Drew Spielvogel
Personal writing and experimental fiction
I was visiting the classy art school while still in high school. I saw Paul walking down the hallway wearing a Cocteau shirt which intrigued me. I later learned the shirt referred to Jean Cocteau and not Cocteau Twins. I saw him again first week of classes and struck up a conversation in the bathroom. Third-person becomes second-person. "He" becomes "you" as we become more familiar, moving in together after two weeks. You're snoring and I can’t sleep—it is too hot under the blankets. Trees cut up Providence skyscrapers. Your hand rests next to your face with painted nails. You wear my white T-shirt with soft plaid pants. I'm visiting your hometown and meeting your parents for Christmas. You take a photo of me. The scenery looks like an Alex Katz painting—green trees stuck on a dotted navy sky. I took someone new to the shop Paul works at in lower Manhattan, not for petty reasons, for a full-circle moment, but Paul wasn’t working that night.
There was a bee last night buzzing at the mirror. I hit it, trying to kill it. It just wouldn't die. Great Aunt Lala was like this, too, resilient. Her husband places a finger on the red-smeared lips. He coos shh. I hit the bee with a paper towel roll, and the end of the umbrella, and finally, I use a candlestick to smush it. I think of Lala, who loved candlesticks and would have commanded her husband to take care of the bee for her. And he’d have put it under a cup and slid a piece of paper beneath the cup to contain the bee. Lala said: go take that bee outside to release it. Lala was quiet in death like the bee.
Gaudy bouquets must have been dyed these bright holiday colors, the flowers under the train bridge. Flowers are bright like rays on my day. Flowers are real. Flowers wrapped in tinsel. 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. This square of sidewalk is owned by the city, but it’s mine. I strap my mattress to my back so it’s not snatched up by a friend. 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 Trump and Elon are doing. I spray my tag on a white domed bank in broad daylight. 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. My goal is to spray paint my tag on the Trump Hotel, but it’s too heavily guarded, the eyesore. I’ll write my tag big in a green scrawl, Fallen Princessa. I want to blast confetti off a balcony, and get a group together to dance-storm the capitol, not like Trumpies did, that was bad behavior. Hey you, fuck, I shout at corpo-snob, why aren’t you angry about how much money you have? Because I earned it, passerby responds in a clipped tone. I respond: flowers could be real beneath the holiday petal dye.
I see you through a window with old youth group friends. I used to go to youth group with you. Youth group at the Presbyterian church, where you would talk to my friends, while I watched.I sit on a bench in my hometown parklet near the high school football stadium. Every bench is crafted and labored over. Someone gave a portion of their life to make this bench. The name of every craftsman and machine operator who worked on an object should be engraved on the laminate wood.We met at church group. You DMed me songs. I lied and said I loved Nicki Minaj and Beyonce like you did. We exchanged puppy dog-filtered self-portraits.In high school art history 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 our bodies nestled together 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, taking virginity sort-of, and I did not like it, and we broke up. 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. I put my clothes in storage—RedBubble t-shirts and candy-color Vans, hoodie with the raccoon pattern, retro telephone stamped sweater, etc.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 stirs the dread up.
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.
School was off the highway, as was church, a complex with a playground and billboard screens above the pulpit, and an arcade and waterpark. Steak and Shake was off the highway, and the mall too, a decrepit iconic place with addictive sesame chicken and stuffed birds hanging from wires off the ceiling. The highway connected all parts. It was the school-work-home-leisure connector. My house was behind the highway, separated from cars by the grey sound wall. In photos, Mom wears a light brown sweater with a high scratchy collar. There is pale yellow wallpaper and laminate stone floors. It's a Michigan house--palatial on a large yard at the top of a hill with flimsy walls, a basement that floods in rain, and similar to the one next door, like a fraternal twin. I had a dream with a man who circled the cul-de-sac, and stepped out of his car. He picked fruits from trees in our yard. The image of a babysitter's old yellow Volkswagen bug, parked in the cul-de-sac recurs to me. Her death was matter-of-factly described in a post. In Pennsylvania, I go for wandering walks every day. On a walk, I see a tree with small red berries, reminding me of the trees my Dad planted in a row of three. Three equidistant trees next to the driveway on our tart green lawn in Michigan. In dreams, I loop the cul-de-sac, see my parents' faces, and children playing on a snow pile. I can always take the highway back to previous stops, though they may be different, rubble, or decaying. What is the use of nostalgia, and going back to a neighborhood with children living in happiness and safety? Death takes it sweet time pulling up to the neighborhood, divorce is slow to pull into a driveway. No sweet fantasy is without evil. A small neighborhood's greatest fear is a different-looking person. I hope the neighborhood remains pristine, like it is in my head and dreams.
Buildings in the downtown area are faded brick and eroded vinyl siding. There are chipped murals too with smiling faces of community members everywhere.On the Main Street mural, a young girl smiles mid-pirouette. In place of a tooth, there is a chip revealing the original grey color of the building.I got to know the muralist who painted the girl in mid-pirouette, his daughter. He was haunted by her early passing.He’d call me late randomly and ask if everything was okay. Ya, everything is fine. He has a tattoo of a hawk on the area between the pointer finger and thumb, which represents his daughter. We both live in New York now, and haven’t seen each other yet. We haven’t seen each other in the place with no reminders of the past for newcomers. He carries the tattoo-reminder.There is no time for the past in a neighborhood that is always changing, always pushing out past inhabitants, scribbling over murals with real sentiment, and excreting the old to create a sparkly high-rise.I wonder if you tell your tattoo stories of bar fights or talk to the girl in your murals about climbing up staircases of tall skyscrapers illegally.The muralist is working on something for the UN building. I wonder if he’ll paint his daughter in it. The mural will travel the world after its presentation at the United Nations building, flying this ballerina around. Symbols and depictions, meaningful, even necessary. The extension of grief and the devices we use to cope with it into unreal territory—magical space. The image of the girl reproduced by its creator in the ultimate American city. The ultimate American city reinvents itself through erasure.The image of the ballerina, or whatever new form he gives her, travels the world thereafter. In the future, someone may stumble upon a fragmented pirouette. If only the ballerina could speak.
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 parted.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 normal family like everyone wants, I am the real one you want to see. Can you hide my heartbeat beneath your floorboards? I dreamed you would remove me from Iowa. And I wandered the streets while typing rants and messages after you flew home to Saudi. I lay in a field drunk and crying at 4 AM, pulling out the grass.I stayed in bed making spam posts of my break-up thoughts, losing a follower every two minutes, checking the follower tic like a spasm. A demise was in full swing. Chain-smoking cigarettes in the basement of a sports bar, I tell my friend I need to be with you, yet feel more alone with his response, realistic strategies to "move forward." Men play their darts, play their pool. Cups of gold and brown fluid are consumed.At Winnie's in Chinatown, I ran into someone who knew you back in Iowa and he said: Oh yeah, we hooked up.I feel blank, like a space. I am not numb. Numb suggests there is so much pain, one must separate from the feeling by turning off, and I did not do this, I felt mildly amused, a little disturbed but not numb, and this is how I knew I did not care anymore. Round hairy shape in fucking fantasy. Green chintz duvet and 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. 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 my head sideways to accentuate my jawline. I captioned it: love is an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap (single tear crying emoji) and love is the feeling of bridging it.The romantic tropes I assigned to us, the love that I thought I'd fallen into, and the young delusional poetry, or narcissistic posts like call-outs to a mostly uncaring audience, were products of my desperation, isolation, and need for an escapist fantasy. What do I take away from the time waste and heartbreak? Did I love you? Did I love that you could take me away? Did I create the notion that you could? I think so.
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, 2Chainz. 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. Families and loners are sitting on picnic tables outside the bakery 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’m in the grey and black room with grey walls and grey sheets on a mattress, and a black duvet, and a single bulb above dressed in a trash bag. Future business leaders are on their grind while I’m laying here. Planes keep going past, reminding me that I am just one object-being. Same end for every object-being, though each believes it will go to a different place. Another eerie whistle. Another windy whistle five minutes later. The bed is warm. I know this is true. It will cool when I leave it. I love the familiar mattress with pilly sheets and a black blanket.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, which lights up the watcher’s face in a colorful miasma. Hope is the gesture and light.
I start my day with a reel sequence and Megan Thee Stallion’s NPR 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 in nothing nowhere NYC, though I will try, I am done with Dumbo.
I will lay in nothing nowhere, 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 Megan Thee Stallion background music.
I sip my black coffee with sugar and plan to make the grime nothing.
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. I said he villainizes me as a fuck-up, only seeing my failures. He tentatively agrees. Who knows blues.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 to Megan Thee Stallion.
Her TV song is bright and alluring. She is doing it.I can always go nowhere and be nothing. Failure and estrangement are familiar. I will try to strive like Megan. If I fail, I fail. I remain convinced and unconvinced that I can inhabit a truism lifestyle.I wrap this up, so we are not late for the function. I sure know how to be miserable. Happiness is available and attainable. The light comes from far away, touching what I touch.
Dark stab, mop hair, I don't mop the floor. White specks on a black comforter, my head's snowfall. Don't brush teeth. No tear. Tear open eye and gash the gash. Dying frog in muck mud is smiling through the Collapse. I laugh at the fridge, bed, microwave, and shower. Lol microwave and lol fridge, I laugh at the apathetic devices. Hair on the shower drain and dandruff on the bed. Fluorescent lights don't care, but I personify them as kind. Frog on the creek shore. Water lapping, water restricted by the shore edge. Water is not deep but expansive. The frog makes a wall to the sky. Brooklyn Mirage overlays decrepit Real. Dying visions at hyper speed earlier, like reels, like the image of a frog, pinned in mud. Frog hops to Lily pad.
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. Smile, grimace, sneer. I grind and grit my teeth. I spit on a tower. I 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.Shake your money, shake your thing. Make that money, make it sing. I am the consumptive face, cool legend, change wizard. I buy modifications to self-express like a game avatar. I pay to sculpt my features and buy outfits to disguise emptiness. I am the empty nest. I nod and smile along, with conditioned responses. I know I have become my image, my face, with nothing under. I have collapsed the distinction between me and my image. Am I what you want to buy? Am I good accessory? Am I good tool? Okay!Body made to labor. Body made to help. Self is no expression, self must be desired with capital assets. What am I? Nothing. I erase myself to blank shot. What am I? Primal. I paint my soul, I paint my nothing. I slide down the pole for money. I slide down the temporary line between floor and ceiling. I write my way out of body consumptive-snack. Purchase me for Quirk. Outside you, I am primal being. Smelly and ugly animal, like person on street you ignore, like I've learned to ignore, the rambling and addicted and nonsensical, who beg and sleep on trains. The sometimes wise, I look past. Without money, we are nothing.
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 restaurant guests, behaving smartly, vapidly, and happily, and chewing in the Greenpoint dark wood box with glistening varnish. 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, whatever. Peel the 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 despondent watching American Psycho in bed while he sleeps. Remotely beautiful body with 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 how my parents speak to each other. 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 to block out the early morning sun. He ordered blackout shades for his windows for me, but they haven’t arrived.Now he’s playing Lana Del Rey because I asked and I’m resting while he cleans because I didn’t sleep. We test out pens together like schoolchildren, scribbling them on pages of a dream journal to see if they work.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 and feeling inhuman and ostracized. Earlier, I I felt like abandoning my desire for happiness and dream fulfillment. Now, I feel good with him in the other room—no tense air. I like the new leaf, green, and arrow-shaped. We will see if the leaf is like the kratom Ieaf, or something wholly new and unfamiliar, a plant leaf from Venus or Mars. I remind myself of our loving basis, so non-toxic and ecstatic—it could replay and 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. Lana croons, If you weren’t mine, I’d be jealous of your love, repeatedly. Don’t make me sad don’t make me cry sometimes love is not enough I don’t know why.I want to play this out and extend hope into eternity. We are carefree and careful now, in tune with each others triggers and careful with our tones.The performance feels kinder and more natural than doing our bests to stab each other until both are bloodless sacks. I want to be full and solid with smooth blood flow.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.
Longing turns to surprise, then empties. Repeat. Silent night. Difficulty to reach, difficult to reach. The fuck pain of different bedrooms. Painting chairs arranged not touching. I don’t care and beautiful solitude. No celebrate. I am happiest with you and at night listening to Sharon Van Etten.White o on a black notes page, could inspire something.
O
Oh
void and ring,
Surprise and disappointment
O face
Vape ring o
Glass cup with o rim full of creamy beverage.
Piss off.
Piss you off.
My stomach is killing me. I ate a can of beans because that’s the only grocery here.
I don’t think I need anything but yoh.
Me is okay too. I would be O K.
White circle on a black page, just the outline , O
o
O.
Like a Sharon Van Etten sigh-exhale, O O
O
What else? But O? Release O, I don’t know.
Nothing to lose, I haven’t lost anything but a job again.
I am O. And No. I don’t know.
I don’t know.
Oh
They slip into sleep.
The O face
Oh of surprise, disappointment. Oh with a frown.
O is void and ring.
I am happiest with you and at night listening to Sharon Van Etten.
Circle mouth say O
Longing turns to surprise, then empties say O
Silent night say O o
Difficult to reach say O
Painted chairs arranged not touching say O in silence
Only feel the need to cry when I’ve realized what I've lost
I want to fade to silence, be the O, getting smaller, O O o o o o o o
Vape ring o
Glass cup rim, o, full of creamy beverage
I had a great night, say O!
It’s the sadness in the morning that is the saddest.
Ooh!
Be hopeful and grateful for the Os and silent breaths.
O of relief.
I added a black O to my painting which is rather conventional otherwise, with small subversions. Scroll past.
I felt the love for humanity and apples for a while, now it’s white O on black, or white O on white. That’s fine. I am oh, nothing more or less!
I think I can do anything, be anything and tolerate it, or change it or not. Materials provide the illusion of something besides body, death, and empty room.I thought the flickering light in my mildewed shower was God when I was sad, with my wet arms crossed over my naked body, like a mummy, ready to be lifted up at the time, yet staring at the grey squares on the shower wall after thinking/feeling this, and deciding to compose myself and be normal.Not normal like a grey square, but fine and not experiencing the collapse of my world and beliefs, composing myself, putting the grey blocks together, building the wall back up, my ego, and personality, dressing up in self-conscious removal again. There is a yellow block in the ego assemblage that I colored with a highlighter.You are everywhere like wallpaper.
The landscape was so minimal that I could hear and see a car approaching from far away. I walked to a bridge covered in grass and trees for animals to go over a highway.Fields of cabbage in disordered rows. Tall wood benches raised high above the fields for hunters. Bullet train in the distance with hidden passengers. I draw there.Each leaf becomes a defined shape in the evening, dark shapes against the sky. Tall and scraggly trees with long trunks and branches that begin high up. Skinny limbs poke around, poke at each other. Hay rolls on a field. Wind turbines are always in the distance, gentle reminders of industry. Bike across the landscape like a free person. I never liked biking until this, never liked routes or exercise until I realized exercise is just movement.I bike to a nearby hunting lodge. I’m taking photos of a mirrored gazebo. I realize two women are kissing inside when I get to the entryway. I won’t document without awareness again.Fox scream, citronella smell, honey wine, and broccoli mash with sardines and spätzle. Horse collar bells. Horse escapes and neighbor must rescue it. Cellar with table and mosquitoes and cigarette cup. Small holes in the concrete wall.Big car factory in Karstädt. Communist housing with green tree icon murals painted on the side. I ride my bike until the road turns into construction.Orchid painted on a frosted glass door.Peeing on the roadside next to cigarette containers dropped from passing vehicle, with oat milk in my backpack. I am treated with kind trepidation at the store, and I treat others cautiously.Rain starts pouring when I am drawing a creek in a horse field, and thundering when I get home.The neighbor sees me riding my bike, smoking a cigarette. Icelandic neighbor from small village originally, now in even smaller village, says he likes it here.New blue flowers. Grain field sea on Instagram video, I record a Tiktok dance that I delete. Grainy close up when I zoom on the fields. Very old trailer with a bed set for one.I screamed alone in the forest with self-awareness of catharsis cliche and was scared of everything at first. I was scared to touch a tree. I feared insects, ticks, and infection from nature. All the spider webs were horrifying and disgusting. I thought nature was dangerous, and sometimes it is.Villages dropped across a landscape separated by fields of flowers and connected by cobblestone paths, bridges, tire pile mountains, and haystacks. Eroded gravestones and memorials, and dog-walkers looking fearful.I talked to myself aloud and thought I felt past souls in flowers, past souls. I called my mother up almost crying. I said the earth is made of dead bodies. I’d never realized this. Which bodies?To price sprouts from dead bodies.Kitchen cooking all alone, wine bottle taken from communal closet. Movie theater with zebra-print in window. German meal cooked by Danish friends, ants weaving between the planks of picnic table.Boomerang video approaching turbines at dusk and a slo-mo. Cute small dog trotting by a gazebo, selfie video with trailer for one hunter. Images and clips I filmed, sometimes posted. I am troubled by the act of posting.Zooming in on a bright-green sports car with blood-red handprint stickers on the hood and a tall gothic background church, the area’s largest. Broken glass in a window reflecting the church. Checkered pavement game for children outside Neoclassical government building. How to make an anti-spectacle of history, my own family’s?To make tragedy a sellable product is bad. “Tragedy” implies something narrative or epic. I don’t know what word to use instead. A word like tragedy without affect.Military-looking trucks carry earth, zoom-ins with twittering background sounds on spiderwebs in big forest, me and spiders.Group exercise machines across from slumped medieval houses. Rotten wood buildings next to new ones.Instagram stories are erased after twenty-four hours. Instagram is a corrupt platform. Instagram has an archive history. This landscape is an archive of history. When will the archives delete for good?In my single honeycomb city cell, I am amazed and horrified that nature exists and is being lost.
Body lying on the bed, one parenthesis next to another. Trucks and cars are outside and shoveling in quiet Williamsburg. Tired feeling on my eyelids but nothing to do about it. Sad memories and excitement for Friday. When I can’t sleep, I scroll endlessly, yet could be doing more. I stalk Instagram highlights of randoms and think about the people in them, behind them. A shovel scrapes across a diamond-studded sidewalk. Flakes of salt are scattered to melt snow. I think about the people in my life. Parenthesis shifts beside me, moving spaces over.I was eating some Club Crackers but stopped, sweeping pebbles off new sheets. I claw my foot, scraping my toenails against the comforter, the rough edges I trimmed get caught on the blanket. It’s been snowing all night in quiet Williamsburg, not my apartment, but it’s feeling like it. Voices float outside. I listen to the conversations between neighbors. Car drives outside the other window. I shouldn’t have eaten so many Club Crackers, but I was hungry. Why go to the past when this is here? I close my eyes, see a wedding in grey with smiles and some drifting amoebas. I hit my vape. Long hours awake all the time.I feel old and settled, like a comforter resting on bodies and an air pocket. I breathe air into my lung pockets, I breathe the exhalations of the person beside me. Breaths of men outside I cannot hear, the breathing of late-night early-morning walkers on a Tuesday. I pack up my bag and go, no, don’t do that. I listen to the cars drive. I might put on a movie.Pointless to experience small notices and do nothing with them, string them together like a necklace, like the bracelet on my wrist made of diamonds. 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.I am content and sleeping with a growling stomach. The shoveler continues to shovel, making scraping sounds. It sounds to me like a 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, it stares down from heaven, missing its earth-bone. The scraper scrapes. I want to sleep.I wake him up to say I might go home but I will miss breakfast. 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. I torture myself with small decisions, letting the time pass. There will be more nights with good breakfast after, which feels earned after sleeplessness. I trace roundabouts, pick exits, and return to the circle. Body presses body in the car and the bed. I want to be more intimate with you and know everything, but I don’t have to to know how I feel. And with that nice thought, which has some beauty, I leave.
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.
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, revealing a black blank screen. 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 taste of a silken chocolate Buzzball is nice. I sip it while police cars drive past. I add hurried strokes to paintings, that complete or ruin them, providing a final solemn edge to the tender melancholy. 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. Hyperrealistic big eyes of children are spray painted everywhere in Bushwick. 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?
I wonder why I can’t sleep, wonder why I tear burst randomly, like I did after the cat got shoved into a box and its little head tried poking out, and its paw grasped desperately at the air, finding an exit in the box folds we were stapling and taping. We were trying to trap him in for a long car ride.I hit my shoulder against the wall as the tears burst out; I couldn’t hold them in, so I collapsed against the closest upright thing, a wall which had no hold to hold me. I was so surprised the tears fell out—I was trying to hold them back while scrubbing and cleaning with a grimace.A red dot on the smiley face button on the computer touch screen bar is right where the nose of a smiley face should be. It is taunting to me, like the dot gives the smiley face a red squishable clown nose, that makes a honking sound.The cat screams as the roommates try to shove it in the crate. They debate whether or not to give him a Xanax sliver, or wait it out for him to enter the crate of his own accord, or shove him in the crate—but then he’ll kick and scratch them. They take the cat into the shower and try to corner him in the crate, and he’s crying the whole time, like a wailing baby, like the cat outside my window mewing as I try to sleep. But the cat getting shoved into the crate earlier today was making sounds at a way higher pitch. When the cat resists the crate, we drop him in a box, and close the box flaps over him, sealing him in.
And we were all thinking it was funny, but also holding back tears.Then I got a splinter in my foot.
Then my roommates said goodbye, and that was when I fell into the wall, saying, this is too much for me. My remaining roommate said, It’s hard when people leave, and that about captures it. It’s hard to see a creature in pain too.When I look in your eyes, on casual Instagram stories, on a face getting slimmer with retinol-enhanced skin, I look for the pain as evidence that you cared—but I only see happy smiling face, with an engaging poll beneath. Are you happy? Do you feel free?Byung-Chul Han writes: "Freedom is felt when passing from one way of living to another..."
We are in the transitional phase, constructing independent ways of living.Han writes that this freedom is experienced "until this too (freedom) turns out to be a form of coercion. Then, liberation gives way to new renewed subjugation."The cat used to be wild and free in Kentucky. Then the cat got tamed to be a house cat in Brooklyn, providing a new, more comfortable type of life with additional comforts and freedoms and freedom-restrictions. It can no longer wander with no direction, but food is provided. Bed is provided.The cat has no choice but to exist in a box for a set amount of time, the car ride. Once the cat exits the box, he will stretch his legs and then be coerced to serve as good companion, in exchange for food, shelter, and attention. Life is exchange.When I paint, I feel free, even if I am not. I am not working for anyone.I went on a date with a finance bro last night in Midtown, who was a little older, with neat hair combed to the side like the hairstyle of a clip-art nerd. I sipped my drink with a maraschino cherry while he talked about how dry January turned into dry February and March. My cherry. I miss my Maraschino.Han writes: "As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose."
I act very invested and interested, waiting for the finance bro to finish speaking and pay for the bill, so I can leave. The date purpose is to listen and be paid for.Han also writes: "…we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: refashioning and reinventing ourselves."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. I shave my mustache and transform into a naked mole rat kinda creature. 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, great dressing on a Chopt salad. Chef Rat makes his own. 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. I am my upper lip. My upper lip is thin and naked. He had a furry upper lip like a predator-pornstar, my ex. I had a furry upper lip like a rat and a pointy snout-like wolf face. My ex four years ago said I looked like a wolf, so I snarl at suits on the train; job-searched in Williamsburg today. Williamsburg is good money. Gentrification experience, I can profit. Nail polish on precise, round nail, I can apply polish with care, polish and clip like a sentence, pour cappuccino foam with flair. I will do the best job for M’lady and M’sir, Monsieur would you like another? My name is Miser Me, Miserly, Misery, by the way, what can I assist you with today? A thing liked; I’d like to be a thing. Slippery like slime, rat, wolf, and thinned oat milk foam. Sniffing white on a lip. Crystal balls, by the roadside, Crystal, by the roadside, Common Name I Name My Daughter-Son.Crystal is the sparkling disco-globe-ball, my world, she-he would be, if I am impregnated, I may abort Crystal? Crystal is the dream for upward mobility, to name my son-daughter Crystal, is to christen he-her "to-be-rich," is to divine financial fullness. Be full with plenty, plenty of fish. Shake like a Doll, I shake for the Doll erz. I am a Doll er. I went to Am herst. I am the trash trash for Elon Mutt to gobble, like some cobbler, I am Disgusting Peach, sent like a child to the boarding school landfill.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 dance with jabs by the subway stop, briefcase open on the pavement, I do my good ditty dance for the Doll erz. 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. While the others snatch fish in their beaks, this swan is vegetarian. This swan is on hunger strike, bleeding like Romeo-Juliet from a cut-wound, which spreads like an oil spill on the swamp water, Gulf of America, no.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. Zeus transformed into a swan, to rape Leda. Kill Zeus, kill that swan.Better swans kiss to make a heart, to make the enclosure pretty, like fuck. A swan is beautiful on the pond, let it be beautiful and unpoisoned by filth, yet, filth, like art, is life. Art is filth and filth is beautiful.Do you like me crazy or composed? I de compose, trash pain the bills, free trash. Free all. All should be free, for poor, and costly for rich!
EVIL: There is a gentle quiet in my brain—an ease. 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, it’ll take us places. 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, through pane-plane to Black. That’s god. God is black. God is dog. Dog is god spelled backwards. Oh Su, I love you. Su says: I hate you, Albert. Pathetic proposition: Su, can you play with the frond in my lap, eating peanuts all the while, gobbling the little shits, the little fucking peanuts, from my cupped hand. Ya, that’s love, You’re dirty, Su says, you’re evil, or worse. Yeah, yeah. You’re worse than evil ‘cause you’re indifferent. That stings. We can black out the sun Su, or go halfway, gray it out. Down the eye drains, down the pupil drains, in His head-face, in her eyes, God-devils, god damn. Hit the gas, hit the Gods, no icon is stable or invincible, all representations of vapor entities are fucked. I hit the gas, springing us to springtime where it is cheerful, smelling like dull doldrums. Let’s sniff the flowers, Su, or glue. Yellow abdomens with white limbs, centrifugal, centripetal, like this spinning wheel, like this spinning Su. Want some more? I offer peanuts. I offer the peanuts in my palm. Su says, I can’t take this shit anymore. We stop. She steps out into the harsh desert. Keep driving without Su, I’ll keep driving without you. Fucking Albert, I hear her mutter, and the mutter evaporates. Albert deserves a rest, Albert deserves a good sleep, warm bath, in golden light, golden wake, I’ll see you there Su? I’ll meet you in a warmer state like Florida? Suzan 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, dripping juice all over each other, Georgia Eve-Adam, this is paradise? Mine. Biting big bites from the peaches, taking bites from the sunlit fruit somewhere, we are fruitful; we live in fruit. I’m drooling on the steering wheel, beige lumps with black edges coat the circle. Serves you right, mama says, while I fall asleep, for good maybe, fall into somewhere, some loving arms, maybe Su's. Su is the peach I’m keen for; and the runoff. Won’t you stay with simple Albert, cause, me, I like you gladly, Gleam Glean. She and me’ll go stomping off to Canada some day, when the pennies stack to towers. She and me provide little for each other. A little is a lot. Flowers emit decay, radiate, are radioactive, in Asphodel, flowers never stay with bad Albert.BETTER: Bad Albert's got a problem, lying, dying, draped over the wheel. I circle back from the desert, and I climbs in the car. 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, he'll be fine. He was fucking annoying, got to go and move. I put my foot on the pedal, starts the car. We jet-set off. Red and green landscape, we drive over mountains, take winding paths, to snow caps, I don't know what this place is anymore. I don't know about Albert, I don't know, so I'll go, turn the radio on. Turn the radio on, and it's not something I like, I change it to 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? Future is salvageable, future with Albert, po-ten-tially. Simple folks like simple things, sure why not? I'll be what I be. She'd been a rocker once, or punk, whatever. Black Flag shirts with long vertical rips worn at Mechanicsburg concerts, small town home to mechanics, where they saw the emo show, she wore her Black Flag shirt all ripped and they jumped up and down, she and Albert, moshing and elbowing at the bum hicks, like us. In those times, he took the drugs at concerts only, I don't know, too tired to finish, look at the bird fly there, she points to a stirring Albert, acknowledging the small thing. Goofy goofball, I swat at him. Back then, they'd laughed with each other, then chugged beers the whole ride home.
Born 2001, Kalamazoo, MI
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New YorkEDUCATION
2024 BFA Painting, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RISOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024 Destiny hope despair alistair, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, CanadaGROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 NADA Miami with Afternoon projects, Miami, FL2024 Art Toronto with Afternoon projects, Toronto, Canada2024 NADA New York with Afternoon projects, New York, NY2024 Galeria Café, Noakowskiego 16, Warsaw, Poland2023 Peace on Earth, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2023 Bliss Information, Gelman Gallery at RISD Museum, Providence, RI2023 RISD Senior Painting Show, Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI2023 Judaica, Weiner Center at Brown University, Providence, RI2023 Soup, who cares?, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2022 Identity as Context; Memory as Content, Granoff Center, Brown University, Providence, RI2023 In the limelight, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2023 Judaica, Weiner Center at Brown University, Providence, RI2021 RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2021 Online Blush, Online Playroom2020 National YoungArts Week, YoungArts Campus, Miami, FL2019 National YoungArts Week, Sotheby’s, New York, NYRESIDENCIES
2024 Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2023 KuBA: Kulturbanhof, Klein Warnow, GermanyWORKSHOPS
2024 Intuitive painting workshop at Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2024 Intuitive painting workshop at Penn State University Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PAPRESS
2024 “Drew Spielvogel at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver,” Art Viewer, 26 Sept. 2024.AWARDS
2019 - 2024 Honors Designation at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI2023 Fellowship with Curator of Contemporary Art, Dominic Molon, at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI2020 Finalist in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL2019 Merit award to attend RISD, Providence, RI2019 Honorable Mention in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL2018 High Merit in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL
Abe, sometimes I just feel like a nothing. Do you feel me? He nods at me with melted caramel eyes, prickles all over his face on the twin bed across from mine. Show him Ryan Trecartin, standing nervously above his bed. My intimate vulnerable voice I’m speaking in, I’m speaking mouselike, not the way the counselor taught me to speak. He told me to sit up straighter and project my voice more. He helped me to gain confidence. Let’s take a walk. Abraham donned his silver puffer and we set out, walking side-by-side on Newport Beach sidewalks. So much ocean here, but so little beauty, all concrete, expansive, growing and growing, the concrete and asphalt, the water growing up too, growing up to the buildings. Every day, we went to the cute developed outdoor mall area, which housed the facility next to gift shops, expensive coffee shops, sandwich shops, bookstores, and Lululemon stores, you get the idea.Singing gonging, goner lullabies myself, to sippers and slots, spit ampersand snot snever spite.
Florian octavia loves me not.
I loved you in knots, nots—I don’t— s love yew ninny moor,
Any more.
Command key, commander,
Eye come and thee to crumb back to me.
Come and her was like fire to bed with me.
Abraham, a bram to cook in flames,
My firestick.
Already you turn the cheek, and I do the same.Semiotic Refusal. I refused to compromise. I refuse (underlined) and am punished.
You slapped me; I slapped you. Already you turn the cheek and I do the same—turning the cheek with my hand, my hand on your cheek.
Chain links I break myself, snap tree stick on waterside longing walk, waterlogging texts.
You don’t snow nonsense, do you, wouldn’t know nonsense if it fell like a bram on your ninny ‘ead.
Don’t like it or you, ninny more, that’s that. Facts is facts.Chronically, I leave, I’m a leaver. I’m a leaf on a tree above Newport Beach. One of many fronds. It makes me feel better to write this; I write the same stories repeatedly to get rid of the aching empty feeling, like a hollow egg across my body. I am a hollow egg, where is the yolk? It’s in there: Abe saw my yolk, funny weird thing to say, slight sexy undertone, though we were just innocent friends, talking about books. He was kind of misogynistic, but that’s okay, most are, have internalized it, sadly. Sometimes, I am too tired to paint, too tired to do anything at all ‘cept sip, type on my notes app hunched over, not sitting up straight, not talking clearly or loudly, whispering nonsense parables to Blank Address. Something beautiful about making something for no one, or writing in/to blank ache. Why do you cry when you pray? I don’t, but I want to, crying, so good, feels like, rejuvenating skin care products. The load turns to sublime, what is release? What is sublime? A feeling or something more? I’ve always wanted to paint your brown eyes but they’d look like many, they’d look like mine, and I’d paint a self-portrait again. I forget what you looked like; I forget your last name too. How to search for potential obituary? Turn my cheek to the wall after confessing, to/for Abraham, I slap my cheek, and chew a hole through it.
The works utilize subtractive and additive methods to build disintegrating renditions of psychological states, avatar self-portraits, and attachments housed in precarity.Normative subjects are deconstructed and obscured; reality-constructions are destabilized through strange tonal shifts, painterly disruptions, weird intrusions, and imagistic breakdowns.The paintings layer class-related signifiers, affective color charges, anachronistic detritus, and attachments to question and depict entanglements between power, love and desire, aspiration, estrangement, and depression. Subjects are seductive yet hollowed or dysmorphic—defaced, splintering, decomposing, or denying the viewer validation or closure—presenting absence, turmoil, or flux dressed in decadent color shrouds. They have already grappled with their loss; they are interested in the poetics of endurance within collapsing infrastructure, while remaining haunted by queer futurities.I am a queer person shaped by both privilege and marginalization—having spent time in state treatment and health care systems, endured loss, and experienced financial struggle tied to a corrupt criminal justice system and a legal dispute that effectively silenced me, barring me from discussing significant aspects of my life explicitly, fictionally, or autobiographically. The art objects refuse to disappear while embracing ultimate ephemerality.They engage queer, feminist, and anarchic strategies of disruption and disidentification within elite systems.Rooted in queer politics of failure and refusal, the works skirt irrelevance, sentimentality, kitsch, and opacity. They thrive in melancholic in-betweens, evoking what Ann Cvetkovich termed “an archive of feelings” in association with antisocial theory.Consumer objects are anthropomorphized. Religious icons are made irreverent. Gender dissolves alongside linearity and meaning. Ghosts of imperialist tradition haunt and fade out. Intimate partners decay. Modernist strategies collide with trash in a simultaneous satirization of genre and sincere embrace of the slippery subject. Attachments gradually detach as the painting progresses. A painting of a partner grows cold as the relationship dies. Warm flickers of humanist feeling assert themselves despite habitual nihilism.These are subversives dressed as normies—made normal to survive a normifying and horrifying political climate (the works also attempt to dial into a political zeitgeist, without identifying with the spirit. They coldly approach its examination or degrade and fracture any connotations of hegemonic alignment). Hauntological jingles, painting-fever-dream-rants, and patchwork scraps run through a nullifying and self-sabotaging human processor, resulting in resilient and transient objects, animated by jouissance, rupture, and hope predicated on despair.
Purple slab, 44 x 36 inches, oil on canvas
Interrogations of collapse, queer subjectivity, poor text-image poems, class, TikTok delusion, disintegrating visions of heteronormative success, semantic abstraction. The works adopt a deliberately degraded POV—a queer 'peasant gaze' derived from working class experience, where aspirational signifiers degrade into relics and socially insignificant figures memorialize themselves as icons, or are viralized into icons. Oil paint seeps into the screenshot print-outs, degrading the images over time. The works hint at a Real through human paint gestures within a pre-ordained system and ruptures in linguistic and pictorial logic. An American-made fantasy on the brink clings to its decaying infrastructure. 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. The alter-ego in the text-images is similarly fractured, to echo a fracturing in the narrator's belief of class usurpation and American doctrine, and unstratify language and hierarchy within the fleeting container, the poor image. The painting depicts an Epcot ball behind a phantom of success and hallucination of "becoming" as Rosi Braidotti refers to it. While acknowledging its hallucinatory construction, the painting still envisions a world without obsolete Disney-mass-media-disseminated narratives and normative constructs. It disturbs the trope of the "self-made," transforming the Capitalist cliché into a painterly avatar shimmer. Gilded relics decay in mass production and circulation.
Lost coat tries to drift outside it/ complacency versus defiance, 24 x 36 inches, oil on canvas
Grandma's red coat, 8 x 10 inches, oil on panel