& for a long time
I remember being held

By straps
A child

Still I
Remember being

In the back of cars
Peering at the windowpane

Rather than through it
How else to begin

To feel thirst
Lift up your lips to that

Lungs huge
With breath &

Expectation today
You ask me

Please change
My name in the book

I would never do a thing
Like that not like

My insides
Can be replaced

Each time I make something
Of myself: an American

Writer of Cuban and Polish
Descent says Wikipedia

On the Internet
No one shares

My name
I am guilty

Of associations
Making your mouth

Into a metaphor
Turning water

Into want
Come into

Water the sadness
Of clothes without

Bodies, et cetera
Give me something

To live for
I'm sorry I couldn't make it         

You said I said really
It's the thought

That counts

__

Lately I had been thinking about writing a memoir because everything else I’ve ever written is a memoir while pretending to be something else and I figured it was time I did something else, which was a memoir. So much of my life is predicated on pretending or performance. Language has become another performance for me, one in which I can show off and show myself, at the same time. "Adaptation" plays with that idea; the versions and perversions that reveal but also alter a life, and also my girlfriend's insistence that I alter her name in this book, which I haven't. Emily Fragos wrote a great poem titled "The Sadness of Clothes" and I had that image in my mind when writing the turn of this poem, a moment where expectation, associations, and the utopic landscape of creation all sort of collide. The tension that exists in the break between one line and the next is what makes poetry so great, I think, and what most manifests want. Everything that happens will happen in a moment.

As a child, I spent a lot of time riding in the backseat of cars.