He is intangible
Of that you are certain
Intangible and far away
And realistically
There's nothing you can do about it
No wand to vanish the distance
No command to solidify his existence
No chance to verify the feelings drifting across modems

It seems a cruel trick of the Cosmos
That you should be obsessing
Over a binary being
A body who takes the form of a chat window
For all you know, he isn't even real
You could have dreamed him up
Imagined yourself a lover
And placed him across an ocean
Conveniently out of reach when you need him most

Yes, it's a cruel trick
To be questioning the universe at every turn
Wondering if it's his intangibility that captures you
Rather than the sweet words he lets play across the screen
Wondering how he could ever disappoint you
If he's only made of instant messages

Sometimes
You hold your own hands
Wishing you could trace the lines of his palm
Imagining having something solid to hold
Instead of slippery dreams and fluffy half-images
That get dislodged by catchy songs

Sometimes
You talk to yourself as though he could hear you
Wishing the sound could reverberate around his room
Envisioning the faces he would make
And hallucinating his responses

Sometimes
You want to slap him
Wishing you could hear the satisfying smack
Of your palm against his cheek
Rather than the clattering of your typing fingers
When you're jealous over a piece of cyberspace

Nonexistence is disappointing
When you've worked out all the details in your head
All you want to do is reach out
And not be stuck catching at empty air

In the end
His intangibility will let you down
So why are you so enchanted?

Why are you feeling like Eponine
Pretending he's beside you
Knowing you're living in your head?
And yet these days
You find it far too easy to let the city fall away
Only to have it shock you with its solidity
When you realize you've been imagining things again

When she opened the door and saw him standing there
Her first thought was
Holy crap he's so obsessed that he swam the Atlantic!
Well, his hair was dry
So she realized this thought was not reasonable,
But she couldn't formulate a second thought
Because that's when the shock started to set in
And all she could say was
"You exist!"
Awestruck,
Reaching out to make sure he was solid.
It was just like she'd imagined.
His lithe, ******-trained body stood less than an inch
Above her own over-worked and over-fed frame,
And his brogue-heavy voice tumbled out
Without a type-face to give it cadence:
"You exist, too…"
Palm to palm they stood there,
Staring wonderingly at the other,
Unconsciously twining their fingers as though,
If they didn't hold on,
They'd flicker out like a computer shutting down.

On her fifteenth birthday she'd told him
"I'll be eighteen in three years. Then I'll come see you."
And in those days
The Atlantic Ocean didn't seem like such a big thing.
It seemed that its breadth was just a story moms told to keep their kids from wandering off,
From sneaking out and stone-skipping across its waves
Until they splashed up on some foreign beach.
Dimly, she thought she could flatten herself out
And fling her body so that she'd bounce her way across the ocean
Right to his door.
In those days
She was leashed by a modem,
Bound by the words typed out in real-time;
"I can't wait until I'm eighteen. We'll finally see each other."

On her eighteenth birthday,
She no longer wore her computer collar,
And she wasn't thinking about him
Or the Atlantic.
But looking at him standing in her foyer,
She couldn't quite remember
When two screens and a modem
Became too fragile to bridge two continents.
Virtual hugs crumbled under real life kisses;
LOL couldn't replace actual laughter;
Emoticons couldn't replace ****** expressions.
For all that she loved him,
Something was missing,
Lost in IP addresses and chat rooms,
Only to be found again
Dropping its luggage on her bedroom floor.

I once drew lots to find the spot
Where I would raise my shining throne
No lofty palace was fated mine
For I am king of gloom and bone
Deep in the earth was my dominion
No light to ever grace my eyes
In darkness stale I would be reigning
While brothers ruled the seas and skies

I didn't want this morbid kingdom
Resented my netherwordly throne
But soon I found I had great power
For all must fall to gloom and bone
Their shades will float across my river
Echoes of what can no longer be
None escapes the world of Hades
For even kings must kneel to me

All men of Zeus must heed my calling
Death will take them to my throne
And Poseidon's waves will swallow many
Mortals to meet their gloom and bone
No god can claim as much as I
My kingdom can only grow with time
For I never return what I've acquired
And every soul is one day mine

They said the fairest of the goddesses
Was the one to give us love,
The one to fetch the maidens
And bring the boys their girls.
What they meant by fair was beautiful,
Not just or right or equitable,
For it hardly seems fair
That she's a goddess,
Enthroned on a mountain with a mirror in her hand
And we're all of us mere mortals,
Hapless humans,
With our ribcages wide open,
With no bone to shield our vulnerable ventricles
And no sense to tell us to cover our chests.
It's no wonder that this otherworldly seduction
Can ****** us
And string us along
And consume us
Until we forget what life was
Before love caught us.

It seems impossible
That these frail, impermanent bodies
Can hold such ethereal infatuation;
It's too strong,
So it ravages us,
Strips away dignity,
Rips away common sense,
And seizes all control.
Our little human selves
Never stood a chance.

Tell me, Aphrodite,
Does it make you laugh to watch us struggle?
From your lofty vantage point,
Do you giggle when the rational become foolish,
When the thinkers become unfocused,
When the innocent become broken?
Does it please your fair reflection
When those devoted mortals go to ungodly lengths
For this love that you inflict,
Until they have nothing left of themselves,
Until they're worn to the very bones
That couldn't protect their unsuspecting hearts?

Do you revel in the irony,
Aphrodite,
When, exhausted and dejected
And downright tortured,
They still worship you?
When they bow
And sacrifice
In gratitude?
When we miserable mortals
Thank you for these feelings that destroy us,
Because for tiny moments
We felt transcendentally good.

Perhaps she'd had better intentions,
That goddess Aphrodite,
Thought that she was filling our open hearts
With something to give them meaning.
Maybe she thought
We'd left our ribcages open on purpose,
That we'd all simply been waiting for her,
Wondering when she'd reach down her power
And give us a love to cling to.
Or,
It could be that she had it right,
That our chests were left gaping
And our hearts were left empty
So that Aphrodite could look away from her mirror,
Smile from the clouds,
And send us someone to make us whole.

Once for Halloween
I dressed up as Athena
The Greek goddess
My favorite Greek goddess
And it was a decent costume
Your standard iParty fare
Paired with an elaborate hairdo and some 50 cent earrings
And I knew I was only a cheap imitation
Nothing close to the real thing
For no one would ever build me a temple
Burn cattle in my name
Put on white robes and fall to their knees
For me
No, not for me
But for Athena
Oh, how they fell!
How the ancient Greeks worshipped her very name
Gave her their capital city
And dedicated the most powerful force to her
Wisdom
That force which drove the philosophers
The very energy
That sustained Socrates
And Plato
And Aristotle
And all those dead guys we read about in class

I was in a class
Reading the words those dead guys collected
In their moments of clarity
But all I could think about
All I really wanted
Was to throw on a white robe
And fall to my knees at the Parthenon
Begging for wisdom, wisdom
Please, Athena, some wisdom!
I don't care if it's heresy
I don't care if you're a myth nowadays
Because you once reigned
You once stood on Mount Olympus
In all your ancient power
And watched your people crying out wisdom, Athena, wisdom!
Please!

I wish
I could have been there
I wish I could have seen
The day the goddess cracked open Zeus's skull
And was born
Fully armed
Ready for her battle
Not the fight for wisdom, no
The fight she faced was undying
The war she would lead
Would ripple through the ages
Taking all civilizations
And tearing at their social order
For it was the men she was fighting
The disbelieving fools who put her *** down
Taking all women's wisdom
And deeming it inferior
Substandard
Not good enough
So Athena blazed in glory
And for her, men believed
Believed in their mothers and wives and daughters
Saw in that enthroned goddess
The sparks that fueled women's minds

Yes, I wish I'd been there
I wish I could have kissed her sword
And asked her to stick around
To blaze her way to the twenty-first century
And make these guys tremble, too
Instead
I look around my 80% male college of engineering
And wonder why I need to prove my worth
Simply because I have a second x chromosome
I wish that I could blaze in glory
And dazzle them all the same
That my Halloween costume could be enough to fool them
That they would turn their toga-party bedsheets
Into white robes
And fall to their knees
Gasping, "Wisdom, wisdom!"
And that, for one moment
I could be their goddess

No poems care to comfort me
No words are willing to clear my head
No thoughts come flowing from my pen
No dreams will deign to share my bed

I used to sleep with company
To doze with dainty desires
But now it seems my mind rejects
Those floating, smiling sires
Instead my head’s been filled with fluff
With engineered tomfoolery
No longer can I find my thoughts
Amidst this heavy schoolery

My florid fancies and swooning sighs
Have decomposed under scrutiny
And inspiration has been so choked
That is has no will for mutiny

I’ve calculated, demonstrated
Extrapolated and oxidized
So now I’ve found that feelings too
Have fallen overanalyzed
It feels surreal, to sit with you
While my mind sits far away
The distance slows my synapses
And causes heart delay

Thoughts, I’ve found, have been rewired
Connected where they shouldn’t be
So silly things cause tears to spring
And trivial words to bother me

I wish my poems would return
To put my mind where it belongs
To weave my dreams so I might sleep
To erase for you my careless wrongs
I wish my words would scamper back
And put my tangled thoughts to rights
My feelings, too, so I might breathe
And finally make peace with restless nights

For some reason
I remember Snoopy
—Don't ask me why
             For I couldn't tell you—
I remember the Snoopy t-shirt
She wore
And that I got really excited
Because I love Snoopy

It's strange
What you remember
What bits and pieces you keep
I remember her reading
Shyly spilling words at the front of the room
And everyone
—Everyone—
Leaning in to hear
That soft, enchanting voice

I remember keys
Lots and lots of keys
A whole hand of them, in fact
An art project I watched emerge
As she wielded a hot glue gun

It's mostly the poetry I remember
—And her smile
            But who doesn't?—
I can see her standing at the mic
Enthralling her audience
Mesmerizing them
Keeping them hanging on her every word
She was a star
There was no doubt
A poetic star
We talked through her poetry once
Tweaked it here and there
Changed some tenses
Fixed some commas
But most importantly
We decided
That when "night sloughed off its veil"
It should be day
Once more