this place is different now

because i am. 

i walk the streets that lead

to dilapidated childhood parks 

and best friend’s houses 

and farrell football fields. 

i now walk these streets as a person

who knows who i am,

as a person who has severed 

connections with these streets 

to make room for me. 

i strive to live a life 

awash in affect, 

hammocked 

in hallucination, etherized 

in essence. i sigh 

as i think of my high school

and how it’s magnetic 

modernity immobilizes 

idiosyncrasies. i remember 

how it sent me to 

the yellow room.  

the room where stares 

are stapled to you firmer

than the chairs are to the floor. 

where you are split 

open, in two, then spliced. 

in that room i thought of sylvia 

plath and how the world 

drops dead when she shuts 

her eyes. i open mine. 

i see that i, too, have

a deadly 

world that needs to die 

each time i do. 

sylvia dies well. 

i die in yellow. 

i die next to men

in beds 

and by acidic idioms

that elude 

paternalistic chapped lips

and with the knowledge that 

beautiful things can end, too. 

they say that trauma

is something that needs

to get processed. 

process, like bessemer,

like lesser 

than progress. 

i mechanize reproductions

of the memories 

but am still in beds,

not being productive. 

not being processive. 

i walk these streets alone,

but never at night.

they bellow to me. 

they read buffalo, 

hylan, dryland 

way. i walk these streets

with desperate perspective.

i walk these streets begging 

to always be 

similarly desperate, as being 

desperate means you felt.

these streets know 

that i have lacerations

larger than love.

these streets know 

that when i am not walking

them i can’t stop 

remembering.

friendship flashes 

before my eyes

but never seeps into these streets.

i shall befriend grief. 

i walk these streets 

to defamiliarize. 

i walk these streets in a dream.