little life lab notes

How delicious—
the idea of being inconvenient.
Of being difficult.

Because I know
how to be easy.

I know how to be good.
All that continuous improvement—
agile development—
the endless how can I love you better?
nonsense.

I know how to leave dinner outside your lab.
Take the street side when your eyes flicker.
Tell you we're past embarrassment.
Sculpt your midnight dreams
into poetry. Into blueprints.
I know how to give you flowers.

But what I want
is to know
how to leave.

I want to be unusual every Tuesday—
mismatched socks, lopsided thoughts.
Ridiculous when the rain pours—
soaked through, silly,
savoring every teardrop.

I want to spend a season—reckless—
speaking in metaphors,
like that 4:03 a.m. text
sent between git commits:
you’ve unleashed something feral,
and now it’s bleeding everywhere—
and let those metaphors
bleed on into the next.

I haven’t stopped writing.

Oh, how I want to be—

salt in sugar,
absurdly annoying—
on purpose,
livid—and let it show,
giddy recounting Chipotle
catching fire.

A little wicked.

Actually—

a lot.

thinking
thinking about thinking
thinking about not thinking
thinking about thinking about not thinking
thinking about not thinking about thinking
thinking about doing
thinking about not doing
thinking about thinking as doing
thinking about thinking as not doing
thinking about doing as thinking
thinking about doing as not thinking
thinking about doing by thinking
thinking about thinking by doing
thinking about not thinking by doing
thinking about not doing by thinking
thinking about not doing by not thinking
thinking about doing thinking
thinking about doing thinking about doing
thinking about thinking about doing as doing thinking

Use her for your edges—
she'll fill every margin.

Why tell her
she's the bleed?

Trimmed,
our pages
picture-perfect.

How does it feel—
me, a counterfactual you.

You,
world-weariness as armor,
begrudging my wonder,
calling it naïveté.

I chose it.
Over and over.

Stopped waiting for closure—
made it. Stopped longing for change—
hunted it down.

So tell me—

How do you feel,
rehearsing every woe,
when you had
my hand,
my voice,
my choice?

like that pothos
starved yellow
she ate herself

hair and nails first:
no need for beauty
where she was going

hands and legs:
her mind made
thoughts run

then the heart:
tired
of the beating

face:
who was she

stomach:
no more

If I thought with my hands,
there'd be cathedrals
looming like memories—
sunspots and hairline cracks
pored over like paint
tracing questions
a hundred times—no, more—
a thousand panels of glass
stained with meaning
made and made and—
the world keeps spinning
like my fingers, words,
into tapestries heavy,
lest my hands forget.

It snowed today.

For the first time,
the thought of a snowman—
abandoned above the belly, armed
with one too many appendages—
never arrived.

No palms up, no head tipped back,
no let me feel you on my lashes,
and later, in every inconvenient cranny.

Instead, they skipped on by—
all mittens and momentum—
come, build a snowman.

Maybe next time.

I'd say you left fingerprints
all over my worldview
with hunger so brazen
it infected like permission
to want
this world cracked open.

Indeed—

I'd say you left me wanting.

Today I woke to yesterdays
stacked like unopened letters,

heard poetry pleading—
   did not speak it,
saw sculptures straining—
   did not free them,
felt the breath of being—
   let her slip by,

as if witnessing were enough for living,
as if wonder could survive unanswering—

so I folded the day back onto itself,
careful not to crease it—

told myself tomorrow will be
for braver verbs,
and a mouth
that opens.

I see you
      cruel
in every never-again—

tides crinkled and colored on an exhale;
the sun deserting the sky;
a billion beginnings breathing before day
break—

taunting me
with the violence of nostalgia-to-be—
or more battering still—
the remembrance
of forgetting you
    —I—to have never known you—

so please
    on your way out

            mar me

/flərt/
verb

chase dreams down
shorelines, skinny-dip in
each teasing thought, then un
dress: this absurdity—
charmed and still
clinging—just to try on
every other future.

how do we end    when
the ending refuses
announcement
   no tumble toward bedrock
   no clumsy farewell

what do i do    when
space      stretches
   a slow   drift
   a quiet   wane

   a pause

the phone could ring

once i
  refracted
through your
      fractures

shattered
into brilliance

i sift

still to find
that vantage
     once more

for a season you
scorched my skies

   resplendent

we
     fall
          flaming

these limbs
can't hold

          forever

Why?

Run gradient descent on my contours.
Tell me—are you even learning?

How wondrous, this engine, summoning
intricate geometries from single snapshots.
"Unsurprising, given the state of the art."

How splendid, those townhouses, awash
in sunset pastels, a palette worth memorizing.
"In distribution, for SF."

How ruptured, my heart.
"And the time-averaged signal?"

Must you always
recompute posteriors,
reweight your priors,
then chastise me:
"Tune your learning rate—
minimize sadness faster."

Did you expect to be my expert now?

Fuck this optimizer bullshit.

You've lost this function.

My landscape: dynamic.
My existence: unbounded.

See—don't summarize.
See—don't solve.

Why.

Explain.

Magic.

Again, I wake
to the concept of you.

Your face—I've forgotten—
but those party lights (blue),
danced in your eyes (soft),
caught on your lips (curled),
in an oh-so-cinematic way—
I thought moments like these
only existed in movies.

That gaze—
three seconds,
a secret suspended between us:
your smirk (knowing),
my smile (confessing)—
I wish those seconds
could have stretched (forever).

Now morning spills
across my sheets—

And still I'm metabolizing
the concept of you.