It does not arrive with trumpets,
with high-stepping horses
and ticker tape raining down.
Someday does not announce itself.
Someday does not mark itself
with a large red X on your calendar.
It does not ask if you can fit it in
between Hair Appointment, 10:30 a.m.,
and Job Interview DON’T BE LATE,
it does not care
if this is a busy week
and you really just don’t have the time.
Someday slinks.
Someday creeps
Someday knocks on your door,
unexpected, when the house is a mess
and you are hungover
and when it does,
you must give it
your full attention.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
Early this morning,
you stepped out of the shower,
lifted your hair, still dripping
with tiny clean jewels,
and showed me the back of your neck.
You said you felt a sting sometime before dawn
and asked me if I thought
some insect had bit you in the night;
after all, we had left the windows open
to enjoy the cool breath of spring
and the whispers nesting down
in the oak trees outside,
so any manner of tiny bug might have
snuck past the window screen
and found its way inside.
I know what sunk its barb in me —
the scent of your soap,
a snap of lilac and lavender,
and under it your fresh-scrubbed skin,
still hot to the touch from the spray.
I ran my fingers across your neck,
searching for blemish or sting.
I didn’t see a bite mark,
no red welt or irritated bump,
but my fingers itched,
and my mouth itched for more
when I kissed the back of your neck,
standing in the bathroom
before you had to leave for work.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
There is a no-name gas station
on the north end of town,
11.9 miles out of the way,
out past the corner where
John Roe sits all day in the sun,
spits tobacco and sells onions
and oranges out of the back
of his rust red pick up truck.
There are bars on the station’s windows
and jars of pickled eggs on the counter,
right beside herbal male enhancement pills
and crack pipe roses. Pork rinds.
Refrigerator egg salad sandwiches
reserved for the brave or foolish.
There’s an old condom machine
in the men’s room, two feet to the left
of the pocket knife graffiti that says
JESUS SAVES and KKK 4 LIFE.
Half a roll of paper towels, no soap,
and the faucet just trickles,
no matter how the handle is set.
The attendant has a face
like the inside of a cigarette.
She runs a hand through
brown grease pit hair,
charges 5 cents more per gallon
than anywhere else nearby,
and she never says a word.
There’s no good reason to come here.
There are better gas stations,
closer, cleaner, less treacherous,
but you ought to know
that every time the needle
on my fuel gauge leans towards E,
I drive up, pull in past the jagged potholes
that get deeper every month,
to suck on hot petroleum fumes
and top off my tank,
listen to standard unleaded
slosh down rubber hose,
and to enjoy, for a brief moment,
that I am a little nearer —
that for these few minutes,
you are 366 miles away.
You are only 366 miles away.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
Every night this week,
I keep dreaming
that you throw me out
the open door of an airplane,
into 30,000 feet of blue —
You fling me out head first,
without altimeter or oxygen,
no tandem partner lashed to my back.
You cast me into solitude and blue,
not endless blue but ended blue,
a sharp-capped blue, a snapped-shut blue,
30,000 feet of blue and love
before the blue stops.
You cast me into solitude and love,
into 30,000 finite feet of your love.
This must be the weightlessness of your love.
This whirl into vapor, this vertigo.
A broad gasp of green looms up
to crack me open and I do not know
whether the stones in the ground,
whether the tiny houses, the lines of roads
are supposed to be a map to find you again
or just a picturesque countryside
to lull me down.
Is this the anxiety, the panic of your love?
Your love hammers the ribs in my chest;
your love is a scarcity of air, a burned lung —
a strained muscle, air pressure blowout–
I am trying to tell my body
we are all falling here at once
but some parts want to fall faster for you.
I cannot find the up of your love.
I am all turned around, I am whirled
head over heels over head
over heels over head
and there’s no way up,
no way down but down, but gravity
into slashes of blue and slashes of green
that circle and blur and whirl.
I am whirled; I am a world of your love,
a dead weight blackout of love,
a terminal velocity, a body dropped of love.
Every night this week,
I snap to wake as body breaks ground,
your name the cord of a parachute
clenched white-knuckle tight,
never snatched.
— Adam Kamerer
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This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
Some nights when you have gone to sleep
I go up to the roof and look for my pilot star,
my navigation star,
my guideline, my trajectory,
the place I am heading
when I stretch out my arms
and leap off the roof
and leave this silly planet behind.
Once I find it, I could go anywhere.
Fling myself out into the black sea,
skip upon every world whirling around the sun:
angry Jupiter, mysterious Saturn,
the frozen pebble of silent Pluto.
I could just keep going, out beyond the asteroids,
out past the dusty corner of everything
humans have ever known,
into the dark, into the dark,
until I find out where space ends
and nothing begins.
I never find it, my pilot star.
It is not there.
I will search and stare and hunt
for my pilot star until the night is almost spent
and then I will go in and lie down next to you,
next to the smell of your hair,
the heat of your body, the shape of you,
and I will know why.
Jupiter has its storms
and Saturn its rings
and forgotten Pluto cold secrets,
but only the Earth has you.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
I have unrolled a map
onto my kitchen table
and put one finger
where you are and
another where I am.
The space between
is only inches. That close,
I could feel you breathing.
I could reach out and
run my fingers through
every strand of your hair,
touch your lips and
barely need to move.
In the corner of the map
there is a guide for judging scale:
every inch a hundred miles
full of roads and rivers and trees,
the guide a sharp reminder
that you are where you are
and I am where I am,
inches apart.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
When you accept them,
you have no need of
afterlives or prior lives.
You have the single empty box
of a life and all the universe
to fill it with.
III.
Live like this: there is an end to you.
Don’t fear it. Don’t wallow.
Flowers wilt. Rivers dry up.
Even the stars extinguish themselves.
Have your time and then let it go.
IV.
Do not shy from your ending
with mad horse eyes.
V.
Allow the box of your life,
when you have filled it,
to have its spaces.
Resist the temptation
to stuff the gaps with gods
who do not know you.
VI.
Pull uncertainty into your arms
and kiss her lips;
too many neglect her,
but she is an eager lover,
and desires only your attention.
Let her teach you how to say
“I don’t know and that is beautiful”
VII.
You have only these minutes and years.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
a smoke of rose, a wisp of heat,
a hint of calm, a whisper
without sound but scented
with your lips, your tongue,
your breath, it eddies through
the turbulence
of my everyday.
Inhale your scent,
pretend your scent
is present to be inhaled.
Swallow the lump
rising in my throat.
This is how I get through
the moments between
our meetings.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
