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.