Waiting Room

I would light one and start the countdown from the

electric blue burst of gas. This is how brilliance begins

to live. I watch the smoke elope

from my mouth to be with the atmosphere.

*

This is my armor. I am gathering courage in this

gauze of smoke, a permissible vice I authorize,

not that of you to whom I sink or swim at the degree

you let the pendulum fall.

*

My mother never told me to stop, only told me

the waiting room has been crowded yet emptying

faster than ever of late because

cancer is not a question of if.

It is now a question of when, but I

am young and cancer becomes a thought

only after other thoughts are ironed

out by denial and time.

*

On such nights like this,

I divide my breaths, long seconds between each

other, afraid to see the threads of clouds

that exit, making their way to the entrance

of the waiting room, its queue beginning to shorten.

growing up is hard to do II

The Virgin by Erik Barmack is the story of Jeb (Joseph, really) who takes part in a reality show, The Virgin, where contestants vie for the affections of a beautiful female -virginal of course. The prize? Her virginity.

But this is not a book on the world of a reality show. It is not about The Virgin either. It has little to do with sex, it has little to do with love.

What it really is about; a 27 year old man's fears, insecurity, merits and his last ditch attempt to meet the expectations of age.

It is about a story about getting lost, attempting to find the self in things, that makes one sink even deeper than before.

The Virgin is such an underrated book. The beauty of it is in how it forces you to read between the lines and eventually take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror. There's a Jeb, a Joseph in everyone of us.

There's no guarantee of adulthood transforming you into an adult. If being an adult is something by choice or biology. Who says coming of age happens only once?

Some of my favourite parts of the book:

The thing is, I like Allison. I really do, but the older you get the more you realize that sometimes people can like, deflate.

*

Allison has looped her arm through mine, but I can barely feel her. We're aware that we're generally beyond "it", whatever "it" might be. This allows us to be honest with each other, and sometimes we don't need to talk.

*

... I call Jenny, my college sweetheart and ask her on a date. Tonight we're dining at one of the chintzy Indian restaurants on Sixth Street. She's sort of glowing in her baggy blue sweater and I feel stupid because she always makes me happy in a pointless way. It will be good to spend time with her but I'll also be glad when this night is over.

*

Through the light blue tobacco haze, I look back at Jen. She's a good girl. Maybe I realize now, a little too late. What was our life like? You know I really can't remember. If I try hard enough, I remember egg colored sweaters and faded paperbacks- things like that. And I remember the frayed shoelaces on her father's hiking boots, the ones she wore. And I remember leaves falling in her hair and on her shoulders. Nothing important. It's stupid to overthink these things anyway.

*

After we stopped dating, we spent a good deal of time in the East Village. Sometimes we were together, but more often we were apart, on dates. Mostly bad dates. These evenings were unsatisfying, and they made us a little less innocent. We were naive, but it didn't seem that way when we were younger, and maybe it doesn't seem that way now.

what I would do for winter and frozen bones right now

Moments make up all of us.

Like that time, waiting for Nad at the airport in Hong Kong, thinking she'd never arrive.

Like that time in 2007 when I first heard Cat Power's Planets from yourmp3.net.

Like the smell of the freshly tiled toilets in the new campus smelling of muted cement and mild urine, the bright lights burning into my eyes then.

That moment of coldness and mirrors and weight loss and skinny girls.

You see these moments make us the same way we make these moments happen.

Your number that I saved from the last few years
I no longer have them now
but when I did
I realised these eight digits were
a farce
posing as you.

Of course it wasn't.

Once before falling asleep, I thought of something honest and beautiful, how someone always had you when you didn't have them yet. It always boils down

to the same damn thing

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
-Albert Camus

If you have always waited to be somebody's without you, I am nothing

cannot lose you to something

as animal

as attraction

Eyeliner

Beautiful but hesitant, you round
yourself off as Dee, one syllabus, a letter for
a name no one can frustrate themselves, or you
over.

I marvel at your eyes. Caves, deep and dark,
underlined in turquoise. You like my black
thinness that extends out like a wave
because in memory, you have seen

bevelled eyes like canvasses,
painted in thick smears of kohl by
girls generous but unknowing. You rationalize
that less needs more.

Standing in the valley of your words we hold
our breaths on the same page, if less
is a territory I will agree with or defend.

I imagine I must deserve this,
at how you became Dee, first tired then familiar
with the four pitched tongues unable
to roll out the waves in your name.

Curriculum

Histopatology
Things we couldn’t see diseased,
under the industrial eye are purple and pink.
Slice thin, tissues in its paraffin coffin.

Laboratory Management
Bhopal and Prypiyat still call on.
Their generation of abstract births and limbs
have only just began.

Anatomy & Physiology
Bolted by joints, my skeleton is
a white roller coaster the heart
rides on.

Pharmacology
Balancing weight, dosage and excretion,
maths in motion.
We measure codeine and alcohol,
wreath our heads in lightness without dying.

Haemotology
Plump the fingertips, just not mine.
Last night, an errant scalpel broke
the red dams beneath the arm’s epidermis,
my potential end an ironic taunt to live.

Convocation
Only in my entrance,

I saw the exit from years before.
Begin with the end in mind,
but those sephia moments did not capture
a curriculum that nourished
disorders in between.