Waking Up
Waking up
Throbbing skull just preyed upon by the sunlight, the dust is filing the trashed room, with director notes on a whiteboard, condoms, unread books, dust, monitor screens with dust, wood desks with dust, rat infested corners you can hear in the crevices at night, so you don’t want to lend your leg close to the floor for so long.
*cellphone buzzing*
Hello
Are you in New York
Yeah wh-
I’m in Philly
Oh my god you shoul-
Come to Philly
Take a bus here
I leave tomorrow in the afternoon
Come
Right now,
Come
Waking up
In the white layered sky, tasting of the cold freezing ice on the treads beneath my black shoes in the entry way on a thick brownish rug, where we wrap scarfs around our necks expecting our bracing for the wind to be much less than what it ends up being to the dive bar, in the dead of morning, and as I say dead I mean scraping of plastic shovels on front brick porches from men who had gotten off work not much earlier in center city, or further south, or east, and there are trucks stopped on the small roads with humans spreading salt on the concrete in front of us and we finally make it, on the longest walk of my life, with our legs conjoining and the wind just eating away at my cheeks does the door open, and I buy Spud a drink for their birthday and hand cash for a vodka cran, and we can’t quantify how much alcohol we have consumed, only the clock, the last booth in the rectangular bar, a cigarette in my pocket, green eyes in the evening, brown in the morning, dim sum, plastic ware, hugging our shoulders as we walk side by side and kiss our arms every third or fourth step with just our eyes meeting. It is the morning of our lives.
Waking up
In the absence of warm arms and instead there are memories of soft lips in Bushwick at a pool bar with a beer and shot special as we ask questions we think are interesting and the clock hands lend themselves to break even in the corner of a closed burger stand in the back of a Ridgewood DIY venue just as large as the width of my arms, and my legs cross over themselves as a phone call asks us where we have run off to, and there is nowhere else, in the chair with shivering legs and a cotton hole where a knee joint is, the bench waiting for the train, the coat check at the corner back of the bar, and our eyes meet in something ways, as I wake to focused conversations on a couch I may have been fond of, and felines which rubbed their heads in my groined area as the peak of the show series began its way in all sorts of smile lengths and hand rubs and ass claps in the middle of a crowd with a blue purplish overhead shine and I imagine myself alone instead of together and I feel better for it, waking up, with myself, with not those glasses wearing black eyes that remind me so much of me, or the train car that has you written all over it, information is held only in automatic machinery because I take a washer and cable housing in my pockets everywhere I go, for the cold is lifeless, for the cold is loved and tongued, for the cold is the morning, for the cold is I, in the ash of Grand avenue, of Essex, of Metropolitan, of the L of the M, of the space between the letters.
Waking up
In frozen blocked lettering, from grade school, as I rub the back of a pretty boy’s right calf, in the late night conversations we talk about each other, and other people, on the bridge over the East River, we rest our heads on each other’s shoulders and his dark eyes reflect in ways that make my body contort, we are belligerently intoxicated in a convenient store near the apartment, we throw oranges at each other, we try to kiss one another, we slam our hands against the small table between us at that one place, we are laughing and screaming so loud I can’t think of anyone who has ever been of higher volume, with the pool table corner where lost and found is beneath the bench cushions, as his face is freezing off and he gestures wildly with his fingers, our interchanges are sexy and crude, look at the way our fingers are tracing on the table in the midst of the four of us, in the wake of creating work, of different mediums, of vulgarities, of whiskey, of more whiskey, of beer and the icy sidewalk as we hold on to each other’s torso’s in West Village and focus on the one-way traffic at the intersection and the way the wind is howling through the apartment buildings.
Waking up
In a new world, owned by techno-authoritarians, advertising companies that own the moon, legislature that kills young humans and children looking to live, and offers nothing but people searching, but apartments that are not rent-controlled, but mornings that are not lonely, mornings that offer nothing but despair and white walls and dirty water and bad produce and lost lives, we say we are once shaken, to the cross of our legs at nurse betties on the edge of the bridge where bikers carry all their things, the apartment is warm and offers me a place to set the toes at the end of my feet and maybe we don’t see eye to eye on everything but I ask to take them out on a date and the dumplings are just a few dollars and he pours another shot in the downstairs bar and my nerves become settled once again, in the new world, filled with old mornings, of our places we frequent, in the calf-ridden sidewalk, I brush my fingers along her hair in a cramped apartment in Greenwich and we take turns speaking and taking trains and dancing in a venue and drinking beverages and hugging one another.
Waking up
I sit and begin to write, as a way of speaking, interacting, and engaging with you, as pieces come together in the bright hue of the old graffiti buildings, fluttering our eyelids we attempt to remember what must have been but it falls off the bed and off into the corner of the room where we stuff some things some of the time, and I wake to the forward and beckoning of the fingers and joy of our seating posture, as we whisper and glimmer our eyes back and forth, saying things that make us warm, looking onto the outdoors with such wonder that I can only think this must be the first time we have been here.