My heart forever is v'kosmosye

The edge of the world/An evening at Brighton Beach

The air is heavy with salt, the sky is so low that it threatens to consume me, and dark clouds press swiftly inland. I am continually compelled toward the edge of the world, toward surf and sea, where my heart pulls a little closer to the shores of a dreamy and a far off continent that is yet beyond my reach.

At the shoreline eateries, one after another, moon-faced Russian girls serve briny beet salad and stuffed cabbage with creamy pirozhkies, their Lycra club kid clothes evoking smoky European discotheques and shiny, fast cars. Old men shuffle by, wearing neutral colors and smoking cigars, talking hushedly in two languages at once, remarking on the lightning now lapping at Astroland tower, which looms uncertainly in the murky gray distance.

I park my bike and sit on a bench on the boardwalk, next to a babushka in a sweat suit with with thickly painted blue eyelids. She eyes the beer I dig out of my bag with suspicion, but when she sees that it, like her, is Russian, she turns her wrinkled visage back to the salt and wind, closing her painted eyes as she lets the cool evening collide with her face. It is as though she bathing in an invisible sun, one disguised as lightning and an inky sky.

I often wish I were a mermaid; if I were, I would swim to the Black Sea, enchanting sailors with my siren-song, and living forever among the clouds and sand and salt. I dream constantly of Coney Island, and every time I get on my bicycle, ten miles seems to take mere seconds; no matter my destination, my two wheels find me there - at the edge of the world, where land meets sea and where I feel, no matter how fantastical, that I am closer to being both lost and free. Closer to Europe, closer to god, closer to me.

for so long

For so long, she couldn’t feel.

At first, she didn’t want to; and then she succeeded; and then she wanted to feel again, but it was too late.

She kept wondering when things would start to feel again. She hated the reckless numbness and longed to feel. She searched for so long, so long.

Under the carpet, in the trash, on the sidewalk, in all the bars. She bled it into her skin, trying to remember how to feel.

A hundred lovers, a hundred too many paramours. Bitten hard, ripped apart. Early morning G train walks of shame.

She gave up and retreated into her bed, under her covers, clutching her heart close with raw and tender hands.

Dreaming of Eastern lands, she cried alligator tears and plotted her escape, never dreaming her heart might return to her right here.

She stopped trying to remember how to feel. The ink seeped deeper. She noticed she no longer recoiled from children; she noticed the seedlings of warmth for other living things.

And yet she was still alone. Her longing for feeling was a feeling just out of her painted fingers’ grasp.

She happened into a bar on a sludgy late winters night; she had decided that if she couldn’t feel love, she could at least keep kind company.

And she never ever expected to find affection, to find a lover she actually loved as she had once so freely and selflessly loved before, so long ago.

She was startled. She felt anxious. She fought it, grappled it, protected her heart with the weapons of self-preservation she’d acquired over the last couple years.

But she was defenseless to this new love. She was on her knees, humbled and overwhelmed. She felt affection deeply. It was terrifyingly beautiful, like all of the sunsets ever at the edge of the world where land meets sea.

Which is what she had so badly wanted all along.

once upon a time, again.

Electric, like it when tingles everwhere, like being on fire, if fire was shockingly cool and brilliantly silver. Feel it in warming in my shoulders after you touch me just so, feel it sliding down my heart as I try to swallow the lingering sparks in the days when we’re apart. Pleasure and pain, love and pain, pushed together like a circle made of wire -  electric and polar ends collapsing onto one another, sealed now together, forming a perfect loop from two ends supposedly diametrically opposed, but now which are one in the same. 

Once upon a time, we met, not so long ago - unlikely I know, but there you have it. 

I could spend a thousand years right there, on your shoulder, snuggled deep into you. Because it’s just hours, moments, that we have, our time is all the more precious, all the more like quicksilver and lapis in my imaginary cool night sky with a million stars, a sky we will never see here in Brooklyn, but which is always right here in my heart. 

I once knew of love like this, but then, it was entirely different. We snuck up on me, jolted me out of my dark place of hiding, threw me violently back into a sort of love I thought I’d lost. Not childish love, not exactly romance, but something deeper and sweeter, and less bitter and less biting than romance. It was a way to love that I have always considered my greatest achievement, a way to love I never thought I’d meet again; it is so selfless and so boundless. And so here I am, and my heart is exploding. It’s exploding because I do believe that owning the thing you love only depletes it, and because you and me are only occasionally we… I am free and the universe is gleaming again, whirring and humming and shining into frenzied, loving eternity. 

You can’t lose what you’ve had in your pocket all along, and the live wire love song is shapeshifter, a slippery chameleon, a phoenix, and the most brilliant of transformers…  that I have found again in your arms. 

Mourning and Melancholia

She’s a sad girl 

What she wouldn’t give 

for another go 

What she’s learned 

She cannot prove 

on paper

What’s she’s learned 

only reaffirms 

what she already knew - 

The only place she belongs 

is in the shadows 

the darkness 

the island of misfit toys. 

reprise

and afterward 

i sat there alone, 

paced around alone, 

had a bloody mary 

or two

to calm my nerves. 

but still i cried 

after my skin had cooled 

from your touch.

our love is leagues and miles deep 

and it cuts like a whetted knife 

your tears as i left 

to go back east -

your tears mingling with mine. 

but i wouldn’t let you see 

this time i wanted - 

i wanted to be the one

who is strong 

and i love you, i told you

over and over and over 

and you told me 

and kissed me

and held me 

i love you and you love me.

and i’m the luckiest - 

the luckiest 

star-crossed girl 

in this flaming, molten world. 

for everything i’ve lost

all the time i see the sky 

and all the time the dark

the clouds beyond the pale are not 

translucent like i’d hoped.

stars burn in miles-long furies

for everything i’ve lost 

everything i had and gave away 

i gave away for naught.

i’m still here in outer space 

floating away just the same 

another day that lasts long years

oh, i’m dying, oh, my heart. 

take me away from this old pinpoint 

a thousand miles from earth 

in glowing blue and pink-red flames 

stardust and ends of worlds.

take my black heart, now take it dear 

it wasn’t mine to start

i’ll tell you to always be careful, my dear 

i cast off this soft-bruised heart.