caden

i keep practicing on coffee cups— how to hold something warm without dropping it.

you ask what i'm thinking and i'm thinking about how birds know to fly south without anyone teaching them the way, how my mouth makes all these shapes but none of them are stay or please or whatever sound your name becomes at 3am when i can't sleep.

i want to tell you: i'm not good at this. my hands shake when they should be steady. i learned love like a second language all grammar, no instinct.
 sometimes i watch other people love
 like studying for a test i keep failing, like maybe if i memorize the gestures i could pass for fluent.

but here's what happens:
 you smile and i forget every word.
 you're sad and i offer you tea
 when what i mean is
 i would dismantle myself to build you something softer.

you taught me how to speak in whispers because my voice made the walls shake and now when i try to scream nothing comes out but air

i used to write with my whole body words that bled straight from the vein but you said it was too messy so i learned to type instead neat little letters in neat little rows and now my hands don't remember how to hold anything that might spill

you said my hunger was ugly the way i devoured everything— books, music, people, life so i learned to take small bites to leave food on the plate to say "no thank you, i'm full" when my stomach was screaming

and here's the thing about hunger— it doesn't go away it just burrows deeper becomes this quiet gnawing this ghost in my gut

you're gone now say you've grown, say you've changed but i still eat like someone's watching still write in careful sentences still speak below the sound of rain

i've never been to Paris but i imagine it does the kind of snow that melts before it touches your eyelashes the kind that makes strangers look up at the same time

i am realizing now that i don't want the forecast. i don't want the clarity. clarity is for tax returns and office lights.

i am looking for the blur.

someone once told me they saw the Eiffel Tower in winter. how the metal bones collected white like a skeleton learning tenderness.

that which is sacred is always half-hidden.

maybe that is why i crave the snow.

i wonder if lovers still kiss when snowflakes interrupt their lips or if cafe windows fog with breath and finger-drawn hearts that disappear when the heat inside shifts

the soul is too shy for sunlight. it needs the steam off a coffee cup. it needs the collar turned up against the wind. it needs to be buried, just a little, so it can be safe enough to speak.

there is this line i read once, about how the feminine went with the feminine and the union was half-concealed how two things can touch so quietly the world doesn't even know it happened

i don't want to see you clearly. i want to see you softly. i want to know you in the spaces where the camera can't focus. in the hush. in the blurry. in the way the ground disappears underneath the drift of something new.

there are questions we ask not for answers but for the space they create between two people

i am asking if the world can still keep a secret.

do you still think of me when the weather changes?

i've been thinking about how i want to kiss in abandoned hospitals where the wheelchairs still wait like invisible spirits how fluorescent lights dying make that specific buzz that sounds like the universe clearing its throat before it tells you something you already knew but didn't want to

there's this substation off hwy 90 all copper and high voltage signs and steel bones reaching up like a cathedral made by people who forgot what praying was for but remembered the reaching part i sit on the side of the road and watch electricity move through it spectral and devastating the way thoughts move through me when everyone else is dreaming normal dreams

and sometimes i drive past this water treatment plant with its perfect circles of controlled rot and think this is where we admit what we are made of what we leave behind

there's this transformer outside my window gray and boxy and perfect and some nights i swear it's the only thing that understands how it feels to take something dangerous and make it useful make it light

my therapist says why do you think you're drawn to— but i'm already thinking about meat processing plants at dawn how clean they are how honest about what we do to stay alive

i want to slow dance in empty parking garages after midnight all that concrete holding its breath

i want to find love letters in medical waste buried under needles sealed in red plastic but close enough to read my name through the film too contaminated to hold

i want to understand why surgical tools are so beautiful lined up like silver prayers sterile and sharp the way good intentions feel in your chest

i tell people i collect victorian death photography (they change the subject) but there's something about those propped up children dressed for sunday service finally still finally perfect that makes me understand why we can't look at beautiful things without imagining them broken

people whisper “that’s eerie” as if it’s a curse but have you ever noticed how mold grows in perfect fractals? how abandoned houses linger with the echoes of life even when its souls have left? how graveyards stand as the only realms where no spirit deceives about its true nature?

i think i love the things that remind me we're all just electricity wearing meat pretending we're not temporary pretending the humming in the walls isn't the exact same frequency as the humming in our chests

Rocco Frattasio

Jack and I have this habit of drinking too many cups of coffee sometimes. “I just love coffee,” Jack says—yeah, yeah—no kiddin’. There are other things to love besides coffee. Jack’s got a girl named Darla—which is a great damn name and for some reason she’s the only one I know—maybe that makes it greater. He loves her, she loves him—it’s a real strawberry twilight situation. Anyway there are other things to love besides coffee. There’s music. Have you ever heard Stan Getz play saxophone, or Bill Evans play keys? I once sauntered around a town called Ann Arbor in Michigan for two weeks, doing nothing but listening to Bill Evans play Some Other Time. And there was a great, creaky wooden, endlessly unfolding used book shop there with damn near everything. A good coffee shop down an alley too with a shop across from it that sold the loveliest locket-necklaces you ever saw. Well, there was even more than that too but I won’t bug ya with it. My point is that there’s more to love besides coffee. Like there’s poetic girls with buzz-cuts who give no one the time of day, and there’s blueberry stains on my notebook page, and the wind outside that you watch from inside, you only know is there because it moves other things like branches and grass and a flag in the distance and city trash. People’s souls are like that, you know them by the things they move. What moves you? What a question. What a question to ask somebody. If you haven’t asked somebody that question you’re not really living among the human race. What are you living among? What moves you? And for that matter people don’t dance enough. Lord send me a gal that won’t stand for cement feet! And for that matter send me one that’ll be patient with me. I’ve gotta learn to dance.

I’ve never ridden a horse either—can you believe I didn’t dance at my sister’s wedding? I tried but that overcast-killer came on over me. That dance-floor was for hearts of red that beat blood—I guess mine was blue and pumped ink. Maybe that’s why I sit and write. It’s my only way of dancing. It was a windy reception. They said their vows outside in the wind. Him you could hear, but when she spoke the wind overtook her. It was perfectly appropriate. The feminine went with the feminine, and the union was half-concealed. That which is sacred is always half-hidden. That’s why you can see people’s bodies but you can’t see their souls.

If you wanna know the soul you have to be open to being moved by it. You have to take the deepest breath you’re capable of, tilt your head back and say “okay great big world, let’s have your soul.”

Now tell me what moved you.

I was just thinkin’ about a cat the size of a horse that a person could ride.

And now I’m looking up at those puffs of clouds in the light earth blue and I’m almost convinced they came from me.

I smell french-toast.

I smell cinnamon-roll.

Breathtaking things—these are strange-beautiful things that you cannot handle upon introduction.

I could eat maybe two entire boxes of pizza right now and live it and probably be righteously bummed out upon waking. I’ll stick to sipping this last bit of coffee.

Would you mind if I wrote some poetry? Skip it if you don’t like it, sometimes I think it’s all I’ve got in me. I’ll come back around.

Lucky come love me

Lucky you’re pretty

Lucky your stars

Are the music of cities

Lucky my death

‘Cause Lucky my life

Lucky is the one

Who imagines what might

Lucky my breath

And Lucky today

Lucky is tomorrow

Well on its way

Lucky the lights

And lucky the dark

Lucky is everything

Reaching my heart

Lucky I tire

Lucky I wake

Lucky consciousness

Behind my face

Lucky arrive

And Lucky depart

Lucky are the sorrows

And joys of art

Lucky alone

Lucky together

Lucky come love me