A few things to remember: A bedroom painted dark is a safe haven for hangovers. Anyone with a business card is Japanese old a dick or all three. Charles Manson is just one of the many successful products exported by the US government. As far as I know from my limited amount of reading, life does begin at 65. Whores are the reason the One’s Walked Away from Omelas. Dirt is only dirty if you find it inside. And Rodeo Drive is pronounced rodeo instead of rodeo not because it's Spanish but because everything in Beverly Hills has to maintain a certain level of inauthenticity.
I am quite convinced I will find myself alone, even if not. My desk—a dining table with my work sitting on top of it—is no longer my desk. He sat down but I leave that seat empty so my ideas have somewhere to sit in the morning. in front of me so I can look them over, change and alter. Close my right eye then left. and now I feel a presence like afternoon sun through a shut car window. Staring He gets up. not twice, more. Must have forgotten something in the silence I have created. Every sound an interruption, the scratch of cup on table is both an argument and a counter. It is easier to continue momentum than move against it. I forget that other people forget that you have to close one eye in order to see more clearly from the other and both eyes open is more similar to both eyes closed, your mind is just making it up anyway. So what is right when left is also And history was only made by the same types today that only use half of half their brain And the status quo is the status quo not because it is hard solid Truth, but because jello is a sweet soft easy swallow for the old and the young. Yes even if I am not convinced, I will find myself quite alone.
Permanence 2019—
It’s hidden well
underneath my eyes it turns black and darkens me.
I imagine it spreads like black ink accidentally dripping into
a glass of water.
It’s soft at first, stays organized and strings itself through the water
like wind carries leaves.
It’s almost beautiful,
as it continues to drip into a pour and floods the once clear, clean water with
a thick permanence.
It’s hidden but heavy,
if I step into a pool I would sink like lead to the bottom.
Opening my mouth to scream but
water rushes in and fills my lungs and my shriek
spumes to the surface
popping and breaking into my voice
as it finds air.
If my pen didn’t find paper no one would know.
They would only see the bubbles rise from a muck of swampy coarse water,
Uneducated on the pure spring from where it originated.
As I introduce me I can’t help feeling anything but
Contaminated
Cancerous
Incapable of sucking the ink out of my own stringy mind,
Ridding myself of the heavy lead,
like bullet-scarred flesh.
Broken Glass 2022—
the sound of broken glass
feels like a release when it hits my ears,
as if the glass had simply grown tired of holding itself together
against all that hard shit.
exhaustively it gives way
falls
shatters
into a million, distinct, yet unidentifiable pieces,
glimmering in their new, inferior form
shards of what they were.
the ringing of the defacing stops a room,
and for a moment everyone lives in that space
right there,
where something just happened,
and they share that.
the hanging silence.
then someone wipes away the mess, disposes of the evidence.
and a few days later, or a week even—
the light will catch something on the floor and bounce it back like
the sparkle of a memory, misplaced
still living in a moment of destruction.
There I was
double parked in the rain,
one wheel on the curb,
with my hazards on,
blinking.
I decided to leave it,
good enough. Go for a walk,
try not to look back at it.
And when people passed me,
pointing and exclaiming,
I would pretend it wasn’t mine
and point and exclaim in
the direction they came from
—but more foul like,
‘look at this asshat!’
and they’d turn around and see nothing,
because they didn’t double park,
one wheel on the curb
with their hazards on.
I walked for twenty,
playing with the rainbow oil
in the puddles.
I thought I was just going
around the block but when
I got to my block it turned out
I was just going around and
that wasn’t my block.
No car, no curb, no hazards.
No people pointing, no exclaiming.
Just me looking around with
one foot in an oily puddle and
keys in my pocket that belonged to me
and nothing else.
And the rain just kept coming down,
so I kept going around
looking for hazards.
In all her 27 years she had never remembered a time that she remembered her dreams. Now each time she closes a lid longer than a blink, she is thrust into a scene that continues to play with her eyes wide open. And she’s not sleeping, not one of these nights does she lay in the darkness and get the same peace and nothingness that they call rest. At first she thought ‘it’s cause I’m off the weed.’ That happens sometimes—vivid dreaming like your mind is celebrating. like your imagination was yawning and its lungs are finally full. But it’s been months now and she’s beginning to think ‘someone is fucking with me.’ Let’s see how she does with no sleep, no rest, no satisfied cat-like glorious stretch in the morning. Let her be delirious and try to take words and make sentences that reek of anything but circular definitions. Let’s alter her day with a feeling of pain, substitute any pleasure with a longing for things that haven’t occurred anywhere but in her head. Let her toss then turn, pace and stand still, with a pen in her hand but no paper to be filled. Someone is fucking with me. Someone who doesn’t like beds or pillows or blankets or the bliss of an unneeded (yet wanted) cup of coffee. Someone wants me to remember awake, the nonsense I sleep to forget.
My cucumber plant has mildew you left me for two days, he says now look at me diseased and disgusting my green leaves gone dusty even the birds don’t touch me even the bugs, the scummy beetles turn their nose, as I grow feeble how dare you, he says so I brush his leaves spray them with medicine sing to him in apology in hope he will be well again your mildew is not decay your leaves will again be green life isn’t so fragile however at present it may seem your mildew is not decay your leaves will again be green the birds and the bugs will return & into the sun you will lean
I’m lonely, not for the first time but for the first time I am letting myself admit it. I am alone, not for the first time but for the first time I did it on purpose. and maybe the times before it was on purpose too. I cannot decide if I am strong because I have hardened over the many years, or if the strength is in realizing that I never was, but always able to be. I am strong in the same way that I can recite the deafening words of Sartre and the estranged ideals of Nietz. I am strong in the same way that I can strum chords on a guitar. I am strong in the same way that my garden is pruned. I am strong in the same way the wind in a storm is strong and I am also strong like the branches in a storm that break like they aren’t strong at all. I am strong like rye whiskey, like mint leaves on my temples the next morning. I am strong like a callus and like the skin beneath. I am strong in the mirror, I am strong in the dark. I am strong in my loneliness because I am strong alone. I am strong because I am well learned I am strong because I am well practiced I am strong because I am also weak and that’s all fine with me.
Sometimes I worry that something from inside my head has escaped out my mouth without me knowing it. Like talking in your sleep, but awake. When my mind wanders, nowhere really but someplace else, and I am then returned by an expression I can’t place and I think, my god what did I say to cause that expression? What crazy shit seeped from my thoughts like: A radical modification is what drowning would be. An ending in which my existence would stop, my actions would cease and this nasty condemnation of freedom would no longer result in decisions that project me towards a drowning. A circle sliced once becomes a line with a sure beginning and a lasting end Nothingingness sitting on either side. So I say nothing and eventually the expression morphs into un visage I recognize and the conversation I wasn’t present for continues, like a movie with no sound. How beautiful some people are with no sound. And my piano music takes over the scene and my eyes feel as though they are wide open when they are undoubtedly closed. And then I’m gone again. But the only thing imaginably worse than drowning is a straight line, lacking any upward trends, no breaks between beginning and end, no alterations, no change. Therefore in my chilly depths beneath the surface, I survey my options. And what if I talk in my sleep, too? And all these private conversations between me and I were unintentionally revealed? My only hope is they were fragmented to the point they can’t be made sense of, or perhaps in a different language. Like Mandarin, or Greek. Then it could be written off as miscellaneous, mumbo jumbo. There is only one element that determines the present and that is the future. Only the future can turn back on itself and designate this exact instant as a rupture from the past. An end that in turn becomes a beginning and modifies the future. Changing my intentions. Altering my existence. Shifting the focus onto another possible line. I have to live in order to prove my freewill, if only to choose to be something else. Drowning, no matter the beauty of the silence, would be just that: an end to a melody. Yes, that is my greatest fear, that out there they know what is in here. Sometime someplace something somewhere leaks out and takes shape from thin air.
I think it’s someone’s birthday— in fact I would almost swear to it if there weren’t so many holes in the bet I think it’s someone’s birthday— so I’ll celebrate for them with cake and gifts and well wishes I think it’s someone’s birthday— their day of no choice which bred endless decisions I think it’s someone’s birthday— but maybe I am wrong it could be that I am only looking hoping wanting for something to celebrate.