Apologies for the lack of a poem last week! I had finals… and given the topic and scope of this piece, I decided it needed to wait a touch longer anyway.
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Ever since high school, I’ve habitually taken notes. On what? Well… everything. Potential story ideas. Interesting quotes, overheard or imagined. Goofy puns or jokes. Rap lyrics. Concepts for inventions, videogames, and experimental art exhibits. 90% of the time, I have no idea what if any writing I’ll use them in. But, given the fleeting fallibility of memory, I’d always rather jot/type something down and never use it than forget it and be hard up for imagery or snappy dialogue later!
When I moved to Ithaca in 2013 for law school, I started a separate dedicated document just called “Life Scraps.” Later, I renamed it “Cornell Scraps.” Now, with graduation mere days away, I decided to really reflect on these random moments and musings for the first time. In so doing, I saw the potential for a substantial poem. And so, out of what I realized had become forty-odd pages of grievances, late-night confessionals, and idiosyncratic one-offs, I selected and abridged or expanded the most striking lines to produce this.
It’s long, disjointed, and may not make much sense, even by the end. But, for better or worse, that was the last three years!
Three years of Ithaca being gorge-ous.
Cornell Scraps
I.
Outside my dorm window,
something chitters—cicada or sprinkler.
A bird call like a quick firework’s chirp.
An odor—either paint or rotten apples.
The common room, humid, smells of spirits, aflitter with tiny flies—
but at least they got the best Die Hards.
Cutlery comes and goes from the communal kitchen, like artifacts
passing through some high-tuition Bermuda Triangle.
At the dean’s home, a broken basketball backboard
heralds our class’s arrival at the drive.
Crickets congregate about white windowed reception tents,
drooping like jeans over hand-me-down dress shoes.
I’d moved in with optimistic discontent but,
walking ‘cross the gorge some evening next,
I felt a great emptiness within, as if
my life were a blurry eye, a voice gone hoarse mid-song,
as clouds closed over tentative night like a flowerbud.
And on weekdays, sudden bouts of belonging
fell swift to chronically displaced dissatisfaction.
I can’t stand Greek Row, but maybe I just lament not having a veranda
and roof to climb onto.
Mixer time. At the club,
the floor glows crime-scene UV;
it’s an arms race of debauchery,
and our livers are the battleground.
The nightly grind, never to mind by sunrise.
And that’s just the first week.
Fall’s descent brings sticky heat.
Thunder stutters, God
dragging a desk across concrete clouds.
Rain wreaks streaks, plasters the parking lots.
Inside sounds nice, but at a cramped laptop
my hopes are notes on a napkin, crumpled in anticipation
until the words blur to abstraction and all I have are withered strips
with no addressee.
Now, not saying class bored me, but I once wondered in one
what guy piled all that bread in a truck for the “We Can’t Stop” video.
Because my soundtrack is Skrillex and Joe Hisaishi,
for a romance with Holly Golightly meets the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
dressed to the nine-point-fives by Hot Topic and Watson-Kennedy.
So I start to love going to sleep, because that’s the only time
I don’t dream. Rest unassured,
this head is not a pleasant place to be:
strung out on caffeine, blind ambition, and unrequited love,
my brain needs icing down.
I want to live life at the speed of verse—because of course
I would never kill myself. Not when this world still has synthpop,
Emma Watson, POG juice, butterflies,
and the tone it makes when you strike a tuning fork.
But with bedhead that’s passed “restless cop”
and “wacky high school sidekick” straight to “Goku,”
the rock-fountain trickle of my Brita refilling is a bit Sisyphean.
Life’s path feels like a backward shirt: it fits, but something’s off.
Winter waxes,
broken pie-crust tire treads in the snow,
and icicles dangle like fangs from parked cars.
Chinese takeout splays across the sidewalk like collapsed partygoers,
disgorging frozen neon pips.
Green signs glare down the halls: “QUIET: EXAMS IN PROGRESS.”
Still, I get to know a gal at the post office
through the letters I send and tees I test.
Granted, it didn’t last—like a bad twist ending,
she was out before a month.
But don’t worry, hon. Some day you will be in New York
and everything will be awesome.
Nevertheless, anger breaks in waves—a planned impulse
—and from the crest I see the smooth sailing of adolescence
giving way to rougher waters of adulthood.
Predator or prey, adaption matters, and this ecosystem is more concerned
with cardigans, judicial interns, and Friday night shots
than Spider-Man, postmodernism, and riffing on Xbox One.
And if the girls don’t have their nose up in the air, it’s down in a book.
Resistant, I might’ve cried my vice is beauty, but
after a brief reflection that turned into a soul-search,
contemplating complimenting the strikeouts with Your free time is a lucky guy,
I put passion on a pedestal so high I couldn’t even see it.
Like standing with my back to a chasm, I know
some comfort awaits, biding time in a peripheral vision,
but if I don’t turn and look then it can’t entrance me.
But now that backwards shirt is just outgrown,
because setting my own standards isn’t productive—
it’s a tarred-feather coat of doubtful guilt.
An apologist’s résumé: I may have a 3.49 GPA,
but I clean out the sink after I drain the pasta.
Planning exodus from the land of milk and honey
to the land of wine and awkward small talk.
Sometimes I say things just so they’ll die from exposure to air.
With every new social circle drawn, I promise
I won’t be the neurotic guy again,
but finals week makes liars of us all.
Body of a jock, brain of a geek, soul of a goth,
schedule of a preppie, dreams of a hippie—I got this.
In NYC, there’s a leaky halal truck towed ‘round the corner,
plastered with an ad for the Heathers musical,
and washed-out, outdated tabloids stock the sides of sidewalk kiosks.
Of my Manhattan Madame I’ve said enough, except that
I don’t mind putting things on the back burner
as long as they weren’t smoking hot.
Sharing sleep and little else, I think of stupid things
to untremble my muscles.
I think of running out of bed
and lying against the wall of the ground-floor grocery store in my boxers.
I think of punching a brick wall.
I think of riding a bike into a fence, rolling over, and playing dead.
It’s like attraction is a garage door opener: enough distance,
and the signal just stops working.
So I can’t wait to go back;
there’s nothing left for me here but one-way sexual tension and dog barks.
II.
A leaf drags down the street, as if pulled by invisible string from a car ahead.
Flow but no focus:
I still haven’t seen The Muppets Movie, I think
from the back of a reproductive rights panel.
Got a formal text tonight—better put on my dress grammar.
But first, I have to drain complacency like a wound.
All my flights of fancy are in a holding pattern, or grounded outright.
At least, I’ve lost the ability to tell
how much intimacy between my peers is tongue-in-cheek.
I tell myself I won’t live as a dependent clause,
but irony is gonna play hell on archaeologists.
I worry the Internet turns the world into a circle of paranoid, passive potheads
dreaming in dark rooms.
We are hot dog culture: gross and ground-up, but easy to digest.
I’ve got this game I play where I try to see
how many people on Facebook won’t talk to me.
It’s up in the dozens, and I feel like
earlier in life was the film, and now’s just weathering credits
‘til the reel runs out.
Going back to sleeping alone is like reverting to DVD from Blu-Ray.
My heart is an open offer
but my grudges have half-lives, and
there’s nothing less interesting than beautiful people complaining.
So it’s fun wondering what I’ll look back on as so simple about this,
especially when true love is like a UFO: you don’t hear about it as much
now that everyone’s got smartphones.
If only I, Inception-like, could just spontaneously be talking to someone.
Until then, I identify as Straight But Not Applying It.
All of my takes are double-takes;
I think I’m developing smirk lines
from parties (or, “going friend-fishing”).
I’d say I felt like an empty seat, but people sit by those.
Snow floats in whips and whirls, confetti in a quiet blender.
A girl argues with a guy on a porch overlooking a shore of Solo cups—
well-lit, dramatic,
a Disneyland dark-ride of campus life.
Me, moving on is Indy trying to swipe the idol: I gotta really think it over,
and if the replacement’s not the same weight, then bring on the emotional boulder.
So no, Buzzfeed, don’t tell me what my new favorite video is.
Don’t tell me who to hate.
Don’t tell me to nod politely at X times Y celebrity was more interesting than me.
This godlike technology is for education, entertainment—not building new wings
in my inferiority complex.
No, I want love like TV seasons.
Maybe it’s The Simpsons: on for decades, haters be damned.
Maybe it’s Firefly: a brilliant idea snuffed out in its prime.
Let’s make it a competition to see who can miss the other the most.
And hey, who do you think buys all those nightmares their daydream dresses?
At the least, someone in this subway, statistically, has to have nudes online.
Topside, sirens blurp like the Lord flicking water
beneath the trapezes of power lines.
I could admit I’m not confident, and you won’t mind
out loud—but the thought will still seep in, like a leaky pipe under an abandoned flat,
and I’m recycling-bound like To Current Resident.
If talk is cheap, then revenge fantasies are seashells and bottle caps,
so while I can’t act, I’m quite comfortable shouting in crowded rooms.
Trying to find the right song to unfriend old crushes to
while I move through Zeno’s Breakup:
Music for revoking any fucks previously given,
in tune with the phases of the mood.
Earbud cord peeks between my jeans and shirt like a spiritual insulin kit.
Balance doesn’t always mean staying in the middle;
it depends how heavy each side is.
Electric beats thumping out of a juice bar,
people staring at supercomputers,
glass skyscrapers soaring into the clouds…
Ever finally feel you’re living in the future?
Only this era, we’re building the meteor and bringing it down ourselves.
Everyone in my News Feed is closing deals, posing with koalas,
or bungee golfing in Antarctica, and I’m just taking a stroll, thinking
about how weird it is that Scooby-Doo had a laugh track.
My patience is the Earth’s crust: it’s thick, but crack it
and there’s nothing but ten thousand miles of fire.
I want to be a monitor, not a processor, never mind that
I once tried to avoid eye contact with a cardboard cutout.
Fluent in fantasy, my brain is a perpetual motion machine
that runs like The Hobbit: fast and distracting, but only ‘cause it’s closer to reality.
And yet my unfinished business as a ghost would probably just be watching
all the videos I bookmarked in undergrad and forgot about.
III.
The blood moon eclipse.
An aged penny if good,
a molding peach if bad.
Not even the cosmos gets me decisive.
I decided to make all the things I say worth saying
slowly, but I’m still making my goal a worst-case scenario.
Something went wrong, somewhere, in the past,
but it wasn’t just me.
Part me, part world, part my reaction to both.
Like short sheets trying to fit a frayed mattress:
pushing, pulling, coming off
at one corner for want of fitting another, never realizing
until I felt for its opposite and found it bare.
Or waking up to tatters beneath me, thinking it so secure the night before.
The rain was light yet thick, like falling mist,
suffusing streetlights with amber halos.
Another bar tab not bothered with.
They’re not even interesting assholes, they’re just boring assholes.
I lied when I said I’d rather die than do the same job forever,
I think. It just felt good to sound determined by choice for once,
because I need to make things—with my hands,
not my mouth and wallet.
And whether it’s an international bestseller
or the popsicle stick castle that went to shit in fourth grade,
it exists.
Substance.
Fighting back against entropy.
So what can you create today
that wasn’t there yesterday,
and that you’ll be proud of tomorrow?
Savoring the world is priceless like a funeral.
Good memory, bad memory—it’s still just a memory.
Not made but replayed,
and in three years,
I’ve repeated enough for a lifetime.
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Notes&Sketches 