The poetry at the Bowery on Saturday night sucked. It was disappointing and frustrating. My nerves were heightened and ready to feel, and the bullshit just hung out and fell flat on its bullshit face. And then going to dinner sucked because I don't want to waste my time with people I don't feel a connection to. Kim and Madeleine are great. But I spent dinner texting friends from home because we had something real. I don't want to be in New York anymore because it's sensory overload. Everyone thinks they're interesting. Everyone thinks they're creating. It's better to have come out of Bel Air because I had to work for it. You'd think there'd be less to define myself by but it's actually more because there was no one to copy, I had to look at myself to get the words out and I didn't feel like anyone got it so I had to fight harder for my words to make them come out stronger so people might understand.

Like traslating yourself into an imperfect language that people are destined to misinterpret, but they might understand the gold at the center of the bullshit.

...And that said, I hope this doesn't suck. It will probably end up as multiple poems, or at least a better one:

I do not believe in signs.
I do not believe in numerology, astrology,
or the existence of an ancient script that can turn bullshit into gold.
There is no way to transform mediocrity into the shining prism at the center of a diamond.
There is no way that a middle-aged man with sagging eyes can look at my tiny solid thighs on the street,
and tell me I am beautiful
because not everything comes out on the surface.
There is no way for me to translate from my intimate internal language the reason why I curve the way I do,
the reason why the green in my eyes is so hard for most people to see,
but
what I can tell you
is that I no longer believe that I can rewrite a more beautiful version of myself
just by looking up and down the infinite maze of perfectly planned and articulately angular streetcorners that
even in the rotting abandon car lots of the Bronx,
where the wooden rowhomes are climbing down dirty green vines to prickle themselves away into the poisoned ground,
even there this city does not come out to me like home.
I do not believe the women who walk down St. Marks with children's costume jewelry sequins stuck to their face like it will make them pretty
or the young lanky boys who come up like they have something to say,
and force words to rhyme without a purpose.

Like the sagging men who say hey baby, you lookin' beautiful tonight
as they eye my thighs like some strange white-meat chicken dinner.

I have lost my faith in New York.
There is no answer here, because here
even the few who feel beyond mediocrity are constantly prodded and pressured by external interpretations of things
they only need to read for them, to make themselves a copy
but

I have faith that my voice can ring out golden and true among bullshit
because
it wasn't easy learning to speak in a land where the only voice was synthesized angel choirs
and screeching girls around youth-group puppet shows,
boys grunting over the sex of awkward chalkboard sweat and vodka with Gatorade
it wasn't easy, it came out hard like
an ancient intimate script from the hands of a divinely fevered monk
like the need to translate an internal language into plain, mortal English for a world destined to misinterpret
in the hopes they will, at the very least,
see the flecks of green in my dark eyes, or maybe even the shining prism at the center of the diamond.