I listened to the static

mixing tapes.

Facebook

.

At first, I cringe: writing a poem about such

technology. I’m told, that if I post this

on my wall, I will not own its tautology.

Which forces me to think just what do I get to keep?

.

Which of the patents that I parent, prolapse back

to the bookstores and poets?

These words I cite and scribe, these

near-sighted “I owe you’s” from who knows who.

This website owns your timeline — your byline:

all the pictures that made you.

.

I cringe, because to write of such things this new 

is not radical, does not undo

or disrupt the things I speak to.

It does not displace, disfigure. Rather, it creates,

refigures, restarts the browsers, and me too.

.

(third of a five-part social media vs. poetry experiment)

It is never the fear that

140 characters is too little

to say what I’ve been thinking.

.

But rather,

That 140 characters is

Far too many.

.

(second of a five-part social media vs. poetry experiment)

LinkedIn (A Senryū)

Like the answer ‘not tonight’

I don’t understand you.

.

(first of a five-part social media vs. poetry experiment)

I wrote that I thought of you as a vampire.

You could not see yourself without someone seeing for you.

(The mirror, the sunlight, the way you seemed ancient—like the books my mother owned.)

.

And now I think of you as a ghost.

I told you I was unwell. You stared through me, a specter spectating.

(When you hold the shutter open the moonrise looks like a sunrise. You knew this. I did not.)

.

These photos I find of us

Are a way to remind me that the world

Manifests itself through coincidence. 

some people grow parallel to you, run their lines against yours, become someone unrecognizable. some people have a way of being that fits with you. some people change radically, and still find their way back to you. this is a reminder and a challenge, a call to arms, and a call to be. some people don’t worry about calling you three years later, they worry instead if your plane will be late.

Entering Stanley Park is an exercise in saying I will be.

. 

To get through the South entrance you make your way past this art piece, this monolith. It is a way of reminding us this space is paid for. A plane collapsing in on itself, flying, forming this green-and-white-checkered collage of metal and concrete. Underneath, a giant placard reads “AERODYNAMIC FORMS IN SPACE”.

. 

This is what strikes me. The way bodies move in space. The way bodies join in motion. This statue is a way to remember. And to remember is to say ‘there was’ and ‘there can be’.

. 

I think of Stanley Park, and the space it occupies, the space it will occupy in my mind. This collective meeting ground, breeding ground, beating down on me. These images berate me. I think eventually, to the spaces that are not on the map. The places in Stanley Park that are off limits, off the trail. These spaces are subaltern; they twist, they turn, they do not speak. People do not write of them. I do not think of them, and yet, like the seawall when it’s closed,  it continues to breathe against itself, molt against itself, form again, against itself.

. 

I imagine the groping, naked bodies in this park. The way they exist here, the way they resist here.

. 

I imagine preserving them in concrete and copper, building a statue and a placard to the queer bodies that subsist here.

. 

I imagine people mobilizing against this. To keep this park, this space, free and vacuous.

. 

I imagine how the wind here has a final say.  It knocks the trees over. It tears rock from roots, forces landslide. The space here is paid for, yes, but it is also unowned. Bark shrugs and jives off the trees. No one understands this and yet it is. As the water is, as the rocks are.

. 

I cite the wind in my work. I cite the mud. Oh I cite the calm perilous fucking in the clambering bushes of Stanley Park.

.

(photo by ali withers)

sourced from journals 2007-2012

.

1. Oh manifest yourself in me, destined to be

Undone.

.

2. Your eyes pierce like fangs into rubber tubes,

let me extract each drop.

.

3. Berlin comes up in things you obsess over,

You have not heard of it recently because

You obsess over absence, absinthe, the rain.

. 

4.  Know this when you are alone,

that the indifferences you feel

boil away when you no longer surround yourself

by people you don’t love,

that perhaps don’t love you.

. 

5. I am teaching myself how to be alone.

This is a lesson I am not sure I can stomach.

. 

6. Don’t cause a scene.

. 

7. The smell you made as you

washed your hands with my soap.

I could smell myself on you, but you made it

different. This is perhaps what love is:

the undoing of the self—the exotic in your own

flesh.

. 

8. Alice had no backbone she could

not see herself in the mirror,

but oh god, please tell me,

what made her walk through?

. 

9. I wrote those words and

they came true.

I wrote and now I write to make this

come true.

. 

10. My fourth grade teacher read us her poems

from college. They were about a type

of suicide.

. 

11. lumber/tinder/thunder

burn away the small talk.

. 

12. it is important to go where you are summoned. Follow

the guiderails, the trolley-wires. They are long-since buried

but you can feel them catch if you run your fingers the right way.

. 

14. I woke up here and now I am part

of this city. Whether I like it or not. And I

do like it. Seattle you are cold,

but I like the cold.

. 

15. I memorized his face the way one

memorizes the imperfections of a bucket

after a night of drinking.