so ive been asking to come clean and become clean

Push-n-pull in the slivers of light obeying the demands 
of water on earth. There is a lotus shaped dance I did 
once, that stroked my gold enough to take me to that
underground place. Nothing grew at dawn except 
perennial barley and corn in cheap purple sun mimicry.
I will have to cede myself to this archaic junction 
of peoples. Most of whom are thoughts 
to myself 
of myself.

The Grot is a lone tire-shaped plaza of the city
where a beekeeper’s suit has been eviscerated 
and abandoned in the brambles at the empty heart
of the wheel. With an untrained hand, a painter friend 
finds he is less talented than he once previously believed. 
He becomes a corporate ceramicist. And locally, 
with a new spasm in the fore-frock of his face, 
he opens 
a honey farm.

Ebb-n-flow across arbitrary cave tunnel bounds 
The lip, the street, the trade convention of shit, 
the thoughts that pass each other and wave 
sometimes in recognition, other times by mistake.
No horses, only the undying sine curves of fame.
This is only a feeling hanging off a thorn bush. A heat.
Grot caved in high falutin devotion to words of man—
to salt, flour, butter, 
polyeurethane.

Grotto begets palace by the park. A nice affair, 
a sconce. Food consumed before prime, but the peels 
fall off the flesh and turn the smell where things behave
naturally again. I am hauled off for ore. And tents! 
A palace needs tents of a thousand gold. Public holidays
for muscled up diatribes on rain and post-fetal era woes.
Soporific Grot,
Cyanide Grot.

Grot of archaism lain out on a clay tab thrown and 
glazed in successive waves of fracked air. That is 
heat poor citizen. That is what the people crave.
Find me spindle pricked in the drug-induced town square,
wresting a thought from a myth from a dance 
Grot Fall off the vase and into the oily hands of thoughts 
who may or may not recognize each other. Wave at it, cry at it,
gather 
go limp.
 

a smooth pen and a great new kind of artwork

dust from sweat, been so long
minneapolis airp

at dawn nothing can rise from the ground
what absolves you to be frilled and lazacious jug button?

clipped man from the neck down you beg be to fathom you
up up and away

unzip you via that unmentionable protrusion
but your thoughts linger
on a bundle of joy?

now i write surreptitiously
towering over denatured legs
unsure of next words until
there is spontaneous existence.

I am hopeless in the candidate search for a warm bed
jill of no trade—master of lome.

--- bang bang bang bang bang
fist to striated headboard
suckered round
split
and drag trough of belly
with hangover killing
evidenced by daikon and carrots
expiring in the yard. 

---

a smooth pen and a great new kind of artwork

There’s finally a child who addresses
the issue of irony 
vis-a-vis
literature in unreadable cursive.

It’s…
the new style. 
People have now discovered
that roundness appeases mylarism
and bucket-induced wounds.

And hopefully a new child 
will address the issue of asking for secrets
vis-a-vis
stick and hoop games.

I am two children who can’t play the piano on father’s orders. 
I am growing wearing of a callus in the couch and the onerous glow of sad light reactions.

---

Natural grocer gives away small plums in his backyard for FREE?

---

He is tired of fixing irony in socks and pants who were always there for him but never needed him.

s/ash

Wet cotton cuts the capillary at home / via cinching tight around the waist / a slash / a s/ash / an eleven year old best friend / whose brother keeps her awake all night to tell him if he’s alive / he screams about satan in school the next day / and must be taken home / most dinner tables in the region are wry / they’re harsh / slash / overshadowed / by delicata squash.

The babies in wrapped white holler summer afternoon / the circus of the season / the railroad debate / the blanket she enfolded all around herself till she could feel her / thumbs / playing / with the white knuckle grip on the tin cup / the nursing of sweet juices / was good against / green bugs with white wings burrowed through pants elastic.

A failing marriage / calling for rain / they cancelled the pageant and I watched him grip her fat thigh / when we walked / his fingers got stuck with thumb pressed to forefinger / he bashed his knees / his old animal hide was showing / he’d let himself go. 

Laser face / bring him up front / cause the lights / they shoot through the rocks / / / weathered bricks / boolean ladies screaming bread / calamitous johns screaming roughed up / and you wanted a puppy dog? / forget that plumbing dream.

the girl / the husband / the wife / the devil / fail again / at quelling the racket.

city 1

Push-n-pull in the slivers of light fracking water / I will have to cede myself to this / archaic junction of peoples / with an s / and truly most of those people are thoughts / to myself / of myself.

The Kingdom can be a nasty place to find yourself / with an untrained hand / a painter friend finds he is less talented than another painter friend / so he becomes a ceramicist / locally / he opens a few bee drawers / maybe there's common ground in being shit at fiber art. 

Kingdom of archaism lain out on a Grecian clay tab / thrown and glazed in successive waves of fracked air / that is heat poor citizen / that is what the peoples crave / next to drug.

Ebb-n-flow cross arbitrary Kingdom bounds / the lip / the street / the signing convention of shit / the thoughts that pass each other and wave / sometimes in recognition / other times by mistake / no horses / only blinds / salt / flour / butter / acetone.

Kingdom begets palace by the park / a nice affair / a sconce / food consumed before prime / but the peels fall off the flesh / and tents / a palace needs tents of thousand gold / Drug Kingdom / Poison Kingdom.

Kingdom Fall / off the vase / into the oily hands of thoughts / who may or may not recognize each other anymore / etch Kingdom Fall on the street / wave at it / cry at it / gather / go limp.

diary entry

Deeply and irrevocably sticky today. Jam hands coated in rain and humidity and a kind of sweat that is jostled between skin and makeup. I wrote a pretty fabulous email to Alex at work, artful, unique, touching. He liked it even when it veered into pretension. He likes me even when I veer into pretension, I think. I’ve noticed that when I walk a certain way I also notice people staring. It's a chicken or the egg because I think when I walk the regular way I’m less observant. I even notice the heft of my own presence around a table. The table of today was surrounded by a silver high heel chair, a radio man, a good new blue pen, and a vaulted dome painted by some beautiful and famous musician. I ate a marinated egg over rice with spinach and avocado. Whipped up this morning and doused in too much sauce. It was a goop going down at the end. 

Mentally, I’m feeling perpetually foggy and dewy. Like a summer-break child released from homework who has also been drinking beer. I drank too much last night due to an $8 pitcher deal and felt momentarily drunk. The night before that I was in the country and lost some red wine to the porcelain gods. I didn’t tell a soul I threw up even though I’m sure Nic could hear it. She may have been sleeping. Ever dewy, I washed my mouth out and accepted an added degree of fog to which I could manage. I’ve started living in a base amount of it, but not for so long that I can’t remember what a clear mind feels like. Words come to me in jolts now, filling my notes app with middling, unrelated phrases that make me furious to look back on. They are representations of what little inspiration I feel under this dense cloud. Snappy quips come to me occasionally and under pressure. 

Last night at kgb bar a flailing, famous comic on stage asked me whether or not the count in sesame street was jewish coded. I felt relieved when my answer got laughs from the room. I was drunk + funny. He came back on stage five minutes later, asked the same question to Be, and demanded that everyone clap because he was doing it for a video. Outside, I overheard him saying what an embarrassing mess he’d been and erratically stalk down 2nd avenue. He’d been making other jokes about his summer of penixation, so I didn’t feel bad and I wasn’t drunk anymore. In the bathroom a woman approached me under the eaves of the stall and called my poetry “particularly sentient.” 

The cloud thickened and I made my way home after stuffing the directions to Nic’s apartment into her pocket because she was too drunk and her phone was dead. I thought about rolling a great cigarette when I got back, but I felt the slurry of japanese beer in my stomach and opted for a dirty Dead and Co t-shirt and bed. 

Now I’m looking at Roku city and thinking that I live there more than anywhere else. The movie theater in it looks like IFC Center and the Godzilla across the water isn’t too far from the truth. We play godzilla pinball everyday in Jersey City between stints swallowing egg-rice-avocado goop and thumbing through powdery records. I’m doing a project right now where I relabel and organize compilation LPs. I’ve only finished the so-called “traditional” section, whose contents contain everywhere from jazz standards to bird calls. I rip tape, I write in sharpie marker, I alphabetize, I crinkle and lock my knees, I ween off of coffee, and I am the good law herself, thumping to found music compilations. 

There is one record that surfaces in my life from time to time called Finger Lickin’ Good. Its cover is a picture of a woman’s torso, seated in nothing but brightly colored underpants. One hand is down her pants and the other is gripping a bucket of fried chicken. I’ve never heard it, but its cover delights with waves of disgust and admiration. Goop is a bucket and soft skin between thighs strikes me as a combination too crisp and visceral. Gnawing on a puck of carrot shwoomped in hummus. Bell peppers peppers on the razor’s edge.

little red lines

The firepit left in the middle of 1st street is dying and you are eating salad. No one can eat the leaves without feeling them slap their chin, and there. That is universal. You are somehow fancy by wearing the same thing everyday, by gazing up at billboards and requesting them. Eyes. That’s sort of all it takes. The upper triangle of face, cornered at the end of eyes and bottom of the nose. What is making me dumber? I’ve tried prurience, I’ve tried quitting. I’ve tried sticking to lamplight, heeding the advice of my mother, and I’ve tried ignoring my mother entirely. What sticks is knowing everything will be hammered if it's improperly measured. That things break before they’re touched. Lies relive themselves over and over, and she wants me to track the lie at the end of the arch. Impossible. How dare you request anything of me after your hand was stiff in mine. Some people want to travel and some people want me to travel. I’ll travel. I’ll scare you too. I used to have premonitions of our reunion being one of great motion. Legs would swing in air and hair would swing like legs. Now I imagine the awkward after and the unimaginable silence of the train ride home from the island of “happenstance” into the borough of “circumstance.” I’ll stand frozen but you will know I was in motion before and will be after now. We stand around the firepit in the middle of city summer and it’s hotter than equator flame. I try and it handles me all the way to a tiger lily in the dark. It is hotter yet. It can get hotter. 

discretion is paramount

The slug exits mole city, it rickets and bumps against the sides of the lane. I could conjure an image so fast, faster than you. I see a train and I know it's really a bowling ball. If you ask me what some cryptic thing really is, I’ll tell you, and I’ll be honest. You have a son and then you have a daughter who looks just like the female version of him. Oh and the city is still and stuck in (brain) fog and (real) fog. Famous Singer says that Famous Singer 2 says being alone in the city is harder than being alone in the country for a variety of reasons, but mainly one in particular. I have to agree with them. 

First son has made a wax man in his own image. Now that it's done he doesn’t know what to do anymore. It’s perfect, Nordic, and booted. Since its done he can look at it as a perfect narcissistic pastime. He waits for his mother to notice it by finding empty eye tasks. She does and takes pictures. He can drop the wax man later and kill him to practice for his own drop-kill. Limp in his hand, he could crumple him into a ball for a proper Nordic Viking funeral. Let the slug run silver tracks over his wax form. 

Looks like it’s gonna be a great day today. Six people across from me are split between black and white uniforms. With linked arms they make discrete colors into a stalking mechanism that watches you through the pitch window down the street. Only one is wearing the shirt that fits them just right. Slip yourself your own sedative or beauty which last night necessitated. It came to light in the form of a flash photo of a tiger lily and likewise enabled the circumstances which left a steel fire pit in the middle of 1st street. Fiddle with your satanic monogrammed bathset. Flip it over, once, twice, and run away as fast as you can. 

thoughts from the train pt. 1

Feeling relatively lucid today. I say this confidently and still manage to wonder what it means. For example, putting on my black boots of three years or so is just that—putting on the pair of boots for whom my affection has waxed and waned but has emerged from the tunnel of love in distilled simplicity; “I like those boots. I wear them most days.” The love is ongoing and flat.

But lucidity, what is it exactly? When words or phrases fall down easily, thickly, and plainly is the simple answer. But where do we locate its exigency? Locate it in a jolting between places, sounds, and sensory experiences; locate it with an open satisfaction with previous days’ expenditures rewarded with sensations of the distilled simple. The distilled simple, might I add, could be the greatest gift of all. 

I am thinking of all this because I am greeted by an unoriginal hometown, which usually puts pressure on my major joints—knees, elbows, ankles. But with the falling sounds of the distilled simple, I can stave off the emotional body ache of a repetitive location.

I can even watch it from a train window, which excludes me from being confidently placed within the soreness of town but rather rolled up in its immaterial biforcator, its hard-up and sweet body of passage. There is a clear observer and observee formulated by the window pane, separated by its distinctly hard matter. It’s separateness is even corroborated by several conductor witnesses whose bodies and minds are affected by the incorporal experience of occupying a train car for eight to ten hours a day. They are impartial witnesses of soul transference. 

note: hair up is occasionally a sign of spiritual recession. One conductor has exited the train with a high bun and two backpacks slung around each shoulder. When she gets to her car, she will let her hair down and unzip the contents of her bags to find her heavy soul distilled into a drinkable form. She’ll gulp it down, embody herself, and before she puts the key in the ignition, she’ll take a second to appreciate the comfort of a heavy soul once again. Not just comfort, but gratitude, because once she thought the lightness of an absent soul in a day’s conductor work was a distilled kind of simple, but now she knows it’s just probably a distilled kind of pain. The heavy soul, she has found, is far more preferable.

Aquatic Tension

The diagrammable prescription
“in case of emergency”
is an herbal of dark
of the single finger you left waiting
in your water glass
limp and breaking aquatic tension.
Ears popped
and the apartment was marshalled through
we, the undersigned dark.

And man,
I was paying attention
to your words so good
that I forgot the song of the living room
and the content of the kitchen.
Which worried you.

You seemed worried
by my proclivity toward
concentration,
so you bent that lazy finger back
and tipped the undersigned glass.


So the spillage that occurred
at 4:45am Eastern Standard Time
happened simultaneous to
undersigned ear-poppage,
and with it
my focus rested
and ate with its small hands:
Eggs,
Toast,
Stymied juice,
Pills,
and Pebbles.

It burped and ran for the train.
And it tried hard to evade the fare
cause it didn’t think you should pay to
be scared in terminal dark.
And it found a man watching it
legs pinned in the turnstile
(a kind of device whose sole purpose
is to move in one direction)
in the eves of downtown paraphernalia
frozen in perceptive on-the-run
moments like these
focus knows when to dissipate
and join its own
undersigned.

Unfamiliar Soup

She was out kicking cans in the particular morning that I left her

Tickle my armpits she said and we’ll listen for the voices we know
If there’s none we’ll just laugh from the old tickling and
then keep our hands to ourselves
I knew then that I could always hear my mother talks
hair, or head, or one, or both of those a beehive
did you forget the beehive?
it’s just talking and some touching,
mostly its tickling

On that particular morning I was
what the other Edies I know
call
“stock still”
they call it that because your arms are a soup
and there’s too much celery base
in your legs and hands
and it's not the soups you know
that cradle, or rock you in the end
it’s warm air slipping out of the back building
which I know is halfway between my house and here
that loops up my skirt
and skirts my armpits
and I know it will bend me back to
a sleeping surface

She said to listen for voices we know
even when we’re alone
even when you write several mispelled words
and stow them under your skirt
which was all the wrong attire for the occasion
that brought you between here and your sleeping surface

creatures with thoughtless words
have been whispering up the grains of my neck
they’re congratluating me
for the game well played
they’re saying I’ve finally outclassed the masters
with my unspoken thoughts which really, in the end
revealed themselves to be
fists beating on thick wood tables.
A table set for
unfamiliar soup.

Him Inside

Let’s play that game. Do the twist. Lay in the morning and man-make the lake on the ground with small islands. Bask until the novelty of sensation wears off and then rub the face for a while. It’s always got that same potency. Thin walls have nothing active inside them, but she hears us and asks us to be quiet. 

It's Friday morning, and how do you hold a gun? A woman inside you wants to kill a curled up man inside her. Your breakneck heart slows when she touches him. It’s a joke. You think you get to laugh at things. She touches steal to his forehead and his eyebrows twitch but nothing else moves. Is that alright?

Ok now jerk and splay and actually contort because we’re playing that game! Pleat the hair so it doesn’t slide or at least so it won’t leave that thin residue on the scalp and back. Now leave home and slowly palm the flowers from the worst shrub in town, and consider the muscle of its drug. Consider him smoking again and what that would do for his constitution. Tell him it wouldn’t be good and encourage him to be good. You layer your words in grease. You get hungry, so you melt butter in a pan and mix it with cheese and milk. What would you dip in it? A sinuous protein of some kind, most likely. Grown up Mary Jelly Girl, fix your hair and right the inverted symbol you wear.

You wish for goddamn brunch! You wish for a mimosa and maybe a nice dress with spaghetti straps like you used to have at the playground and liked the sprinklers! You wish for any comfort which made the small talk runny and the company welcome. But now people gather in the field to play humiliating games where girls and boys run from water. Fluid. Put you back so that the seeds may be sucked into the tree by their helicopter backs. 

He wants to make his form inside you mean something. He lies that he’s inherent and resonant. And yes, there’s an “I” and a “he”. They are the same person looking at each other, laughing, knowing the opposite of what the other says to be true. In unison now, I am most interested in my mirror image, most interested in looking at myself through him and saying yes, let’s play that game again. 

laughing At The empty center

Lover is back and comes quickly to the bed. What is more important than the sex is the hellos we say in between and the sleep we have in between where neither of us doze well, but we say nothing because being wrapped in arms and being overly warm is probably better. We’ve been told that it's better than complaining or kicking him out to sleep alone. Several pretentious novels are laid by my corner-wall bed in the shoebox. We are mice in this hole with sharp front teeth. He bites my teeth cause we joke around. We’re little jokesters. Yes yes yes. Laugh laugh laugh I live to laugh to make other people laugh to quickly consume the center. Then when they ask why is the center empty? Why can we hold nothing or laugh anymore? The crumbs of the center are all over my face and discarded in my pockets. I don’t live for this or that anymore, not the concepts or acts but the inbetweens and devoured centers. I am low on the wheel of incarnation. I know cause I’m eating it from the inside out and sapping Jack’s energetic pulsations and he doesn’t really notice cause I’m doing it so well and making him laugh so much. 

twilight from doctor gossip

Grease which a skullcap covers is the feeling. Stalking the waves and servers of the old for reassurance of the shit and the gutter. And I can’t remember the right words and god I hate when I can’t remember words. I will never be like Barnes who Winterson and Eliot liked and downright admired. And jesus, I’m sick of feeling and talking about the undersigned, the sundry. So let’s play a game:

Do the twist. Fuck in the morning and man-make the lake on the bed with small islands. Bask until the third alarm and I stay to rub my face. Thin walls with nothing active inside them, but she hears us and asks us to quiet. We turn pink and things harden. Lean over french poet cause I can see your butt crack and its sapping you of all your authority. Your author bio is silly. Is that what you want people to think of you? Overserious and warm mid-forties french poet? What? Ok now jerk and splay and actually contort because we’re playing that game!  Grease the skullcap so it slides, so it leaves thin residue on the hair and back and bent over butt crack. Now slowly palm the unnamed flowers from the worst shrub on campus and consider the nature of drug. Consider him smoking weed again and what that would do for his constitution. Tell him it wouldn’t be good and encourage him to be good. You layer your words in grease. You get hungry so you melt butter in a pan and mix it with cheese and milk? What would you dip in it? A sinuous protein of some kind, most likely. You’re eating ham again and loving it. Grown up Mary Jelly Girl, have you considered the night? Have you considered the night by its division from day? From twilight? From dawn?

been a while, sorry edie

Here’s something I need my old lover to know: you are the goblin who gave my soul beauty. Husband—I don’t mean the word for its commitment but rather its manipulation—husband your water fed the descending pools at the Vale of Cashmere till at some point in the last ten years it went still, eutrophied, and was drained altogether. I am tired of your algae and I am tired of being mounted on a spike on the long meadow. 

Here’s something I need my new lover to know: you are so uncomplicated that I question everything. On Saturday while I was on acid and you weren’t I needed to mount the ball back into your septum before I damaged myself. I have fallen into a comfortable love-routine with you. Love-routine? Lay in bed and stencil magnets, lose at chess, watch you leave unceremoniously without prolonged kisses. Your maturity makes me feel toddling, it makes me feel like you are slipping right through me but then you are there. temporary Husband—I use the term lightly and kindly for you—you should probably find a corner for yourself on this square-mile earth where you can sit away from me, cause I will eat up my own soul which I was told to find beautiful and to love so much. 

phantasmagoria

Feeling toothy and playful, letting it sink in that I’ve reeled in a good one with a kind laugh and a tolerable mouth taste and a sweet, doleful look in his eyes which I’ve seen in every boy I’ve ever liked. He’s regretfully not so crazy, but he sort of envelops my mania and only talks sweetly to me. He only touches me once I’ve touched him first. He only confuses me that I could possibly be worthy of him. He’s disgusting too. My disgusted thoughts of him are disgusted thoughts of myself. I’m twisting my knees and they’re cracking. The cold is coming between two layers of my epidermis. Oh what did I think of today and forget? What bullshit can I think up now that I’m happy? The outside of my skin is hot but all scared and cold. Whatever revving that’s kicking up outside should stop or else they’ll have my full attention. Strange telephone alerts get in from the outside and make us seem hooked up—like we’re in that place where you can’t use words anymore and the fallout shelters have finally dropped. Shelter can be a wretched thing cause where else can you find that you over-love or sleepwalk or need to get high? And they’re all cracking me up, wretched girls and women. 

So what if you love? Take it and mount it on a spike because they’ll inevitably see you open your mouth and hate the sonorous wounds which exit it. Laugh and make your way to the kitchen, exit the house because she’s thinking about you right now while you’re there. Quick, run now because pots and pans are falling off hooks as we speak, and soon the shingles will be peeled back with pointed gusts of wind and what will you do then? The home is lovely but it has to go. The home might be nice but its learning about your over-love. 

meat

I guess this is the first time in a month or so that I’ve felt the meat grinder again. Adderall induced, there is a tightness in my chest that is rendering me a hop skip and a jump away from psychosis. I talked to someone today who told me that nowadays, when he gets in bed he begins to feel a poisonous lucidity—one that has beckoned him to start praying until he falls asleep, an activity which he hasn’t indulged in since childhood. I wish I had a framework for prayer, but my replacement behavior is my one capability in this moment—staring at the ceiling for so long that I cleave it with my gaze. I could only hope to be there when the ceiling collapses over me and relish the fact that I watched its every move until it met its demise. If I can’t do it with people then the ceiling is a comfortable substitute, a placebo in the compulsion to bear witness to the lives of everyone I love. I wish I could be there to observe the moment that the meat grinder subsides, where I hop the gap back onto the mainland and it is noticeable and real. It seems I can’t stare at the ceiling forever nor be present to see myself minding the gap.  

It's the Mud

I’ve likely woken up to the superbloom in the desert. Standing in the doorway, I let the light flit under my eyelids for a while. I am consolidated and can piece myself by opening and closing a gratuitous amount of pockets full of rocks and baubles. Run my hands over hand wrinkles. Reflect on the tarot I drew yesterday. Outcome? Unsettling new changes. Fingernail growth will be accelerated. Internal body temperature will drop 0.4 degrees. The old-man’s wheeze is permanent. Eyes still closed, do I really have anything to say? 

Exit the doorway and assume position in the white monobloc chair on the porch. Purple flowers have appeared in empty rivulets, but the surprise garners no visceral reaction. Without another soul to confirm my corporeality I don’t ascribe the quality of realness to anything. The desert at once covered in flowers could be a delusion, it could be that this whole thing isn’t real at all. Tongue grazes dry mouth, teeth, lips. The sun exacerbates the feeling of my age and the bewilderment of how I got so old and how I got here rather than there—how I became the kind of man who has whiskers and rubs his belly. The world was sticky, and now it’s hot. There is no cool to be found, and even when the breeze breaks off the rocks the air is warm. There is nothing to sip on, there hasn’t been for a while. My fingers are all I can bear to rest my eyes on. Rest now. Nap in the white monobloc chair which heaves under your weight, whose white legs wobble but never snap. 

Asleep, I pass my waking self a note—“let’s pass notes”. I laugh but don't write back. 

Lazily, I drift in and out of sleep until the heat of the day makes itself known, I stir with a sense of restlessness that can only be tamped down by planting myself in my seat. After a few moments with this sense of kinetic energy and sweating, I let myself get up to kick a can off the porch. The absurdity of the moment passing at its certain cadence strikes me as sublime, and I begin to laugh, I begin to heave. I begin to sob and altogether forget what began the sobbing. I wipe my eyes and return to the monobloc chair. 

 I can only impart what I know here, which lives penned into the cement porch adjoining the cement block house. What I know: I live within and without the white monobloc chair. I like to stand on the precipice of the porch and collect the stones within reach of the edge. I like to sit outside until the parts of my face feel hotness in such a manner that they’re moving in synchrony. I remember nothing before the house and the chair and the stones.

I’ve spent the early afternoon examining the stones, perched on the edge of this and everything else. A glass eyed mouse has crept over, hopped onto the porch, and fallen asleep. The superbloom trailed behind it, transmitting the feeling of the small purple flowers peppering the desert—the oil and water and air of it all. There’s these drones that play on and off all day, bleating and wailing like an unreal ghost. The mouse on the porch breathes in time with the drones. The skittering of paws on washed concrete seizes me. Today is strange in a material way. It’s giving me long-gone things back. The motion of back isn’t something I’m used to. I find myself more familiar with the side-to-side of moving through the house, the in-and-out of stepping onto the porch and going inside.. 

Hazy details are returned to me with convulsions: Jenny mixing brownies in the lime green room and the trundle bed behind the stairs and the bog and the river in spaces inside me. My galoshes and walking the street in sleet and self-awareness. Something infecting me now, and the way she’d feed me cookies at lunch time? The way he passed me a dollar on the white lines of the highway? The lead. The paint. The coats. The forgetfulness. The kicking and the screaming. The not knowing it but hearing it anyway and being sure. 

I stumble at the paralysis of the returning of things. The mouse stirs, I almost fall off the porch, I kick over a couple of the precious cairns fashioned from my stones. Re-entering the mix is a skill. I’ll die in this monotonous fashion, the sleeping mouse an unfortunate victim of my severance from time. 

I stomp into the kitchen with its marbled dull grey-green color with grecian style grape wallpaper trim. I need to steady myself. I need something to sip on. I fiddle with a clasp on the cupboard with shaking hands until I give up. Convulsions again. Flat telephone memories separate into layers. They rest on water. A gift from the drones or the superbloom or the mouse or the purple flower litter in the desert. 

The presence of ghosts kicks and sputters on the porch. Specters of familiarity remind me of nothing but their forgotten aspects, the tip-of-the-tongue task. I’ve never noticed all the fucking garbage around me before. The thankyouthankyouthankyou bags and the hair and the corrugated items of all kinds. I can’t call this lucid. I can’t call it anything at all. The wind is picking up, grabbing whorls of trash and purple flowers. The mouse has been reanimated and inserted back into time. It jumps off the porch to tend the garden of pollution and flora, biting into a purple flower floating in the halestorm of debris. Lapping up stem and petals, it drags the flower to the surface of the porch and lays down in the shade. I convulse. I begin to sob. I remember why. 

 

eyes closed

Working on a new story for class and feeling completely unequipped. Just spent an hour untangling it, I was high and just got into a flow state that felt like two minutes. Another consciousness that I'd like to experience more often. Night.

cafeteria

Sitting inside the bustle. My problem these days is that when I have to go to the bathroom I don’t. I can read and sit and jump into her bed in the morning but I can’t write or shit. The spanish professor’s shoes are squeaking and it's bothering Franny. Her fingerless gloves are all I can set my eyes on. I pass a note—”let’s pass notes”. She laughs but doesn't write back. Then I wait for her outside and kick a can around. A bean falls out of it. That which kills all pleasure is something I think after the fact. Beside a dry gutter the bird opened his beak. 

all the pretty horses

I’m on drugs. Am I? Yes, I snorted I stole I ransacked I rampaged I am a monster. As I typed monster the music spoke monster. Cranberry juice can’t cover up the throat taste of k. I haven’t been writing and I’ve changed to a not-writer she says to be THAT oxymoron. Everything is uncomfortable and I’m high and I’m smashing my toes into each other and they’re pleading to god for salvation but he’s not listening. He’s up in my head with the cooks and the orange yellow egg yolks and those lights which bleat and blare and forget to write. And now I’m remembering the crazy, that oh yeah crazy that I forget the instant I feel like a citizen who can do the dance. I prefer the chicken dance more than the ordinary jam dance. I prefer salisbury steak and short songs and the zoo. 4:51am and why why why am I awake. Beep boop zoom zap the space cadet is my little sister. She used to say funny things like “I hate water, especially wet wet water” and lives across the stairs. She likes all kinds of water now, but she’s moving away. How do I face the nose and lips and eyes and ears? Those same shoulders I could wrap my arms around? Could I steal a baby girl and leave her on my windowsill until someone snatches up her steaming babycakes?  

indecisive about title, might take down

So we’ve all fallen and the bag of tricks is behind us. And in lieu, we’ve stopped reading, stopped doing k, stopped pretending to be in love. We’ve learned how to police our thoughts to the right extent, and that’s called self-discipline. We’ve learned that the further we look into ourselves the more infinitely complicated things become. The we is the me but not exclusively. 

Something I’ve learned about myself: over my life: I’ve forgotten that I learned un-lying. From ages five to twelve or so, I lied all the time. Maybe it was a projection of my control over the world, an instinct I developed out of my fear of discerning parents, or maybe I just fucking liked it, but I would lie with abandon. I found a video of myself at age five or six where my sister and I were feeding large tarpon fish in Florida off a dock. My mom comes over to us and asks me what type of fish they are. I say that they’re smallmouth bass, and she prods that they are the smallmouth bass, like the ones we see in the freshwater creeks by our house? The question is posed to call my bluff. Without pause, I emphasize that they are smallmouth bass, insinuating that she is the one who’s silly for thinking that bass and smallmouth bass could possibly be the same. I lied voraciously to protect my reputation, to safeguard my six-year-old intellectualism.  Somewhere down the trail I learned thought-policing for my salvation. 

The tarpons have disappeared and I’m plunged into my latest absurdist nightmare. This one takes place in a dream-altered version of the neighborhood I grew up in. It is snowing in some parts and the sky seems to be undulating. Beside me are my parents and grandma, and we seem to have learned that people are turning into zombies. However, the zombies look identical to people, so there is no way to decipher between zombie and person. As a response to this news and in typical me-dream fashion, we all decide we’d like to go to the movies, and we start walking down prospect park west. At this point my grandma decides she’d like to stay with a different group of people and sits down with them in a circle on the street. We go without protest. After the movie (Say Anything), the three of us are separated and I find myself being chased by a zombie and my point of view moves outside my eyes and hovers about seven feet in the air. As I watch myself being chased, I don’t feel afraid, I feel nothing, but right before the dream ended, the zombie turned around and looked at my invisible specter. The fear of this moment, being seen when I thought myself invisible, caused such a horrible rush of fear, that I woke up. 

on the train

Haven’t written here in a minute, but I have random scraps of writing to cast into the void.

There is a disemboweled kind of empty around things today. One that bears the marks of once being filled. I’ve been watching a man scroll on his phone with his eyes closed and another crazy guy dressed all in white who I could barely make out until he turned around to yell at me and shove his hand in a woman’s face. After that he sauntered off into Penn station. Afterwards, he turned around and I noticed his Sunday whites smeared with the mud of his awful demeanor. The people getting on right now barely made the train but they’re calm about it. I’d be wheezing, thanking my lucky stars. The tufts in my knit hat look like truffula trees to pull and fashion around this ballooning emptiness. Right now I’d appreciate a little pill that gives me life, ounce by ounce. I can’t even tell if I’m moving or still. I’d like a pill that will tell me if I’m moving or still. If I’m still and tired like a wax figure with eyes gently squinted like the precursor to prayer. Who places the debris on the steps? Who walks the steps and tires them out? I’m making eye contact with the man sitting in front of me through our reflections in the window. We both glance and glance away sheepishly. I’d really like some candy and a soda. Alone. Alone. Don’t fall asleep sir, you’ll miss your stop.

Imagining my voluptuous garden where I remind everyone how lovably miserable things can be. This is where I gather up observed truths in my arms and run with them, a full sprint across some busy avenue of empty pasture until I run out of gas. I worry I can’t carry enough in my arms. I worry I’m sick. She goes to the garden or museum or wherever she always comes back to, and her imaginings of being watched are confirmed. All those things which where figments-so-real and knowledge-so-fearsome that they had to be boxed, squashed, plucked, and extinguished all of a sudden seemed observably true. You know those thoughts. You do. Those ones conceived by the firings of neurons just so. These sublime “ahas” might be evoked by a tree that looks a bit like your mother, the same fabric that upholstered your childhood couch, or the horrible sensation of eyes on your back.

I’ve gone cold but she’s next to me. I can stop writing and know that she’s here next to me.

meadowlands

I let the light flit under my sunglasses for a while. Consolidated, I can peace myself by opening and closing a gratuitous amount of pockets. Drew my tarot yesterday. Outcome? Unsettling new changes. Fingernail growth will be accelerated. Internal body temperature will drop 0.4 degrees. The wheeze is permanent. The double-edged sword of creative energy will cut. Sunglasses off, do I really have anything to say? Driving over the swamp now—the one without the box turtles and only the cattails cattails cattails. 

stinking funk

I am finally stuck in a strange funk again. I mean a falling asleep in a bed of roses which you wake up to find grown around you kind of funk. It’s enveloping me hotly and mournfully. I find the little items which once defined my life—doll head baubles, pins, broken sunglasses, single earrings, and baby teeth. They sound like trash listed like that, but each is a terrifyingly expendable symbol of my life’s content passed through objects. As I live inside a space decorated by these symbols, my skin stretches out to merge with it. I wake up with webbed fingers, as the space between then has reached out to its kin—the corporeal body. I’m taller, my cheekbones more prominent. It seems everyday I spend in this bed is one that my body experience what I can only presuppose as a sort of accelerated entropy. The molecules of my body are attempting to move farther and father away from each other. Soon, I’ll have to fold yards of skin into my pants every morning. I turn the lights on, and the world freezes. I saw this in a movie once I think. Frozen stands a car crash’s exact moment of impact before collision, a person in the instant of falling in love, a punch in the face, three peoples moments before death, an air conditioning unit suspended in the air, and me stretching towards my walls. The moment is one of perfect alignments. I’m panting, gathering myself up to watch frozen time. Stillness is what I’ve needed. Shock beckons a presence I haven’t felt in a long time. There’s no one out my window, but I get on my bike and witness the world still as I pass. I touch faces, I open doors, I eat, I drag my body behind me.

gum and sticks and paste

“the devils will drag me down to their place with their hooks when I die. And then I think: hooks?” -Brothers Karamazov

I don’t really need real things anymore. I just want to paint my mother with the watercolors she gave me three days ago and sit at the table with one million tchotchkes that don’t do anything. I want to read again and know what to do at night. Our old kitchen made me think that’s where the word kitschy came from cause it was a marbled dull grey-green color with grecian style grape wallpaper trim. It had cupboards with laborious locks on them and dust in the freezer. Frozen fucking dust. The couch’s ass prints gave you one perfect option for sitting and the sink was the one that cut the meat of my palm when I was six or seven or eight. The one where I bled and cried and cried and cried. Nobody loves people more than I do here. 

Today writing is a toil and its days like these where I feel that my brain will never cough up salient anecdotes. When have I ever thought of a story? I forget where I read that in India there are people who hang from hooks during festivals. They do it so much that their skin becomes a vessel for the hooks. Oriented around their placement, the surface of the body stretches and acquires perfect holes for hanging people, seraphim acrobats. The dragging is up. It's a skyward invention that disrupts earthliness and suspends the function of feet. The proteins of hell become denatured, and maybe the hooks are a stand in for that thing we call holy. The hooks cut my hand, punctured the bass’ mouth, and sewed bodies into the sky. What does a short circuit of this perfect world look like? 

listless

1. I usually live out of bags

1. bites

2. cough

2. ice is to east coast as banana is to slippery

1. like the right side, something has slipped in my brain which makes writing happen again

3. they say edie and her family and her family and her family

4. and what's that willie nelson song that dad wants played at his funeral?

5. I'm a rather messy and quick eater

1. I eat goat cheese try and flick the crumbs away but they just smear into my clothes

6. kant: what causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing

7. when somebody says something I disagree with but I don’t wanna get into I usually just say “please” as if that would sum up all my thoughts on the subject

8. packing up takes a long time cause beforehand we have to take the cat out on a rehearsal pre-drive so she’ll shit and piss herself in a controlled way

1. sometimes she still shits and pisses during the real thing 

9. now when I come home I act more like a child than I did before I left

10. the sky is a special color right now

1. I can’t capture it with my phone but I try anyway

11. 100% of times I guess that I’m moving in the wrong direction

1. this place should be my north star but my body feels like it’s flowing south

12. going upstate already makes me happier 

13. all I do now is stay up very late talking to my dad

1. he’s finally telling me his life story. 

14. nobody asks me about my horrendous smokers cough

1. I try not to fixate too much on how short my breath has been getting 

15. I’ve started texting with an ex again 

1. he was in my dream the night before he texted me for the first time in a year 

father love

Dad finally told me the truth that I knew somewhere inside. He told me that there are always stories to tell when there are people who need to know and be known and that he was a street kid in another life in Oregon. He wanted to tell me to stay out of the northwest—Eugene, Portland, they’re all the same—but he bit his tongue and let his fingers float over all his old bite marks. He told me I’m smart like him and between the lines we addressed something that’s never said but transiently true, that we are the same, me and him. Broken begets a little less broken, but it also means broken is afraid to break the delicate less broken. Come on now father, you gave me the transcendental south and told me to leave and steel myself for goneness. He taught me my name, he taught me my name. And yes, he also gave me a new one, I gave me a new one, but when you peel back the ovaries housing teeny tiny indeterminate ovaries you see everything is still there. It’s preserved; it’s pickled for the moment we become mortally salient and all the moments after when we realize its degrees of salience. He taught me my name so that I may be scared of old age and not death, become chaos-forward, and think maybe someday I could be the one, which is really the many.

“Funneled through him” is my resistance and my focal point, I chafe against the operative “Him” and become increasingly baffled by its superimposition onto my life. He asks, “can you tell me the universal truth?” and I say, “I’m not looking for that—I want to question what is true, I want to shake the basis of truth. But I’m afraid that won’t create something new.” He responds, “New isn’t an idea, it’s a framework, and it’s a reloving of the old”. I end it, “Well maybe new is the old recapitulated so fine that is grazes us with an intangible feeling that we call new”. We move on, and I remember that I love him and he I am the closest carbon copy of him in the world. He tells me about his duplex in Atlanta and his neighbor who made a million sacrifices to sit on his porch and write. He tells me the reason he and my mom are the only people left still loving each other is because of the million sacrifices they never talk about. “When the hard times come, never do something you can’t take back kid”.

notes app

the iguana will bite those who do not dream

thinking about losing it, high, late

Oh my sweet carolina / he taught me / jenny’s mixing brownies in the lime green room / the trundle bed behind the spiral staircase / a hop or two from the bog / rivers belong / in spaces inside me / hats and walking to the library in the sleet and and and/ self-awareness / killing me now / and the way she’d feed me cookies at lunch time? / the way he passed me a dollar on the basketball court / the curb / the lead / the paint / the coats / the amnesia / the not knowing it but hearing it anyway and being sure / the kicking and the screaming

rumbling story

It’s time to build her character. She likes sleeping alone best but always wishes for people to lie in bed with her when the heat is on. She thinks people stave off the cold so she holds them close when she really wishes there were no people at all. She makes love to all her contradictions, and they manifest in dyslexic fumblings of words and ideologies, changing and opposing each other with the randomness of an instant. She idealizes her city because she knows how to get lost there—how to force a day to slip away with interchangeable showrooms, spit wads, cigarettes, and that great blue whale at the natural history museum. She smiles at that memory because she cried under that whale. She’s too embarrassed to say what about but a man and his daughter watched her lay down and cry and he winked at her and told his daughter “this is the only place in New York where you can lay down”. He meant it to be profound but all our girl could think was how untrue it was. You can lay down anywhere you want to, you can defame your body anywhere you’d like. It's just about hearing that compulsion to lay like some intangible force and following it when it embraces you. She’s not a hedonist and you shouldn’t call her that. She knows true presence is the cultivation of that intangible force and she’s trying to figure out what that means. She’s trying to think up new thoughts even though all the thoughts seem to have been thought up already. 

I think she wants to make her dreams mean something and she lies to other people that they are inherent and resonant. I think she’s a long-time-liar-in-recovery. And yes, there’s an “I” and a “she”, and maybe they’re the same person looking each other in the eye and laughing because they know exactly what the other is going to say before they say it. In unison now—I am most interested in my mirror image, most interested in looking at myself through a new pair of glasses and laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

back to chaos again

In bed now after a day of OUT! It was a day of mania around the people who make me manic and solace around those who make me chill. Always this in and out, in to mania and to chill. In and out of what exactly? Chaos—the voluptuous garden from which I’ve built the last six months’ predominant thought spiral. I cannot ignore her presence anymore, she forces my hands to the randomness with which I submit to compulsion or control. But I’m sick of control and I’m sick. I’m sick of being the mother of situation. I wish for once I could be simple sick again, the kind that entailed matzo ball soup or waking up with a crusty right eye. Watching cartoons and eating chicken and rice cause I danced for too long in the rain or went in the pool less than an hour after eating. I wish people would believe me again when I claim illness due to wives’ tale. Omniscient death; Franny wouldn’t explain it to me but I know it to be true. I spend my time living outside the reality of moments shifting into new moments in order to really hold myself inside the knowledge of omniscient death everyday. I wish to hold myself in the knowledge of perpetual chaos. 

Sometimes I get these flashes of thought that embrace my mind with the phrase this moment is holy. Until now I thought that interjection was a part of me imploring me to be present, but now I think it is interchangeable with the true hopelessness of omniscient death. It is the true presence of hopelessness which gives no future to live for and only a nowness with which to catch each moment as it falls, for there is nothing else. All of these things—presence, chaos, hopelessness, entropy, and omniscient death are becoming the same to me. I’m realizing they all point me to the same thing. I just have to figure out what that is.

always screaming into the void

Two nights ago I got home from doing acid and also being drunk. I felt so good there, and I came home from having a lot of good thoughts but god I feel awful now and can’t help but remark on how being around people really staves off the awful of things. And then they leech off to wherever leeching is happening and you can’t find the exit. It’s okay I suppose, but I’d like to know where leeching is happening and also where the exit is. I’m helpless to every form of non-waiting room behavior. Writing is making me feel better, ahh, writing always makes me feel better. 

New line. Good. The hats off and I know exactly what room I’m in but its so dark that I could be anywhere. I could be typing this out of a dumpster in fuck all or wearing some kind of hat and I keep having to touch my hair to remind myself that no, I’m not wearing a fucking beret right now. When I go home at night and watch myself I’m a little here and there.

wake up

There are too many predominant memories from bed. Mom brought me Blueberries for Sal and she sang Pippen. Dad taught me my name and sang about Carolina. I never left my sheets due to the labor associated with exiting the top bunk. My eyes sag and bend towards psychotic activity. 

Last night I couldn’t talk and only cried. It was quick. I checked the clock before and after. I’m a sweet, unruly disciple of the clock. Clocks were enough. Enough was enough. Enough gave me space from my little sister who on this day is six years old where I am twenty. Twenty times I’ll visit her in her sleep tonight. Tonight I'll have three pounds of weed, honeybush, wild angry mustard, and carrots but you can eat queen anne’s lace which is a symbol for sanctuary. Sanctuary is a time when it’s okay to be alone. Alone which is factory settings, the time when I notice trees are people and there’s a big blue whale on top of us, and later maybe I’ll talk about that and people won’t get it unless I put it in a poem. 

Remembering is a far more psychotic act than forgetting. I’ll go dancing tomorrow and while I kick out loud I’ll waltz in my head. I’m so tired but luckily I know a good remedy for that.

before today

I’m writing a letter to him cause for some reason I feel like I’m going to cry right now. Anything to cry and also not cry— check my texts, lean as close as I can to the radiator, and write and write and write because that is what makes my world coherent. I wonder what did this to me, this ailment of writing to sanctify and comprehend my thoughts, this cause and effect. I don’t know how often I experience presence, but I think its a lot less than most people. In the few and far between conversations that truly engage me, I experience it. In the act of writing, the ecstasy of presence washes over me, and although I do not labor to improve my ability to maintain presence, I think I still seek it out. My most nourishing activities are present ones. Sometimes, I think the reason that I can’t make people laugh or uphold conversation is due to the fact that I have never lived in a moment as it occurred. They coalesce and pass me by and I spend each moment catching up on the old ones, and when that gets dull, predicting future ones.

dinner and dinner and dinner

Haven’t been feeling like writing lately. Feeling mostly not depressed, or better than that, feeling genuinely good, inhibits me. I feel like going back on promises and rubbing my tummy. I leave the lint in my belly button so it can accumulate and become skin again. My new metal belt is chafing against my hips, I’m vaping again, but beauty is pain and just can’t quit or whatever. I want to get caught so maybe the family will talk and I can be honest about everything.  

dirty river cleanup

Consider my floating vengeance

His mind is manning a tugboat on the Baltimore Bay,

trapping crabs with steam, wet bread, and buoys.

Where are those repeated pearls when it's time to produce?

Hands behind back, neither weighted with prize.

He’s one mouth scream away from leaving Mary,

who gave him two baby girls and a hatchback.

Mary, who dragged a stained white couch 

and wooden adornments behind her till she got married.

Fate was decided for her when she finally understood

that she was meant to be good, stop smoking, 

and take leave to her brain palace compositions.

Her mind is walking on the Brooklyn side of the Hudson,

eating a sandwich with morsels of sharp cheese. 

She’s asking passing celebrities to give proof of life

for her third baby girl, who she forgot was dropped 

in a spill of objective intestine in the bathroom.

She did the grout work herself. 

His mind is still afloat on the Chesapeake,

and maybe they’re both coastal,

but he’s fishing and throwing spices over his shoulder.

He’s teaching his baby girls how to properly eat a crustacean. 

(you wedge a knife between small joint plates)

And she is wandering around Brooklyn with her internal starfinder

wishing she had a sixth sense for where all her baby girls went.

bill

It’s new to me, this unfeeling. This squeeze and fog and insurmountable molehill. Every Monday I walk ten minutes to work with a coffee and a cigarette. The trees impose on everything in orange and yellow—they cling to the tips of my galoshes and the rain off their leaves makes my hair curl every which way. My boss is an unintentional ascetic. He has no family, save one faraway brother for whom he doesn’t seem to carry much affection. He can’t drive, and rides his bike to the studio in the same variety of plaid shirt and cowboy jeans. As far as I can tell, he has no friends, no complexities, and no intimate feelings. I like to imagine my own rich inner life for him, with all that voluptuous pain, but it's only an intimation of mine. I truly believe his cameras, his passion for lithography, and his cat are the only foundation on which he needs to live. Bill will go on balding, taking lunch on the hour, and seeking the straightest path towards death. I wonder if I could live like Bill sometimes. If I could become used to living on such few fulfillments that they acquire new meaning. I question whether having a taste for gratification as a product of the whims of others has spoiled me forever. I see myself through a million peacock feathers, tilting and glinting in the light. Bill has destroyed his expectation that somebody out there is thinking of him, he operates without the weight of hope. The truth is, that hope is a horrible, twisted bird. The moment you allow yourself to be hopeless is the moment you gain the ecstatic relief of presence. Bill is a hopeless man, and sometimes when I look at him I want to cry for no reason. He has thinned the film between himself and death, and he knows it. When I look at Bill, it is not hard to imagine his funeral, or more likely, his humble cremation and passing of ashes to a distant relative. He expects nothing more, and he is free.

amniotic

Amniotic fluid. Put me back in so that I may float and so that the seeds may be sucked back up into the tree by their helicopter backs. I spend most of my time being angry at people I love. I’ve forced myself into a state of hibernation, I can’t remember the last time I was truly awake. Apparently I’m spending and transacting but, I don’t know if I’ve ever given or gotten. When I was sixteen I dislocated my elbow, and the EMTs couldn’t figure out how to fit my broken body out of the door. My Dad carried me in his arms to the ambulance and I blacked out there, arced over him like I’d fallen from the sky. During the surgery they gave me an experimental ketamine and I had a dream that I was on a stretcher being wheeled through the birth canal. There were baby heads rolling around my forward moving carcass. Amniotic fluid. The lubricant of oblivion which my body gropes toward, my body either held or groping. 

I’m high now so maybe I’ll write better. I always think I write better when I’m high. It’s always a roll of the dice what weed will make me feel. Right now it’s making me think too much about people and making me regret it. There is a tiny lady knocking at the right side of my brain and making me feel sorry. She’s making me feel hurt. And she’s also making me hear crickets and certain brief chants. When I talked on the phone to my Dad today, he said, “you know, if you smoke pot all the time, you’ll always be depressed.” He mechanized his eyes to express a worry for me that puts us into true conversation for a minute; just with eyes, just with an understanding of something deep and generational and distinct to us in that moment.

trying to wake up this time

I wish to understand the flow of the river and also an algebra textbook. Is there any species other than the human that can live and persist amidst such confusion? I think I’ll spin around in a circle until I reach the edge of vomit and look up at the sky. I’d like to feel the earth spinning in a way that is bodily, not rational, not absolute. The only thing I know is that I cannot lie to myself about myself. In that sense I am the center of my universe, my body is the axis on which I expand into space. I’ve wished for brilliant dreams and I’ve received them. I’ve received them upon the infinitude of my body. 

I’m vaguely interested in dying for art, but I haven’t found a mode to exhibit my commitment to this proclamation. Eventually, a family of artists must come to a generation of apex and death. Not martyrdom, or an overinvestment in self pity, but a set of children increasingly radicalized toward artistic revolution. It’s a clean sweep, a belief in the great safety net of dying in the gerund. At various points I’ve attempted to hit the ground running, and slowing to a crawl this catalog is an attempt to stimulate my life. The writing, while I hope captivating, does not exist for the purpose of the reader. Any incidental aesthetic beauty is the bone I throw to myself. The memories on which I plan to expound are needed breaks from grinding through meditations and hopefuls for the invigoration of more thought. 

I’m thinking about cruising through the city. Jumping the turnstile to Brighton Beach in the dead of winter with Sadie and feigning toward the aquarium, wordlessly agreeing not to go, not to spend the money. Instead we meet a man outside a vast housing project on the beach with a bootleg version of a videogame Sadie wants to play and stroll down the beach until we hit the amusement park. I’ve been taking photos of her and she hasn’t been saying much. We walk down every boardwalk jutting into the ocean and I ask each fisherman if he’s caught anything. I ask for fun, and cause Sadie likes it when I approach them. I had to look it up, cause the fisherman always say they haven’t caught anything, but apparently there’s mackerel, cod, and bass to be had at the mouth of the Hudson. They never catch anything. They’re just meditating I think, just making the ocean a metaphor. I hum “Only Living Boy in New York” (too on the nose) while we meander through the carnival and take the hairpin turn under the subway and watch the Russian grocers pull down the portcullises and chat with the gangsters. We’re sipping ice water from Dunkin’ Donuts and making for home after doing nothing in particular. I can’t even remember what we did after we got off the train. I don’t remember where we went. On this day we completed a mediation, moving from Chinatown to Fort Greene to the beach to amnesia. 

sundays incoming

I know the ritual of my father better than my own. I know him for each of its idiosyncrasies which have decided my perception of him more than any other factor. I know him for his insomnia, his two cups of coffee before work, his junk drawer of hidden cigarettes and keys to nowhere. Our house is an institution of the mother—filled with my mother and her family’s eons of junk and paintings. Junk and paintings. He holds court in the insides of things, on shelves, in drawers, within the negative space between floors and ceilings. But who needs awareness of negative spaces? Who needs a world with a woman who paints four-foot by four-foot portraits of her favorite artists and bakes a dry zucchini bread every three Sundays? Who needs a world that wants to repeat the same word over and over again? 

there are people who will know you

in a way your mother never will. 

I’m pretty sure this rumbling in my gut is signaling an earthquake. This quake will jostle the whole west coast quite a bit and maybe rip through downtown cranberry bog or main drag. The first thing I’d like to happen to me is some uncouth injury which pushes me into the first true lucidity of my life. All this writing is a framed still of “the fog”. “The fog” which expels from it the propaganda of reality and forces the mind into a state of surface level lethargy. You wish for goddamn brunch! You wish for a mimosa and maybe a nice dress with spaghetti straps like you used to have at the playground when you were five and liked the sprinklers! You wish for any comfort which made small talk free flowing and company welcome, but now there’s no love in the heart of the city. There’s only green tea and notebook and sleep and sleep.