John Knych – Page 9

June 28, 2018

Paris #2

Wisps of fading smoke

Above crowded and noisy tables

Of an outdoor café

Dusty streaks of fading sunlight

Through the avenues’ trees

Laughter and shouts

Philosophical banter and drunken bouts

As night takes the day

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May 31, 2018May 31, 2018

NYC #12

There are many forms

Of education/s

Lying aching on a lumpy couch

After clearing tables and washing dishes

For strangers’ celebrations

Wanting to thrust a juvenile twitching brain

Into the consuming oblivion of excess libations

Slowly shedding these snake skins

Of a spoiled, debaucherous adolescence and petty adulations

Sticky film of sweat, berating voices, lacerating films

Of the past and a banal existence mixing with jackhammer

Invasions and pulsing temptations pernicious persuasions

Go jack off and eat dollar pizza you privileged red-headed caucasian

Succumb to the easy evasions oh you think you’re patient?

An undiagnosed patient? You think anyone cares you’re alone here in fear

Craving and raging? Or about your ruminations and frustrations and

Fulminations? The doubts and dead ends of your scribbling and wandering

Vocation? This couch is a lazy contracting contagion and spiritual stagnation

Get up you withering, bitter bastard before you

Now I’m lying in an empty park at midnight before a graduation

And the grass is cool, breeze from the river refreshing, and I’m weeping and I

Tell myself to try and let myself enjoy this brief sensation

This small step forward, a steady gradation, towards a vision of creation

Years and frontiers to go but breathe in this rising elation

Before I get up and go home and tomorrow morning

Receive a piece of paper that looks like a PowerPoint slide

Made in five minutes for academic accreditation.

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May 19, 2018May 19, 2018

Maybe I saw her six months ago, I can’t remember, but she was standing on the subway platform in the stifling heat. She looked attractive in her short, black dress. Her mien was flustered because of the train delay. Normally, I don’t talk with strangers, but something about the heat and the dress and the delay caused me to smile at her and make a joke. Her response was enthusiastic. When the train arrived we were still engaged in conversation. At my stop, I gave her my business card. Thirty minutes later she texted, “Hello.” We arranged to meet up on the weekend. A few days later I was waiting for her at a bar. An hour passed by and she didn’t show up. I left and thought, “Well, that was a waste of time.”

In the middle of January I received a text from a woman named “Miah” while I was reporting in Moravian Cemetery and shadowing a funeral. While I observed strangers sobbing over a beautiful casket with Michelangelo ‘Pieta’ engravings, I felt my phone buzz and saw, “Heyy happy new year !!” For twenty minutes I wracked my memory for who this “Miah,” could be. Very rarely do I put someone’s name in my phone and forget who they are. So, as the gravediggers lifted the $12,000 casket into the mausoleum slot, I texted back,

“Hey Miah, this is going to sound strange, but how do we know each other?”

“We met on the 1 train last summer on our way home from an outing. I remember we started talking because the train took foreverrr and you were reading a book lol.” Then I remembered. For a moment, I was concerned that my brain was decaying and that I had experienced memory loss. Then I complimented myself for being able to move past rejection so cleanly.

After more texting we arranged to meet that night at a friend’s birthday party near Columbus Circle at 8pm. At 9pm, I was standing in a mall at Columbus Circle waiting for a text back from Miah thinking, “Here we go again.” I wandered around the mall listening to French on my headphones and riding up and down escalators. Then I left and went home.

The next day Miah apologized and said her friend was vomiting at the party and that it was a disaster. I asked her if she wanted to meet for brunch the next day at 1pm.

At the restaurant the next day it was 2pm and Miah still hadn’t arrived. But I didn’t care because the coffee was good and I was reading a good book (The Razor’s Edge). At 2:30pm, I saw Miah at the front of the restaurant and waved her towards my table. She looked stunning. The brunch went well. When we finished eating I invited her to my apartment nearby. She accepted and, a few hours later, left. And every now and then, for the following few months until things changed, she’d come over to watch a movie.

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May 15, 2018