who can tell the dancer from the dance?

Ode to a Nightengale
Forlon
The very word is like a bell tolling me back from thee to my sole self.
Adieu
The fancy cannot cheat so as she famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu, adieu
thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows,
over the still stream, up the hillside and now
tis buried deep in the next valley glades.
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?

-John Keats

The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end

of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds
of women—those you write poems about

and those you don't. It's true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction

lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast

as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don't have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power

never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,

as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed
antibodies for your smile. I don't know how long

regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don't know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light

of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that's just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing

into each other's ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn't make the silence
any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses

I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out

of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you'd press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I'm sorry this poem has taken thirteen years

to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade's precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we'd put our hands away like chocolate

to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other's eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn't be said.

-Jeffrey McDaniel


I remember when I was younger, one of my favorite secret pleasures was when as a class we would read aloud, pouring through the pages and chapters of the novel we were currently tackling. I was always transfixed at hearing the prose spoken aloud, the disjointed melody of the words trickling together, painting the world, scene, and characters in front of my mind's eye. Perhaps that is why I am so enamored of film and television- the spoken word never fails to entrance me.

Considering how crazy my life has become, I have taken solace in the little pleasures. Cooking myself a delicious meal while listening to music. Sitting alone in silence reading a book/script. Stepping away from a boisterous, raucous party to drink in the night. Solitude is neither here nor there in my current state but I seek it out desperately when my claustrophia kicks in.