It's Easier to Think

My father drinks only black coffee.

Therefore, growing up, I thought without cream or sugar to be the right way to drink coffee.

Therefore, I have looked down on those who drink coffee any other way.

Therefore, I have been rude or insolent with those who drink their coffee with cream or sugar.

Therefore, my situation has become one of egocentrism.

Apply this formula to all aspects of cognitive development and my shortcomings are all justified.

A helium balloon trapped in the floorboard of a basement.

I speak only when spoken to, never before or after.

Going through a drive-thru in a foreign country with a domestic car.

Nothing exists when you are not looking at it; prove me wrong.

A bullet train inside Monaco.

Irreversible clothing with tags on the outside.

I project black light when your eyelids drop.

More of the sort.

Ash has been falling on me for far too long. That is, I’ve been too long in the dark. I’ve been sucking up the ground and rearranging it in my mouth, running it through my teeth to filter out the dirt, taking with it the footsteps we have walked, the oceans we have swam - nothing escapes me in this state of critique. Nothing furnishes my mind the way sucking the ground does.

I stick to sidewalks when this happens. I cannot handle the velocity of the highways, the brutality of the streets, all that bruising and the way lights systematically disappear from you as you recline forward. I have been digested time and time again by my city. I am a completed chain of bile and chance.

I document what I know, not what I think - I have ridden that sort of arrogance from my self. I know what I have become and evolved from, and I know I am now an ashtray, dark with butts and tar like the grey streets I filter through my teeth every sheepish morning, a shallow pond of digested cinders.

Free-writing is NOT poetry. It’s free-writing. It’s letting my hand do a little impromptu dance on the keyboard with borrowed shoes. Nothing more.

i want to write a poem

not about the way i miss late nights

or how i feel like the day i met you i’ve peeled your skin

to reveal the ever-lasting ripe fruit on the inside

(look up at me while i sink my teeth

into your checkered sugars and moist gums)

but a poem about future seems more appropriate.

you see, i want to create with you

the opportunities the homeless in miami beg for,

the will of the youth, collectively,

and how they seem to strew together more evenly

when they meet under the moon.