Bouquets under the train bridge must have been dyed these holiday colors. The flowers are bright like rays on my day. The flowers are real and gaudy in their wrappings. I wander like a pilgrim, the murderers. I make my settlement on someone else’s lot. My bed is my lot transposed on another’s. I lay my cream mattress down. This sidewalk square is mine.I sing to the rusty bridge with a train bumping over it: "Wish there could be wild overgrowth on Williamsburg, mutant money trees, and fauna with cash petals cupping pearls. Flower lockets. I wish money could rain across the borough for all in debt to collect. Selfish sadists love to run a country, stockpile its resources and get money for their friends, what the big boys are doing. I spray my tag on a domed bank, white in the sun. Crime is an appropriate response to bad government. Government is a diffuse entity. Grime men in power. Crime them, the grime aristocrats. Rapists and exploiters in power. Paint big eyes all over their palaces and banks, I am watching you, too, big brother. Big brother, big brother, I am watching you." I raise my arms to the pigeons. "I’ll write my tag big in a green scrawl, Fallen Princessa. You'll see. I want to blast confetti off a balcony, and get a group together to dance-storm the capital, the capital, the capital, you'll see. I will."10 o' clock, uniformed guy is walking with a crew cut. "Hey you," I cup my hands to my face and shout. He ducks his head and scurries over Broadway. "You, you, fuck, look at me. Why don't you look at me?" I slam my fists on the ground. "Oh well," I say to the pigeon at my toes, who is grey and white with a mustard streak. I say, "flowers could be real beneath the holiday petal dye."
My earbuds play a happy mix as I polish the marble. Looking after monument ruins, I polish Lincoln’s nose. The edges of an ivory obelisk are a faraway blur. What do you stand for?Mottled reds, whites, and blues on Don's chest used to be tattoos of an eagle and a flag. They are bruises beneath the salt and pepper hair on my veteran's chest now. Once upon a time, we were happy to sit in a jacuzzi with martinis up in the Poconos, even the jacuzzi was martini-shaped. We sat high up looking down through the coned glass at the wooden lodge floor below. Flowers burst outside for the fourth. The hot tub boils us to bone broth. I am lucky to have my position, to be able to move through the grey spools, sloshing my cleaning bucket. I leave a trail of tears. I am a trail of tears.
I see you through a window with old youth group friends. I used to go to youth group with you. You would talk to my friends, while I watched. I sit on a bench near the high school football stadium. Someone gave a portion of their life to make this bench. We met at youth group. You DMed me songs. I lied and said I loved Nicki Minaj and Beyonce like you did. We exchanged photos with the puppy dog filter. In high school class, I imagine what I would do if a shooter came in and started spraying bullets. Would I risk everything to kiss you one last time? Would I run to you, and kiss you while everyone screams and huddles under their desks? They would find us nestled like the Pompeii lovers on bloody tiles. It would be an iconic image on Time magazine. You burned my temple down like you said you would. I penned your name in my journal repeatedly, in black ink. I drew a heart over and over your name to obliterate it. I threw my YA posters away. You had hair like a Nike swoop. The hairs came from the back to crest at the front. You were always running your hands through your hair and looking at it on your phone camera. I dreaded seeing you at school with your church clique, and seeing you now is dreadful.
To: shattered beer bottle, trampled beer can, and crushed soda cup with plastic petals extending off the bottom, creating a flower shape.I am describing to you my "hometown," the place I lived for five years. It's called State College. It is the residence of Penn State. It is located in Happy Valley.Greasy pizza slice drips oil into a drain and the runoff travels out to the mountains. Valedictorians come in from mountain towns to study and drink. Amish horse-drawn carriages trot alongside pickup trucks on highways bordered by car dealerships, silos, old houses, and strip malls. Small towns in Central Pennsylvania possess a trademark architectural style--red brick, yellow-beige block, or chipped wood siding. Functional early to mid-twentieth-century farmhouses with new updates in some places. Sleek Penn State University, with charming red brick and functional steel, interfering with the quaintness.Clouds muffle stadium cheers. The sky is different every day. Shifty shapes change.Donald Trump visited recently, and the town turned red with blue-and-white accents. Babies are bornin jubilation. Babies are reared for Greek life and game day.A bus goes past me and Huggies sit in a window, waiting for a baby. Across the street, a couple fights. The girl is in cut-off jeans with pockets hanging out. There was a game today—flatscreens on the porches and lawns, with students out, drinking, and shouting in the aftermath.
Hail broke my father's windshield. He repaired it with duct tape. Black tape kept fractal glass in order and covered the absence created by the hail's wound. Hail didn't know or care, how its chance destruction of the windshield would affect my father's daily drive to work an hour away, and back. Black tape bandaged the glass hole and interferred with my father's clear vision of the road ahead. Snow too obscured I-94. Pile-up, the radio announced, so my father took a U-turn, and climbed up the nearest exit. He drove past a Panera, then a series of chains.I looked around with my hat on and stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which vibrated into lavender, like tips of stalks on endless fields, I imagined. Really, the fields were all beige with yellow corn cob punctuations, maybe some pumpkins in the fall fronted the fields, siding the lanes that cut the fields, separating families of bugs.The window wells outside our basement filled with snow. Iron lattices, like child locks on car doors, prevented us from sudden deaths.I was head to toe in snow gear. In the cul-de-sac's center, an iceberg shimmered like an object of desire. I shook my head and crystals fell past my eyes. Snow melted on the tile floor. I stomped my boots out in the garage, before entering the house.Owls hit our glass windows, killing themselves. The animals lay still on the grass, blending into the snow.Caterpillars covered the driveway, in the absence of snow now. I got a caterpillar on my boot. The sole is covered in guts. We filled the wheelbarrow with caterpillars, though, what now?The projector was tilted. A virtual fire glowed in a projected parallelogram shape on the flooding basement’s wall. Water spilled down into the basement through boxes dug out in the lawn. We bailed the basement out with buckets and tore up the carpet. The concrete floor was covered in black mold.Scrub mold off the floor and the grout lines between manmade stones on the fireplace. Dial the flame on, and stare at the flicker.Three trees were equally spaced on the green lawn. A man circled the cul-de-sac and stepped out of his car to pick cherries off our trees, then eyed us children and got back in his car. At the top of a hill, with its fraternal twin next door, our house spied the cul-de-sac for predators.I stared at the ceiling, high on migraine-barbiturates, and the ceiling turned grainy. I closed my eyes and saw the cornfields swaying. I saw a castle at the end of the prairie, and walked a lane to the doorway, where my parents stood, at the opening. I heard the wind chime. I opened my eyes: caterpillars drifted across the sky-ceiling, and mutated into each other.
creative nonfiction
Buildings in the downtown area are pale brick or vinyl siding—white or blue, flaking off. Chipped murals with smiling faces of community members fall off the walls, too. On the main street mural, a young girl smiles mid-pirouette. A chip revealing the original grey color of the building is where her tooth was. She was the muralist's daughter. I got to know him. He was haunted by her early passing. He’d call me late and ask if everything was okay. He has a tattoo of a bird on the area between the pointer finger and thumb. I spent many nights in the basement with dust all over the floor, hanging out with the muralist. Ash fell off our mouths. His wails echoed around the unfinished studio cave, which was filled with his daughter's image. She was painted all over town, in many roles: ballerina, hawk, and graduating student.
I longed for you obsessively. I wrote poetry and posted it online to perform my obsession. I could not cope with a life I perceived to be dead-end. You suggested a handsome escape. I made all your attributes charming and looked for a star-crossed narrative. I attached every feeling to a trope and half-saw that I was doing so. Eventually, I lost sight of where you and the trope differed. I would erase most recollections of my time with you. I edit extractions from the old ramblings and cut them together. I thought it might be interesting to be met in times of lust and marital dysfunction. With a straight family like everyone wants, I am the real one you want to see. I dreamed you would remove me from Iowa. And I wandered the streets while typing rants and messages after you flew home to Saudi Arabia. I lay in a field drunk and crying at 4 AM, pulling out the grass. I wandered the town; sat on curbs. Second time I saw you, you said, when you touched me last night, I died. Now I am the dead one. I stay in bed making spam posts of my break-up thoughts, losing a follower every two minutes, checking the follower count like a spasm. Smoking in the basement of a sports bar, I tell my friend I need to be with you, feel more alone. Men play their darts, play their pool. Cups of gold and brown fluid are consumed. In NYC Chinatown bar, I ran into someone who knew you back in Iowa and he said: oh yeah, we hooked up. Caustic. Salt. Round hairy shape in fantasy, old doll on the couch, Oldboy on the TV. Green chintz duvet and green eyes mean nothing, though I wrote letters with lines like: I had the most wonderful night with you at the Iowa State duck pond. And, and every time I vape now, I'll think of you. Fortunately, I do not. A realization: you are different from how I made you. I returned to you repeatedly over time. Yet, when the charming mask fell off, I did not like you. You were nasty, mean, controlling one night, accusing me of stealing. Now, you sit cross-legged on the floor while looking in my eyes and I know this is the last time I will greet you. In the bathroom of the sports bar, I made a post on my story, a selfie with the caption: love is an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap (single tear crying emoji) and love is the feeling of bridging it. Did I love you or love that you could take me away?
Addicts on Broadway Junction have eyes like knives through glazed donuts. I saw something piercing his eyes, too, black pain stabbing through the irises. It was a nondescript jewelry chain place close to the Broadway Junction stop, where I met Jeff working. I was browsing for earrings to wear to a friend’s wedding. Jeff helped me try on earrings and select a good pair. He pierced my ears and hung the dangles on my lobes. Depression made me feel like I was looking through a donut at more donuts far away. I saw Jeff initially as a nice man with a customer service voice and red slick outfit like a Chaim Soutine bellhop posing—mannered, dignified, squished, and cute through the holes. The world was smaller before he strolled on the scene, took the donuts off my eyes and ate them. My lobes are so weary of jewelry now and drooping. It's the future. I’m old upstate and talking to my dog. I tell her I like eyes that I can connect to. Laying on my favorite couch, with the dog lapping at his bowl, I circle my tongue around my dry mouth. Holding hands, eye-contact in the store with those fucking donut eyes, “I feel that” was the link between two chains, me, and him. I send a message out, don’t know where he is now, I say, meet me where the two yellow arches make an M. Jeff brings me new earrings that are bigger than the last ones. I loop my arms around his shoulders and pull him to me. I loop his remaining hairs around my fingers tightly. I like the open smile on his face, still same under high yellow glowing arches. We meet again next week at a bakery. Families and loners are sitting on picnic tables in the black night. I buy a donut. I hold it up to my eye. I close the other eye. One week later, we meet again. I pluck a strand from his head, and loop it around my finger. I take another strand and loop it around my finger, and pluck four more strands from his head, making rings and earrings for us both. Jeff, you are the ear holes in my head and the earrings that fit them. You are a ring I want to link with. Will we break up or stay together like two rings on a highway billboard next to a slogan about promise and forever? I always wondered if we might make it, after that first eye contact in the store. I don’t remember the name of the store brand, but I remember the store brand jingle. My ears hurt remembering the earworm and the earring. I want to show you what I’ve wanted all along. It’s not the gold jewelry. I pull out a needle and make a hole in each of his ears. I string the hair earrings through his lobes. I place the hair ring around his finger.
She felt something; now it’s gone. She is opioid happy, made a picture, wrote a song, she is opioid happy, all her children went away, she is skating in blisses, and I do not think it’s wrong to paint pictures of missed kisses like Miss Catherine all the time. I know it may be right to remove her from the circumstances, but she does not think it’s wrong to spiral out laughing, all alone, writing a song, painting a picture. All her children left, and she pretends she doesn’t miss them, but she knows she does. She says while she’s laughing that her daughter brought a stray back home from Meatpacking. Her stray was fucked up, it would bark all night and pee itself, but the dog ran away too. Miss Catherine was out for days on snowflakes, and it is very upsetting, to see all the creatures outside her house, but there is nothing she can do. Once, her mama did tell her that the children might outlast her, and she did not believe her mother thinking her daughters might fall off one by one, on similar benders. Her mama doesn’t like her in her blisses. Her mama doesn’t think that its right for Miss Catherine to abandon the girls, to seal herself off, in the bathroom, or leave for days, but there’s nothing she can do for her dear girl Catherine baffling, yeah Miss Catherine is a baffling one, Miss Catherine’s surely laughing, by herself all alone now, 4 AM and Miss Catherine’s got her napkin, where she writes her fucking tunes, and they are sure not read by anyone, a real Bob Dylan. I ran into Miss Catherine at the Home Depot, and she looked better and brighter now in her orange vest, all smiley with that vacant look removed. She swiped my items across the bar code scanner, and we went our separate ways.
I routinely pass a fake hopeful image of a child with a smiling face on the side of a school in the projects, holding hands with other smiling perfect children. A more hopeful image or image sequence is a child holding their mother’s hand on the way to school or the movie enjoyed on the flight above. Hope is the gesture and light beneath the image.
I start my day with a reel sequence and a Megan Thee Stallion Tiny Desk Concert. I watch a reel with a strip club called Xscape, which advertises itself with chicken wings. The wings drip red oil off sticky fingers clutching leg bones. I can’t leave the bed, though I will try, I am done with Dumbo. I will lay, until you open up my heart latch and remove the organ, clutching it like that chicken wing. I sip my sugary coffee with the to-do reminders like the background music. Some white hipsters clap along to Megan. I sip my black coffee with sugar and plan to clean, housewife behavior. He said: you’re lazy. I said: today, while we were walking, I hated you. But hate is the opposite of love, so I also love you. I was addicted to destruction in the past, walking between aliveness and Xscape latch. I said he villainizes me as a fuck-up, only seeing my failures. He agrees, wanting me to perform better as a robo-cleaner. x x letter to x x you did hurt me so what I forget you x x heart beats, heart of a chicken with its leg cut off. Drenched in sauce, a wing glistens. I scrub away. TV song is bright and alluring. She is doing it. I finish cleaning and typing, so we are not late for the function. I sure know how to be sad and abstract like a Rothko. Happiness is available and attainable. The light comes from far away, touching what I touch, bright dancer on the TV.
Dark stab with mop hair. I don't mop the floor. White specks on a black comforter are my head's snowfall. I don't brush teeth. No tear. Tear open eye and gash the gash. I laugh at the fridge, bed, microwave, and shower, apathetic devices. Hairs on the shower drain and dandruff on the bed under fluorescent lights. Frog on creek shore next to water lapping, restricted by the shore edge.
Pair the vest with the mini skirt. Stare at the sun from a faraway perspective. Burn cigarette holes. Dogs trot past. Walk to the park. Runners circle round a dance circle. I enter the circle to be one of the dancers, polka dot on a halo. Shake like a free bird for Bacchus and all the shit saints. Shit saints didn’t get a raise. Shit saints are burnt out and blacked out of blasted portraits. Shit saints were never depicted.Sienna left the old party and did not return. I went to bed thinking it was alright. In the end, I am drinking the sloshed music without her. Sienna overlay on a dancer winks hi, and I burst like a blueberry under tongue pressure. Sienna is brown beneath the illuminations. Sienna is the brown illumination. Sienna is the face on an anonymous face. Sienna is November Fourth of July fireworks, today’s underpainting, and a saint in a shrine dedicated to grunge. Sienna would have interpretive-twerked while tweaking. I twerk now in the slosh. This is life. Sienna was my best friend. She would like it here. Sienna’d lick this shit up. Heaven. Heaven in a circle. I scrape the edge of the dance circle. I scrape the edge of the infinite line.I stare at a Byzantine icon who is arrogant in his spiritual achievement. I prefer alternatives. I prefer Sienna.
Abs in the mirror, above black Calvin Kleins from the 99-cent store. Small hairs from my razor are piled on the white counter, thin black lines. Slurp spaghetti with extra-garlic canned pasta sauce, getting red all over my mouth.Self expands.Power is stupid. Slash power construct, yet peace in practice? Strong men are weak as death. No neoclassical worship or canonical crooning. No inheritance or veneration. White temple turn to sandstone dust on a purple podium. We celebrate with Target pride flags and sip snake venom, chanting, We Love Collapse, We Are Collapse, We Will Collapse.From temple dust, blooms a new kind of creature: unnecessary, unfinished, non-gendered, and non-financial. The new creature has no body. The new creature is not new at all, the new creature has always been there beneath Lux and Debris.The black sun blares its trumpet and stabs its rays across the universe, jubilating in the collapse of Order, Power, and Reign. The plants sing too, and stretch and twirl up toward the black sun, whose light is cold and unfeeling, but not unwelcome.
When body is gone, there is soul. When soul is gone, there is money. Make your money, make your bling. I can be that face, moving how you want, elastic. I grind and grit my teeth. I spit on a tower, build hair towers instead of real ones. Body can morph, body can stack. Body stretch like plastic, gummy like snack. I make my body old, I make my body fat. I make my body skinny. I snap my fingers; I snap my bones. The hairs stand on each other. Every hair on my head, I use to make the flexible ascending line. I build it until it touches the clouds. I make my hair a tower. Thin tower, wind will break it down. Body made to labor. Body made to help. What am I without money. Only money I have is yours. To think I loved an Equinox-er.I could fall into a hole and be satisfied to lay there with a broken leg. Hate was the bedsheet on hurt. I lie in the bed, totaling feelings to subtraction. You snapped at me every time I woke you up accidentally. In a barely lucid state, you hated me. I watch the movie Arctic with Mads Mikkelsen to remind me of the desire to survive. Heartbreak drama, raw feeling, I attempt to compress to something of worth, but fail, but try anyway. I think of the few times we danced at Animal, the dusky, sleek gay bar/club, and kissed, and I think of when you stopped wanting to dance, instead, sitting at a table and pouting with arms crossed like a obstinate child. Next time, leaving early, do what you want, I'm heading out you said, which to me approximated, I don't care what you do, which to me approximated, I don't care about you. I followed you out the exit, trailing past you through the red doorway.Bataille writes:
You are the horror of the night
I love you like we laugh
You are weak as deathOn Reddit, I search: what to do if we are incompatible, but I love him? What to do if we fight all the time, with temporary resolutions? In the half-awake state, you hated me. Love ya, I redact the I and you. I am I. You are you. Not together in a phrase that confirms attachment. The desire to disappear passively, instead of orchestrate destruction. Mads Mikkelsen with a broken leg drags a dying girl across the Arctic, I can surely breathe and be good in my warm-climate room. When I woke up, the other day (not sure which, it is all slosh) I dragged myself to the birthday party, felt shaky fingers on the table at Walker's. I am tree hit with ax for a sec again. I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro. At your party, a guy you hooked up with long ago, maybe recently, who knows, you grabbed his hand at the party you hosted like a bigshot, you grabbed his hand when we were fighting, anyways, when I was ignoring you 'cause you were being mean. He kept patting me and looking sadly at me, while taking photos of me and you, me and then-boyfriend kissing performatively. He took the photos and smiled sadly like he knew something I did not. The photos looked convincing like nothing was wrong. Did your best friend tell him we were bad?I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He is me again.I did not want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one. I want to be a frowning clown, still loved.
A couple fights in the apartment next door. I wake up to them through my window, and it sounds like they are talking in my ear. The woman is a “starving artist” and the man is yelling at her for being one, though they both are stoned I think, or smoking while arguing. They keep taking pauses to cough. The man sounds like a frog on amphetamines and downers. He says: I’m not telling you to take Walmart commissions, I think you can do something though. I think your work would translate well to tarot cards.I can tell she is offended by this, but she says: yeah true.He is also yelling at her for her Instagram take on buying from Walmart. She is creating a micro-stir on social media by defending individuals who shop at stores we are supposed to boycott. She says: what are they supposed to do, these people in the middle of nowhere with Walmart and Target as their only store options? They have no choice.He talks about being a starving musician too, and refers to a friend who is surprised they make no money from gigs, and questions why the friend is surprised by this.He drones on and on about corporations.She responds: yeah, yeah, yeah, mmhmm, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mhmm, yeah, yeah, yeah.He says: you’ve been a starving artist ever since I met you fifteen years ago.She says: yeah.Below them, another conversation floats up between a girl with a podcaster voice and a guy with a shy skater voice. They are exchanging thoughts on Fahrenheit 451. It is cute.My alarm sounds and the older couple pauses to listen to it and then continues arguing.I don’t really remember what else he said or think it matters. I was impressed by the woman’s persistence in saying yes in an agreeable voice, while her husband spewed nonsense. Agree to let the steamer steam.The woman and man justify their starvation by hating the man, hating corporations. He tells her again and again: I’m not telling you to sell out to Walmart, but you need to make money somehow.Why does he keep referring to Walmart? Stoners do this--make cloudy connections.--I participate in a forty-minute conversation about Equinox with my boyfriend and his friends and the luxury sounds very luxurious, Kiehls in the bathroom. I contribute to the conversation by saying the only gym I’ve ever been to is YMCA, but I am curious about the Equinox lifestyle.The fighting couple might be happier if they went to Equinox, but happiness is not the goal for them, suffering is. Suffering for suffering and suffering for art, age-old Kirchner classic.I tell myself I am suffering for something besides suffering, but I won’t be starving for much longer. I remark to my boyfriend that people seem happier in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Money makes people happy, he responds. I guess it does.I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He probably uses cheap face wash, good for him. I have never seen him smile or notice my existence, the sad smoker on the stoop in ratty black and green clothes. Archetypal male blows smoke out his mouth all day and all night, making meaning in the cigarette self-harm.Help me diagram the differences between Equinox-ers suspended in fragrant viscosities, the old wealthy and the new, the formerly wealthy cast-off self-flagellaters, and the always poor poor. Individuals scatter across the money-pain-status diagram like streetwalkers on and off the city grid. To think I love an Equinox-er who is so much more than the face soap, formerly minimum wage working PhD drop-out, attends Equinox and is stunned by the luxury, lists it off like a beloved list. American Dream beneficiary, you worked hard to get where you are and make me want to believe in the steps to reach the Ultimate fantasy and wear the Kiehls face soap myself, though I remain on the stoop and its miserable smoke haze, which can provide a transcendence semblance. Whipping oneself and making watercolors from the red outpourings, I believe in this too, devotion to pain-expression to fill up sparse space, with no prettiness except for a bleak snowscape kind.I don’t know how or who to be. I am proud of the hard-working winners; I am sad for the losers and “self-identified” losers. I don’t believe in scales of measurement. It is a privilege to fail and a privilege to win. The glory in losing and winning, obviously, we keep trying at survival.
Every week, I magic-erase the grime from my boots. Parents came to visit and say it’s remarkable here like the world isn’t happening, with toned and bejeweled guests chewing in the Greenpoint dark box. I forget what it is to be mad here, yet the delusion croissant flakes off its moon shape, sometimes. Next week, I will wash the grime off my boots in the shower, then polish them. Domestic rituals in glass enclosures like washing and polishing my boots, help me forget grime and crimes against humanity. Escapist behaviors in enclosures create the sensation of release. Routine behaviors in enclosures approximate release. Erase, wash, polish. Produce glamour illusion and create disaffected mask. Eat pastry, peel dough flake off croissant. I escape into ecstasy, the pale yellow folds. I erase myself to join the totality which is ecstasy also or blankness, like post-death. What is the moonlight exactly besides photons, I’ve never liked science. What is the pleasure of the dough? I think it is more than hollow consumption, or can be. Memory eating croissant with you creates light I hold onto. Light warps pastry flakes. Back to the boots, I am glad my rubbings will scar and degrade them. Go to the trash, boots. Go to the landfill and incinerator, so I can walk barefoot on the flat earth. I’m no flat-earther. Is delusion necessary to maintain happiness? Escape sets reality closer and further, like fleeing the earth for the moon and seeing the place behind you, a cliche about reckoning with one’s own smallness in the context of the cosmos. The earth is not a perfect circle, but it appears to be. I only know what I experience and take away. I take away pastry. I take pastry to space.
I am sad watching American Psycho while he sleeps. Tender tan bald spots are visible. Tender tan bald spots I tried to cover up earlier, tried to move your hair to cover, and then you told me I had bad breath so I dragged us to get gum, and then you ran into your friend you used to do coke with and described your rock and roll friendship and it reminded me of my old rock and roll friendships which always shattered. Little hurts tally up, we are working on being nicer to each other, replicating a polite dynamic that reminds me of marriage. It feels nice, but more staged than before, when we were our worst selves openly. I listen to old Sharon Van Etten albums after American Psycho finishes, with a black t-shirt over my eyes. This morning I said: this the end or a new beginning. He agreed. I am staying awake during the day for him and me because I was turning miserable never seeing daylight. Earlier, I felt like abandoning my desire for Eternal Relationship. Now, I feel good with him in the other room—no weird air. I remind myself of our loving basis, so non-toxic and ecstatic—it could replay. I won’t have to listen to Sharon while he sleeps. The sound of him scrubbing the dirt off his cleats in the background mixes with Venice Bitch. Hopeful for eternity, we are testing old pens together, on the pages of a dream journal. He gives me socks with the words babe on them, from his old rock and roll friend, and we head out, separating after a kiss. Every kiss begins with K. Every kiss begins.Delusion drapes me in fantasy. Hope bookends the dream journal. I build a life to actualize my dreams, which are informed by pop lyrics and slogans, examples of success. Relationships cover the sun, can be the sun, provide hope, and sublimate despair. TikTok pop psychology would tell me to work on myself. I go to sleep and dream to kiss you on the sunset marriage advertisement, dating app picture of success, we could be assimilationist queers. There is nothing but the black t-shirt on my eyes creating a barrier between light and me, light I step into when the day is done, 'nother cliche, or Catholic comfort. Hope creates despair, yet without hope I'm dead. Hope does not have to relate to fulfillment of desire. Was he my projection? His bald spots should have been loveable too, love doctrine would dictate. And my quirks should have been charming. Imperfections deteriorated the bond. I am ideological information. Without belief system, I have nothing to believe. I believe in shattering trope, yet without trope and pop music, what is there? Laborious repetition, dirty streets. No meaning. I miss trees. Trees are equal in forests like a Socialist fantasy. No murder. No genocide, I SHOUT! To be separate and spiralling is privilege. I am a hegemonic winner. And so, I shatter all belief in Love, and turn to Greater Advocacy.
White O on a black grid stone, grey blocks together. There is a yellow block in me I colored.
The sky is orange above the hay cylinders.Blonde children play hopscotch outside a white pillared building.Militaristic trucks carry earth. They are the largest trucks I have ever seen.Exercise machines sit lonely across from slumped medieval houses.Cats curl around blue flowers at dusk.Halved buildings rot next to new ones. Chairs sit on sagging floors.I hear and see a car far away. I walk to a bridge covered in grass and trees for animals to go over a highway. It turns into hills. I try to walk over the hills, but they are naturally overgrown. In my shiny blue Dickies, I see: disordered cabbage fields, and hooded benches raised high for hunters to aim at far deer. I sit in the floating cubby. A bullet train with hidden passengers traces a single long line from my right periphery to my left.In the evening, each leaf becomes a defined shape that is dark against lighter blue.With my emerald Calvin bag I reach: calendar hay rolls, a frozen crescent jacket, and long-trunked trees with branches that begin high up.The trees are tight together and uniformly thin. In other areas, they widen.The moss is a steel wool pad.My black boots accumulate dirt. Their waffle cone bottoms are caked brown. My blue pants turn dusty.Wood piles sit unused. Spirals in their cut ends look like children’s faces.Wind turbines are always in the distance—spinners grow and shrink on the horizon, the closer and further I walk or bike.I bike to a nearby hunting lodge. I’m taking photos of a mirrored gazebo. I realize two women are kissing inside.A horse with collar bells escapes, and the neighbor must rescue it by following its bell sound.Small holes are scooped out of the shed wall.I cower in the corner of a chicken coop and selfie it. I make myself scared and small in the corner, like someone is forcing me to be there.A car factory in Karstädt is an eyesore. Identical houses line the street leading up to it. Few people are outside. I ride my bike on the road, which stops before a dirt zone. How do the workers access the factory? Lollipop trees muralize former Communist housing. I buy vodka at the store.A man sees me riding my bike on a highway. We are the only ones. He stops his car and reverses it slowly.A glass door has an orchid Fathead. A garage door has its door removed. In the absence of the door are wood planks surrounding a jeep tail, which hovers above the ground. A white pug sits statuesque in a lawn pot.I pee on the roadside next to discarded cigarette packets. Rain starts pouring when I am drawing a creek in a horse field, and thundering while I am speeding home. I miss the bulk of the storm, though I saw the sky grey gradually. I saw grey on the dome edge near small spinning turbines. Grey envelops the blues, pinks, and pale yellows.I walk along the train tracks. The bullet train announces itself with a sailing sound that increases in volume. The passengers are flashes.No one is out here. No one lives here. Have I ever been to a place so unwatched?I spill pastels on the ground. Pastels crumble in my hands, making rainbow mud.This place is too beautiful to draw, I tell the married couple. What's the point in drawing what is a perfect study? I'm not longing for anything here; I have it. I don't have longing.A mail truck passes by me in the woods. The driver is the same woman who served me at the gas station. She has a shaved head. The van recedes and drops off the picture plane.New blue flowers on the wide field, and blue-beige pointillism when I zoom in on the fields.In an off-trail wooded segment that frightens me with its unruliness, I find a trailer with a bed set for one, which I take a selfie video next to. The trailer window is behind me, and the video pans up to the netted sky.They blindfolded me and said draw the trees from touch alone. Now, draw the moss. Bugs crawled across my hand and weaved through my fingers.I screamed in the forest alone: "AGGGHHHHHAAA." I had the thought to burn it down—if all this beauty were to incinerate.I feared insects, ticks, and infection from nature.Fifty residents per township. They were separated by fields of flowers and connected by cobblestone or gravel paths, bridges, tire pile mountains, and haystacks. Tire piles are black snakes wriggling on steamrolled trees.There are many flattened sections; low square fields, with no crops sometimes. The low field is an empty cube cut-out with hair on the bottom plane. What is he for? Who am I? A white van traces the side of the flattened field and disappears. A white van is parked at a neighbor's house. I video it with some trash techno overlaid and camera shakes.Eroded gravestones and memorials, and dog-walkers looked fearful. I talked to myself aloud and thought I felt past souls in flowers.Pinwheels are planted in the lawn next to farm machines with spinning blades on metal circles behind a fence. Betreten verboten! The farm machines are spider-webbed. Turbines line the backdrop horizon, echoing the motion of the candy rainbow pinwheels.I bike into a ditch to see if I can get out.Why do we price sprouts from dead bodies? I'm in the kitchen cooking all alone with a wine bottle stolen from the communal closet.In Grabow, ein Kino has a zebra-print in the window.I eat a German meal cooked by Danish friends who arrange potato plates and sausages on a wooden table in the shed with holes scooped out the walls. I scoop potatoes on my plate and find an ant on a brown chunk.Ants weave between the planks of a picnic table outside, too.I go ten hours without speaking to anyone except myself. I don't text or call that month. I mutter while clutching the tire-patterned handlebars, and blow smoke over my shoulder. I carry groceries ten miles in a backpack, when the car isn't available.There are no street cameras. There are no humans, except stout men with gun slings sometimes, or rail-thin men riding bikes in groups.I sat and drew the river clouds. What was the shed used for? What is making me sad, and what is making me fearful?One night, I got lost out there. It was all dark. I had no phone. I made it back because the sky had a little slate in it. And I saw the slate in between black trees. The ground was black too, like space. I saw two headlights as far away as stars fallen to earth, grow larger and shine toward me. They could take me here. I trip over a log and sink my teeth into a bush.Back in Grabow, which had ein Backerei with a twisted pastry, I zoom in on a bright-green sports car with blood-red handprints on the hood. Broken glass in a brick-rimmed window reflects the church. I cross the old checkpoint. They tell me it's where fascists stayed. It is here, I see the gazebo couple. They look startled I am photographing the gazebo. I didn't see them inside. It was a one-way mirror from their perspective.I am present tense in absence.In the car on the way to the grocery store, which is a respite from troubled domesticity, the Danish woman tells me her mother lived here. She explains melancholia and repression are linked. Paranoia persists in a changed political landscape, despite growing up in a more enclosed and distrusting one. Not much industry here. The skies and bushes provide a respite.I've been filming myself, though it's not so fun. I'm an intruder. My bad family was from here. My good family was brought here. I record a boomerang video approaching turbines. Close up, the cylinders are as wide as my yellow house.
Body lying on the bed, one parenthesis next to another. Trucks and cars are outside and shoveling in quiet Williamsburg. A shovel scrapes across a diamond-studded sidewalk. Salt flakes melt snow. Parenthesis shifts beside me, moving spaces over. I was eating some Club Crackers but stopped. I claw my foot, scraping my trimmed toenails against the comforter. It’s been snowing all night. I listen to the conversations between neighbors. Car drives outside the other window. I shouldn’t have eaten so many Club Crackers. Comforter resting on bodies and an air pocket. I breathe air into my lung pockets. Breaths of men outside I cannot hear, the breathing of late-night early-morning walkers on a Tuesday. Pointless to experience small notices and do nothing with them, string them together like the bracelet you gave me and reclaimed, so poetic when it broke, you commented on the meta-qualities of the break: see it's like us. It’s so nice to be comfortable in Williamsburg, it is the charm square. There is a stream in Williamsburg made of melting snow, and I fall into it, going out to the Hudson. A man sits on an orange tube in the water, legs hanging off it. The sun is cold. The shoveler continues to shovel, making scraping sounds. Reaper polishing a scythe. Asleep parenthesis next to me for a long time. The photograph of a dog in his room—preserved with black eyes, stares down from heaven, missing its earth-bone. The scraper scrapes. The heater keeps rattling like a cobra who doesn’t rattle. The parentheses have their backs against each other. A leg hangs off questioning shoes. A parenthesis hangs off the bed like a toenail-clipping seesaw.
Puff Ball
I.The sound of a marble on a circular track spiraling down a circular track to hell, faces peer out of square cells on Instagram. Sorrow fails to arouse any feeling but sorrow. I fear reality will peel off like a sticker soon. I am flying avatar in Second Life, derealized in a sim world made of products and signifiers. When reality peels, I will be awake in hell, surrounded by users, perusers, sodomites, and misers, who are better than the saintly-types.I had a flying dream, says a customer at the bar. I want to add, me too, pouring the waters, pouring the drip. Alcohol is the IV. The service-worker is an actor, butler, secret anthropologist. Sameness was the trend in PA mountain town, but individuals were nice and I enjoyed my conversations.Serendipitous encounters occurred recently, man I served in small PA mountain town turned out to be a gallery artist, and I went to his painting show and the afters. He was rude to me as a waiter, and not sure if he recognized me, drinking at his open bar. This was back when I was boozing heavy, now, no more. He ordered me around like a butler, yet treated me kindly as a fellow artist. Little does he know, I draw caricatures in the park, the faces of Millenial Williamsburgers are undone by graphite smears and erasures, which see I hope the human below the shell, the shadow of the shell. Peanut shells around peanut meat. Portraits for fifteen dollars a pop. His friend was there, at the opening, from PA town too, who I also served. The man called me his "comrade," working class ally. I'm not like you. After working so much, I decided I prefer destitution to consumption, because hard-work is miserable with no redeeming qualities, besides the potential for observation. Republicans here were nice. This was my takeaway, nice to your face, friendly, familiar, though I was so miserable carrying trays that I was rude, and acting out sometimes, kicking doors, swearing loudly, and being sarcastically friendly, like a chipper bot, tip-sucker on my knees, you can ply me. You can drain me. I trace the circular track to hell again: the sky last night and the air relaxed the humans on picnic benches, sipping their sweet drinks, sitting around in costumes, dressed up for shows and events, playing roles we have been trained to play, acting proper for situations.Cool, not humid, romantic night, all of us floating and flirtatious as the sun speckled the clouds, puff balls on a lilac gold dome with green mountains hugging the township.Beverages with spice and basil syrup. Rose, apertif, seductive intoxicants.II.The air puts the human-animals in a good mood. The air puts the dogs’ dogs at ease too, they lap at their bowls as clientele sip drinks. "Dogs" is mean and dehumanizing, but I can't help but dehumanize my clients. They take my service, though I do not like to provide it. In saying "dog," I am also referring to a kind of domesticated stupor, many feel, or exist in. I miss free wandering, wolf-like prowl. Domesticated creatures in middle space. To fight, and play, and kill, and drink, and fuck in middle space, animalistic behavior. If only I could be a wing-ed dog for real, fly up like a golden retriever angel. Consumers on the grass; many friends of mine are grass consumers, lappers, treat-eaters. At work, I make up sing-song stories like Björk in Dancer in the Dark, who constructs a musical fantasy in which she is the star actress, to maintain morale at her factory job. The songs she creates are escape paths to another dimension. My stories are darker:Rose leaps across the backseat and slams herself into a window, mimicking the deer they hit; Azalea is distracted by the charade and drives off the bridge accidentally, hair strands floating in suspense, and Aster prays for his mama. The children are intertwined with the car smashed on the icy river. Children meeting an end. The bouquet rots by spring. Their namesakes grow overtop their embrace with the vehicle. The rosy snow melts into the river, which carries some car parts to a nearby town. Aster’s mama finds a wheel she recognizes. A search party is constructed and spreads across the region, like a plague. No one finds the children with flower names. A deer sidles up to the river and finds the scent of its mama intermingled with the few car/children parts remaining by the stream. The deer is the original dead deers’ baby. The mothers and fathers in the town down the river have no flower children, but the deer knows who the culprits are for her mama’s killing and nibbles some of the leftovers off a metal bar.III.I sweep leaves off the floor, I pick up fallen cups. After a night of being sweet, I feel drained. A night with a floating cast of characters, like my coworker Sandy (fake-name) who is hoping to get promoted, go to kink clubs in Berlin, on Xanax. She cooks Gochujang shrimp for dying farmers. I inhabit the consciousness of Sandy, spacing out of my own to join with her headspace. My dog is my girl, my dog makes me happy, lapping blood off my leaky cuts, cleaning me up. If I can work with bandages on my arms, you can too. My shaggy lady keeps me sane. I think I will get out of here someday, but I'd miss my parent-farmers and the wide-open skies and plains, and I'd miss all these cheerful and respectful regulars who tip well. Why am I so sad? I tell men about my anxieties, and they tell me to go outside more. Whatever this problem is, I will get it sorted out. Whatever, this problem is, I will fix it. The workers hate the uppers, use the uppers to work harder. Work harder to fly, go to Disney, work hard to go Soarin' in the clouds, the ladies up there, all the angels up in heaven, we'll get there. Dehumanizing the dehumanized, white Trump supporters all, in all likelihood, who worked extra to save for Disney trips for his wife and kid, works at the Hilton to get a deal on $40 hotel rooms anywhere in the world by Hilton, dream to be a band caterer so she can travel the world, on tour, convert her parents' farm to a horticulture therapy retreat. Ginger with a prison guard husband. She is trying to get him special shoes because he spends so much time standing on the concrete. She was a drug and alcohol counselor at state facilities. Coworker breathes fire, chews tobacco. Coworker who sings karaoke three nights a week, saw him out, red-faced and happy. Nice people, nice to me, with the constituents that I perform sameness and similarity, acting like an echo vessel. The queer is an expert mimic. To soar with a band. To fly through the roof of the dive bar. To wash so many cups that doing so becomes automatic, to turn on a smile in despair, style a Great Clips haircut, I hate that some have to struggle so hard to survive while others spend so frivolously. Trump gave them hope, feel bad, he never meant to do much for 'em, never was going to, stoked their hatred and stroked their resentment for self-gain.I was attempting in the previous paragraph to inhabit the evil collective-consciousness without identifying or aligning myself with the hateful clan spirit. To pass as one, one can understand one. I am not one, a hater, I was trying to inhabit a hater perspective. Suffering can create hatred. Reduce suffering. Stop caricaturizing evil; evil is nuanced and faceted.To have a Disney daydream, to infinity and beyond. All the valor of hard work, there must be valor in a dead life, a hard life.
Poor Bot
I.In New York, many humans become bots composed of their status markers and desires for wealth or power, consciously or unconsciously. Some would benefit from faith or belief in something other than gain and accumulation. Life is not a ladder made of human rungs. What is at the top? Is it possible to ascend when class and regional cultural habits are so deeply ingrained and performed? Does one have to unsocialize and resocialize oneself to do so? The mythos of hard work is fed to non-elites, passed from parent to child, to save the child from a life of repetitive labor and hardship. Humans are seduced by a desirable image without realizing it is constructed. An image can be cute or desirable without being real. People become their images without realizing, and then are perplexed by their own misery and desires which emerge from behind the front image.My stomach turns due to sleeplessness and the fixation on it. A green leaf lays on the bench. The side of a bench is blackened. I am tired of performing success, happiness, irony, or humor, because, it is not natural to me. Honesty and sincerity are natural, though perhaps uncool. Misery is comforting, and pain is present often. My sunglasses reflect light in a convex. Leaves lay, detritus of life. I must not be scared or consumed by fears. I am a reverberating amalgamation. Conversation is a meeting of paths. How can a painting release persuasion? Many in Bushwick scope. It is fun to play along. Cigarette smoke drifts up to the leaf overhang. I must become a non-bot, though it is fun to customize myself with clothing and tattoos--still I have minimal assets to do so, so I try my best with objects from the 99-cent store, and india-ink stick and pokes. The only articles I relate to are non-articles, or tinfoil maybe. Tinfoil body-fit may be interesting. The plastic "wifebeater" (not my term) sunglasses, and lighter, and beer glass form a cheap and harrowing still life, reminding me of an outdated bohemian lifestyle, and arrangement on a plastic table at a taco salad family reunion in the coal-mining town without coal-mining-industry outside Pittsburgh.To be a bohemian-type today, one must be destitute. Slightly above the rung of houseless with no social capital, and I have decided to do this. Poverty is a fact of my life, in Expensive Place, and many of my thoughts are related to financial concerns. There is no pressure to be anything now, I have the luxury to be selfish, choosing, sort-of not choosing to be poor, potentially for the rest of my life, with a useless degree, and few attachments to wealth, capital, or influence, I think soon, I may disappear from spheres of "influence." Perhaps I would be happier as a plumber in Kansas, though trade school is costly. For now, I treat poverty and relative unemployment, like a difficult adventure, flaneuring myself around the city, hungry all the time, and using the same few objects I have owned for years, wearing the same dirty shoes, two pairs of jeans, and rotating between two dollar solid-color shirts. I miss being able to buy $6 coffees or meals. Now I buy expired fruits and vegetables and mix them with the same discount sauces, alternating this dish with oatmeal and spoonfuls of Jif peanut butter.When I dated the corporate worker in Williamsburg, I had a taste of a high-spending lifestyle, but it was not for me. Buying makes one want to buy more. The relationship created a power imbalance, almost a "sugar daddy" and "sugar baby" dynamic, which is not what I was after. The dynamic emerged because I was too poor to buy anything myself. He decided he wanted to stop paying for me, but then we couldn't go to the oyster bars and two-hundred dollar dinners. We realized we only liked each other when we were drinking or spending money. It is better to be poor, finding satisfaction in restraint, and rare treats. I don't want to look like or be a gentrifier, living in a tech-compound like Williamsburg, spending $60+ dollars in one night, at a themed bar. Now I spend 60 dollars in five days. This is an exaggeration, of course it varies; I don't check my account until my card is declined. I will see how long I tolerate poverty. Life so far has been a class sampler, tasting taco salads and caviar. Caviar tastes like oatmeal in time.II.My ex broke up with me partially because he thought, I was too poor and lazy, for his lifestyle; embodying a quote "bus stop lifestyle" he was uncomfortable appearing associated with. After the breakup, I decided to embody the image of the drifter he critiqued (not in a romantic hegemonic sense, but something anti-archetypal). The upper classes do not want their illusions ruptured by Real depictions of marginal life, yet it must be ruptured, without being violently unlikable or it will be dismissed outright. To be dismissed is okay for some, but to others it means they must continue to live in undesirable circumstances; this creates an impossible dilemma for the poor artist between pandering to achieve a glimpse of upward mobility, and remaining stuck in abject poverty, yet staying to true to oneself. The hope is that staying true to one's vision will result in a honey spoonful of success. Bad and pandering objects are often wildly popular in the market, which creates frustration and mangles self-conviction. The “true artist” does not pander; yet the notion of “the true artist” is also a construction, and unavailable to those separated from, or tentatively linked to power. "Abject poverty" is a commonly used phrase. Rereading the previous passage, I have realized it deals with abjection. I was taught to hate the poor—their teeth, their cigarette odors, stereotyping them as lazy substance abusers. Were you? The poor person has the option of caricaturizing their poverty for elite consumption, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Yet, to the poor artist, romantic or beautiful depictions are often more appealing--the impulse to romanticize one's experience or worldview results from a sorrow, or lack. There is a desire to fill the dirt ditch with gold. Yet to the rich, romanticized depictions of impoverished experience appear "romanticized" and thus "seemingly inauthentic" or problematic (in an art school critique, a friend of mine was told her morbid paintings of drugged little girls romanticized violence. Yet to the victim of violence, these paintings embody a kind of reclamation or rewriting of negative experience). The problematizing of her "problematic" depictions silenced her traumatized expression. An unbridgeable chasm exists between a poor authentic expression and the desire to be in "good taste" or unproblematic. "Good taste" is a tool embodied by the enforcers and maintainers of power. To make high art in bad taste--infused with genuine and feeling bad taste, and not "bad taste" presented with humor or a downward-looking irony-- is difficult to pull off. I saw a video of a rich influencer saying she would only recommend approaching Bushwick with a body guard (I say the word rich because poor people, service workers especially are taught to only see others through a lens of rich versus poor, client-other versus server-us). Parts of Bushwick are pristine. The street I live on bordering the Myrtle Broadway MJ Train is badly maintained, yet still safe. It is littered with shit piles that do not get cleaned up. Meanwhile in gentrified Williamsburg, it is immaculate. The bathrooms in Prospect Park do not smell like the shit they contain.Related observations:Art world elites who dress themselves in minimalist clothing punctuated by spare and tasteful high-class signifiers, are highly skilled detectors of wealth and taste, trained to distinguish potential buyers and insiders from non-insiders.New money is often drawn to displays which signifiy high class or status. Old money views these displays as garish.I own a faux-metal plastic bracelet. I think the bracelet is beautiful, as it represents an impossible strife, an impossible and tender trying-to-be, and appear, as a person in different conditions; a person trying to become, or escape. The glittering plastic bracelet embodies the desire for transcendence. The bracelet betrays me as a "faker."The color yellow is tremendous, glimpsed among greys and browns, flittering yellow brochures on the street.There is a dissonance between the taste of the poor artist and the taste of the elites. The poor are often drawn to glittering colorful and beautiful objects, whereas the rich often relish images of abjection, sterility, etc. which to them feel exotic, as their living spaces are already highly aestheticized.I would include more personal examples, of living amongst “new money” and their class aesthetics, but have been barred from discussing aspects of my upbringing. To not be able to talk about the ache at the center of my life is hard. The justice system sides with whoever has the most money, and I had none. I write here about money, because I think, especially in New York City, the extreme class discrepancy is repugnant. Money should not be so taboo to discuss in highbrow circles. Unfortunately, money is the spirit of our nation. How many times can I say the word "money" to neutralize its aura and strip currency of its violence?
My earbuds play a happy mix as I polish the marble. Looking after monument ruins, I polish Lincoln’s nose. The edges of an ivory obelisk are a faraway mirage. I forget what this dick stands for. Tattoos of an eagle and a flag are faded beneath the hair on Don's chest, the veteran's skin. I pair the sexy image of Don's chest with a happy song. Remember the time we were happy to sit in a jacuzzi with martinis? We looked at fireworks, big, flashy floral explosions, while the water bubbled around us. Donny wrapped me to him, and I sipped a martini. Jets fire water at my backside, and I shift my position, maneuvering out of the embrace. The hot tub boils us to bone broth. To take care of someone I don’t care about. I thank Abraham for my job-position. I am lucky to have my position, to be able to move through the grey spools, sloshing my cleaning bucket. I leave a trail of teary liquid. My earbuds sit cupped in my hand. They are my prized possessions. I bump my cleaning bucket, and it sends a flood across the dais. I put my earbuds in. My knees hurt, like my back as I bend over to soak the flood with a rag. Songs on my music mix are sparklers on a grey humid slab. I scrub and I scrub, producing more bubbles on the stone. I am responsible for creations: bubbles in a hot tub, bubbles on Abraham Lincoln’s feet, bubbles from a magic wand in a green childhood summer. A far-off heel in the distance--I go to it. A politician may have lost a shoe (no tourists allowed on the mall since the attacks, and the attacks after that). Not made of glass, this slipper is synthetic material. It is waterproof, heatproof, and fireproof, I guess. I try the shoe on. Possible endings: It fits, and I fly back to Donny before his illness and the stroke. I fly back to the clear-aired hot tub. The shoe fits, and I wear it home, limping all the way. The shoe doesn’t fit, and I relegate it to the trash can. I ditch the shoe; I fly away.
My body is made of all the things that I’ve bought, too expensive at the grocery store.Everyone dress in equal clothing which costs the same. Get new uniform when the old one is frayed. That could be okay.Someone would have to distribute the uniforms. Someone would have to penalize the people wearing different clothing.The uniform would have to be adaptable and customizable, picked at birth, still individual. The uniform would have to account for cultural differences. The uniform would have to be open to change, accounting for different life phases. Individuals change religions, body types, genders, group identifications, and preferences.The uniform would inevitably represent the dominant preferences of the group, but couldn’t be a fit too reminiscent of Western traditions. A concerted effort could be made to create a uniform that represents all peoples in this country. Clipping representations from every group, no no.If the dominant uniform represented a Eurocentric tradition, yet individuals were still allowed to wear other clothing, those in different clothing or alternative uniforms might become outcasts, unless a concerted effort is made to educate those wearing the dominant outfit on the alternatives to the dominant fit and the problems of the dominant fit, and unlearn their outcasting, and othering tendencies, discovering why some may not want to wear the same outfit they wear. But many of those in the dominant outfit may not want this education, may reject it, and try to erase all traces of it from school curriculums and government programs.If everyone wore the same uniform, except those who did not identify with it or felt discriminated against by it, then those in the different alternative uniforms would not feel a kinship with those dressed in the clothes that represent to them an oppressive Imperial tradition. They would feel separate. They may dislike outsider status and try to wear the clothing they associate with the oppressive Imperial tradition and may find they are more successful wearing the clothing. But they shouldn’t have to do so.Queers with wild customizations would become outcasts unless they market their outfits as quirky options for those in the dominant fit to ape. If they do not do so, yet insist upon acceptance and seamless integration into the dominant mass, they may be refused. They may in turn refuse to wear the uniform altogether as protest, shocking those in the dominant clothing with their nudity.The uniform would have to be completely new to avoid creating all of these problems. The uniform may have to be no uniform at all, nudist colony. How do we account for the weather?Working less, less factories and mines, and abundant laziness. I may be naive but I don’t see why we need what we have. I do like my diamond bracelet, but I don’t need another, would probably buy another if I had the cash.To make less, be more lazy. From ‘laziness’ comes music, food, paintings, lackadaisical purposelessness, lying around with someone you love.Fruit trees could grow out of potholes in the street—fruits for all to pick. But someone would come with a big bag and grab more than they need—Social Darwinists would think that may occur. Some may be trampled in the scramble to grab fruit, with factory production ceased mostly, and food off the shelves. Some may be too hungry to be lazy, too preoccupied with their hunger and malnutrition to make love, music, or paintings.Don't like being told what to do, I would probably hate these world sketches. I would probably get stabbed or shot because I can’t defend myself, and I might miss the free market, reminiscing with friends about a time where we believed anyone could become a CEO if they worked hard enough. We really believed that.The inability to imagine a utopian alternative, I investigate more options for my personal wellbeing.I scavenge for nubs in the fridge to cook with and herb sprigs. Life is great, I take inspiration from a positive emoticon. Never settle in too comfortably to a flow I fear may cease. Sour dour times.Whenever I am in studio late at night, all the anger physically hurts me. Next morning, refresh and look up to the sky. I wish there was no pain or torture in the world, so naive.I wish Americans could be comfortable, not out of work. Do you think a conman has duped his supporters by making false promises of jobs opening up, by preying on fears and biases and utilizing groupthink strategy to create a unified group, like a stadium crowd, cheering for the defeat of a common enemy? So harmless the selections for the team his supporters don’t like. For the most part, harmless, though they may defy the conservative values and sit outside the patriot’s sphere of like and understanding. If there is an enemy, it may be those who fell prey to a conman’s manipulative tactics, and voted for him. But those are just desperate and biased people who like traditions and the same-old implicit and explicit discrimination. If there is an enemy it may be those in the sealed boxes up above, with thousand dollar wine bottles and buffets. But those are just people with money and many have nicely curated art on their walls and good hearts. Who knows who to target, maybe remove the target entirely and demolish the stadium. Humans need games? Do all games need winners? I want to forfeit the game, I try my best to do so. Yet, I’ve been taught to try to win and see life as a playing field.This essay is all claims and questions with no data or warrant. Is there a proper way to write? I’m not making an argument here or pushing a point. Don’t agree, hard to envision better solutions to mass depression, paranoia and hatred of the Other, massive economic inequality, discriminatory policy, etc.To protest is important. To write and create is important. To think about other worlds is important, even if the worlds may not be better than the current one. I care desperately about economic inequality. Who likes to party on a budget?
Greys and blues and rotten violets. I want to be with the you that doesn’t have disdain for me. You convinced your friends to disdain me; I felt the interrogating looks, and you confirmed they disdained me. Chop my hair off, and delete every image of us. The I that exists is the typing I.Closed-eye hallucinations of you, you hover above me with a smile stretched wide over a skeleton. The fantasy decayed in real-time. The smiling face turned dotted and static.I drown feeling like a puppy. I am the cold dead-eyed puppy hanging in a photograph on your wall, preserved for you to see in its happiest state, with a wagging tail. Delirious in the windowless room, I move to the light-filled kitchen to cook pasta. I walk into the hallway to eat some yogurt briefly, then return to the pasta. I tried to mirror your behavior by one-upping you the way you do with me. I wanted to demonstrate to you how you act to me--show and tell. It led to us both acting nice. The chocolate Buzzball is silk. I sip it while police cars drive past. I add hurried strokes to paintings, that complete or ruin them, providing a final solemnity, coffining the paintings. I am myself when I am crying instead of a self-observer. Empty streets remind me how empty streets are without you. Alone, I experience the rats, trash, architecture, and big eyes peering at me from the sides of buildings. A rat smacks into my foot, creating full body revulsion. Hyperrealistic big eyes of children are spray painted everywhere, peering emptily. Quirky coffee shops remind me of every place we never went and did. We didn't fight at Nook; we fought later that day when you kept painting my dirty studio floors white even though I said not to. I'm doing this for you, you said. I said, I'm telling you not to. I am going on a date with the guy I was seeing when I first met you. He has black lines tattooed on his ears and recommended Acid Communism. Your eyes will watch us make out on the ceiling.
I could fall into a hole and be satisfied to lay there with a broken leg. Hate was the bedsheet on hurt. I lie in the bed, totaling feelings to subtraction. You snapped at me every time I woke you up accidentally, with vitriol. In a barely lucid state, you hated me. I will paint from a tree’s perspective. I watch the movie Arctic with Mads Mikkelsen to remind me of the desire to survive.Heartbreak drama, raw feeling, I attempt to compress to something of worth, but fail, but try anyway.I think of the few times we danced at Animal, the dusky, sleek gay bar/club, and kissed, and I think of when you stopped wanting to dance, instead, sitting sullenly at the table, and the next time, leaving early, do what you want, I'm heading out you said, which to me approximated, I don't care what you do, which to me approximated, I don't care about you. I followed you out the exit, trailing past you through the red doorway.Bataille writes:
You are the horror of the night
I love you like we laugh
You are weak as deathOn Reddit, I search: what to do if we are incompatible, but I love him?What to do if we fight all the time, with temporary resolutions?Reading the book I read while you lay next to me is too sad, so I start Paradise Rot, a transgressive Jenny Hval novel.In the half-awake state, you hated me. Love ya, I redact the I and you. I am I. You are you. Not together in a phrase that confirms attachment. The desire to disappear passively, instead of orchestrate destruction. I think like a tree.Mads Mikkelsen with a broken leg drags a dying girl across the Arctic, I can surely breathe and be good in my warm-climate room. When I woke up, the other day (not sure which, it is all slosh) I dragged myself to the birthday party, felt shaky fingers on the table at Walker's, chic Tribeca joint with old New York charm, sight of a Woody Allen romance scene, interesting.I am tree hit with ax for a sec again. I don't know why I am so sad to be honest, it's not like we were good, to the end, been miserable for weeks with nice moments, I'd say. That's love. I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro.At your party, a guy you hooked up with long ago, maybe recently, who knows, you grabbed his hand at the party you hosted like a bigshot, you grabbed his hand when we were fighting, anyways, when I was ignoring you 'cause you were being mean. He kept patting me and looking sadly at me, while taking photos of me and you, me and then-boyfriend kissing performatively. He took the photos and smiled sadly like he knew something I did not. The photos looked convincing like nothing was wrong. Did your best friend tell him we were bad?
Can’t sleep, cry. The cat got shoved into a box and its little head poked out. Red dot on the smiley face button on the computer taunts. My cuppa, my mommy, the cat screams. Xanax sliver for him. Corner the cat; he wails. Seal him. Do you feel free? Han writes that this freedom is experienced until "liberation gives way to new renewed subjugation."Kentucky cat. Rabid to tamed. Boxed, then released.Daniel meant well, trying to clean me like a kitchen. Clouds up there; boxes below.I am not a project to be worked on.
Though I told him “I am working on myself,” I hate that healing is framed as work. I am working on healing. I am leaning into healing, a therapist would phrase it this way.Once he—ex in photo—started viewing me as a project, it collapsed.
He acknowledged that he did so: “I think I started seeing you as a project, a person to work on. A person to help and fix."He meant well, trying to clean me like a kitchen, and organize me like a pantry.I don't want to be organized. I don’t want a capital relationship. I don’t want to be power-gays. I don’t want to improve or be made to, or turn into, or become, to be wanted.I want to be, like the letter B.I don’t want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one. I want to be a frowning clown, who is unconventional in appearance—maybe displeasing, or repulsive, but loved anyways.I take the wrong train into Dumbo and reverse-take it back into Manhattan, so I can take it into my sector of Brooklyn.I felt great on the date, the finance bro was nice actually, until I talked about something that reminds me of my ex, and then started talking about him to the date, which created awkwardness, which ruptures the construction of a “fine date," and it is broken.Let us acknowledge collapse instead of self-deceiving that all is right, good, clean, and organized, inside the box, that opens into another box,
and another, beneath a sky with clouds we try to sort and categorize,
though they resist, because they are fundamentally fluid and changing, non-commodities, we could harness, we do harness their water, but they remain decisive of their own shapes; or unawares, changing according to the logic or non-logic of a non-capital force--we can call it God, we can call these forces Laws, scientific laws. Laws cannot fix clouds into place. Clouds are unfixable and free in their state of permanent post-ness, permanent transition until they are coerced to be fixed, which will not occur. Clouds will be clouds. Clouds will B.
I am happy to be dying to you; you are dying to me. I am not dying for me, I am not dying. Disposable slime on Clementine peel, pee slime on cilantro, green onion gloss. I rinse slime from green vegetables and chop away, toss rot into the pot with on-sale fish.I misread the spine of a book, thinking it says, slow death for slow swan. Fast bird, efficient pigeon is better than slow swan, better for economy. You were my Hilda Af Klint mirror swan image. Circumcised feathers on your upper lip grated my belly skin, grated my pork fat. Silver grate grates carrot, slicing it through pincered holes. Pork belly and great carrot, orange slivers. My fur is shaved so I do not resemble you, my fur mustache is gone, accentuating the thinness of my upper lip. The mustache made it fuller. I am thin now, my upper lip. My upper lip is thin and naked.I am the corn dog stick stabbing a one dollar bill, and I am the one dollar bill. Corn dog stick is slippery with hot dog traces. I do my corn dog dance. He pets my dog. I harvest ants from the corner of my room. I wipe ants from my nose, I serenade them. I toss ants in chocolate and upcycle as salad garnish, resale, upcharge for more than ants are worth. I upcycle the useless black three-dots with legs and antennae.I am my crystal ball.In reality, I am a cool man on a bed, sipping songbirds from a glass, sipping swans I still believe in. The swan circles the trashed swamp.
I wish the swan could be beautiful and not bleeding, but we love to kill swans or allow swans to exist in parks, majestically framing the opposite side of the pond, these swans kiss and make a heart, which frames green trees.Better swans kiss to make a heart, to make the enclosure pretty.
EVIL: Fraying rope, fraying hair strand, fry, fries on a plate, fry cash, we’re fried. Fried hair strand on Suzan’s head, bleached hair looks fried. Cash, I’m strapped for. How strapped are we, Su asks. Strapped for what? Strapped for cash. I got a few pennies. Few pennies can add up to a dollar. She, me, provide very little for each other, pennies. I insert a president’s head into my mouth, to make Su laugh, I put the coin on my tongue. Tonight, Su, we dance on the roof, then booze and drive ourselves across state lines to bad states. Tomorrow, I’ll drive the muscle car, blaring trash, smacking trash, smacking across bumps. I lean on the engine hood at the pit stop, twiddle legs hugged by denim fabriqué. Suzan, what would you like from the curb store–some M&Ms? Milk chocolate, or strawberry milk? Peanuts? Let’s hit this store, crash into it like a cymbal. Dusted the peanuts are with Cajun seasoning, or is it old bay, same shit. I don't know you or like you, Su sighs. When cattle surprise us by crossing the highway, we’ll go flying, through glass veneer to Better Place. Su smiles, big grin looped around by berry lips. Su, how bout we black out the sun, Su, or go halfway, gray it out. Down the eye drains, we'll go down the pupil drains, in his head-face, in her big eyes, god devil god damn. Hit the gas, hit the Gods, no icon is stable or invincible, all representations are fucked. I spring us to springtime. Let’s sniff the flowers here, Su, or some glue. Yellow abdomens with white limbs, centrifugal, centripetal. Want some more? I offer peanuts. I offer the peanuts in my palm. Su says, I can’t take this shit anymore. Keep driving without Su, I’ll keep driving without you. Fucking Albert. Albert deserves a sleep. I’ll meet you in a warmer state like Florida. Su answers with an eye roll surrounded by black sludge penciled on strawberry milk skin around big eyes. In Shitsville, we danced to the trance, haha, stupid fucks all ‘round, Suzan pouts, pours me a drink, drank it. We intertwine, fuck on the car hood, which is still driving across the canyon now, or desert, which is still driving to Georgia somehow, we’re in Georgia, eating peaches. I’m drooling on the steering wheel, beige lumps with black edges coat the circle. Burger lumps, haw. Serves you right, mama says, while I fall asleep, falling into some loving arms. Oh, Su won't you stay with me? We'll go stomping off to Canada some day, when the pennies stack to towers. BETTER: I take the wheel, knocks Albert's head off it, take it in my lap, stroking his wet forehead, so sweaty. I braid his hair. I take the wheel. Albert's slumped over, breathing raggedly, fucking annoying, got to go. I put my foot on the pedal, start the car, jet-set off. Red and green landscape, we drive over mountains, take winding paths, to snow caps, America, haw. I turn the radio on, classical static. Albert's stirring, sludge in a pot he is, a crusted and loveable pot, like her mother's. Her mother's kitchen, white with peeling walls and rusty silver, rusty grates for pots and pans, cooking mackerel fireside, choking on cherry pits, she's not sentimental for the past, course not, future is road? Sentimental Americana, not like her childhood at all, which was much darker. Future is salvageable, future with Albert, po-ten-tially. She'd been punk-ish before. Black Flag shirts with long vertical rips worn at Mechanicsburg concerts, small town home to mechanics, where they stomped and jumped to the thumping music, elbowing bum hicks out the way. In those times, he took the drugs at concerts only. Look at the bird fly there, she points it out to a stirring Albert, acknowledging the small thing. Goofy goofball, swat him. Silly back then, they'd laughed with each other, then chugged beers the whole ride home, swerving nicely.
Vulgar Marxism, Theatre of Cruelty, détournement of the commodity-world-simulacrum, and further queering of Salomé
Born 2001, Kalamazoo, MI
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New YorkEDUCATION2024
BFA Painting, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Additional credits in English and Comparative Literature, Brown University and Penn State UniversitySOLO EXHIBITIONS2024
Destiny hope despair alistair, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, CanadaGROUP EXHIBITIONS2024
NADA Miami with Afternoon projects, Miami, FLArt Toronto with Afternoon projects, Toronto, CanadaNADA New York with Afternoon projects, New York, NYGaleria Café, Noakowskiego 16, Warsaw, PolandGroup show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2023
Bliss Information, Gelman Gallery at RISD Museum, Providence, RIGroup show, RISD Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RIGroup show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RIGroup show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2022
Identity as Context; Memory as Content, Granoff Center, Brown University, Providence, RI2021
Group show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RIOnline Blush, Online Playroom2020
National YoungArts Week, YoungArts Campus, Miami, FL2019
National YoungArts Week, Sotheby’s, New York, NYRESIDENCIES2024
Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2023
KuBA: Kulturbanhof, Klein Warnow, GermanyWORKSHOPS2024
Painting workshop at Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2024
Painting workshop at Penn State University Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PAPRESS2024
“Drew Spielvogel at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver,” Art Viewer, 26 Sept. 2024.AWARDS2019 - 2024
Honors at RISD, Providence, RI2023
Fellowship with Curator of Contemporary Art, Dominic Molon, at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI2020
Finalist in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL
Psychological states and attachments hover. Contradictions and uncertainties braid into a perceptual realism. I defamiliarize observations of the normative via souring, archness, corrosion, and cut-up methods. The paintings and writings parse the living from state ideologies and classed hierarchies. I study how negativity and fantasy appear in a subject, and relay life affected by the carceral or bureaucratic eye. I am interested in a Midwest and Appalachia-specific sensibility, the insider-outsider, and who or what is deemed dated, unnecessary, and banal. How can a sensibility sublimate Fascism and echoes of harm? Can complicity rupture under negative conditions, and what are alternative forms of disruption? How is nonconformity versatile? How does desire create or defeat motivation? How do excess and lack appear pictorially? What is a skeptical reinterpretation of European modernism, and rework of underclass material? How does the middle class contain repression, and handle non-subservience? What is a logic of wealth? What is generated by cognition and abrasive, or body-aware processes of revision? An interior-state camera roll evokes what queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich termed “an archive of feelings."
Black sun/ Purple slab, 44 x 36 inches, oil on canvas
The works adopt a queer 'peasant gaze,' where aspirational symbols degrade into relics and unknowns are preserved as self-styled failures, who embrace earnest effort and potential failure as a non-normative and anticapitalist way of being—a form of deliberate Camp. Oil paint seeps into the screenshot print-outs. Human paint gestures and genuine sentiment rupture pictorial and imagistic orders. Fusing high and low language, the poems echo strategies used by John Berryman in his work, The Dream Songs, which is written from the POV of a disintegrating alter-ego. Delusion collapses into rage. In the fleeting container—the poor image and "poor painting"—illusion and reality are one; the separation between life and art is nonexistent. The painting depicts an Epcot ball behind a phantom of success and a hallucination of queer "becoming" defaced by a profane self-confidence mantra. Queer becoming is deadened by and within capital logic. The figures hallucinate self-actualization, while trapped in a downward cycle, or "poverty loop." A rejection of traditional success actualizes into a destitute reality. The individual cosplays Other within a degraded loop. The Tiktok figure's angel wings and attempt at online virality could help her escape the frame, or find joy costuming within it. The Epcot ball decays in mass production and circulation; the souvenir is a cheap keepsake of a degraded American construction.
Lost coat tries to drift outside it/ complacency versus defiance, 24 x 36 inches, oil on canvas (work-in-progress)
Grandma's red coat, 8 x 10 inches, oil on panel
People turn like Earth. When did I become so plotter, plotting sun's course? Course there is a scorched cookie in my stomach. Course today, I was smiling in Prada shades. This morning, I was smiling at everyone in SoHo, feeling half-decent. Crying tonight with cigarette, bleeping out, shielding face. Salty waters, these are, boyfriend problems, I tell cashier, smacking gum. Yeah, all the water is fucking salty, he say, girl. I thought water was clean for once, I thought water was drinkable. He says: cut the shit, talk straight. Okay, shrug. Shrug like pastor with no faith. Stomach growl, light on headphones flashes, the beeper. Are you a c-c-cookie, like me, stuttering, and sugar sweet 'till you get to know me, my best friend was right, give it three months. Then I got sad and said, no way Jean, bleep is different. Unwashed dirty jeans, I changed my clothes today in the coffee shop bathroom. Too sad to launder. Short time 'comes a long time, turns long, sun turns. Bought new underwear at TJ’s, bought new socks, changed them in front of a government building, the sox. And guard thought I was houseless 'till he saw my Prada shades, atop badly clipped hair, Prada confuses. Yes I did smile at the guard, apologetically. Yes I did smile at the cashier and he smiled back. TJ Maxx bag in the mirror, who does a bag love? Who does a cookie love? Cookie loves who buy it. Who buys cookies? Who will buy me? I love my eater, who consumes me. I love my Prada shades. Am I a strain, drain, or vain? Shopper be the judge. Like a bag waiting for clothing, I am Katy Perry lyric, plastic bag. Does a cookie love who eats it? Does a bag love who throws it away? Sun don’t care, sun revolves like a door. Handle sunshine with care, sun go way soon turn to night, cry. Bag don’t cry, stop. Be bag, O, be bag, oh cool, Bag mutter, they all see past me. Bag for landfill, Destiny says. Destiny lies, but she is my friend.
diary essay
The mythos of hard work is fed to non-elites, passed from parent to child, to save the child from a life of repetitive labor and hardship. Humans are seduced by a desirable image without realizing it is constructed. An image can be cute or desirable without being real. People become their images without realizing, and then are perplexed by their own misery and desires which emerge from behind the front image. How can a painting release persuasion? Perhaps recursiveness and contradiction can allow for something more realistic, as opposed to persuasive.In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz writes: "... to be working-class or poor and to have leisure time is to warrant suspicion..." The upper classes do not want their illusions ruptured by depictions of a "bus stop lifestyle," yet it must be ruptured, without being violently unlikable or it will be dismissed outright. To be dismissed is okay for some, but to others it means they must continue to live in undesirable circumstances; this creates an impossible dilemma for the poor artist between pandering to achieve a glimpse of upward mobility, and remaining stuck in abject poverty, yet staying "true to oneself." The hope is that staying true to one's vision will result in a honey spoonful of success. Bad and pandering objects are often wildly popular in the market, which creates frustration and mangles self-conviction. The “true artist” does not pander; yet the notion of “the true artist” is also a construction, and unavailable to those separated from, or tentatively linked to power. I was taught to hate the poor—their teeth, their cigarette odors, and crassness. Were you? The poor person has the option of caricaturizing their poverty for elite consumption, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Yet, to the poor artist, romantic or beautiful depictions are often more appealing--the impulse to romanticize one's experience or worldview results from a sorrow, or lack. There is a desire to fill the dirt ditch with gold. To the rich, romanticized depictions of impoverished experience appear "romanticized" and thus "seemingly inauthentic" or problematic (in an art school critique, a friend of mine was told her morbid paintings of drugged little girls romanticized violence. Yet to the victim of violence, these paintings are a reclamation or rewriting of negative experience). There is no proper expression of violence for someone who has suffered it; the labelling of her expression as romanticized, and thus improper, according to bourgeois standards, dismissed her minority experience. The problematizing of her "problematic" depictions silenced her traumatized expression, and was more implicitly violent than any violence she could have depicted. Why did we (largely) neglect to address class at an institution that feigns interest in rejecting hegemony? Why did we eat at dining halls, where the staff was underpaid? Why did we think what we were making was somehow above the tastes or sensibilities of the service workers and custodians who surrounded us, and cleaned our studios? They should have participated in our critiques. Why did we think we were above the poverty and abject suffering that occurred three blocks away at Kennedy Plaza? Why were we not trying to bring the people there into our classrooms and provide them with art tools that could provide some relief from their suffering? Why did we hoard all our resources, and allow houseless people to starve and die outside our classrooms and libraries without even a second glance? Why were our dining halls stocked with unlimited food, while the houseless person outside our gated compound could not even get a sandwich? Did we think we had no responsibility to help, when we were so able to do so? Why did we not consider opening our classrooms up to him? To elite individuals, these may sound like absurd questions, as belonging to an elite class depends upon the self-belief and collective-reinforcement of an "us" that is inherently superior. The questions I ask may also indicate an unsavory "saviourism," that may only exist amongst elites to absolve them of the responsibility to be altruistic, or share their wealth. Why do we allow the rich to dictate what the poor can or cannot express? Why do we need their money or validation? We depend on their money and validation for survival. Being an artist is not unlike being a service worker; it reminds me of being a waiter. To disobey the elite client you are serving means they will stop providing you financial rewards, yet one has to express themselves accurately, and without pandering, to be an artist. An artist should not make work for a patron, though the patron-artist system is age-old. Contradictions express the poor experience; masking and unmasking proper and improper selves and presentations, encapsulates what it is like to depend on elite morsels for survival, and tailor oneself to be tipped better. If one makes an error in their food presentation, the server is dropped or not paid. The artist can decide if they want to make work outside the market, and forgo an interest in elite tastes. An artist can serve at a dive bar.A gap exists between a poor authentic expression and the desire to be in "good taste" or unproblematic. "Good taste" is a tool embodied by the enforcers and maintainers of power. To make high art in bad taste--infused with genuine and feeling bad taste, and not "bad taste" presented with humor or a downward-looking irony is difficult to pull off. In his "9.5 Theses on Art and Class," Ben Davies writes: "Artistic quality is not something that can be judged independently of questions of class and the present balance of class forces, because different classes have different values for art that imply different criteria of success." I own a faux-metal plastic bracelet. The glittering plastic bracelet marks my place on the class hierarchy--I know who I am and I do not seek to transcend my class, or role-play as something I am not. What does it mean to take pride in one's poverty and disinterest in consumption or transcendence? The color yellow is tremendous, glimpsed among greys and browns. There is a dissonance between the taste of the poor artist and the taste of the elites. The poor are often drawn to glittering colorful and beautiful objects, whereas the rich often relish images of abjection and sterility which to them feel exotic, as their living spaces are already highly aestheticized. We are not our status markers and desires for wealth or power. Money is violence. Davies continues: "Art’s current definition as a luxury good, or the primary concern of a specific professional sphere, is a problem. Programs should be launched and supported that offer venues for artistic activity that are not necessarily aimed at the rich or already-initiated... Contemporary art suffers from a narrow audience, and access to art education is largely (and increasingly) determined by income-level and privilege; art education should be defended and made universal." Davies characterizes artists who produce for the art world as predominantly middle class, yet I see artists become increasingly subsumed into the elite class, or not subsumed. Artists not subsumed are left poorer than ever and may find they have more in common, politically and sensibility-wise, with people who share their class level, than with individuals in an out-of-touch elite sphere--who seek to preserve their power and class status, while virtue-signaling an aesthetic interest in revolutionary politics. My friend and I went to a Zoe Leonard opening recently, and he commented that it was "giving Balenciaga." I told him to cheer up, drink more, and have fun. "Pretend you're at a fashion show, or fancy party." We waited in line to receive plastic cups full of ice and tequila served by a person who looked at our shabby clothes and shrunken bodies with suspicion, and then we left.
short fiction
At Christmas, Gunnar gave me an extra small hunting jacket. I keep my hunter jacket clean and iron the creases. Mud and shot birds leave marks. I pick the red and brown scabs off.Gunnar’s face is in the yearbook grid with mine—he’s in an upper left rectangle, and I’m in a low row.When I am seven, he teaches me how to hunt.—I’m a pudgy child munching chocolate pucks. I get chocolate on my designer jeans, imported from Europe. When the jeans stain, I toss them in a hamper and put on new ones.Crumbs fall out of my mouth and onto the grass below, where birds eat the cookie dots, and hunters shoot the birds later.Later, the hunters say it was terrible to kill or see killing occur.I slip under Gunnar’s checkered arm. I get dirt on my jean knees, so I take them off and walk around.Gunnar sits swinging on a ferris wheel carriage. Gunnar says: one day we’ll go tenting around and kill off thousands.For now, we aim at whatever birds show around us.He circles a dead bird’s belly with a sticky finger: aim here on a live one.When he nails a bird, his eyebrows raise, he shows wolf teeth, and his cheeks sphere up.Aqua clouds obscure the ferris wheel. The ferris is taped to a grass field—it grows mossy with Gunnar still armed in the chair. Gunnar sits with his gun up while nights turn to day in fast motion. He eyes his scope and crosshairs and picks off birds. Sped up, over time, it is like machine gun fire, though he only holds a rifle.
Ride the carriage of regret. Security watches my cage. Secured the restraints, too. Christmas cookies under the tree, I was a pudgy child, munching on snacks in designer clothing. Child looks down from his carriage at fair-goers in the mud. Security notes disobedient speech and disorganized behavior. Outbursts may lead to prolonged entrapment. The participant rounds the circle in his cage and is reliant on the ferris' ruleset and the rulesets of the fairground. He can play the fair games, providing Owners change.The fairground was not theirs to take.Mobile stasis. Expressive explosion of BIRDSHIT is the spray on GREY LIFE, white box, grid-organizations.Hunters stole the fairground.The fairground was not theirs to take. He is from a family of hunters. Walking grey streets, the streetwalker strolls the mechanism's pipework, scavenger-patroller of its colon, cruising pockets for spare change and crumpled dollars.Families die in front of Prada Stores.
Individuals are removed from the fairground if they do not align with its participatory criteria, racialism.If he prefers to see what he misses, a pigeon can glimpse it through a glass pane. Pigeon steals a bag. Pigeon rides the subway, from High Manhattan back to BK. Pigeon rides the roof. Sunlight is bright to enlarged pupils. The sunlight reminds him of the ward's fluorescence.Individuals are normalized to be good fairground participants; the voice is neutralized by the state.The individual constructs outburst spectacles.Pigeons and rats, the abject.Beauty is pigeon. Grey bird of grey life
wheel.
Abstract state of being, out of time, I wander the prolapse into past. Past and speculation fuck.
First, most recently was the blonde man I wrote poems about:
Contour lines the mattress twink
with a bleach crown.
Skin on triangle
beneath shirt collar,
denim flaps.I don't know how tender; he has me.
He is open like a pantry
door.
The smiling light of mydoor,The smile is the lightning on the shore.
The smile is the
bleach.
The smiling light he spills
on the floor.
Hook stuck to door and time passes.
Push him off mattress to the floor,
he enjoying it,
says back is hurting,
stuck to wood floor.
You-me, hooks are hyphens.
pit sprouts. One bleary imprint from us two.
Salt rim.
back lick,
I am red mark on your chest.
You are the dot on my ditched sweater.Double pink hooks
Arousal puncture time wheel. AwkwardInvisible acts turn to
disintegrating information
swallowed by
a pinhole.
And a year ago, it was K, who I exoticized:
I longed for you obsessively. I wrote poetry and posted it online to perform my obsession. I could not cope with a life I perceived to be dead-end. You suggested a handsome escape. I made all your attributes charming and looked for a star-crossed narrative. I attached every feeling to a trope and half-saw that I was doing so. Eventually, I lost sight of where you and the trope differed. I would erase most recollections of my time with you. I edit extractions from the old ramblings and cut them together. I thought it might be interesting to be met in times of lust and marital dysfunction. With a straight family like everyone wants, I am the real one you want to see. Camille Paglia writes: “We can never embrace (sexually or otherwise) a single person, but embrace the whole of her or his family romance” (I am not quoting Paglia because I endorse her politics, I am using the reference as an unexpected rupture, an intrusive thought). I could have embraced yours totally, your reenactments of familial dynamics, the possessiveness of your father, your impulse to break us and let me back, if only you would have let me. I would have come back. I dreamed you would remove me from Pensylvania. And I wandered the streets while typing rants and messages after you flew home to Saudi Arabia. I lay in a field drunk and crying at 4 AM, pulling out the grass. I wandered the town; sat on curbs. You said: when you touched me last night, I died. Now I am the dead one. I stay in bed making spam posts of my break-up thoughts, losing a follower every two minutes, checking the follower count like a spasm. Smoking in the basement of a sports bar, I tell my friend I need to be with you, feel more alone. Men play their darts, play their pool. Cups of gold and brown fluid are consumed. At a bar in Chinatown, I ran into someone who knew you back in Pennsylvania and he said: oh yeah, we hooked up. Caustic. Salt. Round hairy shape in fantasy, old doll on the couch, Oldboy on the TV. Green chintz duvet and green eyes mean nothing, though I wrote letters with lines like: I had the most wonderful night with you at the Penn State duck pond. And, and every time I vape now, I'll think of you. Fortunately, I do not. A realization: you are different from how I made you. I returned to you repeatedly over time. Yet, when the charming mask fell off, I did not like you. You were nasty, mean, controlling one night, accusing me of stealing. Now, you sit cross-legged on the floor while looking in my eyes and I know this is the last time I will greet you. In the bathroom of the sports bar, I made a post on my story, a selfie with the caption: love is an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap and love is the feeling of bridging it. Did I love you or love that you could take me away?
I go slack on the mattie,
he go soft.
Ego hard on the tease.Like the hops of my
doe on the mattress,
gone soft.
The milky color of his skin was mixed with caramel and his eyes were like burnt chocolates; same with his hair, chocolates burnt and melted twisted in and into flames; the flames burned his eyes too. They were too hot to look at, it was almost painful, making my face warm in an overheated way. The hair on his legs was twisted curly, and the shorts, dark denim hugged his crotch, making the lump there look alien, yet nice. To touch it would send pleasure across his legs, through my hand, up my arm, down through my torso and into my groin. I had this thought when I saw him the first time in the apartment doorway, in the forgettable red brick building late at night. I had tapped on the door, felt my skeletal fingers rap against the hard speckled door.The dark hairs on his legs looped in clusters. A bunch of hairs pressed together and made many circles that grew denser the closer you got to his groin. The hairs got lighter further down his legs, close to his feet and ankles. The hair furred down his neck and then vanished, becoming soft skin, with small finer, almost invisible hairs that one couldn’t see unless they were looking very close. His eyebrows grew towards each other; the hairs reached out across the long ridge to greet each other, like we did, when the door opened and I slipped inside the dimly lit place. Lamps everywhere and a clean, yet heavy incense smell, like a heavy curtain. His eyes looked at me through the curtain of hair on his forehead; the chocolates exposed themselves to me, his eyes and the other seductive features. I wanted to stroke his soft slightly wet eyelids and trace the bridge of the sharp nose, so I did so, feeling the lotioned face, follicles with prickly sprouts extended towards my fingers, creating a fuzz between us.
Most recent "blondie" again (the gay male uses straight "objectifying" language--"blondie"--and plays an abject/desperate role). E is the genderfluid pronoun; he is shortened to e, because what does it matter, we are we:
white pillows tinted yellow, damp legs with hair glued down, snotty congestion. e likes me when I’m fake e likes to comb his hair in the mirror while i confess suicide urge. nilla coins on the floor, nilla wafers, blood flag on my door. black lion started on me let the fuckers come and watch him finish is meal. white pillows tinted yellow, the saliva turned it, e leaves some blood clumps left on the floor, dayquil sticky on foot. i hang a chandelier, string up crunchy white ribbons from my illness, stick my tongue out a fat mouth, tin cries and a pewter wheeze stretch my legs out fuck the floor. e doesn't like me when i'm real e doesn't like my sick room.e goes fishing when life gets hard. holds the reel over the wide cool pond, lowers the string down into a hole cut into the pond’s top ice layer, and catches a fish. yes before like me he want to carve, yet when he catches the fish, he’s fine, he is reeling it up. alone on the rowboat, summer, fall, spring, winter, alone with his thoughts which are quieter. fishing is the closest act to a death-hug, reeling it up. He is reeling me up, and he is reeling me in.
I realize this is a picture of my despair, in part. And obsessions. In Black Sun, Kristeva writes: "Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, the face that is to bear him away into death, but of which he is unaware while he admires himself in a mirage." There is no self-admiration. Only the reluctant indulgence of the black backdrop which is all-consuming and self-indulgent when I am in it. In a way, it is also a survival diary--writing through the despair that makes my limbs and body feel greasy and heavy and my lungs slimy and tar-ful, like every breath is sucking oxygen through a mucous veil. She continues: "I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved." Perhaps this is that, tracing the ghost loops for an explanation forSorrow
Dead and Black
Hollow Egg
Sedates meAnd I find it more comforting to sit with, than Reject or Overlay, manicure the mirage of me.
And perhaps it is "the eroticization of suffering" as described by Kristeva, which saves me from my Death Drive. Pain is just pain without the eroticization of it. Pain kills. Pain is terrible.The erotic other, who is both hated, loved, and admired, incorporated into one's being, then Spit Out--semen onto stomach or chin.The lover incorporated into the body, Melancholy Cannibalism:
"Melancholy cannibalism, which was emphasized by Freud and Abraham... accounts for this passion for holding within the mouth (but vagina and anus also lend themselves to this control) the intolerable other that I crave to destroy so as to better possess it alive. Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested . . . than lost. The melancholy cannibalistic imagination is a repudiation of the loss’s reality and of death as well. It manifests the anguish of losing the other through the survival of self, surely a deserted self but not separated from what still and ever nourishes it and becomes transformed into the self—which also resuscitates—through such a devouring."Am I a devourer? All I try to do is LOVE, SEDATE, and ABATE the Death Drive which propels me to self-destruct and die. Rather than cannibalize, I wanted to Conjoin, two rings linking forevermore. PROMISE of ATTACHMENT. Is that not marriage? Pure and sanctified marriage, so beautiful, the white veil which cloaks the snarling face, and the tuxedo which hides the hairy body of the animal. Marriage is the organizational veil on our animal being; the veil made of interlocking white lines, perfectly organized to form a screen between the bride and his/their/her bride/groom.Kristeva writes: "Depressed persons do not defend themselves against death but against the anguish prompted by the erotic object."The depressed person defends themself against death anguish and anguish caused by the erotic object. The depressed person ensnarls themself within bed-fabrics, creating a shroud. A pre death-shroud. The depressed person is already dead, living in deadness until the melancholy abates. I saw marriage to you, as an escape from the shroud (I was going to get married at age 20 to an ex); I tethered myself to your vantage point which was not like mine, seeing a small hole of lightness at the end of the shabby black blankness. I was swimming in the drugged pool, like a DORY. You saw light everywhere like you were traipsing round a prairie all the fucking time. The Imperial male urge to own a prairie; the Imperial male urge to own a manic-pixie prairie-dancer. Disgusting. I wanted to build a house on the prairie with you, is that so bad? It is. The Wilders were colonizers.Marriage is a core tenet of Western Civilization, an organizational strategy, marriage under state law, perhaps better to reject it, and reject the Male (?) Urge to Possess, Own, and Control--turn the human companion into a commodity, a fetish-object, to be worked on, traded in when the fetish-object disappoints. The fetish-object must maintain its aura, like a car that stays polished, must continue to make its consumer desire it, or it will be onto the next partner! Onto the next marriage!I am the marketer of myself. I am the maintainer of myself. If I stop maintaining myself, I will be junkyard material. So be it...The toxic tenets of our Civ, still so embedded within MY fabric, the fabric of my personhood; so I try to remove my very DNA and yours. I remove DNA from each cell. I remove all traces of you and me, my programming, our togetherness. I die on the text to spite my body and its container.
Tangle of relationships now; the past leaps forward and fractures my present; every fragment is assigned a reminding person, now Object, Thing. Family stories too. What are they doing now? Abstract blocks. Blocked quite literally on socials. What are they doing?
Sour cream bedsheet is a rope around my neck. I take the noose off. I fray the rope. The relationship between EVIL and BETTER, swiped into by two males. We stepped into the roles constructed for us. Destitute in a rural place, what else was there?EVIL: Fraying rope, fraying hair strand, fry, fries on a plate, fry cash, we’re fried. Fried hair strand on Suzan’s head, bleached hair looks fried. Cash, I’m strapped for. How strapped are we, Su asks. Strapped for what? Strapped for cash. I got a few pennies. Few pennies can add up to a dollar. She, me, provide very little for each other, pennies. I insert a president’s head into my mouth, to make Su laugh, I put the coin on my tongue. Tonight, Su, we dance on the roof, then booze and drive ourselves across state lines to bad states. Tomorrow, I’ll drive the muscle car, blaring trash, smacking trash, smacking across bumps. I lean on the engine hood at the pit stop, twiddle legs hugged by denim fabriqué. Suzan, what would you like from the curb store–some M&Ms? Milk chocolate, or strawberry milk? Peanuts? Let’s hit this store, crash into it like a cymbal. Dusted the peanuts are with Cajun seasoning, or is it old bay, same shit. I don't know you or like you, Su sighs. When cattle surprise us by crossing the highway, we’ll go flying, through glass veneer to Better Place. Su smiles, big grin looped around by berry lips. Su, how bout we black out the sun, Su, or go halfway, gray it out. Down the eye drains, we'll go down the pupil drains, in his head-face, in her big eyes, god devil god damn. Hit the gas, hit the Gods, no icon is stable or invincible, all representations are fucked. I spring us to springtime. Let’s sniff the flowers here, Su, or some glue. Yellow abdomens with white limbs, centrifugal, centripetal. Want some more? I offer peanuts. I offer the peanuts in my palm. Su says, I can’t take this shit anymore. Keep driving without Su, I’ll keep driving without you. Fucking Albert. Albert deserves a sleep. I’ll meet you in a warmer state like Florida. Su answers with an eye roll surrounded by black sludge penciled on strawberry milk skin around big eyes. In Shitsville, we danced to the trance, haha, stupid fucks all ‘round, Suzan pouts, pours me a drink, drank it. We intertwine, fuck on the car hood, which is still driving across the canyon now, or desert, which is still driving to Georgia somehow, we’re in Georgia, eating peaches. I’m drooling on the steering wheel, beige lumps with black edges coat the circle. Burger lumps, haw. Serves you right, mama says, while I fall asleep, falling into some loving arms. Oh, Su won't you stay with me? We'll go stomping off to Canada some day, when the pennies stack to towers.BETTER: I take the wheel, knocks Albert's head off it, take it in my lap, stroking his wet forehead, so sweaty. I braid his hair. I take the wheel. Albert's slumped over, breathing raggedly, fucking annoying, got to go. I put my foot on the pedal, start the car, jet-set off. Red and green landscape, we drive over mountains, take winding paths, to snow caps, America, haw. I turn the radio on, classical static. Albert's stirring, sludge in a pot he is, a crusted and loveable pot, like her mother's. Her mother's kitchen, white with peeling walls and rusty silver, rusty grates for pots and pans, cooking mackerel fireside, choking on cherry pits, she's not sentimental for the past, course not, future is road? Sentimental Americana, not like her childhood at all, which was much darker. Future is salvageable, future with Albert, po-ten-tially. She'd been punk-ish before. Black Flag shirts with long vertical rips worn at Mechanicsburg concerts, small town home to mechanics, where they stomped and jumped to the thumping music, elbowing bum hicks out the way. In those times, he took the drugs at concerts only. Look at the bird fly there, she points it out to a stirring Albert, acknowledging the small thing. Goofy goofball, swat him. Silly back then, they'd laughed with each other, then chugged beers the whole ride home.
Tangle of relationships now; the past leaps forward and fractures my present; every fragment is assigned a reminding person, now Object, Thing. Family stories too. What are they doing now? Abstract blocks. Blocked quite literally on socials. What are they doing?
OBITUARY: bee at the mirror. I hit it, trying to kill it. die. Lala like this, too, stubborn. husband finger on the red lips. shh. I hit the bee with a paper towel roll, and the end of the umbrella, and finally, I use a candlestick to kill it. Lala, who loved candlesticks, would have commanded her husband to take care of the bee. And he’d have put it under a cup and slid a paper under. Take that bee outside. So, he did. Lala was quiet in death like the bee.
Rural red sea
fish iron
their red hats.
I serve him fish,
pray bone catch in his cut throat.
Abstract blocks. Blocked quite literally on socials. What are they doing?
I see you through a window. Youth group you would talk to my friends, while I watched. Time magazine: shooter spraying bullets: one last kiss? scream & huddle. Meanwhile, we Pompeii nesters.
The friendly-faced Corp saw me across the room, dressed in dirty clothing, with a broken iPhone. I didn't even know how to navigate home. The Corp was down on the floor of the Corp store. It was a chance meeting between us (like fate) my second week in NYC. He helped me fix my iPhone. He became a star I loved for how bright it shone high up; I wanted to fly to the star and stay with it (trash behavior). I leashed myself to the star. Debris is lassoed around. But the object is drawn into the orbit slowly. And once the object is in the orbit, it is there.I was willing to submit to the orbit, until I lost my personhood. He also stopped being a star to me: he became pathetic. He shrank and fell into an ocean on a planet and his illumination was quenched.A small part of me resisted the orbit. The part caught fire in orbit, and the star kicked it away to float aimlessly for a while. Debris realized floating is better. Debris is better than star in the ocean, trying to shove its star shards through water. You were extinguished to me; you were nothing when I realized you had constructed yourself to be a star, organized your life to take you higher. You chose money over passion. I could have respected you for succeeding in the corporate world if you'd respected me for pursuing my passion. But I reminded you too much of what you had given up. I reminded you too much of being poor and alive.It took a while for you to dim. I am no longer transfixed by Starpower Images. Starpower Images are images. Starpower Images are attractive. Starpower Images are seductive auras, that's it. Starpower Images are not stars. They are star-toys. They are CGI stars produced by the companies they work for. CGI stars simulate effect. CGI stars lack real affects. Many important people are CGI stars. Idols are CGI stars. Men with good jobs, money, and power are seductive but often dead inside. They are the Bright Humongous Stars on movie screens. Behind the image on the screen is a black wall.Prior to the screen and the image projected on it is the machinery that constructs it, the image-distraction. The machinery is desperate to create an appealing front; because the machinery is just machinery. And machinery needs to produce a likable product, to prove its societal utility.
Shovel scrapes snow off a sidewalk . claw my foot, scraping my trimmed toenails against the comforter. string observations together like the bracelet gift, stream in Williamsburg an orange floatation ring. legs are in the water. cold sun and the shoveler Dog in his room—preserved with black eyes, stares down, missing its earth-bone. The shoveler scrapes the sidewalk. questioning shoes. parenthesis hangs off the bed like a toenail-clipping seesaw. You: Dog.
Robo-cleaner reel sequence Megan Thee Stallion strip club called Xscape, which advertises itself with chicken wings. red oil off sticky fingers. thin leg bones. Done with Dumbo. I will lay, until you open up my heart latch and remove the organ, clutching it like a chicken wing. you’re lazy. I hate you.
I watch American Psycho while he sleeps. His scalp shows through his thinned hair. I tried to comb your hair, cover the bald spots earlier, and you told me I had bad breath so I dragged us to get gum. We are working on being nicer to each other, replicating a polite dynamic that reminds me of marriage. I listen to music and cry silently with a black t-shirt over my eyes. This morning I said: this the end or a new beginning. He agreed. I am staying awake during the day for him and me because I was turning miserable never seeing daylight. Earlier, I felt like abandoning my desire for an eternal relationship. Now, I feel good with him in the other room. The sound of him scrubbing the dirt off his cleats in the background mixes with music. We are testing old pens together, on the pages of a dream journal. He gives me socks with the words babe on them, and we head out, separating after a kiss. Every kiss begins with K. Every kiss begins.Delusion drapes me in fantasy. Hope bookends the dream journal. I build a life to actualize my dreams, which are informed by pop lyrics and slogans, examples of success. Relationships cover the sun, can be the sun, or cloak despair. TikTok pop psychology would tell me to work on myself. I go to sleep and dream to kiss you on the sunset marriage advertisement, dating app picture of assimilationist success. There is nothing but the black t-shirt on my eyes creating a barrier between light and me. His bald spots should have been loveable. And my absent-mindedness should have been charming.I miss trees. Trees are equal in forests like a Socialist fantasy. I am a hegemonic winner. And so, I shatter all belief in Love, and turn to Greater Advocacy.
Greys and blues and rotten violets. I want to be with the you that doesn’t have disdain for me. You convinced your friends to disdain me; I felt the interrogating looks, and you confirmed they disdained me. Chop my hair off, and delete every image of us. The I that exists is the typing I.Closed-eye hallucinations of you, you hover above me with a smile stretched wide over a skeleton. The fantasy decayed in real-time. The smiling face turned dotted and static.I am still posted on your Instagram. I am the cold dead-eyed puppy hanging in a photograph on your wall. I am preserved for you and others to see in my happiest state, with a wagging tail. Delirious in the windowless room, I move to the light-filled kitchen to cook pasta.I tried to mirror your behavior by one-upping you the way you do with me. I wanted to demonstrate to you how you act to me--show and tell. It led to us both acting nice. I add hurried strokes to paintings, that coffin them, casket you. They are paintings of you. Empty streets remind me how empty streets are without you. Big eye murals stare at me. A rat smacks into my foot. Quirky coffee shops remind me of every place we never went and did. We didn't fight at Nook; we fought later that day when you kept painting my dirty studio floors white even though I said not to. I'm doing this for you, you said. I said, I'm telling you not to. I am going on a date with the guy I was seeing when I first met you. He has black lines tattooed on his ears and recommended Acid Communism.Your eyes will watch us make out on the ceiling. Not yours, Yours. You know who you are and I hope you die without adornment very soon.
When body is gone, there is soul. When soul is gone, there is money. Make your money, make your bling. I can be that face, moving how you want. I grind and grit my teeth. I spit on a tower, build hair towers instead of real ones. Body can morph, body can stack. Body stretch like plastic, gummy like snack. I make my body old, I make my body fat. I make my body skinny. I snap my fingers; I snap my bones. The hairs stand on each other. Every hair on my head, I use to make the flexible ascending line. I build it until it touches the clouds. I make my hair a tower. Thin tower, wind will break it down. Body made to labor. Body made to help. What am I without money. Only money I have is yours.I could fall into a hole and be satisfied to lay there with a broken leg. Hate was the bedsheet on hurt. I lie in the bed, totaling feelings to subtraction. You snapped at me every time I woke you up accidentally. In a barely lucid state, you hated me.I watch the movie Arctic to remind me of the desire to survive.I think of the few times we danced at Animal, the gay club, and kissed, and I think of when you stopped wanting to dance, instead, sitting at a table and pouting with arms crossed like a obstinate child. Next time you said: I'm leaving, do what you want. I followed you out the exit, trailing past you through the red doorway.On Reddit, I search: what to do if we are incompatible, but I love him?Mads Mikkelsen with a broken leg drags a dying girl across the Arctic, I can surely breathe and be good in my warm-climate room.I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro. At your party, a guy you hooked up with long ago, maybe recently, who knows, you grabbed his hand at the party you hosted like a bigshot, you grabbed his hand when we were fighting. I was ignoring you 'cause you were being mean. He kept patting me and looking sadly at me, while taking photos of me and you, me and then-boyfriend kissing performatively. He took the photos and smiled sadly like he knew something I did not. The photos looked convincing like nothing was wrong. Did your best friend tell him we were bad?I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He is me again.I did not want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one. I want to be a frowning clown, still loved.
Now, it is back to the beginning with the Blondie who was after the Corp. This is the ending with the Blondie. Sorry for dehumanizing men.
The vegetable dumpling tasted bad, fetid. What is this shit? It reminds me of Midwest takeout from the yellow storefront on beige street where everyone was drunk. Drunk, the now-dead people played with each other and yelled at their children. I push the dumplings around, beige lumps on soy sauce-stained paper plates. Rorschach residue. Repressed homicidal urge. Now I repress heartbroken feeling. Scrape plastic utensils against the paper pulp and small white pills appear. I sigh. Why are you sighing? I sigh--trying to calm down. Why are you trying to calm down? We took the J to Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, more time with you. We waited for the train back while police patrolled the 2 AM station. I always blow it out big, you tell me to try and ghost it, while I touch the tattoo on your arm, and ask the significance though I already know. Maintain the fracturing allure. Sweet coffee and a snotty nose the next day. I waited for your vibration all the time. You think I enjoy my own pain and maybe I do. City of sads, city of adderalled workers. How do you distance suffering? We are one screen away from child murder, three stops away from goodnight. Phone screens merge with city lights in the window. Empire state building is still pretty to me. I smacked your ass in front of shady police. No eye contact because to do so would arouse me. Perfume advertisement is muddled by piss. Dead people had a cupid statue on the marble mantle next to an urn. Dead people fly around the marble island. We take the wraparound train back to Myrtle, gimme a kiss. See you tomorrow for cheap Chinese, last time I may look at you across a table. Back in Midwest state, winged arms catch takeout containers. I scrape the dumplings into the marble trash hole with control. Cupid flies off the mantle, crashes through a high window, and returns to Rome. The lump dumpling ascends my esophagus and exits my mouth, plopping on the dalmatian plate.
I kept myself from stalking your Instagram, until morning, I had to. From my ghost account, I stalked your story and noticed that it was a repost of your concert post, noticed that I was cleaned off your feed and reels.You drove me to Queens to see a concert in the rain. I might flirt with other guys, I joked. You said, you know what go ahead. I danced beside ensnared couples alone. In the car, you wore the glasses I liked, knock-offs from a chain, and they reminded me of our early dates, when you would wear them in the car and I would tell you I liked them, then tear them off your face. We made out at corroded stoplights; drops on the windshield made shadows on your face. Red glow around the teary shadows. Same frames you wear while driving now, though your demeanor is different. You are preoccupied, yet I am focused on you. I say: I'm getting sentimental for early on. You say: I feel like we weren't together long enough for sentimentality.You were obsessed, I was disinterested. Too touchy in the movie theater, but then I decided to give in.Driving in the rain, orange and navy lights, your face is splitting. Before, I waved at roommates who looked at me like I was a cat being readied to get put down. You said: take your grey sweatshirt, said we would be better off friends, driving in the rain, though I disagreed. I am reminded of all the guys who only wanted a boyfriend-mirror. Do I show them who they are? Do I become what they want?Smiles turn to sneers. With an old ex, I felt there was a devil underneath, though it took months to see through the front. Devil is a money-hungry man with skin creamed to look younger.You rejected the you I reflected, and the true self I revealed. I paint your profile into my painting, a curly-haired smudge feathers out like a parlor room curtain. The painting of you on the domestic overlay is a hopeless vision of prosperity. You looked at your phone while stoned on my bare bed. You talked about mainstream concerts and read favorite lyrics. I was interested because I loved you. You become a soft memorial icon, love is dissolved by a turpentine soaked rag.Gone person fades. The lover is absorbed into the mire of profiles. Each successor is more and less significant.7:29 turns to 7:30, and soon I will ride a Coney Island ferris wheel. I focus on the wheel's creak. Children scream and seagulls squawk. I eat a bowl of butter rice.
I undo the squeaky bottle cap while waves shush on the shore. A man stands with the water up to his knees looking at the grey hotels and buildings on the horizon. Percocet large-pond with bleach-tipped curls. Green blips on the horizon and an archway of lights, maybe planes. Arch like the St. Louis one. Arching blips on a black sky. I arched his back on my bed which floated on the sky or water. I take the subway back. Phone dies. Wander through the Hasidic neighborhood and fry rice at home. Hiss and crackling on the hush. Lifeguard chair watched the whole time and held me. Lifeguard chair under the St. Louis archway is made of plywood, no matter. The lifeguard's chair was safe.
The present distinguishes itself from the past once again, theorizing the document:
Byung Chu-Han writes: "Without hope, we remain trapped in beenness or in the badly existing. Only hope generates meaningful actions that bring the new into the world." Most of this text was written pre-Hope, in despair. The final paragraphs are the bridge outside of the dark slip, I looked into in my solitary room. I looked into a black slip fabric and saw no change possible; only the past there, "the beenness" as I breathed in a musty odor, reminding me of something that had already happened, I strained to find potentials between the threads I looked at, but I was too close to be able to distinguish between them; it was a black mass. The writings are in the voice of the acrid black despair, which made me feel that no change or hope is possible--that the future would be a further burrowing into the black slip, and that a black orchid might still emerge from that slip, even though black orchids cannot grow without sunlight and sustenance, which provide possibilities of upward momentum, flourishing, etc.
Sword in despair, apathy. I swear I will be the sword (or try, though I have no $ and hate this sh*t).
The Resolution (Narrator leaves room-cave, laptop-cave, reenters the Moral Order):
Pots and pans swim in water in the sink, dirty water made up of food stuffs. What is at the end of the tunnel? A coin? Were you my coin? Of course you were not a coin; it was L.O.V.E. Have you ever experienced it in your life? Have you ever felt what it is like to love a human being or are we just experiencing the gamification of everything; dating, love, sociality, art? Do you only love who will take you higher? Humans are assigned a place on the game hierarchy. Life is not Chutes and Ladders; why are we like this? Break the ladders, break the chutes. I walk all night because I cannot sleep or sit still. I end up on a dead-end street. The sky lightens. We are no better than the pigeons and rats. Dead-end zone. Our leaders hack away at the remains, eating bodies--trans people, immigrants, children who did nothing wrong. Children are born only to die because of where they are born. And these "leaders" eat each other, too, thinking there can only be one winner. Why are we cannibals? Why do the rich patriarchs need more than they have already? Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. The coin is the sun. The sun is not a coin. And you already have PLENTY. W.H.Y. are you doing this? W.H.Y. are you exploiting the vulnerable? Inhumans dehumanizing humans; greed takes us down a chute.
Sword in melancholy, in despair. I swear I will be a sword (or try).
The vegetable dumpling tasted bad, fetid. What is this shit? It reminds me of Midwest takeout from the yellow storefront on beige street where everyone was drunk. Drunk, the now-dead people played with each other and yelled at their children. I push the dumplings around, beige lumps on soy sauce-stained paper plates. Rorschach residue. Repressed homicidal urge. Now I repress heartbroken feeling. Scrape plastic utensils against the paper pulp and small white pills appear. I sigh. Why are you sighing? I sigh--trying to calm down. Why are you trying to calm down? We took the J to Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, more time with you. We waited for the train back while police patrolled the 2 AM station. I always blow it out big, you tell me to try and ghost it, while I touch the tattoo on your arm, and ask the significance though I already know. Maintain the fracturing allure. Sweet coffee and a snotty nose the next day. I waited for your vibration all the time. You think I enjoy my own pain and maybe I do. City of sads, city of adderalled workers. How do you distance suffering? We are one screen away from child murder, three stops away from goodnight. Phone screens merge with city lights in the window. Empire state building is still pretty to me. I smacked your ass in front of shady police. No eye contact because to do so would arouse me. Perfume advertisement is muddled by piss. Dead people had a cupid statue on the marble mantle next to an urn. Dead people fly around the marble island. We take the wraparound train back to Myrtle, gimme a kiss. See you tomorrow for cheap Chinese, last time I may look at you across a table. Back in Midwest state, winged arms catch takeout containers. I scrape the dumplings into the marble trash hole with control. Cupid flies off the mantle, crashes through a high window, and returns to Rome. The lump dumpling ascends my esophagus and exits my mouth, plopping on the dalmatian plate.
Light on the wares in glass boxes on a grey carpet. Silver, diamond, and gold with price tags. I noticed so-and-so. Grey shirt in his pants and side-ordered hair. Side of that, hss. So-and-so's earpiece. Cobalt earrings. Jeff shot the gun twice. Hole per ear. Donut vision. No distant donuts. So-and-so, though. Take a piece of that meat. Be your donut hole. Eyes like knives through glazed. I saw the blood pouring out his rounds.
Tongued my dry mouth.Pull hairs; string earrings through hstring the hair earrings through his lobes. I place the hair ring around his finger.I close my eyes. Jeff emerges. He walks toward me. We are back at the earring store. He has the same plain face. Same donut eyes. Jeff brings me new earrings that are bigger than the last ones. The cobalts are bigger, larger. I loop my arms around his shoulders and pull him to me. I loop his remaining hairs around my fingers tightly. His hair is still orderly though sparser. I see some peach showing through.Next week, we meet at the earring store again. There, I pluck a strand from his head and loop it around my finger. I take another strand and loop it around my finger, and pluck four more strands from his head, making rings and earrings for us both. He is looking more faded, though the eyes are the same. I pull out a needle and make a hole in each of his ears. I string the hair earrings through his lobes. I place the hair ring around his finger.
I.The sound of a marble on a circular track circles down a track to hell. Faces peer out of square cells on Instagram. Sorrow fails to arouse any feeling but sorrow. I fear reality will peel off like a sticker soon. I am flying avatar in Second Life, derealized in a sim world made of products and signifiers. When reality peels, I will be awake in hell, surrounded by users, perusers, sodomites, and misers, who are better than the saintly-types.I had a flying dream, said a customer at the bar. I want to add, me too, pouring the waters, pouring the drip. Alcohol is the IV. The service-worker is an actor, butler, secret anthropologist. Sameness was the trend in PA mountain town, but individuals were nice and I enjoyed my conversations.Serendipitous encounters occurred recently, man I served in small PA mountain town turned out to be a gallery artist, and I went to his painting show and the afters. He was rude to me as a waiter, and not sure if he recognized me, drinking at his open bar. This was back when I was boozing heavy, now, no more. He ordered me around like a butler, yet treated me kindly as a fellow artist. His friend was there, at the opening, from PA town too, who I also served. After working so much, I decided I prefer destitution to consumption (I really don't buy anything now, it's sad, I look like shit) because hard work is miserable with no redeeming qualities, besides the potential for observation. Republicans here were nice to me (a white man), though I was so miserable carrying trays that I was rude, and acting out sometimes, kicking doors, swearing loudly, and being sarcastically friendly. I trace the circular track to hell again: the sky last night and the air relaxed the humans on picnic benches, sipping their sweet drinks, sitting around in costumes, dressed up for shows and events, playing roles we have been trained to play, acting proper for situations.Cool, not humid, romantic night, all of us floating and flirtatious as the sun speckled the clouds, puff balls on a lilac gold dome with green mountains hugging the township.Beverages with spice and basil syrup. Rose, apertif, seductive intoxicants.II.The air puts the human-animals in a good mood. The air puts the dogs’ dogs at ease too, they lap at their bowls as clientele sip drinks. "Dogs" is mean and dehumanizing, but I can't help but dehumanize my clients. They take my service, though I do not like to provide it. In saying "dog," I am also referring to a kind of domesticated stupor, many feel, or exist in. I miss free wandering, wolf-like prowl. Domesticated creatures in middle space. To fight, and play, and kill, and drink, and fuck in middle space, animalistic behavior. If only I could be a wing-ed dog for real, fly up like a golden retriever angel. Consumers on the grass; many friends of mine are grass consumers, lappers, treat-eaters. At work, I make up sing-song stories like Björk in Dancer in the Dark, who constructs a musical fantasy in which she is the star actress, to maintain morale at her factory job. The songs she creates are escape paths to another dimension. My stories are darker:
Rose leaps across the backseat and slams herself into a window, mimicking the deer they hit; Azalea is distracted by the charade and drives off the bridge accidentally, hair strands floating in suspense, and Aster prays for his mama. The children are intertwined with the car smashed on the icy river. Children meeting an end. The bouquet rots by spring. Their namesakes grow overtop their embrace with the vehicle. The rosy snow melts into the river, which carries some car parts to a nearby town. Aster’s mama finds a wheel she recognizes. A search party is constructed and spreads across the region, like a plague. No one finds the children with flower names. A deer sidles up to the river and finds the scent of its mama intermingled with the few car/children parts remaining by the stream. The deer is the original dead deers’ baby. The mothers and fathers in the town down the river have no flower children, but the deer knows who the culprits are for her mama’s killing and nibbles some of the leftovers off a metal bar.
III.I sweep leaves off the floor, I pick up fallen cups. After a night of being sweet, I feel drained.A night with a floating cast of characters, like my coworker Sandy (fake-name) who is hoping to get promoted, go to kink clubs in Berlin, on Xanax. She cooks Gochujang shrimp for dying farmers.I inhabit the consciousness of Sandy, spacing out of my own to join with her headspace. My dog is my girl, my dog makes me happy, lapping blood off my leaky cuts, cleaning me up. If I can work with bandages on my arms, you can too. My shaggy lady keeps me sane. I think I will get out of here someday, but I'd miss my parent-farmers and the wide-open skies and plains, and I'd miss all these cheerful and respectful regulars who tip well. Why am I so sad? I tell men about my anxieties, and they tell me to go outside more. Whatever this problem is, I will get it sorted out. Whatever, this problem is, I will fix it. The workers hate the uppers, use the uppers to work harder. Work harder to fly, go to Disney, work hard to go Soarin' in the clouds, the ladies up there, all the angels up in heaven, we'll get there. Dehumanizing the dehumanized, white Trump supporters all, in all likelihood, who worked extra to save for Disney trips for his wife and kid, works at the Hilton to get a deal on $40 hotel rooms anywhere in the world by Hilton, dream to be a band caterer so she can travel the world, on tour, convert her parents' farm to a horticulture therapy retreat. Ginger with a prison guard husband. She is trying to get him special shoes because he spends so much time standing on the concrete. She was a drug and alcohol counselor at state facilities. Coworker breathes fire, chews tobacco. Coworker who sings karaoke three nights a week, saw him out, red-faced and happy. Nice people, nice to me, with the constituents that I perform sameness and similarity, acting like an echo vessel. The queer is an expert mimic. To soar with a band. To fly through the roof of the dive bar. To wash so many cups that doing so becomes automatic, to turn on a smile in despair, style a Great Clips haircut, I hate that some have to struggle so hard to survive while others spend so frivolously. Trump gave them hope, feel bad, he never meant to do much for them, never was going to, stoked their hatred and stroked their resentment for self-gain.I was attempting in the previous paragraph to inhabit the evil collective-consciousness without identifying or aligning myself with the hateful clan spirit. To pass as one, one can understand one. I am not one, a hater, I was trying to inhabit a hater perspective. Suffering can create hatred. Reduce suffering. Stop caricaturizing evil; evil is nuanced and faceted.To have a Disney daydream, to infinity and beyond. All the valor of hard work, there must be valor in a dead life, a hard life.
Pots and pans swim in water in the sink, dirty water made up of food stuffs. What is at the end of the tunnel? A coin? Were you my coin? Of course you were not a coin; it was L.O.V.E. Have you ever experienced it in your life? Have you ever felt what it is like to love a human being or are we just experiencing the gamification of everything; dating, love, sociality, art? Do you only love who will take you higher? Humans are assigned a place on the game hierarchy. Life is not Chutes and Ladders; why are we like this? Break the ladders, break the chutes. I walk all night because I cannot sleep or sit still. I end up on a dead-end street. The sky lightens. We are no better than the pigeons and rats. Dead-end zone. Our leaders hack away at the remains, eating bodies--trans people, immigrants, children who did nothing wrong. Children are born only to die because of where they are born. And these "leaders" eat each other, too, thinking there can only be one winner. Why are we cannibals? Why do the rich patriarchs need more than they have already? Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. The coin is the sun. The sun is not a coin. And you already have PLENTY. W.H.Y. are you doing this? W.H.Y. are you exploiting the vulnerable? Inhumans dehumanizing humans; greed takes us down a chute.
conceptual writing
"You" brings to mind K's face first. The drawing you made me after I drew you is your hand's trace. I close my eyes: the sheet holds your face on a glowing field. You saw light everywhere like you were traipsing around a sunlit prairie. We face mirrors. My mirror blocks your face. I see my face with your body below my neck; my glass neck cuts off and your torso is below it. Your torso is bloodless, and pearl liquid mutates into the shape of your chest. Prosthetic pecs twist into nipples I kiss. You said you are bisexual, so marrying a woman won't be too bad, but you've never had sex with a girl and have no desire to. I wonder if you are having sex with your wife now, and if she is pregnant with your child who will have brown hair like yours. I picture the crib, but I cannot picture the house, your wife, or your parents. Karim is Palestinian; his family doesn't live in Gaza. I was raised with menorahs in the window. My parents don't have one anymore. Karim is moving back to Saudi Arabia soon, he'll marry a woman there and take a job at an oil company. His parents are adding a wing to their house for their future kids. I want to change his set-path. Kathy Acker writes: “Fantasy is or makes possibilities. Are possibilities reality?” (119). I try to love without reducing Karim to an object-fantasy or narcissistic-projection site. Karim is a subject, and K is more “impersonal object.” K is a letter on the horizon, and Karim is a person walking away. Trees grip coconuts in front of a pixelating ocean, and a blown-out beach on the wallpaper. I look in the bathroom mirror, and I wonder if I look like Karim. A Greek Life couple asks if we are twins. Karim leans on a railing in rainbow club lighting. Colored circles spin across him, while students dance. I lay in a field at 4 AM, pulling out the grass. Pain is just pain without the eroticization of it. I wander past fraternity houses with rave light windows, and around a golf course, while I spam post on stories. I drink beer and listen to music that reminds me of Karim. The erotic other is hated, loved, and admired, incorporated into one's being, then spit out. The white veil cloaks the snarling face, and the tuxedo packages the hairy animal. Can a union be outside consumption? I picture K and I, two grooms in Saudi Arabia, about to move into a room in The Line, a two-billion dollar smart city being built across the Saudi Arabian desert. I learn that The Line project was abandoned, downscaled. Halberstam writes: "... sometimes libidinal energies are given over to destabilization, unbecoming, and unraveling" (209). I unravel, as does he, I'm sure.Karim sits on Corp's velvet sofa. The sofa morphs into Karim's beige couch, back in Pennsylvania. He stretches out and puts his feet on my lap. Charcoal curls outline his head, but Karim's face is gone. The candle on the windowsill glows through his missing face. We are drawn to images that mirror our reality and reassure us that it is stable and true. Is it the same for people: are we attracted to who can mirror us, reassure us of our anxieties, and confirm our self-assumptions? I dated Karim in the town where my parents lived. My mother cooks Pioneer Woman recipes, and listens to country music and Christian-parenting podcasts. She teaches Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses to students, many of whom are ex-military, or conservative. Her job is at risk, because the same populace she is trying to educate, voted for eliminating DEI programs. Yet, she changes conservative minds, and encourages empathy. Now, her class is all left-leaning, and there are only five undergrad students majoring in WGSS. My mother assigns students a side, insisting on a dialogue. How long will this continue? What are the ethics of a classroom dialogue, with no hate speech or anti-human assertions allowed, and personal viewpoint set aside? What do you think of my mother's job and livelihood? Do you believe she should be fired? Too moderating for Leftists? She says: you have to see the other side, and it breaks my heart to tell her that is not the zeitgeist. My mother is a nonconformist: reserve moral judgements. The nice white woman, a target. No empathy.Corp, my ex-boyfriend who worked at Apple, advised my mother to pivot into tech. I relayed the advice, and she said she'd rather work at Trader Joe's. She saw how miserable money-addiction made her ex-husband, a Wall Street banker, as I saw how miserable Corp's career-obsession made him. She refuses to aid in tech power, and knows another Szechuan pepper cocktail, is another drink.''Karim looked out at an equal field: how can we start here with no displacement? Karim was an organizer for the Free Palestine protests at Penn State. The queer café moved its flag indoors. White SUVs drive around with American flags flying off the top, and white men wear backwards hats inside the cars with gang signs out the window. Jacked boys stick their tongues out with backwards hats on in front of Greek letters. They sit on benches high up and watch the streets, beside police cars.In “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MxGx Movement," Mendelberg writes: "the discursive community of the MxGx movement is one of status reversal... Their critiques of schools, of teachers, of workplaces, and of government were grounded in the notion that these core institutions of society should be signaling the supreme value of “traditional” mores such as... assimilation to a uniform vision of America, and the authority of the law. The gravest status injury for many MxGx adherents was the loss of institutional stamps of approval and signals of esteem for a way of life and a set of values they viewed as morally superior. Like many right-wing populist movements, the MxGx movement connected these issues to a particular enemy—the corrupt elite who have unjustly hurt and maligned everyday Americans like them... The movement constructed a populist notion of the virtuous “American people” called to fight against domination and oppression by those in power. In doing so, the movement combined the status concerns of MxGx participants with a sense of righteous injustice about this loss, coupled to a normative vision of how the country’s problems could be solved by re-centering the traditional status order" (13).I've walked by the frats hundreds of times over the last ten years: fraternities are gangs with alpha and beta male divisions. Fraternities determine membership, based on perceived strength, power, future income, and, virility. Contained within the frats and outside them: homophobia towards self, brother, and outsider. Decorative American symbols like flags signal white nationalism and defensiveness of tradition. Underrepresented groups are selectively integrated into traditionally all-white Elite organizations. Elite organizations speak in code to keep outsiders from understanding, and knowledge inside.Lee Edelman provides a definition of queerness that is: "(...) the dismantling of identities... Rather than be an identity," he says, "queerness can only disturb an identity... queerness is always what is outside a structure of norms" (Edelman 00:15:12–00:16:54). Queerness is an identification with "not," queerness is aligning and identifying with what has been stigmatized, and according to Edelman, only exists in relation to what the "norm" demonizes; its existence is presupposed on reclaiming one's stigmatization.Stigma is assigned to the queer person who counters normality; is queerness a counter-culture? If MxGx and conservative orders endorse a reassertion of the "authority of the law," isn't the most effective form of anti-authoritarianism, law-breaking and law-disturbance; a continued violation of the normative systems, symbolized by the fraternities, that produce stigma?If queerness is criminalized, queerness can become criminal; opposing anti-queer laws, and systems. Why join a fraternity, or oppressive order; why not work at dismantling its logic and probe its rectum, like a Dadaist?I am not a Freudian: exhibiting interest in understanding an ideological enemy places the individual at risk of being directly or indirectly eliminated from a sphere or organization. Organizational membership requires subscription to, and reproduction of, spherical belief.Paraphrasing Freud, Berlant writes: "the will to destroy (the death drive) and preserve (the pleasure principle) the desired object are two sides of the same process." The fling flames at the end; even with sweet Karim, we broke each other to break.Corp laughed callously when I said my mother did not want to go corporate. I looked at him in the gentrification loft, with a underclass struggle down below, and thought: I am looking at a Himmler. I am the power-accessory. Why am I attracted to a materialistic megalomaniac? Why do we assign demonizing terms to replicants of systemic oppression, when we are all complicit in Capitalism? The desperate debase. The meanest people I know are poor and rich; it's not about money. It's ego.Arendt writes: "the mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history... was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation" (338). I believe we will see the anti-culture, and bourgeois limiting its voicings on belief, honor, dignity to preserve its power, social standing, and "private security." Do what is right, if you are able, prioritizing resistance and harm-minimization, over personal-advancement under corruption, forgoing bourgeois status and career accomplishment, and acclimating to precarity-conditions.I told him I saw him for what he was, and he tried to rebuild his illusion of grandeur, or delusion I had broken by telling him I saw him. When he realized my disgust could not be bought away, he tried to break me after. Is this Capitalism?
He waved his money over me like an American flag, and I took it from him. Finally he retracted his money and clothing from me, and humiliated me in front of a tech-and-finance group, though this was nothing new, the club turning against a newcomer who learns he does not respect the club rules, or club.In Michigan, a trans girl at my middle school was featured on local news and bullied, subsequently. My mother said, privately—it was wrong for her to hurt that girl, and unfriended the mother. The mother and her daughter were members of the country club; my mother had access to that gated community, through the transphobe. Violators of normal reality were shunned; unfriending the wrong person meant losing a friend group, and access to an elite circle. Shunning: we experience a maligning of dissident individual voices by mainstream reality-enforcement.Fraternities and conservative social clubs replicate the codes of orders they fall under. Institutions and social behaviors in them, are similarly designated, hence the necessity of nonconformity, even at penal cost. My friend and I broke into the fraternity after being turned away, when The DL Guy didn't come to the front door, to let us in.The Right's "successful" populism: a screenshot from Nancy Mace's Instagram reads: “No More LGBTQ Agendas” in a cute Soviet square on a library background in Midwest cursive (post archived or deleted as of: November 17, 2025). It hides it harm in Michael’s craft store color and familiar sensibility. It is the candy red sign advertising a forty percent sale.Anita Bryant smiles like an all American Eve. Nancy Mace: “Eve” and "Pioneer Woman," too. The detournement of "The Pioneer Woman" sensibility posits Mace as a family-friendly figure to families who consume Hallmark TV-movies.A comment reads: "Nancy you're an inspiration for a lot of women God bless you Wonder Woman." Mace adopts a Marvel pose, with her arm on her hip, and horizon-directed gaze.Like a public school slideshow, or social media rant, I play lecturer out-of-work, futilely talking to an uncaring mass, who moved on to more lucrative ventures: America genocided thousands of queer people by refusing to prioritize AIDS research. Reagan neglected to address AIDS until thousands were already infected and dead. If conservatives wonder why it seems there are more young queer individuals, it is because past generations of young queer individuals were in hiding, straight marriages, or died from AIDS. Conservatives, like Mace insist on a single reality. Paraphrasing Talia Mae Bettcher, I think queerness destabilizes the reality-enforcer's conception of reality. Queer lives can and do haunt the conservative simulacrum. I screenshot fragments from the AIDS memorial quilt: will we erase an already reduced population from public education discourse? Of course, many died alone in alleys and didn't get spaces. The quilts can be playful and clever in the face of mass death, which gestures to queer resilience. What made Scott Slater "COOLNESS?" Needless death is transformed into a craft collage of pattern, care, and personality. The subjects are re-embodied by their families, original or found, and ex-partners. Sentiment asserts life lived. The dead are provided rectangular lots. The dead are released with angel wings and doves and evoked with jeans, block letters, poems, naive utopian pictures, quotes and stains, birds, flowers, colors, and rainbows, music notes, and fractals, states where they were born, and birth-death brackets. Structures that lean on power and allow for maintenance and expansion of power: scaffolding on a FiDi skyscraper or U.S. capitol building. Erase the quilt from public school classrooms: dead queers meant nothing. The genocider wraps itself in its victim's cloth, or discards its victim's clothing. Will teaching children about a gay death memorial be called an act of grooming, or indoctrination? The quilt may be paraded as a warning: try this "lifestyle," and reap your fate. Dead lives can be a scare tactic. I think about Laura Lima's Gala Chicken and Gala Coop: anarcho-spirit. Can an artwork be alive, and dying?
I tried to find K on Second Life. Yet, I encountered barriers, delineating property from open space, and my search was limited to public zones.
We can build anything we want and we build the same world.
Can Karim be found online? Can Arial make a body? Can his LinkedIn be him? I found him online. I am in an erotic desert, until I meet a new love. A contour lines the mattress angel with a bleach crown. Skin on triangle beneath shirt collar, denim flaps. Damp legs with hair glued down and a congested nose. Blondie has his arm around me on the subway platform at 3 AM, while police watch. Kissing him, I said: I love you, I love you, I love you. You make plans, and don't text me for twelve hours.
He says he's tired from working, and then at work. Blondie works fifty hours a week at Starbucks, despite having a Master's degree. Phone screens merge with city lights in the train window.
In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam writes of Erika's self harm in Haneke's The Piano Teacher: "She then wounds herself with a knife, stabbing herself, not trying to kill herself exactly but to continue to chip away at the part of her that remains Austrian, complicit, fascist, and conforming. Erika’s passivity is a way of refusing to be a channel for a persistent strain of fascist nationalism, and her masochism or self-violation indicates her desire to kill within herself the versions of fascism that are folded into being—through taste, through emotional responses, through love of country, love of music, love of her mother" (208).Accepting depression, can I look through it? I seek to understand the reproduction of bitterness, complicity, depression, and nihilism, because it is produced by the co-mingling of poverty, mental illness, trauma, and addiction. Systemically caused, though masochism can become addictive, and identity. Given the demonization of personal disclosure related to taboos and underclass experience, I use a distanced objectivity, that breaks. Disclosing suffering publicly, puts you at a workplace disadvantage unless you are able to spin your suffering into a wholesome and institution/ workplace-approved narrative-commodity. How can I enter "a cut-and-paste genre, to find another realm of aesthetic production dominated by a model of radical passivity and unbeing?" (Halberstam 209). What privileges undernote this? I return to this investigation, and think about de-privileging. Am I confused or about confusion under a REDACT climate? Who said confusion is not truth, or closer to the falsehood of truth, than certainty? I don't feel the attachment to sentiment. Am I sane, degenerate, or outsider spectacle? Am I defensive? This ideological breakdown is the art subject, and its form shatters the mirror, which reflects what I see.Does resistance have to be loud? The most important resistance-work can be the quietest: I think about my mother, who is paid little for working hard and changing conservative views. In "I'd rather die," Deli Girls shout: "Nothing you say will make me change my mind. You can't make me change, so just am I just supposed to die? I'd rather die. Nothing you say can make me change my mind." Can the assertion of a sxicide urge oppose the expected: performances of wellness, active healing, and progressive optimization? I am walking around Bushwick and end up at a bookstore that is doing a book club with McKenzie Wark. She says (paraphrasing): the way to not be property is to be a subject.Byung Chul-Han writes: "Without hope, we remain trapped in beenness or in the badly existing. Only hope generates meaningful actions that bring the new into the world" (59).I think of a decimated building: is that hope? Is renovation hope? I don't think so.In The Accursed Share, Bataille writes: "Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy... living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth" (28).Organic life can grow sideways and diagonal, too. Can we prioritize radiation over growth? What if we did not get any taller, but intersected with each other like X-joints?Halberstam writes: "the dream of an alternative way of being is often confused with utopian thinking and then dismissed as naïve, simplistic, or a blatant misunderstanding of the nature of power in modernity. And yet the possibility of other forms of being, other forms of knowing, a world with different sites for justice and injustice, a mode of being where the emphasis falls less on money and work and competition and more on cooperation, trade, and sharing animates all kinds of knowledge projects and should not be dismissed as irrelevant or naïve" (83).GenderFail’s “Manifesto, Profit-For-Survival” states: “we need to prioritize black folks, indigenous folks, trans and non-binary folks, undocumented folks, to normalize access to not just PROFIT-FOR-SURVIVAL but PROFIT-FOR-FUTURES. In this I do mean PROFIT in a capitalist sense, but also in the sense of how PROFIT can help create non-capitalist futures. This is not utopic, rather it is about facing the reality of living within a colonialist capitalist racist society.”
"Indeed the centrality of failure, negativity, and partial successes in the striving for gender to provide the foundation it promises but always fails to be is the condition for its symbolic and practical transformation" (Berlant 62). I deleted everything I wrote about Karim, basically, he is a ghost you'll never know. I never knew him. I fell in love with the aura around him, and him, I think, but what is love? Originally, I set out to make an automaton of Karim, and failed. A miss in building a gendered subject, like Karim, resulted in an alternative possibility. Instead of recreating him, I created a partial surrogate in my memory eye. I do not want to retrieve, or relive the past with Karim, because I do not want to conjure anything past. Nostalgia is conservative.I think about looking and feeling backward, as is symptomatic of the queer experience and described extensively by Heather Love. Feeling backward is all I am doing here, returning to my past relationships. I consider other forms of movement.The present contains what we were and my present is moving sideways, or diagonal. To change for the better non-better, is to envision movement on an equal plane. I can live in a fantasy-reality, not one in which my desires are satisfied, but where my desires are non-packaged in my head. Not your property. The introspective reality deepens, if surface reality does not correspond to the individual's imagination (the imagination is non-individual, as individuality is a Capitalist figment). I envision Karim, not as a fictional device.I hope that we can continue to grow our imaginings of non-authoritarianism, even if the authoritarian state requires we alter ourselves to become more outwardly normative (normative is what the state defines as normal, not what I personally think is normal, or abnormal).Can one queer from within the normative mask? The space containing the miss is the queer space.
I wear a masc-normative mask for navigation ease, even though I am queer.I'm not claiming to speak for anyone, so much paranoia in the air, and this thought results from the culture of critique and competition, to advance in an American society that kills its losers off, "spiritually," or physically, "for New York City is a very expensive metropolitan area," and America is expensive too (Acker 86). The child is killed by the organization coach.Halberstam writes: "when the Sex Pistols spat in the face of English provincialism and called themselves 'the flowers in the dustbin,' when they associated themselves with the trash and debris of polite society, they launched their poison into the human," and became politically necessary rather than cynical for its own sake, or pure negation and defensiveness (172).Halberstam accuses Edelman's definition of queerness as not as being too hopeless (172).I don't want to be hopeless; sorry for being depressed and solipsistic. Can we be punk still? In 1990, Kathy Acker wrote: "I searched for younger or more radical work or just something other than stock. But the New York art world seemed to have closed its ranks: the old community in which an underground gradually became commercial has disintegrated into a market whose share-holders, frightened, are determined to take no more chances" (86).Why do we fake revelation, instead of admitting confusion? I am an inmate at an uncaring market. What am I trying to do here?Reckon with queer erasure, and the irrelevance of queer theory to M-G- UXA.Everything I know and am good at is useless to corporations and people like Corp.The call-and-answer format/ voice split is the schismatic culture manifested in the individual, which requires we break into performed and private parts: secret and public voices, policed by ideological correctness and controlled by the bourgeois leaders. I am poor and powerless. There is no freedom of speech. There is no freedom of expression if dependent on an economy.Italics insert conflict. You are reading the breakdown of an essay and the ideological frameworks it applies to itself, which is what queer art is: uncertainty in itself as counter to normative forms of knowing, mastery, and "genius," which I am not.CUT UP 1: Dumpling caught in my throat. I gulp it down. I push the beige lumps around. Fork against the paper pulp, and white paper pills appear. The beef got caught in their teeth. Blondie and I are out for dumplings, in Corp's neighborhood. Somersault across my plate. What? Just say. With care, I scrape the dumplings into the hole. not enough for me. don't text me for twelve hours. tired from working, and then at work. blame me sitting here and trying to have a nice fucking night with you. trap opportunistic. savior, and whining . I don't know what to tell you. friends at tech jobs and start-ups, and with the corpses eating Chinese food around a marble island. tech fucks I was eating with. I pause to gulp my beer. champion of the poor. appliances for self-improvement, Use and disuse. Unuse. free time is. be free. ditched Corp, disgusted wasn't impressed tormented, unhappy. disposition. Untrue, sip my Heineken. happier alone. dead people I ate dumplings with, cupid statue Corpses Cupid return to Rome Blondie smiles turns to me. cute make out. drives me to Queens flirt with other guys. glasses I liked, knock-offs. Prada on the subway. Said goodbye. Nice laugh. same frames, demeanor is different. High, funny. Funny car ride. sullen, knees to my chin. I might flirt with other guys. High, sweaty. Graduation, had to leave. always sad. hateful. successful. with you. Let's move out of the city to a cheap countryside. I can't do that. you can, you don't want to. He turns the wheel, says nothing. hand on his neck like a claw and steer his head. Car in park. I love you. I love you too. We can work this out. Car in drive to finish the route. we tried. It didn't work.God knows we tried. sip my kratom seltzer, and try not to cry. if we were rich, we could be in love. so unfair. good night. you. slam the car door. woman sits in her puffer at the black ocean boardwalk. can't see her face. Waves shore. man stands grey hotels on the horizon. lifeguard chair. arched K's back floated sky, water. take the subway back. unhappy. phone dies. rice hisses and crackles in the pan. eat butter rice.CUT UP 2: sxicidal document for whiteness; is queerness good? useful to the empire? theory OBSOLETE? low status. ACADEMIC TONE: IS QUEER INTELLECT OBSOLETE? Is earnestness weakness, or effeminate? IS WEAKNESS ANTI-FASCIST? (...) INTELLECT OBSOLETE? Is earnestness weakness, or effeminate? IS WEAKNESS ANTI-FASCIST? AMATEUR AND NON. called cruel art: constraints of REDACTION. Convolution CLIENTELE. CLIENTELE, LUXURY REDACT OBJECT CONTENT. TEXT. not STATE. lament. not; REDACT. CLIENTELE. TEXT. paper. I am not STATE. Am I lament? I am not; I AM WAIF , UNLIKABLE. waste, Dustbin Flower, Psychiatric Material. DO YOU LIKE ME cute sweet PSYCHIATRIC rage and politeness when I am happy, Pay Buy sex. emotion. human. sweet. humor. Entertainment value EVIL, CAPITAL CAPITOL BODY: ANARCHO-SERFS in NEW YORK die. lament, I am not; WAIF, really, FOE. DIDACT. breakdown DXE. I am weak. SUBTRACT REDACTED and Disturbed MIND, said the LAWYER! sensitive viewer, YOU are beautiful. I am CLEAN BPD, PRESCRIPTION FXGGXT PENITENTIARY, stabilized science-fiction. FEEL GOOD escape, what you want to call it? November 15, 2025, said the snarl.GRINCH: ART STATE. STATE ART. dead PEARL. GOOD BOY. anger issue. CLIENTELE TEXT STATE REDACT. OBSOLETE? AMATEUR NON. LUXURY OBJECT. negative. COIN UNPENITENTIARY, I AM THE GOOD BOY. GAY INTIMACY. FORMALISM AND LANDSCAPES. ADVANCEMENT OF SELF AND HIGHER INCOME. HIGH INCOME, HIGH INCOME GRAFFITI TEXT IN A REST STOP KINDNESS.CUT UP 3: Hugh Jackman Reminiscence,cyberpunk on a plane, I try to remember K. sex scene more trope pornographic interlude, a male gaze fantasy fruited. Perfect sanitary and well-acted sex with self-aware acting, a raised leg, a dress pulled up from the knee for the camera man, build-up to sex and cut-away Hugh Jackman peels a device off prior sequence memory: device realive her audience witness resurrection. Writing: resurrection and regurgitation; don't know what happened to you, so here you are, a fragment pointless sad masturbatory give it up waste years . evades capture. opposes power kaleidoscopes diaristic, poetic, and academic, blog-writing, non-totality and atonality.recursive. deteriorates in the recursive machine. instability. Instability destabilizes enforcement. cries and eats itself.contradiction. masochistic opposes the sadistic unproductive responses. non-productivity. mutant baby. killing machine splits its citizen-parts. The citizen splits. IT dollar. pop song remix. morally inferior. attempt. gay DADA. priest Stories.CUT UP 4: Corp's clothes like unsleaving iPhone. opening the white box. top lid lifted off the bottom lid. rose gold, turned him on. He befriended guys at the deli, nice clothes to wear: no ratty jeans. proper etiquettes: cheers, tap your glass cultured at design school. Sex climax after a short period of time, sexual desire was no longer useful. porn dolls; talking to the CEO of a social media start-up platform, for adult content-creators, monetizing the sex. completed the position, we shuffled to next best option, then Corp gym. I said: lay around, or look into my eyes? Dream journal. Karim Corp didn't look up from the Apple Watch. -- At Apple, in charge of many lower rungs, Corp liked to feel superior. marry for money, Karim went back to Saudi Arabia. "I feel it, I fuck it." song on headphones Williamsburg. bloody chic heart. immoral. I buy Oslo coffee Corp's debit. Corp drinks himself to sleep shovel scrapes snow off a sidewalk. rough-edged toenails against the comforter. The photograph of Corp's dead dog stares me down preserved with black eyes. misses his earth bone. Williamsburg apartment, Greenpoint loft. networked and optically beautiful szechuan pepper sea foam. scowling at the rooftop. Why are you mad? You know why. I don't sits in silence quail crackers with cilantro dust. He is still silent. I say: propping up of abstraction retrograde, decorative, or apolitical something, feels like nothing. huh? cute, interesting, funny, and zany, dreamy, and adjective. apathy that is not apathetic? numb horror? I don't know. non-decor? non-style? scrappiness that is not sloppy non-predetermined? without post-human aesthetic? failure that doesn't look pretty or made-to-fail non-rehash? care that is not kitsch or sentimental? non-pretense? adjective art for adjective time. insecure market decorator, entertainer, innovator, interior decorator, master, entrepreneur. Instagram spectacle for a buying class not aware. collective fragmentation that has resulted in the cordoning of individuals from individuals? positive hopelessness? He says it is better to focus on making money: come to Equinox with me. no, gym. I'm not happy here. lying on your nice sofa and looking at the luxury around me and feeling empty. if you don't like it, move out. rooftop restaurant, I look at the city below. I like us. calamari porridge too salty for Corp. flag the waiter down. to the sad-looking girl: this is too salty. We need a better batch. : only the best. -- Here, he passes me the bill. You pay. I can't. You need me.classic NYC coming-of age experience, eight years older. She rails a line, and says: he's rich. I love him. instrument to capital, a careerist in tech. artist. part of the evil, but his whole life is nice, because he works for it to be. Men take your time and dreams. sex worker in Paris, my roommate is wise. Her ex-boyfriend, Euro-money, flew her all over, before he broke her heart and got her to drop out of college, he said: if you don't like to work, you'll become a prostitute. And she did. if all utopian possibilities are eliminated, played Corp the album, unsettled: are you listening to the lyrics? Get to playing with that cock and make that bam and I walk and pimp 'cause I am. Sex time frame not transcending the frame. "sex is the corollary of capitalism and war" and advocates pragmatic strategies to win the sex-money-war game (Preciado). sex as strategy Corp's paycheck. Choice is a luxury. locked into production's mirror room, one will have sex in the mirror room. The mirror room Equinox gym.exit the mirror room? Can production-line-sex sensate sublimity? Björk's "All is Full of Love" music video, and I think for a second it was like that, two robots in limerence, until it was two robots having mechanical intercourse, debit card after. Paul Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi," or "orgasmic force... This strength is of indeterminate capacity; it has no gender... its orientation emphasizes neither the feminine nor the masculine and creates no boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality or between object and subject; neither does it know the difference between being excited, being exciting, or being-excited-with. It favors no organ over any other... Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule... It is a force of transformation for the world in pleasure—'in pleasure with.' Potentia gaudendi unites all material, somatic, and psychic forces and seeks all biochemical resources and all the structures of the mind" (33). Homosexual, heterosexual, trans, and non-binary sex contain potential for unregimented and non-logoed orgasmic expansion and transformation. The genderless orgasmic force is queer expression. It haunts and threatens preconceived games, orders, rulebooks, and warfare. Queerness is not a capitalist tactic; it does not play within exchange-based doctrine; it seeks to exceed it. It shares; it does not exchange. It widens; it is not narrowed by penetration. It is not focused on one giving, and the other taking. It is not financial. Queerness opposes capitalism, queerness is greater; "it is a force of transformation for the world." conservatives: queerness, a social contagion? queerness like love. Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi... does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into private property." Apple employee, Apple skin. not trade autonomy for employment. not love. Homosexuality and heterosexuality terms from a dated glossary. man looking like a man, sitcom actor. vaginal and penile. organs and slots? fetish objects, worshipping girls with preserved sex organs? elementary school, they made us play factory. entrepreneur? E-N-T-R-E-P-R-E-N-E-U-R. GOOD WORK, DOING GOOD; GOOD JOB. Language enforces productive and pro-social behavior. suitable mate.CUT UP 5: met Blondie at a bar with racing turtles Maneater Blondie was from Long Island. I am from Penn State. Long Island and Penn State . “falling in love” “I Love You All The Time” Corp. Blondie pleased by the kiss, but still interested in Corp. not mechanical like with Corp. not robotic reenactment of a straight romance. high with a bland comedown. magic was gone. Regalio Deli, respark the magic wand, and he fine breaking it. Reality kicked in."Object-libido changes to narcissistic libido... when love changes to identification" (Silverman 193). Karim had a different experience, uncommunicable and non-understandable, though he tried to tell me about his life. Karim went to Islamic schools, and had sex with Grindr men. He didn't know if the hook-ups would turn out to be cops. I went to public schools, and dated openly. I didn't know if the relationships would last.Acker writes: “If I’ve died to you, if I am dead, who am I? Because I love you I’ve destroyed myself; I’m you… love destroys common time and reverses subject and object… I’m your mirror; identity’s gone because there’s no separation between life and death… the final model of time is that the mirror reflects the mirror: time is our love” (116).I loop back to K who deserves even more, yet I cut it here, a lie.He leaned against a railing on a porch, in a Stories snapshot. I took shot after shot. He and I made out in a stall. The frat voices were slurred bros.I saw Karim on Tinder after we broke up, a week or two before he was meant to leave for Saudi. He was flexing his arm, and looking at his reflection.Corp's friends told me he had a pattern for going for younger guys, artsy-types. The guy I saw at the bar in Chinatown, looked sort of like me, and I wondered if Karim had a pattern too."Repetition is what enables you to recognize, even unconsciously, your desire as a quality of yours" (Berlant 19).I wrote poems about his leg hair, and posted them online, resulting in loss of followers.Berlant writes: "love is always deemed an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no attachment and no love" (7). When does fantasy turn into delusion?"(...) melancholia becomes integral to love itself..." (Berlant 19).I had a wonderful night with you at the Penn State duck pond. What's the baby's name?
CUT UP 6: love in Capitalism (or post-capitalism) cannibalistic? Attachment to possession, ownership, and/or control. Fuck to possess and consume, have fun, or actualize a contract. fuck to Link? honey pool, productive or reproductive. oppositional. bedroom dissent. -- Poor or abused don't know who to blame self-destruct. neoliberal state conditions people to blame themselves, excusing power structures of their role in manufacturing suffering, and excusing power structures of guilt and responsibility. Maladaptive or masochistic behavior is a symptom of a systemic wound. Maladaptive or masochistic behavior fetishizes and self-administers. crazy to neoliberal believers, who are unable to see outside of the societal construct. labeled crazy or "ill" by the state and psychiatric system, in order to discredit radical or dissenting thought. Psychiatry necessarily treats individual suffering; it does good. trauma confession details what happens when you are poor excising trauma confession, Rage concerns. UNSTABLE “scary” or “angry” or “concerning.” If a person is seen as “scary,” “angry,” “disturbed,” or “concerning” they are “crazy,” CALM. stay calm. logical and make careful and logical arguments silencing enrages sublimate the rage . disaffected tone. People like to be soothed If people are made upset, they like to feel there is a message reason to be upset. not made upset for no reason. made upset for no reason, the upsetter is “cruel.” work details sadness, presented without solutions, “depressing” and “useless.” Sad are often socially outcasted. unhelpful and unfun. sad people should get help. burdens. The sad person get better. If they do not “failure.” Treatment eases life. Medications ease pain and make the individual a productive citizen. “Recovery narratives” “It gets better” submits to a progressivist improvement narrative. do not believe “it gets better” are villainized.grinch character (who is coded as gay). antisocial grump, cave-existence, made happy by Christmas cheer. normalize by adopting a positive Christian outlook, and you will be accepted by your American community. Despair happiness performance or transformation worsens despair. Eliminate improvement and depressed may “improve.” happiest when the men I date aren’t telling me to be happier. happiest not mimicking happiness. Happiness is not the goal,Despair is valid Depression has to express regardless of utility. Punishing a viewer with despair, while perhaps “cruel,” may unsettle the settler-colonial front. Confusing a viewer or reader can confuse colonial logic. Overwhelming with emotional contradiction resists the flattening of aura under capital.mimic an ideological stance Rubik’s Cube an enemy ideology. Rubik’s Cube is not unsolvable; the Rubik’s Cube presents as a familiar object, banal toy. mutable. has infinite solutions. No solution is permanently correct. enigma. work to solve it, never solve it forever. resets. struggles to solve the Rubik’s obsess over. fascist. enemy is closer to friend. What is the significance of a Rubik’s Cube? Thing disseminated. Thing copied. reproduced. Cube preoccupies. absorbs time.
CUT UP 7: no stable solution. the depressive’s preoccupation. distracts from despair. kills itself, through deletion, anticapitalism useful. “does not get the point.” Urgency, more dire. Rubik’s Cube asserts its existence. different. diversifies the text. made readymade. go on a date ; he attends the top ivy. He : the best art is more community-engaged. liberal: wants to make surface changes to the state & earn a large paycheck ,deserves this, coming from a working class background. James Forman writes: “liberalism is the refusal to engage in principled ideological struggle inside and outside of a revolutionary organization and if we are truly revolutionary we will struggle to eliminate all forms of liberalism from our social practice.” revolution may be impossible. Revolution may be possible; I don’t know. he sees me as futile. Bad contributor and bad income. Medium attractive. good art is advertisements. advertisements useful attractive, creative, and well made. Ivy League date shocked by the writings of Diane di Prima or Valerie Solanas: “dark,” “disturbing,” “pessimistic,” need radical dissent. conservatives may be a lost cause. art like techno: mutable and abstract, queer in refusal to resolve or settle. revolutionary in its refusal to conform to time and space norms.is not for everyone. NTS umru set: “I don’t think we need a government.” A good anarchist mayor would disband the corporations and allow peasant ransacking. NO GUNS DAY frat boy can call me a faggot. bash his head in They act like the “first American” missionaries who were KILLERS. Gays shoot them. play shooting range. if total anarchy occurred, so anarchy may not be best. If money was eliminated, differences are not so great. ART FARM. Blaze the guns first. Envy for larger farm. Capitalism or bureaucracy. Happier commune. suffering is shared. bureaucracy. wish humans could not be greedy or power-interested, eliminate power, eliminate the idea of power. Is the desire for power in human nature? Capitalism says YES. Forman writes: “We must struggle each day against the state and its control mechanisms and constantly summarize our experiences so that we will have theories to guide our future work.” The document is an ongoing de-conditioning. summarize and dissect encounters with the state and its “control mechanisms.”Taught to maintain social cohesion and social order. One has to leave one's culture to realize their culture is a culture. One has to be outside of belief to realize belief is construction. politicians, public schools, and parents: the panoptical units. Humans conscious of our programming. hack and delete rewrite leave the code slot blank, watch TikToks of conservatives talking about "woke ideology." it is an ideology that opposes or seeks to reform state-colonial ideology, whose tenets are to maintain social order and American global power. Conservatives : correct or delete woke ideology. problem with "wokeness" and "woke ideology" : correct and reshape the surface and illusion of reality--maintaining the Neoliberal order, instead of REVOLUTION. The settler-colonial state is built on the genocide of Indigenous people, and on slave labor. Kill us. sham. Why labor? I'd rather die. Necessity of: LOVE, PUNK, PLAY, ART, FRAGMENTATION, and REMEMBERANCE.
WORKS CITEDAcker, Kathy. “The City.” Bodies of Work: Essays, Serpent’s Tail, 1997, pp. 106–25.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley, Zone Books, 1988.
Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Dead Letter Office (an imprint of Punctum Books), 2012. DOI: 10.21983/p3.0015.1.00.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Björk. All Is Full of Love. Homogenic, One Little Indian Records / Elektra Entertainment, 1997. Directed by Chris Cunningham, music video, 1999.
Deli Girls. “I'd rather die.” Take It It’s Yours, NUMB Records, 2016.
Forman, James. Twenty Enemy Forces Within a Revolutionary Organization That Must Be Combatted. Black Panther Party, 1971.
GenderFail. Manifesto, Profit-for-Survival: Discourses on Anti-Capitalist Publishing Practices. 3rd expanded ed., GenderFail Press, 2021.
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Spirit of Hope. Translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 2024.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1989.
Lopes, Ricardo, host. “#715 Lee Edelman – No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.” The Dissenter, YouTube, uploaded by The Dissenter, 2 Sept. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-kg4QRa3lc.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press, 2007.
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Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson, Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013.
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The NAMES Project Foundation. The AIDS Memorial Quilt. 1987–present.
I begin again. I saw Karim on Tinder after we broke up, a week or two before Saudi. He was hunting for other guys, flexing his arm, and looking at his reflection in a building's side glass pane.Later, in New York I met a guy, who said he and Karim hooked up once. He said it like he didn't know it would stun me, which he couldn't have known.I say: that sounds casual, then.It was casual. He has a big dick.True, I say, and sip my drink.Corp's friends told me he had a pattern for going for younger guys, artsy-types. The guy I saw at the bar in Chinatown, looked sort of like me, was an artsy-type and I wondered if Karim had a pattern too.Karim and Corp were mean, but I can be. The sweetest people have a knife inside. When they feel betrayed or undermined, they stab to kill.I begin again, in second person. I longed for you obsessively. I wrote poetry and posted it online to perform my obsession. I could not cope with a life I perceived to be dead-end: so what? You became a romance protagonist to me: when does fantasy become delusion?What is the line between me and you? We had sex with beheadings on the TV, horror movies, not real ones, and it was hot?I don't want to forget you. Do I regret the chokehold you had on me? I have had some very hot sex in my life; sex between two men can be passionate and intense.Meet me in heat. I am who you want to see.I could have embraced your family: who did not know you were gay. College was your time to be gay: then, back to Saudi Arabia.I think you got your behaviors from American movies and television.At our final meeting, you walk out from behind a bookshelf.You say: my sister just had a baby.Oh, really.Men play their darts, play their pool. Gold and brown beers are consumed. At a bar in Chinatown, I ran into someone who knew you back in Pennsylvania and he said: oh yeah, we hooked up.I say: green chintz duvet and green eyes, no brown, meant nothing to me.Nothing?Nothing at all. Though I wrote letters with lines like: I had the most wonderful night with you at the Penn State duck pond.I did the same.And, and, I wrote, every time I vape now, I'll think of you.I wrote the same.--Karim, sits on his rug, making eye contact.In the bathroom of the first sports bar with a beach along the wall, I posted a selfie captioned: love is an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap, and love is the feeling of bridging it.Did I love you or love that you could take me away? I say to Karim on a bridge, high above the water. The bridge is in the clouds.Both.Your hair is like a cloud.You cut yours.Yes, I shaved it after you, and I have kept it cut short.The sky is too blue overhead, on the bridge. Turns out, we are characters in your Animal Crossing world, and not my SL game. You walked your short character across the world to meet me here. We are both shorter on the game.You shared your world, in an apartment that was private, too. You showed me your private--Life.I look for you around: how many hours have I spent looking for, and constructing you?Obsessively resurrecting you has stunted my progress, and I do not mind.You should leave me.So I do.
Sounds like clickbait: people who don't post on Instagram may be dead already, symbolically "suicided," or in the process of being worked to death offline. Digital death is social suicide. Is social suicide self-punishment or self-immolation? Can non-participation be a hunger strike, or is silence always misread as "neutral" compliance, or a gesture of defeat? Can suicidal expression function as resistance? Does resistance have to be utilitarian? Does resistance, too, have to work toward "productive" goals? Non-productivity can be inadvertently productive. In "I'd rather die," Deli Girls shout: "Nothing you say will make me change my mind. You can't make me change, so just am I just supposed to die? I'd rather die. Nothing you say can make me change my mind." The assertion of a suicide urge opposes the trending "clean" lifestyle imposition and the performances of wellness, active healing, and progressive optimization it endorses. It opposes conservative arbiters in power, by refusing to perform "okayness" or "involvement" in power-scaffoldings. Symbolic suicide can be an act of radical refusal to further be transformed or optimized by a system, which is killing the subject. The subject refuses to be healed by a system killing it. The subject refuses to participate in a genocidal economy. The subject is a human, not a subject. The subject asserts humanity to rupture the distancing academic tone. Non-participation is a hunger strike; it results in starvation. Non-participation is a strike against comfort; it results in being made houseless, and thus invisible--or perhaps better or worse than invisible, an obstacle or active disturbance on the bourgeois workday route (like the masochist who wraps himself in a carpet outside Basement, step over me or on me). A poverty-spectacle functions as an abject intrusion. A poverty-spectacle reminds the middle and upper classes, of their oppressive statuses and active compliance in a murderous socio-economic scheme. A glimpse of an outskirt, or a dissident thought is a different note in the echoing bubble-cavern.Poverty kills. White patriarchal Imperialism kills its underside. Despite progressive efforts at diversified representation, state-sponsored slaughter still occurs. We change what we can. I refuse to "get rich" or invest in "becoming better" while people are dying of class discrepancy, misogyny, anti-queerness, racism, and genocide. Is this an expression of white privilege? We refuse if we can. We act when we can. We act how we can. We act if it kills us.
IN PROGRESS
For K: a gay anti-gesamtkunstwerkOne year and eight months ago, I met K.
You told me about Saudi Arabia: Islamic school, your religious sisters and their husbands, men on Grindr hacking your phone and threatening to send your Grindr chats to all your phone contacts, and The Line, a two trillion-dollar smart city being built across the desert. You told me the first time you had sex was on vacation in Germany because you were too scared of being arrested for hooking up in Saudi Arabia. You said some Grindr profiles are undercover cops. I was mesmerized by your eyes while you were telling me about the cops."He" becomes "you" as we become more familiar. You suggested a handsome escape. I made all your attributes charming and looked for a star-crossed narrative.Men play their darts, play their pool. Cups of gold and brown fluid are consumed.
You will move back to Saudi Arabia. You will marry a woman there. Your parents are adding a wing to their large house for you, your wife, and your future children. The financial incentives provided by staying at the oil company will keep you there, and overpower your desire to live a gay American lifestyle.
I made K into a prince and this is the problem with my gaze. K is a subject not an impersonal object. K lives in Saudi Arabia now and I don't know him.
write through the despair that makes my limbs and body feel greasy and heavy and my lungs slimy and full.
Ugly feelings that have no use cannot be absorbed into capital.
"The eroticization of suffering" saves me from my Death Drive. Pain is just pain without the eroticization of it. Pain kills. Pain is terrible.
The erotic other is hated, loved, and admired, incorporated into one's being, then spit out.
K's leaving was intolerable; he became an intolerable reminder of future loss. I wanted to remember him, so I wrote him down. I tried to splice K into a video work. I couldn't find the right tone or point. I couldn't arrange him across a page to frankenstein him. My "melancholy cannibalistic imagination" repudiated "the loss’s reality," and I still couldn't have him in my mouth again. On our first date at a restaurant, he ate an octopus tentacle. I swallowed an octopus limb from his plate. The octopus limb is a phantom limb of K's. Rather than “cannibalize” you, I wanted to join with you. Marriage promises eternal attachment. The white veil cloaks the snarling face, and the tuxedo hides the hairy body of the animal. Marriage groups citizens into expanding units. Marriage is a veil on our animal being; the veil is made of interlocking white lines, the grid screens the bride from his/their/her bride/groom.
The depressed person defends themself against death anguish and anguish caused by the erotic object. The depressed is dead until the melancholy goes away. "You" brings to mind K's face first, which is holy and spotted with absences. Holy drape on a green glowing prairie.
You said: When you touched me I died.
K's family was Palestinian. I swore off Judaism when Israel dropped the bombs (again). I did not have to swear off Judaism, but I don’t feel attached to Judaism. In Hebrew school they said Israel is good. In primary school they said America is good. I believed what the teachers said because the teachers were authority figures. In public school, they split us into groups.
Teacher: one group play pilgrim, the other play indigenous. They did not use the word indigenous.
Teacher: Sit at table and eat thanksgiving together.
Why do people feel pride for a genocidal nation?2: CORP
Corp saw me across the room, with a broken iPhone. I should have been invisible wearing no designer brands, but you noticed me. It was a chance meeting between us (like fate) my second week in NYC. He helped me fix my iPhone.A dog stares off the wall in a photograph. It is preserved with black eyes and misses its earth bone. The heater keeps rattling like a cobra who doesn’t rattle.
.
I tried to be your housewife. On the TV of the apartment in Greenpoint, I lie on a plush couch and learn how to be a restaurant host from YouTube videos. You say I should get rich so I can go to Equinox like you. I don't want to. You say: "Go back to Bushwick then. Go back to your trash apartment on Myrtle Broadway, with shit all over your doorstep, and your cracked-out coked-out roommates. Do you want that lifestyle or do you want to be an Equinox-er like me?"
.
I talked to my "cracked-out coked-out" roommate about this when she was doing kitchen lines and I was drunk. She said: "This is a classic NYC coming-of age experience, older man, slightly predatory vibe picks up young newcomer, who is bright and bushy-tailed just like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. You'll be fine..." And I was. She is wise, because she used to be a sex-worker in Paris. Her ex-boyfriend said: "If you don't like to work, you'll become a prostitute." And she did.
.
If all utopian possibilities are eliminated, we must do our best to excel within the stated conditions. Megan Thee Stallion says: "Lick on my hand, then I put it in his pants. Get to playing with that cock and make that motherfucker bam and I walk and I talk like a pimp 'cause I am." Megan accepts that "sex is the corollary of capitalism and war" and advocates pragmatic strategies to win the sex-money-war game. I try to see sex as strategy. I use sex to get what I want from Corp. I withhold sex when I am unhappy. I have sex like a soldier with a soldier. Paul Preciado writes: "...the raw materials of today’s production process are excitation, erection, ejaculation, and pleasure and feelings of self-satisfaction, omnipotent control, and total destruction... sex is the corollary of capitalism and war, the mirror of production." Sex is absorbed into capitalist exchange; providing sex acts to/for money in a direct or indirect exchange is a strategy if one wants to or needs to profit. Choice is a luxury. If one is locked into production's mirror room, one will have sex in the mirror room.
Paul Preciado writes: potentia gaudendi," or "orgasmic force... This strength is of indeterminate capacity; it has no gender... its orientation emphasizes neither the feminine nor the masculine and creates no boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality or between object and subject… Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule... It is a force of transformation for the world in pleasure—'in pleasure with.' Potentia gaudendi unites all material, somatic, and psychic forces and seeks all biochemical resources and all the structures of the mind" (33).
Homosexual, heterosexual, trans, and non-binary sex contain potential for unregimented orgasmic expansion and transformation. The genderless orgasmic force is queer expression. It haunts and threatens preconceived games, orders, rulebooks, and warfare. Queerness is not a capitalist tactic; it does not play within exchange-based doctrine; it seeks to exceed it. It shares; it does not exchange. It widens; it is not narrowed by penetration. It is not focused on one giving, and the other taking. It is not financial. Queerness opposes capitalism, queerness is greater; "it is a force of transformation for the world." Is it a privilege to strive to be outside capital? Corp thought so, but capital will have this effect on a corp.
Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi... does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into private property." The orgasm is a boundless non-commodity.
What are Christians supposed to do without a priest's validation? What are Capitalists supposed to do without a consistent salary check or promotion on the horizon? What is the point of life? What is life without heaven?
Keep up the GOOD WORK. Your job is DOING GOOD. You're doing a GOOD JOB. Do you see how language enforces the capitalist reality it exists in?
I liked being with Corp because he was a "normal man," with a "good income" and "stable situation."
Why can’t YOU accept people? Why are YOU obsessed with genitalia? STRAIGHT PEOPLE can only understand sex as penetrative. Individuals with narrow conceptions of reality determine who is or is not worthy of rights, or acceptance. Normalcy asserts what it is normal through “reality enforcement,” yet straight reality is constructed and not “reality” at all. Straight reality demonizes alternative and marginalized realities as products of mental illness and disturbance in order to discredit alternative experience. Alternative experience disturbs them.
During sex, I imagine you are wearing K's face, and I wish we were in a sci-fi movie where I could press a button that would project K's face onto yours. I do not remember K's face.
"You" becomes "he" again, is this epistolary? I can't decide if he can be you.
Closed-eye hallucinations of you, you hover above me with a smile stretched wide over a skeleton. The fantasy decayed in real-time. The smiling face turned static.
I am still posted on your Instagram. I am the cold dead-eyed puppy hanging in a photograph on your wall. I am preserved for you and others to see in my happiest state, with a wagging tail. Delirious in the windowless room, I move to the light-filled kitchen to cook pasta. Empty streets remind me how empty streets are without you. Big eye murals stare at me. A rat smacks into my foot. I pass Nook. We didn't fight at Nook; we fought later that day when you kept painting my dirty studio floors white even though I said not to. I'm doing this for you, you said. I said, I'm telling you not to. I am going on a date with the guy I was seeing when I first met you. Your eyes will watch us make out on the ceiling.
When body is gone, there is soul. When soul is gone, there is money. What am I without money. Only money I have is yours.
I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He is me again.
I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro.
I did not want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one.
I want to be a frowning clown.
I stand on my shit stoop slamming cigarettes.
I ate the food Corp gave me, and when I look at the vomit, all I see is his money.
—
I think about early net.art. And the hope that the internet could be a radical realm, free of colonizers and police, and money. And capital turning humans into capital; apps turning humans into optimized bots. The post-future mourns past future visions. Maybe the creation of a free realm was a manifestation of American manifest destiny. Part-infinity. New realm was created and colonized. We created a new realm to tame it. West Coast hippies, LSD-takers tried to be outside the mainstream and create an a-capital way-of-being. Radical lawless, yet cooperative place it could have become with no hierarchy and equal opportunity. Being like wandering through a forest is being; I tried to do that on Second Life during COVID, just wander, just fly around. Yet, I encountered barriers, delineating property from open space.
In Second Life, I was a ghost finally. I looked in the mirror and saw nothing; I was wandering with no body. We choose what is familiar to imitate. We choose kitsch.
Can an artwork compose itself of decomposing fragments of Self and internalized Other? Can arial font conjure a body? Can a webpage? Can an artwork be genreless, media-fluid, and non-commodity? Can an artwork be a chopped and screwed diary?3: BLONDIE
Blondie was the angel twink I thought could save me from my sick room and despair. He was a Starbucks supervisor, not a corporate high-up like Corp. I thought maybe he would have internalized capitalism less because he was on a lower class rung than Corp, but I was wrong. People with less money or influence are often still indoctrinated in "work hard, earn more" propaganda. If they work hard, they do earn more. Blondie was working fifty hours a week at Starbucks, making slightly-above minimum wage (and addicted to stimulant drugs), despite having a Masters degree. He saw valor in this, despite disliking the Starbucks corporation. I thought the dislike was a good sign until Blondie began resenting me for not wanting to work my way up a corporate ladder like him. He did not see me as a person who could take him higher. I agreed.
He thought I was a star, initially, because he saw me shining at my art show. He did not realize that was a blip, though I tried to tell him "I am a low creature, like a rodent here." I realized Blondie was a CGI star, a person made of signifiers with nothing but the desire to shine brighter underneath. Starbucks captured his solar energy and used his sociability. It flattened him like Corp’s Apple job flattened Corp. Starbucks was transforming him into a star buck. I don't think Blondie should have to work fifty hours a week on drugs with a Masters degree at a fast food chain to stay alive in New York. Starbucks enabled him to pay rent and have fun, while on prescription-stimulants (like many). The job was good enough to sedate him. When not at work, he wanted to have sex or have fun. I was too sad and difficult, obsessed with my own problems and the worlds' like many liberals. I did not want to have sex because I felt neglected.
Close the door and I suck the pink hook right away, hit the floor. The narrative climax is an orgasm.
Blondie and I go out for one last supper. The vegetable dumpling tastes fetid. It reminds me of Midwest takeout from the yellow storefront on beige street where everyone was drunk. Drunk, the now-dead people played with each other and yelled at their children. I push the dumplings around, beige lumps on soy sauce-stained paper plates. Scrape plastic utensils against the paper pulp and small white pills appear. I sigh. Why are you sighing? I sigh--trying to calm down. Why are you trying to calm down?
Phone screens merge with city lights in the window. Empire state building is still pretty to me. I smacked your ass in front of shady police in the subway after.
I scrape the dumplings into the marble trash hole with control. Dead people had a cupid statue on the marble mantle next to an urn. Dead people fly around the marble island. Winged arms catch takeout containers. Cupid flies off the mantle, crashes through a high window, and returns to Rome.
The lump dumpling ascends my esophagus and exits my mouth, plopping on the soy-sauce-spotted dalmatian plate.
—
You drove me to Queens to see a concert in the rain. You told me to flirt with other guys. I danced beside ensnared couples alone. In the car, you wore the glasses I liked, knock-offs from a chain, and they reminded me of our early dates, when you would wear them in the car and I would tell you I liked them, then tear them off.
Make out at stoplights, drops on the windshield made shadows on your face. Same frames you wear while driving now, though your demeanor is different. Time distorts man. Driving in the rain, orange and navy lights, your face is splitting. Before, I waved at roommates who looked at me like I was a cat being readied to get put down. You said: take your grey sweatshirt, said we would be better off friends, driving in the rain, though I disagreed.
I eat a bowl of butter rice.
I undo the squeaky bottle cap while waves shush on the shore. A man stands with the water up to his knees looking at the grey hotels and buildings on the horizon. Percocet pond with bleach-tipped curls. Green blips on the horizon and an archway of lights, maybe planes. Arch like the St. Louis one. Arching blips on a black sky. I arched his back on my bed which floated on the sky or water. I take the subway back. Phone dies. Wander through the Hasidic neighborhood and fry rice at home. Hiss and crackling on the hush. Lifeguard chair watched the whole time and held me. Lifeguard chair under the St. Louis archway is made of plywood, no matter. The lifeguard's chair was safe.
ACT II
When I was dying five years ago, drugged on random circles in the bath, the water turned yellow and warm. I began to dissolve into urine, who is like god. God is a warm and sunny pool.
Belted to the bed cot in the ambulance, I made small talk with the EMT.
Sour cream bedsheet is a noose around my neck. I take the noose off."Without hope, we remain trapped in beenness or in the badly existing. Only hope generates meaningful actions that bring the new into the world.""Living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth."What would happen if we all grew diagonally, if our arms and communal shelters shot out like tree branches, and we did not get any taller, but rather began to intersect with each other like X-joints? No more skyscrapers, only branches weaving together.“PROTESTERS INTERRUPT WALL STREET AND SHUT IT DOWN DURING PRIDE MONTH FOR PALESTINE, SIMILAR TO SOME OF THE ACTIONS OF GRAN FURY AND ACT UP DURING THE AIDS CRISIS.”And: “A GENERAL BOYCOTT OF FIRE ISLAND, MOST OF THE FANCY, RICH AND GLAMOROUS GAYS WON'T LIKE THIS ONE BUT FUCK THEM. SIDENOTE, I DON’T WANNA LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE FIRE ISLAND IS THE IDEAL WITH ITS RICH YUPPIE GAY POWER BULLSHIT… IF YOU FEEL LIKE A BAD FUCKING PERSON READING THIS, THATS THE POINT: DO ANYTHING, OR ELSE YOU WILL SLIDE EVEN FURTHER INTO THE MORAL ROT OF THIS HORRIBLY UNJUST SOCIETY.“ACT III
K, LASTLY
I loop back to K who deserves even more, yet I cut it here.NOTE ON THE STRUCTURE:
The document evades capture. The document opposes power and power's sensibility. It kaleidoscopes diaristic, poetic, and academic registers.
The self is recursive. The self deteriorates in the recursive machine. The self is polyphonic instability. Instability destabilizes and disturbs panoptic enforcement. The self is the document. The document cries and eats itself. The self is contradiction. Its masochistic performance opposes the sadistic engine. It kills unproductive responses. Its unproductive responses are non-productivity. Fragmentation is form and content. It is past, present, and future cut up and spliced. It's its mutant baby. Fragmentation is produced by the killing machine who splits its citizen-parts. The citizen splits itself first. The citizen is an IT. The citizen is a dollar. The citizen is not a star. The document is a pop song remix. The document is morally inferior. The document is an attempt. The document is an attempt at gay DADA. And it is an attempt at a non-total atonal work, that is play.
He eats the Lay petals from a bouquet, while I lay here like a thumbs up. Chip bag crinkle in my sleep.
Psychic bruise on the lost coat (which carries a note and conceals a collar) and I look at myself in the mirror. A bird flies across the black fabric of the coat which is a bloody night sky. Its wings make a V. The coat floats off the nail, and goes from where it was hanging, while windows glow green (far off, unattainable vistas) and the black coat turns into an opulent purple mountain. Guess I have to climb it like a Gorp, take a winding path to the mountain’s collar. The mountain is nailed to the sky, yet floats above it. I look down at the sky. Wipe your fucking tears.I am lesser than "The Great Unknown." Is It located in the excess? Are They?White light pierces the psychic mess, which is a mound-mountain.Have you ever lost anything? Have you ever lost a coat you didn't own? The net worth of a nice coat is greater than me. My college tuition was an investment I haven't paid off. I am forty dollars. I am lesser than The Great Unknown.The coat was a triangular shape hanging off the hook like a mountain.I am a coat. My body is a coat I unzip. Do you want to wear me? Do you want to come inside the warm coat?
Bite, oil and charcoal on canvas
Karim, oil on canvas, 20 x 26 inches
But rain/pain was nothing 2 me (justice mallets, though no justice in USA), oil, acrylic, paper, and charcoal on canvas
Wilma in the stars, acrylic, oil, paper, graphite, on canvas
Hell diva, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 48 inches
Psycho-romance fairytale with K, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches
Drawings from KuBA: Kulturbahnhof residency in Klein Warnow, Germany.
The field ran through us, oil and acrylic on canvas, 44 x 60 inches
Extension of a hand/ purple is the color of excess, oil on panel
Fighters, oil on canvas, 10 x 23 inches
YMCA child, oil, acrylic, ink, and denim on canvas
St. John the Baptist with Vogue Dancers and Octavia Butler, oil on canvas. Exhibited at NADA New York 2024 with Afternoon Projects.
Pennsylvania January, oil on panel
With this flower and a dagger for you, oil on panel
NYC barter-economy fantasy/ an apple for a coin, a coin for an apple, charcoal on paper
Shapeshifter, 30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas
Crying at the Sheetz with a Jon Serl musician and Die Grrrrl-boy graffiti (Sheetz is often located in rural alt-right regions), oil on canvas
The word Clone is spray-painted in black and white block letters and dripping on the side of the building like a loose gash.L: It's all over the US. Hex's friends are trying to paint it in all the major cities to remember Hex with.D: Why Clone?L: It was Hex's tag, so they're trying to do it forward and make him live on.—L sobs on the stoop, while Bushwick drunks rubberneck.D: If he didn't want to get off fentanyl, he would have died regardless.L: He was going to move to New York in a couple weeks. He would have lived near you.D: He would have died here.—L sits swinging her legs with flip flops hanging off her toes at The Lounge.L: You make me feel like not a terrible person, because you’re friends with your shadow. Everyone else thinks I have a moral failing.D: For what?L: People think you're evil if you cheat, or drunk drive.D: Good Christian-types and good citizens are the worst.L: So-called ‘degenerate’ acts result from need, conditioning, or hardship, like the crimes in Bresson. The underclass are deemed immoral before they lash out too, or have to prove piety or capital value in order to be taken seriously or considered human. The real-real immoral are never caught, because they're the ones in control. My friends and I drunk drive and play bumper cars, smash into shit. Then sledge up rich people cars at night.D: Aren't you scared of getting in trouble? Or killing anyone?L: Where would I be if I wasn't in Seattle, doing crimes?D: Skincare specialist in Pennsylvania.L: I want to be a husk. She holds her arms out like a circle.D: What?L: I want to be a hot air balloon, leaking bills across a Trump landscape.D: Me too, I wanna be nothing.L: You can't.D: I can. I can dream.L: I'm a floater.D: Me too. Better than a nail in the ground. Nails all start off shiny, then rust, or get pulled up by the balloon tied to the nail. The wind carries the ballon, wherever.L: Fuck the wind.D: Be the wind.L: Be the train.D: Whatever.
At the cocktail lounge, Layla sits swinging her legs and dangling her flip flops off her toes.You make me feel like not a terrible person, Layla says, because you’re connected to your shadow self like me. Everyone else thinks I have a moral failing.For what?Like people think there's something morally wrong with you if you cheat, or like everyone's Christian and stupid.True, like Christians run the country.The people at the table next to us start talking about the ArtNet article about big galleries picking up young artists, so they skip the small gallery to mid-gallery step.Layla says: it's so pathetic that poor people imitate and worship the rich and suck up to them and do whatever they say and do whatever they can to get rich, but yeah I hate being poor.Yeah, I say, when you’re poor, it’s so easy to get stuck in a cycle of poverty and addiction.True, Layla says. Where would I be if I hadn't moved to Seattle?I say: probably aesthetician in one of the small Trump towns like the one where you got your license. But instead you've managed to integrate into this PNW DIY scene.Layla takes a pause and sips her drink.Like all my friends are crystal-heads, though.Wait, I have to show you this. Layla pulls up a video of her hopping out a minivan and crouched over on a door stoop spray-painting the door.Yeah, they have been sending this to all the neighbors, saying like watch out for--The waitress interrupts and takes an almost empty drink without asking.Layla grabs it out of her hand, I wasn't fucking done, she says. Layla sighs and looks around the room, I wish I could kill them all.Woah there, I say, who?I-d-k, she says, but I'm serious, she laughs.The tables next to us are talking louder.I want them to know, Layla repeats, I am right next door.Escalating the volume of our conversation, I say, I am sure they know.It's sad, she says, like they sold their souls for cash.Seems fun, though, I say. And I'm sure they are happy.If you're into being a husk.I want to be a husk, I say. I want to be a big shell. Do you?Yeah dude, she says. I want to be a mega mega big shell. I want to be a fucking hot air balloon.D: But we're fine, though.L: We are.D: We're both happy, and will be fine.D & L: We will be.D: But I'm angry.L: I am too.D: Who are you angry at?L: Rich people.D: Why?L: For killing the poor, and being hot air balloons.D: The rich don't have a monopoly on that. Poor kill themselves too, or turn evil out of desperation, and resentment.L: Or criminal, but not all crimes are bad.
A hail stone broke my father's windshield, and he repaired it with duct tape, then drove an hour in the white-out on I-94 to work at a Christian liberal arts college and an hour home.I stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which became like lavender stalk tips. The fields were all beige with corn cob punctuations. Pumpkins in the fall fronted the fields, siding the lanes that cut the fields.Snow filled the window wells. I was head to toe in snow gear with mittens, ski socks, and boots. In the cul-de-sac's center was an iceberg. I shook white crystals off my hat, and they melted on the tile floor. I stomped my boots out in the garage, before entering the house. Owls hit our glass windows. They blended into the snow. My dad cried seeing a dead owl. Nail under a fingernail. School, work, home, and church—off the highway. You are here on the world rug.I tossed caterpillars in the wheelbarrow when the snow melted. They smooshed on our feet and tires. The projector tilted. A virtual fire glowed in a projected parallelogram shape on the flooding basement’s wall. Water filled the basements through window wells. Black mold on the concrete, so we tore up the carpets. Three trees were equally spaced on a green lawn next to the driveway. A man circled the cul-de-sac and stepped out of his car to pick cherries off our trees, then eyed us children and got back in his car.I closed my eyes and saw the cornfields swaying. I saw a castle at the end of the prairie, and walked a lane to the doorway, where my parents stood, at the opening. I heard the wind chime. I opened my eyes: caterpillars drifted across the sky-ceiling, and mutated into each other like mates.I wrote my name, tidy, in my bound notebook with a granite-pattern cover. The f was a vertical infinity symbol with a line protruding between the ovals, like a penis. The teacher was sexy with a beard. The kitchen table was a square made of glass with foam on the corners. Rags & Windex for clarity. Foam corners on the fireplace prevented us from hitting our heads, and car locks for falling out. Disney stickers on the glass curve obscured the sound wall. Later, my father scraped the stickers off, using the same scraper meant for ice. Unlike the ice, which turned to water that dripped off, the stickers left a permanent residue. An air-freshener tree hung from the curved rectangular mirror of the car. The mirror reflected my glasses on a squished face. My glasses reflected the mirror. The Honda Odyssey door opened automatically with a mechanical groan, and beeps. School lunch equaled lower class, gay if I sat with girls, white kids shouldn't sit with Black kids, or the parents with Pure Michigan bumper stickers would say the Black child was a bad influence, and discourage contact. Dating. A white girl, with a Catholic father who surveyed drivers from a highway billboard advertising his law practice, began dating Black men in succession. Inappropriate.A snake nest is the neighborhood on a satellite map. A snake swallows Americana-mash-up houses, crashes through the sound-wall, and eats the long roads. A yellow Beetle sits still on the cul-de-sac. She died. How do you know? Facebook. Blue light illuminates the car interior and cul-de-sac. Capture the Flag, a small pillaging game. Boundaries with boots or fingers, on the windshield, which broke again from the hail, and we made virtual families for caterpillars in suburbs. Hail broke the windshield. Again, my father laid the tape over the break, like a wardrobe craftsman, and I cried for the rupture and its anesthetization. Black tape bandaged the glass hole and interfered with my father's clear vision of the road ahead. Snow obscured I-94. Pile-up, the radio announced, so my father took a U-turn, and climbed up the nearest exit. He drove past a Panera, then a series of chains.--I sit in a hooded bench, while a bullet train traces right to left. A stout man waits to use the gun tower, while the insects walk over my eyes. He stands at the foot of the hunting tower, and I climb down the ladder, so he can go up. The sky is orange above hay rolls on a plain. Blonde children play hopscotch outside a town hall. It is a white building with white pillars. It sits like a plain man surveying a townscape. Human-shaped sacks are dressed in military uniforms on front lawns. The dolls pose in lawn panoramas or on fire trucks, holding phallic hoses between gloved grainy, or straw fingers. I’m taking photos of a mirrored gazebo at a hunting lodge. Inside, two women kiss while statesmen parade, a town over. Tire piles are black snakes on steamrolled trees. The RV lot is a white sail on moving video. Back close to my yellow house, turbines spin. A truck carries a sediment hill. My Israeli feminist neighbor gifts militant Acker books. She invites me to watch Black Mirror and we watch it without speaking. A man smokes outside the window, across the stone yard. The train appears every hour. I photograph three spinners: pinwheels, bladed farm machines, and turbines. I snap a glass door with an orchid Fathead. A blue flower is next to a rail, hot, from a train approaching, or gone past. They stare; I stare.--At Christmas, Gunnar gave me an extra small hunting jacket. I keep my hunter jacket clean and iron the creases. Mud and shot birds leave marks. I pick the red and brown scabs off. Gunnar’s face is in the yearbook grid with mine—he’s in an upper left rectangle, and I’m in a low row. When I am seven, he teaches me how to hunt. I’m a pudgy child gnawing chocolate pucks. I wipe chocolate on my designer jeans. When the jeans stain, I toss them in a hamper and buy new ones. Crumbs fall out of my mouth and onto the grass below, where birds eat the cookie dots, and hunters shoot the birds later. Later, the hunters say it was terrible to kill or see killing occur. I slip under Gunnar’s checkered arm. I get dirt on my jean knees, so I take them off and walk around. Gunnar sits swinging on a ferris wheel carriage. One day we’ll do more in. He circles a dead bird’s belly with a sticky finger: aim here on a live one. When he nails a bird, his eyebrows raise, he shows wolf teeth, and his cheeks sphere. Sea-foam clouds obscure the ferris wheel. The ferris is taped to a grass field—it grows mossy with Gunnar still armed in the chair. He eyes his scope and crosshairs and picks off birds.--The SunChips bags were plastic fires, stacked pyramidal in the common area bowl. Sam and I shared SunChips, getting red and orange dust on our fingertips. Sam smiled and licked the dust off her thumb, in front of the cafeteria window. We walked in a V between grey windows in a hallway with glossy tile floors and a low foam-core ceiling, like middle school. Behind us was an older woman who said her son was coming to get her. He's coming to get me rang like the bell of a demolished tower. A short statue of liberty stood nearby in a lake, while crawfish ate at critters on the monument's rubble pedestal. Earlier, the older woman stood at the free payphone, with a thick metal shoelace going back into a box.My son won't pick up. My son won't pick me up. How long have you been here? Four weeks. They won't let me go, because I keep having an issue with the head doctor, who has scanner eyes.Gwen wanted more time to get ready and do her hair first.I drew the portrait quickly, and handed it to her.Make me look younger.I saw Gwen six years later at Home Depot. She was checking out my purchases. After, I looked out at the lot bordered by cars and trees, and smoked. One day I wore a tight Zara shirt and the Altoona guys glared me down, so I changed. I wore something plainer and looser and the glaring stopped. I saw my roommate and thought: my roommate is a ginger, around my age, nineteen. Our beds were side by side in curved plastic bed frames like a summer camp. We talked about our outside lives, and he told me he had sex with men, who roomed him. He showed me a tattooed A encircled on his soft stomach. The A's horizontal ran into his belly button, rode the divot down, and ran out. The circle was sloppy, more like a beer bottle cap. I showed him my recent stick and poke. I flexed the arm and turned my wrist in and out.In the cafeteria, the women circled their hips and slashed the air. They slapped their stomachs. SunChips hung around the side of the tray. Mashed corn next to a black pudding cup, and sloppy Joes with Hawaiian rolls; the meat was a syrupy pile with soft pork strings.I want a better burger. Sam sighed and poked the damp roll.I pictured us breaking into a Wendy's.Sam, do you want to cry on the field while The Lonely Lady watches the highway like a surveillance camera?The branches reached up to the sky outside the courtyard's small recorded rectangle.Are we subjects under an umbrella, Sam?She said: yes, you have power.--Dark stab with mop hair. I don't mop the floor. White specks on a black comforter are my head's snowfall. I don't brush teeth. No tear. Tear open eye and gash the gash. I laugh at the fridge, bed, microwave, and shower, apathetic devices. Hairs on the shower drain and dandruff on the bed under fluorescent lights. Frog on creek shore next to water lapping, restricted by the shore edge.Fraying rope and hair strand, fried up, fries on a plate, fry cash, we’re fried. Fried hair strand, bleached hair looks fried. Strapped for cash. How strapped are we, strapped for what, strapped for cash. Few pennies can add up to a dollar. Denim-hugged legs. Crash into storefront. I’ll keep driving without you. Beige lumps with black edges, steering wheel.White O on a black grid stone, grey blocks together. There is a yellow block in me I colored.Can’t sleep, cry. The cat got shoved into a box and its little head poked out. Red dot on the smiley face button on the computer taunts. My cuppa, my mommy, the cat screams. Xanax sliver for him. Corner the cat; he wails. Seal him. Do you feel free? Byung-Chul Han writes that freedom is experienced until "liberation gives way to new renewed subjugation" under Neoliberalism.Kentucky cat. Rabid to tamed. Boxed, then released.So-and-so meant well, trying to clean me like a kitchen. Clouds up there; boxes below.Light on the wares in glass boxes on a grey carpet. Silver, diamond, and gold with price tags. I noticed so-and-so. Grey shirt in his pants and side-ordered hair. Side of that, hss. So-and-so's earpiece. Cobalt earrings. Jeff shot the gun twice. Hole per ear. Donut vision. No distant donuts. So-and-so, though. Take a piece of that meat. Be your donut hole. Eyes like knives through glazed. I saw the blood pouring out his rounds. Tongued my dry mouth with his device.I am happy to be dead to you; you are dead to me. I am not dying for me, not dying. Clementine peel, pee slime on cilantro, green onion gloss. Rinse slime and chop. Slow death for slow swan. Fast bird, efficient pigeon, is better for economy. Circumcised feathers on your upper lip grated my belly. Silver grate on carrot. My mustache is gone, accentuating the upper lip's thinness. My upper lip is vulnerable. Corn dog stick is slippery with hot dog traces. Poke in eye and wear to be humorous? I harvest ants from the corner of my room. I wipe ants from my nose and serenade them. I up-cycle ants as salad garnish, or resale, up-charge for more than ants are worth. I up-cycle the black three-dots. Toss on salad as finishing. Swan circle the trash and drain. Swans kiss and make a heart on trees, so-and-so's painting.What are the ethics of the Ben Shahn retrospective? A man looks out with a cut log substituted for a leg. He is what he can cut. Families in button ups and long sleeves push strollers. Quieter than I remember, though this is after museum hours. A young man takes care of an older white man in a wheelchair. The younger man is Black, and a hired caretaker. The caretaker is seated on a grey bench in a swirling grey Central Park gate. He is the only one that sits on the gate. His legs are crossed like a girl's. The young man spoons the old man food, and they both appear content in the sunshine. It's so quiet here. A woman says she is moving to Puerto Rico in a loud voice on the telephone. The same young man from the park pushes the same older man in a wheelchair across a road. A monochrome advertisement depicts a woman in a Jackie Kennedy dress turned toward the Statue of Liberty: backward-looking. In a window advertisement, an older woman with an orange coat sneers at walkers. A grandfather in a suit jacket holds his grandson's hand. The grandson is wearing a mini suit jacket. I smile slightly at the image. I smile slightly at street walkers, who smile back.--The tattooed guy shows an hour late to the third date with a dead phone. The Australian was waiting. I almost left. The Australian walks fast to their seats. The Australian is trying to lose him. They sit down next to a couple, from Utah. The wife introduces her husband, a construction-company manager. He sits beside her. His knees are crunched to his chin, and a beer can is crunched between his knees, feeding his mouth, the guppy. The tattooed guy looks down at colorful shirts and faces ringed on an incline. Neither men talk to each other, but the tattooed one keeps making moves, like tracing a finger on his next door's thigh. The Australian focuses on the game with a headset on, playing TV commentary. The Australian passes his headset to the tattooed guy, who auditions it. Static and a shredded commentator.I don't need this.A player smacks her thigh with a racket, then throws her tennis racket across the stadium, and it bounces a few times. She collapses in her chair and puts her head in her hands while the stadium cheers for her opponent.The Utah man adds an empty can to the floor row, and the can falls over. Going to grab another, he grips the almost vertical railing with two hands crossing over each other. The Utah man's knees crunch his beer can tighter. The Australian is talking to his wife, close.The Utah Mormon woman has seven drinks on the floor, souvenir cups with miniature tennis balls punctured on rim toothpicks. Joe has two on the floor, but it's enough to cause withdrawal.Joe taps the Australian on the shoulder: I'm going to go. Have a nice flight home.He and the Australian hug in front of the Utah couple, who stare at the game, synchronized. The Australian kisses Joe on the cheek. And this appears okay to Joe. The stairs steep down, and a woman stands on the rim of their stadium section with her torso a two o'clock arm over the railing. Moving dots and chiseled marks, below. Joe joins the flow out.--Buildings in the downtown area are pale brick or vinyl siding—white or blue, flaking off. Chipped murals with smiling faces of community members fall off the walls, too. On the main street mural, a young girl smiles mid-pirouette. A chip revealing the original grey color of the building is where her tooth was. She was the muralist's daughter. I got to know him. He was haunted by her early passing. He’d call me late and ask if everything was okay. He has a tattoo of a bird on the area between the pointer finger and thumb. I spent many nights in the basement with dust all over the floor, hanging out with the muralist. Ash our mouths. His wails around the auditorium, full of his daughter's image. She was painted all over town, in many roles: ballerina, hawk, and graduating student.
A glass door with an orchid Fathead. A garage door has its door removed, and in place of the door are wood planks surrounding a hovering jeep tail. A white pug sits statuesque in a lawn pot on a sidewalk square before a factory, like an altar. The 16:9 images are flat on my phone with enhanced color and contrast.Three spinners: pinwheels, farm machines, and turbines. Pinwheels are planted in the lawn next to farm machines with spinning blades on metal circles. I sit in a hooded bench, raised high for hunters to aim at far deer. A bullet train traces a long line from my right periphery to my left. The bullet train announces itself with a sailing sound. A nine-petaled blue flower is next to a hot rail.The sky is orange above hay cylinders and blonde children, who played hopscotch outside a white pillared building near the Lidl we visit once per week. Exercise machines are lonely next to slumped medieval houses, made of stone and x-ed by black planks close to the eyeglass store. Halved buildings rot next to new ones. Chairs sit on sagging floors suspended above a people-less street.“Basket” is scrawled on a checkpoint wall. “Basket” is painted over a castle mural.Human-shaped grain sacks are dressed in military uniforms and posed in lawn panoramas or on fire trucks, slumped drunk, or holding limp phallic hoses, ineffectively putting out forest fires in former East Germany.In the quiet car, the Danish woman says, my mother was an East German.Holes break up a flat wall with a sunlight shape on it. The sunlight shape moves across the concrete and turns from rectangle to rhombus on my neighbor's house.I bike to a nearby hunting lodge. I’m taking photos of a mirrored gazebo. Two women are kissing inside, and look scared to see me. I apologize in German. Two women kiss with a military parade the next town over. Pennsylvania is not dissimilar: trees, militaria, and private queerness.The landscape is an archive erasing. Stone stubs with faint names appear like spawn. A low field is an empty cube cut-out with cornstalk hair on the bottom plane.Tire piles are black snakes wriggling on steamrolled trees.The turbines are visible, always, turning steadily in the sky.Losing it, I mutter while clutching the tire-printed handlebars, and blow smoke over my shoulder. I arrive at the gun tower. A stout man wants to use the gun tower, so I let him.The sky has some slate in it. I see the slate in between black trees. The ground is black too, like space. I see two headlights like star trails on the earth. I trip over a log and sink my teeth into a bush.Rail-thin men riding bikes frown, and I quicken my bike pace. I go fast down a hill next to an RV lot. I go faster while filming the RVs, which blur into a white sail.Back close to the yellow house, I see my turbine friends again. The turbines are as wide as the yellow house, where greying apples spill behind a window from a bin.I slice cucumbers at the window. A military truck drives past with a sediment hill making a humpback.The train comes again.My neighbor was an Israeli feminist who gave me militant Acker books. She invited me to watch Black Mirror and we watched it without speaking. Townspeople gawked her trans wife who bowed her head buying groceries. A man smokes outside the window. The train appears every hour. He did not speak, though he was only twenty feet away. He sat in the chair in front of the grey building. I saw him there every day.I lay down in the grass and say "AAHHHG" into it.I spin around and lie down in the steamrolled field. A white van passed by earlier. I’m the only person for miles, unless a hunter sneaks up. I spin around while the turbines, pinwheels, and tractors spin. We are present-tense and absence.The train climbs off the ground, arching over the RVs on a brown-brick structure flying up from the water.A rubber horse lies flat next to a pinwheel. I drag flower pictograms over the image with my finger. At last, only its eye is visible, and it resembles a human eye overlapping my own. It resembles my iPhone lens. I filter the sacred.
A tucked into serviceable sheets after taking off his puffer and jeans. Two neighbors in the room woke to A's alarm. A donned his puffer. The all-male household looked up from its coffee and straightened its postures when D and A left together, and snickered. On the oceanside walk, A wore a tin man's coat below purple hair. The coat flashed light shapes on the blue sky and sand. M ate chips in the sandstone building at lunch. She placed each chip in her mouth with two glossed fingers. Her lip-glossed mouth was above a mask sling. Flaky salt stuck to the pink gloss. Her legs crossed. D's legs crossed. A eyed M wiping her fingers on a paper napkin, while ocean sounds musicked the room—real and machine-made. A chip lay curved on the floor below A's chair. D looked out a window behind A's chair. D clicked his pen; A clicked his pen; M clicked her pen. A's coat was ahead of the window, pressed into the plastic chair back. On the walk, A's coat was an aluminum parasail. D peeled his sunburn. M picked chip crumbs off her lipstick: she pressed her finger on the lip and smeared its edge. Her fingertip was pink with crumbs landed in the residue. M wiped her finger on a paper napkin. And then rubbed her hands over her jeans, up and down. The napkin was a crumple on the floor: a white flower with a pink bloom. It bumped into A's coat sleeve which was trailing off the chair. A pinched his earring and rotated his bracelet. Arms stretched up with interlocked hands, and chins pointed at the window. Back home, lobsters sat on each other and clicked. They tapped the fruit drawer's rectangular monocle, while the men ate separately, except for D and A, who ate together. Across from each other on the twin beds, the two's pressed knees pointed in different directions. Plates on laps. D's legs pointed at the wall. The different angled legs sent dotted lines out. A's purple hair was neon on the white wall and his eyebrow had a piercing, whereas D had a shaved head. There would be Thanksgiving here: the five men at the table staring down, while M had hers in the separate place. No one touched in the homosocial environment except for brush-ups. D used the silent one's dandruff shampoo. Why was he so quiet? Men never share their playbooks. And what had the silent one gone through? The camera grows a conscience, the DSM-eye. The camera pirouettes across the stage, hoping men will copy. What's your name? I'm Drew. Abe lay staring ahead at the wall; fuck-up, he was thinking he was.What is the bright sun supposed to do outside? It looks through the shoegaze. Cars and bikes and people talking. In the window, the sunlight is fuzzy, strained. I thought you radiated from some smiling thing, all yellow with shark fins and shades. The arm of the clock goes tick-tock. The arm of a bench holds an arm in the smog. And isn't the eye just a smear, on your face Abe? Isn't my lip just an amalgamation of tissue, pink, it still flakes off. Red-pink, my lip has a sunburn. Put a chip on your mouth. Put a chip on your mouth in the spray. Cameraman gives me directions, like film the lobsters, film the duo.Today I woke up past the alarm's setting. Today, I woke up and took a stroll in the beach breeze. Like a crank arm, mine lifts to my mouth. And I feel them touch me, the fingers. Abe, give me your hand. Who is on the blue sea? Waves lap. Hush, hush A gray head appears, smooth and silken: dolphin mother, arrived to take my trouser pennies. Before Before the waves drown your Echo, echo, echo. To Abe, I said there was someone to meet me, and take me down under the film wrap. Saran on the water undulates, with the moon's pull. Gravity drags on and on and on and down and a blinker hit. Abe goes, pass me that blinker, with hair like a ruffled monkey. Maria walks in her sundress and floppy hat. To twilight she walks alone, on the water toward the dark dome. Dolphins out, a fin school, circling. Looking down, the circle is a rotating dotted line.Plates from yesterday were on the floor still, and the men moved the plates to the dishwasher. The clatter of plates; what's the matter. Are you listening to the clatter of plates? The silent one brought a dog in: what gives? The dog bark brought laughter and cheer to the household. Randomly, it ran a track from room to room. Fleas on an eyelash. Sea salt on its fur. Salt on hair by the water. The salt got out the water, without trying to. Salt runs out of the shaker. Salt is located in the sandstone. Salt on the lobsters still. Salted on plates, and the meat is processed in organs. Salt returns to a dolphin mother.
The tattooed guy shows an hour late to the third date with a phone on five percent. The Australian was waiting for him. He says: I almost left. The Australian speed-walks to their seats, and the tattooed guy speeds to follow. The Australian is trying to lose him. They sit down next to a couple, from Utah. The wife introduces her husband, a construction-company manager. He sits beside her, silent. His knees are crunched to his skin, and beer can crunched between his knees. The tattooed guy looks down at colorful shirts and faces ringed on a ramp. Neither men talk to each other, but the tattooed one keeps making moves, like tracing a finger on his next door's thigh. The Australian focuses on the game with a headset on, playing TV commentary. The Australian passes his headset to the tattooed guy, who auditions it.A player smacks her thigh with a racket, then throws her tennis racket across the stadium, and it bounces a few times. She collapses in her chair and puts her head in her hands while the stadium cheers for her opponent.The Utah man adds an empty can to the floor row, and the can falls over. Going to grab another, he grips the almost vertical railing with two hands crossing over each other. The Utah man's knees crunch his beer can tighter.The Utah Mormon woman has seven drinks on the floor, souvenir cups with miniature tennis balls punctured on rim toothpicks.Joe taps the Australian on the shoulder: I'm going to go. Have a nice flight home.He and the Australian hug in front of the Utah couple, who stare at the game, synchronized. The Australian kisses Joe on the cheek. The stairs steep down, and a woman stands on the rim of their stadium section with her torso a two o'clock arm over the railing. Moving dots and chiseled marks, below.
(...) and I armed myself for this highly perilous attack with qualities such as courage, scorn, wrath, indignation, disdain, even the disdain of death; and with these indubitably very appreciable weapons I hoped to advance, successfully and victoriously, against biting irony and mockery lurking under a simulation of friendliness.— Robert Walser, The Walk--Men Like To Feel Better Than Other Men & Humiliate Other Men To Feel Dominant:
The Influencer sits on the beige couch, sniffling meth-am-ketamine, while I stand in the kitchen. He asks: why did the chicken cross the road? Why? Because the chicken was trying to find an answer that he thought was across the road. Stand there. He points at one side of the kitchen. You're the chicken. And this, he gestures at the hallway-kitchen floor, is the road. Now, shove your head up your ass. What? Actually, the entire time we have been talking, your head has been up your ass. Okay. Walk to the center of the road. Look ahead at the cabinets. Picture they are pretty green trees. Now, I want you to take your head, and I want you to shove it up your ass. See? All the shit you talk is shit.No, you are.I'm going into the city.I board the beige train. The train goes over the water. I imagine these buildings will have penthouses soon. The penthouses are top prisms, and the Influencer wants to live in one. From the penthouse, you can look out at the sea without seeing the choppiness of the waves. I want a country with no penthouses. Let plants grow in the already-built ones.I tell Mom that I am sick of average sadism.You can work towards becoming a therapist, or teacher.Why do I have to pay to learn altruistic work?My mother says: that's how it is. You have to learn the skillsets.What are the ethics of the Ben Shahn retrospective? A man looks out with a cut log substituted for a leg. He is what he can cut (actually, I misremembered, and it was a metal machine holding wheat, that was a substitute for his leg, which shows how little I know, about agriculture. The worker is part automaton. The face is confrontational, but plain, dignified, and spectral).Families in button ups and long sleeves push strollers. Quieter than I remember, though this is after museum hours. A young man takes care of an older white man in a wheelchair. The younger man is Black, and a hired caretaker. The caretaker is seated on a grey bench in a swirling grey Central Park gate. He is the only one that sits on the gate. His legs are crossed like a girl's. The young man spoons the old man food, and they both appear content in the sunshine. It is dead and calm, on the Upper East side. A woman says she is moving to Puerto Rico in a loud voice on the phone. The same young man from the park pushes the same older man in a wheelchair across a road. A monochrome advertisement depicts a woman in a Jackie Kennedy dress turned toward the Statue of Liberty. This is just backward-looking. In a window advertisement, an older woman with an orange coat sneers at walkers. A grandfather in a suit jacket holds his grandson's hand. The grandson is wearing a mini suit jacket. I smile slightly at the image. I smile slightly at street walkers, who smile back.
short fiction
The ornate-patterned paper blocks converge at peeling seams. She steps on the carpet and the floor creaks. The carpet will be torn up, and the planks will be polished back to their original complexion. On the landing, there is a door with a red sweater hanging off the Venetian doorknob. Egyptology books will be sold off precarious stacks. Knock down nuisance bookshelves, and hang flatscreens. Library rooms will become entertainment-guest rooms with pull-out couches for too-drunk guests. The kids can watch TV, while the adults drink hard seltzers outside and gradually remove clothing, fall into the pool. The TV volume will get louder to block out the splashing and screams. Amanda knocks over a stack of old decor magazines to store in the clock glass cabinet. She restacks them; sees the plum sofa her mother envied, and so bought. It's downstairs with a medicinal stain. It's downstairs with spit-up on it. The painting by her other foot will go: a cracking rose.The stairs ascend to a window that views the deck and backyard temple. A white fence separates the deck from the trees. The trees separate their yard from the neighbor's, the new ones she's never met.Bulldoze the temple to make room for the saltwater pool. They will build a marble countertop bar in the backyard before the mountain view. She will play bartender at parties, and stock the fridge with green dips, brie, and fine booze.In photos from her wedding day, her hair is more vibrant beneath the grecian triangle. She puts a finger on the baby bump to concave her stomach: the nuisance bookshelves, and nuisance daughter. Leave that girl out in the cold, on a rainy day, she would and has, but doesn't have a priest to confess to. She kisses the man she lives with still, though they only talk property details. Burger juice stain on his shirt, like the sofa, the objects around her, once lustrous, carry abjection. Every object can be replaced and will be when she's got the father's cash in her back pocket. Barbecue sauce mats the husband's beard and crusts the hairs, pubic-like they cover the sheets. She wakes up with a pube on her cheek, like a tear. After her dad is dead, she is filing for divorce. The guest room on the top floor has become her father’s sickroom; there are no guests anymore. Her father used to have a bulky body, with a beard.She goes over to the floor mattress and stares down at the shrunken man with fish eyes. The room smells like sweat and baby powder. Sweet and salty. He is swimming in a sweater, red like her mother’s was. An electronic candle sits on the window bed’s alcove above his wet head.She pulls the sweater over his head. The collar sticks under his chin. She yanks up the fabric, while pulling his chin down through the neck hole with a curved finger, and he flops back on his pillow. She adjusts the pillow, so the neck is more comfortably held.Every week, they wash his sheets. She feeds him a pill and pours Evian water in his mouth. What's a little more wet. He swallows it. A trickle gets on his lip and she wipes it off with the damp sheet. She pats the cheek, and wipes her hand on the blanket. She snuggles the blanket up to his chin and gives him a kiss.I love you. Everything will be okay.He murmurs: I love you too.She will throw out the sheets and her father’s clothing will go to Goodwill. She will keep her mother's sweater, and wear it.The living make the lists. No love, only money. Legacy. At least, I was a dutiful daughter.She will cry at her father's funeral like a widow. And then she will post on Facebook, with old photos in a slideshow video and a black & white filter on it all: SENTIMENTAL. A song like Bob Dylan or Don't Stop Believin' will play, and flowers will fall down the screen. The well wish motley will make her feel like a tragic figure, Jackie O: heart you, love you, thinking of you, heart.Convenience store it is for beers tonight. Beers like the sunroof on the car Dad bought, replaces every two years to ensure her safety.She slots the key in the front door with a deer cam above. She keeps her hand steady. She walks steadily up the stairs. She brushes the beer off her teeth. She checks the children's rooms: ensure aliveness. She checks the live cam app to make sure her dad is sound asleep--his chest is moving up and down in the grainy green image, good. The Samson sleeps too. She slips under the sheets, and stares at the ceiling with the alcohol glow in her chest and abdomen. I'm Byzantine. I am a Glenda. No trouble. No trouble, only peace. No money. No money otherwise. Never worked a day in my life. Impregnated by the hick at eighteen, and marriage was the only way to maintain propriety face. Never wanted. I never wanted the sad girl with my husband's face. Her daughter hovers in the doorway like a small feminine replica of the sleeping man. Mommy this, mommy that. Mommy is busy. She looks at the ceiling fan. It spins, fanning her face. Soon, this house will be listed and sold. She will take her father's. She looks over her cart--toggling between pool chair cushion color options. With a hand on her chest, she selects old photos for the post: her and her dad, her and her mom and dad. She thinks to herself as she's falling asleep: this is not so sad, like it was with mom, no, it's rote.No, really, lying here, I am lonely. She pictures Billy's face. She slid down to him on the rope she made out of tied sheets: it sailed out the window with her, into his arms and busty beat-up Corvette. The red car they sailed the highway on. Kissed him while he drove. Her hair tangled around the headrest and he looped it around his stuck-up middle finger. Creek they parked in, blue and red lights from the coppers. They hid their drinks in their glove compartment. And ducked down, while giggling. Sh, stoned, they laughed at the coppers who could never catch them, untouchable rebels in their youth. Dad caught her of course, paddled her ass. Never again, her father wagged his finger. Windows are for looking out of, not climbing out of. She obeyed, for fear of the paddle.Yes, it's rote. Fine, life is this! An utterance escapes her mouth like the repressed laughter of a pulpit crowd at a priest with a hidden boner. Am I happy? She says aloud: I am, yet the sound is lost in the overhead fan wind and the snores choke it like a pillow could choke a dying man. Lovely, life is like doing the dishes with underlying dread. A dish may slip and break like the sneer on her face, at you, me, her, and her children. Do your duty with the Jackie O face. I'm the president. In my head, I am the presidential candidate. Though outsiders see me, they do not realize I am not her. Biden lawn signs. Venom, she thinks, I've always been the fucking snake. I want to bite, thrash, wrap, or lash, and I want you to bleed.
fiction, *draft
He orders the car from the pier. In the backseat, I pinch the vertebrae on his neck, going up and down on the workhorse muscles as he watches. I knuckle into the flesh beneath his skull. I picture the architect slicing me up, and dragging me out to the river. At the elevator door, a couple smiles, uncomfortable, with a groomed dog on a metal collar. Sheen and granite, the bellhops are smiling too. The architect relaxes on the couch, with hotel art above his head: Franz Kline lookalikes, the smaller framed drawings are curvier and more symmetrical than Kline. Linen pants with a hard groin, like a building. His eyes are squishy spheres in a skull covered in skin that is nice, he looks younger than thirty-three. The bedroom is grey as the rest of the suite, and silent, no gravel jokes through the window. I lay on top of him, kissing his ear. I pull his pants off. His underwear humanizes him—common briefs. Hands around the architect's neck, giving the muscles a kneading, I remember motorcycles outside the tavern and orange creamsicle beers. My ex worked at the grocery store. We played techno in the car going over hilly roads, and pulling wildly into stations with camo-colored memorabilia. I smoked Pall Malls from a five-dollar pack and drank syrupy blue alcohol, while he ate a corndog coated in vinegar cheese dust. He wiped the dust on his pants, going back and forth like a grater. Dank corridors with a sewage smell, my ex hit his pipe and watched reels while I painted. The architect whispers while I've got my knees on his back, to lie on my stomach. Do you have a knife in a drawer? I picture in the bedside table a kitchen knife. Open that drawer, and you could sink it in right between my two back plates. Take that knife and drag it down, disemboweling me in reverse. Spinal mutilation, I can see it happening, and I'm scared. I tell him what I'm scared of and he says, now why would that occur? On the couch, he says: allow some hope into the darkness. He continues: do you think I was meant to meet you tonight and interrupt your assumptions of the rich? Will you take a car or will you take the train? I don't know, train, probably. I kiss him on a pursed mouth, while he sits in a bathrobe, tied. His chest is dark-haired. He's in front of the window in the bathrobe dress, with his black hair wet from the shower.Bataille said: Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off. The architect scrolls through a portfolio on his laptop: I am the head designer of the building next door.Strolling, with his arms behind his back, I walk at his side. The architect asks why the classes don’t interact in New York. I look out at the castle dispersed: all its turrets skyscrapers, with fireworks in the sky. This is like the bombs from my childhood. What war? Yugoslav.I adjust the couch cushions to be at a slight angle and dim the lights. You have to adjust your environment to be yours. You have to engineer your space. You should know, being an architect.The sheets are dry, not like my damp sheet mattress, poised unlike my slumping rectangle. The lamps light the walls: cold spotlights. I read him Wojnarowicz smut. He stares with a flat Russian face and expects me to initiate. Not now. He talks about his ex-boyfriend, a blonde European noble with a desperate face. I talk about my ex’s brother who killed himself. He worked at a grocery store with my ex, and every day my ex saw the same coworkers, from when they worked together. His brother: car accident brain damage, he was never the same. Destroyed the family, the suicide. My ex had a friend who had a father who was a veteran with PTSD. He committed suicide after being a drug addict. Her mother was in prison and now is a line cook.Hard to be poor here, less hard in Europe. Despite this. He gestures out. And we are walking close to the AT&T Tower.But my friend is a cook at a good restaurant and signed to a modeling agency, discovered online, but dropped ultimately.The gold disguises the rot; the concrete wraps around a scaffolding, that is bare steel, all mechanics. Where is the building heart, and where is the blood river filling the toilets and exiting the silver taps?He is face-down in a crucifix position.The car is riding the highway; the car is riding the city street and we're in it. I don't know what to do here. I have my hand on his leg. The buildings are gravestones taffy-pulled by the architect on a y-axis.The cell towers go up in flames, like tall matchsticks across the country. The bombs go off on the city, and the city towers alternate with scorch marks.My mother says a happy life is the best revenge. The car became our closet extractor. Me and my ex in his dad's old roller. Techno music down the mountain, I kissed him at the wheel, while a deer ran across. We lit the side of the deer. I stared at the dashboard. Voyeurs and backstabbers, except you. Trembling for forty-eight hours, time to go to work. How do you do it? He hits the bong. A marble on a circular track circled down a track to hell. Faces peered out of square cells. Sorrow failed to arouse any feeling but sorrow. We floated in cool air under sun-speckled clouds: puff balls on a lilac-gold dome with green mountains hugging the town, and bar. I served beverages with allspice and basil syrup. Rose, apertif, and orange blossom. Espresso beans on icy chocolate milk froth, and a spicy pickled Bloody Mary with olives on a skewer. Dogs lapped outside, at bowls. If only I could be a winged dog, or fly up like an angel. I would fly to the moon and take it down. I could carry it to earth. I could carry the moon down.Game die are spray-painted on the concrete pillars that hold the MJ train up. Fruits mold. I stare at the wall. Wind hits my back and face left side from the fan. A bird's clothing is stuck to its goose-bumped skin. Plucking a feather is like plucking a hair. A pear hugs its own curve. A bouncing orange is a molding sphere. An orange molds behind the window screen. A pigeon tears through the orange, filling its small stomach, the pigeon gorges on discard. The man at the ninety-eight station, eats a pretzel off the ground. And it's sad to me. Two planes overlap. One leaves a trail and the other keeps going. Though the one plane's trail is more visible now, it will disappear. The architect will build skyscrapers and mausoleums across the world. Blips in the sky next door.I am flat on my floor bed looking up at the ceiling. I am flexing my toes and rubbing my ankles together, looking at the blue jacket the ex wore in the rain to Maryland. Where we shared a bed, not in a hotel, but his friend's custom place. It lacked the coldness of the spaces the architect brought me to.Hotel rooms compartmentalize connections. A person called "maid" or "cleaning person" sweeps off the pillow hairs and dandruff, then washes the sheets. My ex's mother cleaned schools. My mother cleans the house. Pillow speck sky blips, the cleaner who is not a cleaner, deserves a skyscraper seat. The wall in my room turns into the hotel window. Through the window, I can see a grey tower the architect builds in Russia. It has a golden cap. The cap points down instead of up. I stand by the water, and look through the skyline to see his skyscraper-in-progress: thin and surrounded by cranes. It hasn't been covered in glass yet. The upside-down gold head, his signature, is not on there yet. The architect said: it's for the people; it reflects them. And I wondered, privately, if that makes luxury real-estate any better. That hotel was a fortress. The turret architect is a pragmatist. He dislikes the skyline he adds to, yet he would rather be an architect than a builder. The architect rakes millions off luxury real-estate, but I can see that building in the future with its gold cap looking down on the city, and reflecting grey floods. I can see the building like a hallucination of apocalypse, and the Russian oligarchs hide out there.Assessing our differences, he said: you see darkness; I see light. In my dark room, I know every object. In the car, headlights and taillights shone on wheat like four rays. Your dad's car, will he care you took it? On the cat piss couch, it snowed outside. The walls were made of wood; might as well have been a deer head, add a lei around the decapitated bear's neck, too. We watched TV: Jerry Springer and Million Dollar Listing reruns on Bravo, while I drank blue beer and he hit the bong. Passed out drunk on the bed, while the cats ran scrabble. Do it again tomorrow. Drink the cat piss. I was happy. Scrabble game on the floor. Cheap champagne, like we'd just bought a house. Junk meadow, the daisies grow out my eyes. I'm a head and joint-less. Laid, in the architect's hotel room, I asked if I was there to make him less lonely. He said: yes, but you're the one I called. Not phrased like this, not so blunt. Like a shirt with an invisible seam, the architect walks with the security of belonging. On a decrepit pier, the architect told me I reminded him of it. Whereas, I am more like the other pier. He pointed at a distant more sleek pier. Yet, he made the comment with no malice, hands deep in his pockets. With a hand he slams his cock up and down like a burly Russian soldier. He is vertical on his knees above me, while I am reclined and watching. I like his blank grunting face. His eyes close and open. They contact mine when open. He rubs my back: you’re doing a bad job. They corrected me to sweep properly. Teaching me the form: of one hand over one hand and sweeping into a pile made in a specific room part, instead of sweeping into the container with each motion, it was better to accumulate the dust, in a pile then take the pile into the box. Dump the box in the trash. Take the trash can to the garbage. Take the bottles out back. Polish the silverware every day with the shift drink: how do you do this every day? You do, said the captain, shift-manager—straight butch with a husband and daughter with Down's Syndrome. She was there every day: no complaining, The mountains roll past my eyes. The car heads down the mountain and pitches off the road to sail in reverse to the moon. The architect designed Brutalist buildings and his face was illegible. I will miss the chipped wall. It ascends higher, bracketing the payers.He texts: I want to be honest I'm not in the right place for something romantic. I recently went through a tough break up and need some time and space to settle my feelings.He offers to recommend me to a Foundation. I knew I was right to be wary. Yet, I studied him like one might study an object of purported greatness: with suspicion. And I touched him like one might touch an obelisk, or mannequin. He admitted he had a different conception of kindness, that had more to do with strategy. I helped him set up his new apartment. Stretching the new bed with sheets, and picking out furniture. I played him my music, songs with titles like: Great expectations, Rent boy, Not what you want, You know how to make me happy, I Hit em' wit da hee—he said it was depressing. The songs played like dirges in the hotel room, slowing us into the recognition of his unhappiness, and my unhappiness as a result of his being preoccupied. He played American pop and I always let him, without commenting on the negative qualities. We sat on the couch listening to my songs, while he munched at chips in a bathrobe and I vaped, staring at the wall, and out the window of that hotel. And we sat separate on the bed; I was empty, yet longing to be a tenant, even part-time, in a skyscraper, with him; this was my most shameful desire. He talked about slow IKEA deliveries, and I could not relate. He gave advice, and picked apart my assumptions on art, then tugged at my ear. And at the restaurant, I caught him on Hinge talking to a Georgian, and he explained it away. And at the Georgian restaurant, the waitress remarked she'd seen him there recently with another man. A friend. He talked a lot about real-estate men and their egos; I reassured him and was polite. He wanted me to draw him being surrounded by sharks, and offered to hang it, yet said it like he would be doing me a favor. And suggested I buy a frame for the drawing I didn't make. In Milan he posted his ex-boyfriend's initial: the minutiae of guessing why, interest was not, reciprocated. And he dated the noble for eight years, they had just broken up, six months before, so this erotic tale I've made was that, a tale. Though he took me out of the rain, and into a drizzle. It undoes: the story works itself down to a basement, and it is very musty there, unextraordinary, and crowded with details, of casual alienation, and a Pragmatist charmed by a hopeless romantic momentarily, though it could have been his loneliness, for a brief companion, and I fit the bill, knowing the basement very well. It is dark in the basement, usually. Though I think he would realize he is darker than the basement, if he took a pause to stop, building toward the sun. I am free when I have unloaded my darkness; I am carefree, walking anonymously around the city, like a pauper. And for all his toutings of humble luxury: a small modest box car, instead of a Lamborghini, it is still all potpourri. No legacy I need, and feel freer, now, without the imposition, of fantasy. Did I sabotage his perception of me to escape from what could have been, a life with a closed man? Or did he really not see me as a person, transactional. A cold and lonely life in a tall building, I know, what that is like, and I have seen women I know, fall for men like the architect. Who would have led me to a submissive fate: the first night he did not like how I refused him, and the oblong explanation I provided to justify not lying with my back to him, was unnecessary. I do not like a man who assumes what he should get. And I do not like a man, who exposes his portfolio quaintly like it should be, so impressive. Though this may be a case study in the reaction of the spurned. And he dropped me like a penny. Had I set out to see if he would be the same, as all the rich men I ever knew? Was I beginning to love him, or merely waiting for the end? Doomed, I am drawn to these cold-types: compartmentalized hotels. The sky breaks ahead. The sky breaks open. And on the red river, I am floating like a wasted Sidonie. The river goes out past the piers.
Face, scaffolding, sediment. The grey Authoritarian wall turns from spectral to backdrop, bird shit sky, gender blur on the convention. Loss folds into a larger erosion of state-reality which the Right reasserts via emphasis on the hetero-gender-strict construct. Who do you want to be resilient, and who would you prefer to disappear, or silently continue providing goods and services to the RWB vampire (the painting subjects and who they serve as avatars 4 AND also who they are, which is where love is. Isn’t an interesting dialogue better than placid vacancy)? Uncertain under smokestacks, water towers, sears houses being renovated into mansions, or being pried apart, by the builders, who are paid to unmake the houses and re-lay the Lego bricks. The maintainers live in the houses the builders build, the maintainers and city planners give orders, yet are subject to direction. blue is a harsh and garish color. Royal blue rain turns to a feathered garb clay-caked. The face slides off in the rain to reveal a stoic pose, and the kitchenware clatter, subaltern is loud. The grey sound-wall is punctured with windows for shrillness, and the wrongfully imprisoned escape like pink dots, while the office chair, maintaining convention, breaks into fossil noise. The negative spaces in a chair make tombstone-reminders, of complicity (for every dollar made, someone is harmed) while the driveway turns into an exhaust-pipe-internal-organ: a tunnel beneath the city is given breath, and the green-gold lawn has a dirty veneer. There is no purity, and the stripes, like the white wind, are muddied flesh-like yet holy still or -ish in impurity, beside the hairline scaffold on the arm-chair, while the legs grow feathers and the air turns to the vapor sail-wings of a cement gargoyle. Though exhaust scents the air, the inhabitants forget the smell, or turn it to mauve perfume: the perfume is the manufactured separation which is always a military-industrial complex product veil-screen-glass, through which we see, unfortunately. If I could peel off the layer of grime, though learning to see through the grime is bleak life, not sad or Greek life. Yet loss ⚓️tattoo&CEMENT=strength.
A hail stone broke my father's windshield, and he repaired it with duct tape, then drove an hour in the white-out on I-94 to work at a Christian liberal arts college and an hour home.I stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which became like lavender stalk tips. The fields were all beige with corn cob punctuations. Pumpkins in the fall fronted the fields, siding the lanes that cut the fields.Snow filled the window wells. I was head to toe in snow gear with mittens, ski socks, and boots. In the cul-de-sac's center was an iceberg. I shook white crystals off my hat, and they melted on the tile floor. I stomped my boots out in the garage, before entering the house. Owls hit our glass windows. They blended into the snow. My dad cried seeing this. School, work, home, and church—off the highway. You are here on the world rug.I tossed caterpillars in the wheelbarrow when the snow melted. They smooshed on our feet and tires. The projector tilted. A virtual fire glowed in a projected parallelogram shape on the flooding basement’s wall. Water spilled filled the basements through window wells. Black mold on the concrete, so we tore up the carpets. Three trees were equally spaced on a green lawn next to the driveway. A man circled the cul-de-sac and stepped out of his car to pick cherries off our trees, then eyed us children and got back in his car.I closed my eyes and saw the cornfields swaying. I saw a castle at the end of the prairie, and walked a lane to the doorway, where my parents stood, at the opening. I heard the wind chime. I opened my eyes: caterpillars drifted across the sky-ceiling, and mutated into each other like mates.I wrote my name, tidy, in my bound notebook with a granite-pattern cover. The f was a vertical infinity symbol with a line protruding between the ovals. The kitchen table was a square made of glass with foam on the corners. Rags & Windex maintained crystal clarity. Foam corners on the fireplace prevented us from hitting our heads, and car locks prevented children from accidentally falling out of the mini vans. Disney stickers on the glass curve obscured the sound wall, behind which, our cul-de-sac was. Later, my father scraped the stickers off, using the same scraper meant for ice. Unlike the ice, which turned to water that dripped off, the stickers left a permanent residue. No amount of scrubbing could restore the glass to perfection. An air-freshener tree hung from the curved rectangular mirror of the car. The mirror reflected my glasses on a squished face. My glasses reflected the mirror. The Honda Odyssey door opened automatically with a mechanical groan, and beeps. To buy school lunch meant you were of a lower class. In the middle school cafeteria, boys could not sit with girls or they were gay. White kids could not sit with Black kids, or the parents with Pure Michigan bumper stickers would say the Black child was a bad influence, and not invite the child over. One half of the cafeteria ate packed lunch, and the other, school lunch: a line cut down the middle like a tug-of-war rope. When dating began in middle school, a white girl began dating Black men in succession, and behind her back, and it was determined this was "inappropriate:" word from our parents. Her Catholic father surveyed drivers from a highway billboard which advertised his law practice. A snake nest is the neighborhood on a satellite map. A snake swallows Americana-mash-up houses, crashes through the sound-wall, and eats the long roads. A yellow Beetle sits still on the cul-de-sac. From a Facebook post, we learn, the car's owner has died. Cold light illuminates the car interior and cul-de-sac. In the highway town, we live on earth and in builder's textures: mud, pastel vinyl siding, and rock glued into a facade. We designed the lives of caterpillars and straight virtual families, assigning gendered tasks to the animals and sims. Yet alternative possibilities were made possible, game options expanded with LGBTQ+ rights, and we experimented with strange pairings. We role-played the explorers we celebrated on days, off like small carriers of disease. We sat on the world map and learned our state was our hand. We role-played architects and killers, shot toy guns, played dead Native Americans, and ate at symbiotic Thanksgivings. We drew paths in the snow, game maps, territorial demarcations, for small pillaging-games, Capture the Flag. We drew boundaries with boots or fingers, on the windshield, which broke again from the hail. Again, my father laid the tape over the break, like a wardrobe craftsman. And I cried for the rupture and its anesthetization. Black tape bandaged the glass hole and interfered with my father's clear vision of the road ahead. Snow too obscured I-94. Pile-up, the radio announced, so my father took a U-turn, and climbed up the nearest exit. He drove past a Panera, then a series of chains.
Hail broke my father's windshield. He repaired it with duct tape. Black tape kept fractal glass ordered and covered the absence created by the hail's wound. Hail didn't know or care, how its chance destruction of the windshield would affect my father's daily drive to work an hour away, and back. Black tape bandaged the glass hole and interfered with my father's clear vision of the road ahead. Snow too obscured I-94. Pile-up, the radio announced, so my father took a U-turn, and climbed up the nearest exit. He drove past a Panera, then a series of chains.I looked around with my hat on and stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which vibrated into lavender, like tips of stalks on endless fields, I imagined. Really, the fields were all beige with yellow corn cob punctuations, maybe some pumpkins in the fall fronted the fields, siding the lanes that cut the fields, separating families of bugs.The window wells outside our basement filled with snow. Iron lattices, like child locks on car doors, prevented us from sudden deaths.I was head to toe in snow gear. In the cul-de-sac's center, an iceberg shimmered like an object of desire. I shook my head and crystals fell past my eyes. Snow melted on the tile floor. I stomped my boots out in the garage, before entering the house.Owls hit our glass windows, killing themselves. The animals lay still on the grass, blending into the snow. My father cried seeing this, melting like the snow. Crying like a child with skinned knees, whose mother'd died, yet the child never properly mourned the mother's loss, so the skinned knees, shorn skin, a small superfluous pain, set him off. Cried like an icicle under a fingernail, peeling the nail off, I know that cry.Caterpillars covered the driveway, in the absence of snow now. I got a caterpillar on my boot. The sole is covered in guts. We filled the wheelbarrow with caterpillars, though, what now?The projector was tilted. A virtual fire glowed in a projected parallelogram shape on the flooding basement’s wall. Water spilled down into the basement through boxes dug out in the lawn. We bailed the basement out with buckets and tore up the carpet. The concrete floor was covered in black mold.Scrub mold off the floor and the grout lines between manmade stones on the fireplace. Dial the flame on, and stare at the flicker.Three trees were equally spaced on the green lawn. A man circled the cul-de-sac and stepped out of his car to pick cherries off our trees, then eyed us children and got back in his car. At the top of a hill, with its fraternal twin next door, our house kept check on the cul-de-sac. Predators, you never know.I stared at the ceiling, high on migraine-barbiturates, and the ceiling turned grainy. I closed my eyes and saw the cornfields swaying. I saw a castle at the end of the prairie, and walked a lane to the doorway, where my parents stood, at the opening. I heard the wind chime. I opened my eyes: caterpillars drifted across the sky-ceiling, and mutated into each other like mates.
short fiction
At the mic, the girls all say: Lala was strong in death. She was omnipotent; there was nothing I could say to counter.I hit the bee on its head, three, four times to kill it. Loud, the tables next to us. I want them to know, my friend says, I am right next door. I am sure they know. It's sad, she says, like they sold their souls for cash.They did, my aunts.Fox in his den, sniffing through the memory piles and choosing what stories to form. With black eyes he looks down on earth. Lala was occupying his vertical wedge, saying: their summer voices, I was listening to their moans from the bedrooms, about her parents. Butterflies were like my chance, Fox. To go into Broadway performance.Said the Fox to me, in a wistful tone: Lala, got caught in the bedroom and killed off pretty easy. THE COAL TRAIN RAMBLER MURDERED SIX that summer. I watched it all unfold, like a story I was reading in the paper, and now it's all jumbled up, on the paper wad. Fox was the husband. He was playing the sorry creature. Like he did, with a cane and walker after.I walked up to that lane, and I saw Lala standing in the window. A smiling elegance with brown hair, she looked out through the glass at me, wearing gold and silver. Black pants, yoga-like and a purple shirt. In that huge house, she was so lucky and grateful, to have left the mining town, and built her own palazzo up, with the man, she could almost forget how he tamed her, the fox.The OBIT says she was a mother of twelve, how strange, to be lied to. In plain-speak. Broad day. There was never a Broadway possibility, for her. And a fox was the best bet for the good life. The righteous pathway led up to that door front with a brass and gold knocker. I hit it; ran away.Broadway jewels on the street, I make no sentimental actions. I forgot her. Or maybe there was a possibility, for Lala and she could have taken it. Maybe her life was good, she laid around all day. Pretty dream-like, on the calm drugs. She was always taking those pills, maybe twenty a day.I saw the bottle stacks in her cupboard one time. Orange pharmaceuticals. Pills and pills and more. No wonder Lala was so fine, I wouldn't say happy, and spectral. She was high. Some were plain normal supplements: Valerian, and Magnesium, pills with calming effects, but when the names got stranger and I saw an opiate, I shut the cabinet. I laid that investigation to rest.At the mic, I say: I think she had a good life; can't be sure. To a murmur. The heads nod slow. Yeah, I think she had a slow life in the later years.An actress on the stage like a starburst. The curtain is cobalt blue, and she's singing there with her arms flung out at the ceiling, empty theatre.In heaven, said the fox. Where will he go? The fox sniffs the green.The purple stays in form: the rectangular door frame, about ten feet away. She stands. Skinny bones. Dozing pillar. With her hair dyed brown until the last day, and in her coffin, her hair was brown. And her lipstick was purple-crimson. She never kissed my cheek; she wasn't like that.THE DREAM RETURNS ALL THE TIME OF THE WOMAN with a baby. The first-born. Got her set up in the initial red brick. Then, the next one, an addition. Until, the bricks built up, and the plow drove down through the soil, a basement. Where the corpse lay, Lala. Said, me. Said, the fox.Her skin was pale. Translucent. The bangles hit the pillow. The strands on her hair were coated in a murk. Coated in a gloss. Because the room was dark. And the windows were open to the backyard: so the wind blew in. There on her makeshift cot, her mouth opened for water and I fed it to her. I sat in my polo and waited for her gasping to stop. On the carpet, my feet, were pressed. I was in a room. With a dying Lala, and felt nothing, but gratitude. Her pain would end. The gold and furnishings would stay, the arched chair she selected and it held her everyday. Same with the bed I never saw.It was behind the upstairs door: the bed, where she slumbered, reading magazines on the cushions, on the plush mat, she cannot be blamed for being passively resplendent: the aristocrat's wife. Like a throne, she was still. She gripped her silverware. Silver jewelry in the cavern room, a small house clipped to the first one. She drank too much, though she did not; she was prevented. If she did she'd vent at the room, gone silent at her rage. We always listened to her, the colonel. Snap at the Fox when drunk, he took her wine. The grass lawn fell down to the street below. Went out to the hill slide. Never learned to drive, she was in that house until dinner. Agoraphobic, Lala only went out to the hair salon or dinner. Your hair looks so nice today; why thank you, she'd say, with the tempered laugh. No coarseness. I wonder how she learned to be so poised: because her father was a factory-worker. Second of her class, the Fox was the first. I lost her, but she died before I forgot her. The grandfather clock ticked a beat. And the classics echoed in the house: skipping tracks, I lay like a Henry. I lay like an ingrate, waiting for Lala to be done and talk to me. Like I was a godson. Cold and aloof, she kept most to herself, in the tall house like a smokestack, pumping gray out on the blue sky. And Lala was Fox's pet name, Fox, the pseudonym. Lala got the aunts to do her dishes. And the cleaning. While she sat in the plum chair, in a plum shirt, stoned. Waving a hand around and making corrections to bad servants. Unload the boxes: begin the organizations. Plan the plans. Sat on the plush chair, speaking into the curling phone, she said the one cousin is a dud, he works as a custodian. I was aghast at his descent. Manual labor. And now I am the gas-station worker. I sit hitting the buzzer for customers to come visit. Regal, she walked down the stairs with a haughty air. Do you want a round of applause? But she knew she was a showstopper, with no effort, or a hidden type.The funeral ends. She is laid out like a person to watch. We say our goodbyes to the body. Her hairs were brown strings on the pillow next to the silent gasps.Laid in bed she'd tell the Fox to catch a bee. Point her finger at the buzzing sadist, with fear. So he did, bringing a cup to place on it, and sliding a paper under. Her bed, I remember the paisley cover, and her skull with blush on pale skin; she did not like the sun. She did not go out, even at the beach condo. Stayed in the sunscreen room, looking at magazine pictures: decor. Withered, her body on the walker or chair like a marionette. Her neck was bent: she suffered. No medicine could stop the pain, internal bleeding. She was a stage coach to children. She ate grapefruits with a serrated knife, putting her lips around the bite, careful not to touch food to her lips. Finding something to do, a task, I reorganize the lottery tickets. I polish the pseudo-granite, like penance. For allowing Lala to die like that. Without even an I love you, her death was cold. Snow blanket on the drapes. Her drape was coarse fabric, non-linen, her body bag. May as well have been a rucksack, unlike her cashmere. Lala loves you like a trickle.I never saw her get lowered in the ground: where is she? Roaming the stage and speaking soliloquies to no one. Transparent, still. And transparent too now, the Fox.
The half breed sat, sipping his LongIsland. He was looking at the green in Bellefonte, the small Centre County town near the college, for students interested more in getting drunk than learning.