1. Not miss a single sunrise.

2. Run five miles straight.

3. Learn to play Evenstar on oboe.

4. Write a book.

5. Read all of Ian Fleming’s 007 novels.

6. Actually fill a journal.

7. Blog something daily. (totally not going to do that)

8. Go vegan.

9. Fence.

10. Write a letter to Dan Radcliffe.

11. Order some of those weird posters in my bookmarks bar.

12. Read The Epic of Gilgamesh.

13. Read The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

14. Memorize some more poems.

15. Finish reading Physics of the Impossible.

16. Anathem.

17. World War Z.

18. Learn to dance.

19. Achieve Mitchell’s beautiful vibrato sound on my oboe.

20. Teach Merlin to do something awesome. Merlin is a bird.

21. Eat bagels.

22. Macy.

23. Katie.

24. Cammie.

25. Deck out my room in Ravenclaw stuff.

26. And the aforementioned weird posters.

27. Make pancakes.

28. Make waffles.

clumsy words that don’t quite look like poetry:

that’s my genre.

my niche.

ripping a tormented soul from an inferior frame

and trying to cram it into the space of a language—

that’s my talent.

my gift.

has it occurred to you that every single poem i write

is exactly the same as the one

before it?

and after?

i am devoid of inspiration, for the trouble is that I don’t always have

something to write on.

an outlet.

i find again and again that i leave my home without

a preservative.

a salt.

no way to capture my ideas.

my words.

no way to keep them.

do you know how tall

mt. everest is,

or would the pain in

your thumb

(the one you keep hitting with the

hammer)

make it too unbearable?

the feeling in your chest

that you are, in fact,

doing the right thing:

you found you couldn’t raise your sword arm;

it was, in fact, the feeling of isolation when you’re

in a dream and you find you can’t scream.

but you won anyway,

and you might find it

interesting

that i, in fact,

know not only the height,

but how long it    would    take your pitiful soul to scale

mt. everest…

but you have to stop hiding behind

“hypothetically”

.

if you wore your hair the right enough way

if you roll the top down,

if you didn’t leave your glasses in the hotel room,

if you set out on your own enough to

be free of expectations,

if you can feel the sunset and

see the breeze

on the highway from apathy to

Lights,

from home to

Paris

to London

     San Francisco

     LA

     Churchill,

you will wish you’d worn

summer clothes,

because the bite of the night wind

has never made you feel

so alive

so free.

a clear glass dome of a sky,

reeking of car exhaust,

is the blackness a cloud

or a cloud of ink,

spreading too quickly or too slowly,

depending

upon the small choice:

am i in a city or

a fishbowl

or an ocean?

i’m a phytoplankton

in ten thousand oceans

drowning in the melting asphalt of

a billion urban streets:

Welcome to my City in a Fishbowl.

a stone chronicle never written

etched into the liquid pages

of a living history

that lived, and left

its stone sentries behind.

do not sing to me

of a stone chronicle

if you call yourself a poet or a

wiseman

write me a verse

or an essay

about death, not the death

that makes the living alive,

the death of stone that never

lived,

for i have never seen with my stone

eyes

a kingdom rise or fall, never witnessed

history, as you call it,

never felt nor seen the acid that even

now eats holes in my

dead granite face,

for i am a stone gargoyle

sitting on the ledge which is all

i know,

for i am a stone gargoyle,

and not one of you ants

has etched your

history

into me yet.