When you move, dark bits of your life

are shaken into light. A Polaroid, receipts

from a place you’ve “never been,” a marble—

the midnight attic of your choices.

Such labels sink me like a stone

so I drive away with you

to “work on our relationship”

as naked as the law allows.

‍

Still, the spiral narrows deeper in

flaying me of adjectives.

Being not myself confers strange powers,

only a couple of which

I ever discern.

But I can see at night. That’s one.

All that is created

can be barely understood.

They say the big bang happened

when the devil told God to go fuck Himself.

‍

Be that as it may,

I need to find a fiction

we can agree on.

‍

This bridge,

this lonely crossing that I build for us.

‍

You can’t leave home

unless you have one.

And if your home is assembled poorly,

you will be defined

by what clings to you in your worst moments:

your anger your anchor.

‍

It’s freezing on the Avenue of the Giants.

The lightness

I thought would free me does no such thing.

Only desire returns me to a semblance,

only desire, like a tab of ecstasy,

stamps a smiley face on oblivion.

I worry your skin like a rosary.

Momentarily,

even the seals make sense and are in tune.

They sing: “As you learn, you teach.”

The past suddenly seems

rife with possibility. In the future,

I shall let my wordless heart

do all the talking.

‍

On the drive home,

I record the new names—

Arcadia, Eureka, Ukiah, and I remember

riding the LIRR when I was a kid,

hearing the magical spells chanted by the conductor—

Montauk, Patchogue, Massapequa—

‍

And when the train sometimes slowed,

I imagined jumping off unseen between

stations and walking into these strange towns,

leaving my parents behind,

a ten-year-old city boy

knocking on a Long Island door, saying,

“I am a citizen of the world, take me, rename me;

I’ll mow the lawn, do the dishes, wear the hand-me-downs,

whatever.”

‍

As each second passed, geography

would change my fate.

Every moment brought new towns, new families.

New lives.

Those were the days.

But I never did step off.

No, I don’t think I ever did.

‍

‍

‍

^{Source: About Time: Poems (Akashic Books 2025)}