E.]

URBAN

tall, tall buildings here.
evry place, evrywhere such
changes can now come
- [by E.]

There are buildings there.
It is so extremely big!
It’s the city.
- [by I.]

grass is great, the green
expanse and air, blue skies, but
smog is comforting.
- [by me]

she’s moving slowly toward nowhere good, the car is in neutral

with the brake at a right

angle to the floor. everyone can see them through the windows,

and the burnt light falls

evenly on their intensity but this infidelity

can’t last too much longer. it’s like the train

she’s supposed to be on; it’s like

the overcast sky, the sheen of her new shoes, the table he’ll soon fill

with flowers and deceit; a good freeze kills,

but lies burn faster through the body and this is the

hot red truth they’re both avoiding, hungry, inspecting

one another in the backseat like two starved dark birds

competing for the kill.

We cleaned out her late grandfather’s late wife’s apartment in the Prudential all day Saturday. The whole place was filled with dust mites and trash and furniture from the 60s. We put on rubber gloves and bug repellent and went to work, dissecting the life of a secretive old woman who left behind salad tongs and silver platters and china teacups and who left no one behind to appreciate it. Some stuff was her husband’s, and now one of his modern art prints hangs in my kitchen, his blown-glass orange vase lives on my table, a French thermostat dice-shaped pen holder made of amber sits on my desk at work. “I don’t want any of this stuff,” my roommate said. “It’s dead peoples’ things. It creeps me out.”

“At least we kind of know who these people were,” I said. “It’s better than buying dead peoples’ things at a thrift shop, not knowing where they came from.” What’s fascinating is how quickly life comes and goes and how fiercely we hold on to the things we acquire, even when they gather dust. By the time I’m 90, if I live that long, I don’t want to own anything. Maybe a bed, some eccentric rings, some colorful boots. Maybe an ice cream scoop, but that’s it.

And now it’s El Dia del Amor, not that every day isn’t full of love. The kids gave me extra Valentines they’d made. I put their paper affection in my back pocket and forgot about it. That’s a metaphor, people.

Now that the moon is boiling
like the blood where it swims

the claw marks of those
who preceded us across this burning floor

- John Yau, from Borrowed Love Poems

Thinking too hard about this, it almost makes me choke; now the bricks are swept clean first with a fine mist, then an unrelenting rain. We’re stuck under an awning again.

And I try various tactics to convince you to love this place as blindly as I do, which is like trying to convince a hungry man to eat. It’s pouring and we’re on North Second Street and my feet feel like sleeping dogs which,

when you eat octopus later, I have nightmares about. What now? I don’t have this city anymore, you don’t have your secrets anymore, we only have a comforting car ride in the dark during which we eat

too many chocolate donuts and sleep sideways with our skin pressed clean against the glass, where you make faces at other drivers and take pictures of their pretty spinning tires, their fast white lights.

Now an unfinished cartharsis is growing on our walls like a strong mold. The floor smells of it, the sink smells too, and in your room this and the stillness become thick as smoke; thinking too hard about it makes me choke.

now i can’t see straight: the bench is the night
and the night is as much a friend as you, also it’s foggy,
also the raw air mixes bitter with my profound
unawareness — all this

because of the pile of hours we talked instead of sleeping.
The room was so black I could only see white circles
round the corners of my eyes like out-of-focus
fireflies, the outlines of your windows hinting of
dawn and a finished rain.

we’re quiet as prizes for bargaining vendors: I’m like fruit,
you’re like bread: you give up your shoulder, I give over my head,
then all my fingers, then it’s over, we’re six years older,
we never had a chance.

someone robbed the drug store tonight while i was shopping for tissues.
the young pharmacist ran frantic with his lips dry and open,

leaped behind the counter and
phoned the police, breathless. the rest of us
moved in very slow motion as if we were
in water or someone else’s dream.

it’s the new pollen season: love and
love’s endings are in the air, making us sneeze.
i think about

my future, your future, your decisions,
all the nights this city has clouded us from
silver stars and a black expanse.

i’m talking about you, friend, and you, man, even the robber
sprinting through the back streets of Brookline like it’s
the most important thing he’s ever done.

Public urination must be incorporated, which isn’t hard, since I tend to hang out soberly with mildly inebriated musicians on a regular basis…

Tuesday, post-Burren

I can’t feel my feet
and out back, our bartender
friend corners a wall,

peeing. You’ve had
way too much to drink tonight
so you’re loving me

loving me loving
me with arms around my waist
and a voice like a

toddler in the night.
There’s a British chill to the
evening that makes me

want to hug you back,
which is why I do. Also
you need me and I

know that you need me
& I love that you need me
because everyone

needs needing, really,
especially in winter.
For this and other

reasons I refuse
to join you watching hours
burn their embers back

from a foggy black
to a grey-white dawn, with tired
people singing the

same song. I only trust
the straight line that I walk down
is for both of us.

in bed so late again. the list of phone calls
to return pile up like spilled sequins in the dark.
tonight we watched an odd french film
while eating cold shrimp. again, i feel
so happy i could sob and sob. maybe it’s from
relief and a collective grief, combined. earlier,
i tried coughing my heart out over lasagna
but only half of it came out. half is better
than nothing. i think you were smiling
because you’d already figured that out.
i want to trade this silence for a shout.

in the car, he swore like a man really scared of something, because he was. the future was not a lifetime away but began the next morning, and we all knew it, and we couldn’t really talk. it’s hard to convince someone you don’t want them to die. sounds like it should be easy, but it’s not. i couldn’t think about this for too long without evaluating myself, taking inventory of my own faults, booking appointments for rectifying various conflicts with various people. this is what life is about: self-awareness, or sweets, or blue sky, or something as close to love as you can get.

the way i dealt with it was through thai food. i made D. take me out to sweet chili, or brown sugar, or sweet sugar, no: to sugar & spice. fourteen minutes spent stuffing fried spring rolls into my mouth while jealously eyeing D.’s shrimp-and-papaya salad, which would have been a much better choice — cleaner, pinker, light. i had one bite and the shrimp tore so perfectly in my mouth next to the pickled, julianned fruit, it was one of those culinary moments that make you want to cry, probably because you want to cry anyway.

at home, the walls of my room are pervaded by a single song lyric: “pink magnolia in winter, she doesn’t care.” if, tomorrow, she doesn’t, i will lock myself later in the office bathroom and pray.

today was full of the awareness of happiness, much like
realizing the presence of an insistent electric hum
in an office building: at the cafe,

chatting mundanities with a stranger, i thought
take note of this moment: i am happy right now;
there were people all around us and i was

not alone on a train in eastern europe at night or
whipped back by loneliness in a cold house, not even
mildly discontent, no, it was like how one must feel when

coming out of solitary confinement and onto
the outdoor penitentiary grounds, everything so white, everything
suddenly much more real than it had been before.

same thing happened at the movies. there we were,
sitting in the dark while the world went on without us,
and i asked so many questions but no one even got annoyed,

i never even figured out the plot but i understood still
i am happy, i am so happy right now.
because we choose these moments like a new pair of pants
so we ought to wear them with pride.

we sang a marching song in church tonight, the windows
trimmed in mint sitting static as they’ve been for years,
the faith in the whole place filling me full as usual

and all this time you lay emptied, sleeping.

since the sentimental mental space i once reserved for you
lies in latent vacancy, my body
couldn’t remember how to navigate those few familiar miles
to your too familiar picketed place; i got lost not once

but twice, and when i found your face placid
in unconsciousness, i took the time to remember what you look like.
you look like a kind guy, the kind of guy

i’d eat matzo balls for, and did, and yet
the house smells the same without me in it,
without me to bring it plants and food and

tennis balls, all the affection i had.
i always leave you the same way:

sad.

i flew into the new year hanging onto your shirt.
the room was black with red-orbed edges, it
smelled like laughing people. a boy i just met
wrapped a glowing purple tube around my wrist and i asked
“how long will it last?”

“forever.”

this made me think of us.
and in the stairwell where
last year you cried alone,
we spoke of love and trust,
our words eddies of breath
swirling between the still walls til they
vanished quietly and we
vanished equally into the tinted sea
of happy strangers.

i’ll go home and write an elegy
for this dying year, i thought,
and the snow was thick and clean.
in your driveway we seemed
so small, so still, if the wind were to wake it would have
crumbled us, til we were
the same pile made of different stuff.

The other night we watched Dil Chahta Hai, my favorite Bollywood movie from the early days of the millenium when I lived with Indian friends. I remembered all the music and the general plotline, the incredibly sappy song lyrics, the dance numbers that had been transformed into something akin to modern music videos, and the moral of the whole tale: you cannot be happy if you don’t find true love. Grippingly insightful, eh?

and then

Last night I put new bulbs in dirt and thought of the time
we repotted the Kalanchoe plant together but it still died.

Now I’m on the back porch shoveling earth
into a cold pot with a soup ladel. This time I’ll try

harder, with less urgency and more precision, with an offering
up of all my best intentions to the snow:

if it lives, let it live well;
if it doesn’t, let it go.

everything is so much more
siginificant than we think it is.

food fills, the heat goes down,
out the window a neighbor

hurts her ankle and i pray my prayer
from earlier again.

december brings a singing, a sighing,
a lack of turtles.

the dust mites revolted, the bosses have won:
it’s almost christmas now and we’ve been run
down so low, here we are, licking the fuzzed floor

and yelling at eachother over artificial walls.
my dreams are like a marathon i cough through
with strangers; when i wake i feel so tired.

and that odd unconsciousness keeps my restlessness
seeping through the down.
when the day rolls into evening now,

i leave you without a word, without a gesture.
this is cruel, and at night i grieve the cruelty,
as if i have allowed an innocent thing to stay injured

though i can’t say what between us has been broken
other than the static luminance that shines
a hale pale fire between your space and mine.