damn f*ing honest

To get too attached to New York

is to invite the city

to break your heart,

over and over again.

Bill Hayes

 i knew

You were slim, usually in slightly

loose fitting, washed out flared

jeans, red clogs, and always a

striped long sleeve shirt or sweater.

Your hair was thin though

lovingly soft with gentle brown waves.

i didn’t realize then

that your tears were tears of loss.

What did life

without us

Chapter 2

a series

of contrasts

fear

alongside bravery.

I THINK WE

don’t see these contrasts in the

same way that we don’t see the

couple sitting across from us on

the bench at Smith and 9th or the

crowd of people on the platform

at Hoyt Schermerhorn.

They define

who we are and

what will become of us.

If we cannot see things

as they are now, we may be left

with only the memories of them.

KISSING ME

while we were lying in bed late on a cold morning in a remote cabin in Pennsylvania. This was the cabin of lust, of the first time since college that I acted on true and desperate love and sexual longing for someone. I do look thoroughly sexed. By that I do not mean to portray this as a bawdy, promiscuous, intemperate novel, but instead to try to recapture the ecstasy, exhaustion, and wonder that is a new lover.

Most of the great moments in my life happened without my realizing them. That is not to say that I did not intensely enjoy the events in my life. I am sure that I feel things more strongly than most. But it seems to me that births, graduations, falling in love-if only I could have known how amazing these events, these relationships were at the time that they were happening; I could have acknowledged that I was ecstatic. I could have had the double joy of living the ecstasy and being aware of that ecstasy at the same time.

When you are lying in bed with the woman you love, when you have the right to sleep next to her warm body night after night, to make love to her if you both desire it and if the moment feels right, you don’t always realize how great that is; that in 6 months it will no longer be an option. In the words of Ben Gibbard, “You look so defeated lying there in your new twin size bed.”

This is not to say that I did not cherish you. There were times when I touched you in a way that was ours, when I concentrated and devoted my attention to loving your body, to becoming a part of you, to meeting you in that space of deep essential desire to be within you.

To be in love is a form of madness. On some days, with some loves, it is a cool river on a hot afternoon. With others, it is a river overflowing it’s banks, oblivious to those on shore. But

WHAT IF I CAN’T SWIM?

Am I defective? Because I am free-spirited, because I place no bounds on love, because I want to feel everything— in needing more, am I somehow less? I know the rules. These rules are the Empire State Building-sturdy, dependable, old, as seen from the hastily erected glass condos of Greenpoint. Rules need to be broken. Conquering them is a part of who we are. But sometimes we try to hold the duality, the idea that we can be two things, that we are both a free spirit and a rule follower even if these things are polar opposites.

And yet it is here,

exactly here,

that the joy of seeing you,

the girl I love,

coming across the yard early in the morning to share coffee with me, to sit in my tiny Brooklyn kitchen with its dappled sunlight streaming through the windows. To step towards me and to kiss me as my body succumbs to the absolute need to touch you,