February 9 - PROVE YOUR IDENTITY (qed)

Write your nature in sinusoidal terms
Multiply by your reciprocal
(that guy, you know the one,)
(who would fit perfectly into your curves)
(as you would fit perfectly into his arm)
Look at your identity...
         Is it what we expected all along?
Rip yourself apart - into factors of your being
Raise yourself to a new power
Are You common?
         You should be..... half anyway
         AND perhaps monomial
Finally, combine.
         After all, you're not that different anyway.

February 8 - Cosine

Sometimes I get bored in math class.  When I get bored, I write poetry.  When I also have to study for a test, I write poetry about math....


look for the setting sun,
drawn in red marker
stark against the white
        of the board,
watch that you don't cross beneath the
waves cast in the same red ink
and enter the domain of the leviathan -
which we arbitrarily define so that the
        arc is a function -

Take a sip from a wine glass filled with
a radian - t liquid,
watch it doesn't spill when you shift and stretch - ripping it away
from its prescribed borders according to the "d a b c"s
Inverse, arc, secant, cosine - they're all the same to me.

All a wretched mix of graphs and angles
TAUNTING me with a poisonous liqueur...

February 7 - The Gospel of Desire

On the corner stands a woman preaching the gospel of desire. 

Her sacraments: the laying on of hands, and legs, and lips, and love for an hour

She opens her hand for an offering turned over for salvation from the sin of wanting

            in exchange for the sin of lust.

And past her walks the kind of person who was once told that looking twice at her would mark him as debauched

            or worse a man.

And so he walks past her glancing at a hand and a leg and her lips

            and imagines what might be.

Leaves blow across the street on a current of a grey winter wind in teardrop eddies of regret and loss

She feels the sting of converts

He feels the sting of a wife and child who do not know what he needs and who cannot help him

They walk home.

He to a lonely house full of suburban saints

She to an apartment

            in which her scriptures are written in the cracked ceiling and stained sheets

February 6 - Conservation

My love for you is conserved
       - like angular momentum or charge -
So that when you tell me
       - I love you -
I return the favor

But I do not give you any more of that
       - though I want to -
Because I was told once not to give my heart too far to anyone

So I keep some to myself
And watch you slip away

February 5 - she hands me a flower

She hands me a flower.  A bunch of hydrangeas.  And she wants nothing. 

“Here you go sir.  Have a nice day!”

I walk on down the street.  She dives behind some boxes in an alleyway, giggling.  The vast, vulgar architecture of the city rises up around me, spiraling into the sky, clawing at the last fresh breaths of air in the stratosphere. 

She handed me a flower.  And she wanted nothing.

The cross-bracing of the black, toothy edifices of main street (with a small m.  It is far from the way that Fox News talks about Main Street) trap the heat of the day in the trench of the city.  Summer, how far from winter when white snow covered the streets and for a moment refused to be blackened by the grime of the metropolis.  I wipe my hand across the back of my neck to remove some of the grime and sweat of the train.  I walk on.

She handed me a flower.  And she wanted nothing.

The boy on the corner cries out about some scandal to sell a paper.  He’s lying, but he’s working the system.  Winning? Maybe.  Doing better than me at least. 

I know she’s still lying in bed, brooding.  The sheets tossed about her naked body because she’s too set in her ways to sleep without sheets even in this heat.  She’ll be thinking about how it’s my fault we don’t have air conditioning even when it was her idea to save that $50 a month on our shitty apartment.  She’ll blame me, even though it was her idea.  Damn this heat.  I slog.  It has turned the air into a liquid through which to swim.  All she does is want and want.  But that girl…

She handed me a flower.  And she wanted nothing.

I turn around.

“Girl! Little girl, come back!”

She pokes her head around the corner again, scared now.

“Why did you give me this?”

“Do you not want it?”

“Why did you give it to me?”

“You looked like you needed a friend.”

“So you gave me a flower?”

She nods.

“And you want nothing?”

She nods.

“Why?”

“You… looked like you needed a friend.”

I look at her.  She is a grimy street child, hair limp, skin blackened, eyes yellow and sad.  She seemed to peer at me through her still thick lashes.  

A friend? Yes, I need a friend.  But not the kind of friend she thinks.  I need the kind of friend that greets me fresh at the door with a cold beer and her body.  That's the kind of friend I need.  The kind of friend that also wants nothing in return.  But this child, she needs the kind of friend that will care for her and caress her and make her forget that her parents left her naked and cold and too hungry to cry.  They bequeathed to the world a stupid child without even the good sense to die.  A flower in an arid, hot, grimy city, buckled down against the beating heat of a rainless, nuclear yellow sky.

I hand it back to her.

"You cannot be my friend."

February 4 - La Reina

A mournful saxophone plays on the steps of a classical museum of modern art housing works we each pretend to understand for the benefit of the other.  And we two, like lace and leather, scowl at each other out of love as we ascend to the entrance to greet a fee that we will argue is too much but will pay any way even though you will worry about your student loans and I will worry about a child that we might have in the future.  A boy named after your father or a girl named after my best friend because you love your parents as much as I hate mine.  But we will decide it's not too much - even though it probably is - and enter a museum only to grow angrier and angrier about the fact that we both cannot admit that we do not understand modern art.

February 3 - 55 Fiction 1

Fifty-Five Fiction is a genre of fiction that is comprised of 55 words.  No more.

What is it to me?

I can watch you walk away and dismiss all the fantasies of prom dates and movies and dinners.

So what is it to me if you walk away?

“Wait, John…”

“What?”

“Say something, please? Just tell me why.”

“Why what?”

“Why you’re discarding me.”

“I’m not discarding, just letting go."