Drew Spielvogel
IN PROGRESS
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 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. 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 says. I respond: 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 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.
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.
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. You were drunk all the time, like me then, drunk in the snow, cupping an orange ember. He has a tattoo of a hawk on the area between the pointer finger and thumb, which represents his daughter. In New York, we haven’t seen each other yet. No past reminders for newcomers; he carries the tattoo-reminder. No time for past reminders 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 talk to your tattoo. 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. The extension of grief into traveling symbol, flying still ballerina. 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. American global traveller, imposition. In the future, someone may stumble upon a fragmented pirouette, silent, his image now.
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.The act undos the commodification of union, asserting an equitable and genderless non-exchange, a passing of one person's non-essential to another, a give and receive that is unbound, spaceless, timeless,
in death or dream,
in death do us merge.
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, 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. 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.
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, tells me not to burn the forest down. Stupid American, hauling around an emerald Tommy Hilfiger bag too, me. 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 and was scared to touch a tree. I feared insects, ticks, and infection from nature. 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.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. 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. 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?
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?
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: 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, RISOLO 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
Intuitive painting workshop at Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2024
Intuitive 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
Abe had melted caramel eyes and prickles all over his face on the twin bed across from mine. I show him Ryan Trecartin. 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 developed outdoor mall area, which housed the facility next to gift shops, expensive coffee shops, sandwich shops, bookstores, and Lululemon stores.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 (DADA). 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 in precarious compositions and situations. 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 are interested in the poetics of hope and endurance. I am a queer person who has spent time in state treatment and health care systems, and experienced loss related to a corrupt criminal justice system that silenced me, barring me from discussing or making art about significant aspects of my life. The works embrace ephemeral qualities, while refusing to disappear. They engage 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 fatigued nihilism. These are subversives dressed as normies—made normal to survive a normifying and horrifying political climate.*Hauntological jingles, painting-fever-dream-rants, and patchwork scraps run through a human processor, resulting in resilient and transient objects, animated by jouissance, rupture, and hope predicated on despair.*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. The "Yochanan.Ohev" painting, for instance, depicts a banal militaristic evil guised by its spectacle. It is a piece of military propaganda advertising itself as a fun dance video. The seemingly innocuous painting is a study of power's propagandic mechanisms, not an endorsement or advertisement itself. "Jesus Country" in part studies how the conservative party utilizes pastoral and Christian iconography to appeal to a rural white demographic. The work deadens itself.
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.
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? 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?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.In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz writes: "... to be working-class or poor and to have leisure time is to warrant suspicion..."
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. This is because I spend much of my time not working or furthering myself in Capitalism, preferring to squander it by smoking cigarettes and walking around, laying around, dissociating, sitting in my studio, not spending money or making money, staring blankly at something, or painting something that probably would not sell. I don't buy clothes; I wear the dirty ones I already have, and refuse to advance within a system I despise, drifting slightly above the threshold of what is necessary for basic survival, but also accomplishing so much more non-capitalistically; thus I will be forgotten and have already decided this is fine. He saw this all as evidence of a "degenerate" bus stop lifestyle or demonic anti-Protestant work ethic, anti-American lazy ethos, whereas I saw his regimented lifestyle--going to work (9-6 job at Major Corporation with additional outside-workplace hours), making money, spending lots of money at bars and restaurants in his allocated leisure time, before returning to work again refreshed and rejuvenated from his leisure time as a kind of "automaton" behavior. We learned that a Neoliberal striver cannot be in a relationship with a self-called burnout (though as I said, I am productive in my own way and as Cruz writes, a "'dumb time' is essential. Without this time, it is not possible to make original work. It is also not possible to make good quality work.")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, 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.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 write about money, because I think, especially in New York City, the extreme class discrepancy is repugnant.People die on the street outside our galleries and institutions, yet class moves forward, openings steamroll on with plenty of wine being poured. Maybe some of the individuals on the curb outside our institutions and galleries should be featured within them; not excluded because they don't have a "BFA" or "MFA" which is a bullshit piece of paper anyways and actually an entirely useless degree in Trump's America. It should not be useless, and art should not be relegated to luxury interior decoration.Ruling class spaces should open themselves to the people dying outside of them.One cannot see the sanctity of their own space until they are removed from it. We need outsider-observers of our cultures. We need outsiders to become insiders. We need to make the same degree of education, the same opportunities Radically Accessible to All; we need to open our doors to the people who sleep outside of them, to the people who never even had a chance to make it in.The houseless person dying on the street is no less talented or intelligent than you are, person drinking wine on the inside, they just did not have the same opportunities as you, to hone and develop the "intelligence" or talent.It is strange to have been close to both houselessness at one point (in complete and utter abject poverty) and also be able to dine with people whose families make billions a year, probably, though it is very taboo to discuss money in these situations. Social codes favor the privileged; yet the person who is a guest at the wealthy table must abide by the codes, lest they want to risk being removed from the table and relegated to the curb.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?
Fair came to the county, and I rode the circle wheel. Bright bulbs on the ferris, flashing in the field. Spinning ruin, seen through a plane window. The ferris wheel rotates, as the plane moves. The ferris slides across the window. The county fair collapses. The ferris is taped to a field, taped to grass. Ferris is stuck there like a sniper to a building. The wheel is stuck to a maximum flatscreen. The flatscreen was the field for Colonial Vision. Clouds cloud the air and cloud the ferris on the fair field. Clouds cloud the ferris wheel in dark aqua, and the ferris spins its wheel. Silent to the plane passenger. Ferris is the only one left, then another left. Now one me on the chair.Outside a plain cross is lacerated by power lines. Outside, graffiti star is high up on a condominium building, B&W, no color, black beamer on the street below with a ticket on the hood.
I think of who miscarried in the Sharkie's bathroom, and came to hang out after.Blue vests say I call myself a victim, as is typical of blue vests to say.
Acker writes: we "are both victim and victimizer."
I decide I'll be a pigeon in police-state. No trial for pigeons, just theness.
Ferris signed his speech away. Grey pigeon is grey, still a
mover like a ferris.
The human-object demonstrates decay;
the ferris frays, its mechanisms.
The pigeon is a winged scavenger,
Grey angel on the rotational.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. He is from a family of hunters. Walking grey streets, the streetwalker strolls the mechanism's pipework, scavenger-patroller of its colon.Individuals are removed from the fairground if they do not align with its participatory criteria, racialism.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.Beauty is pigeon. Grey bird of grey life wheel.
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?
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.
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 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. After, I searched: what is consent? 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 the same.
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.
A shovel scrapes snow off a sidewalk outside. My parenthesis shifts beside me, moving spaces over. I claw my foot, scraping my trimmed toenails against the comforter. Pointless to make observations 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. There is a stream in Williamsburg made of melting snow. I float out on an orange floatation ring. My legs are in the water. The sun is cold. The shoveler continues to shovel. Asleep parenthesis has been asleep for a long time, snoring. The photograph of a dog in his room—preserved with black eyes, stares down, missing its earth-bone. The shoveler scrapes the sidewalk. 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.
Robo-cleaner starts his day with a reel sequence and Megan Thee Stallion on Youtube. 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 mental to-do reminders. Plodding keys in Megan's Piano. I sip my coffee and plan to clean, housewife behavior. He came back to a filthy apartment and said: you’re lazy. I said: today, while we were walking, I hated you. I was addicted to destruction in the past, contemplating Xscape. 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. The light comes from far away, touching what I touch, bright dancer on the TV.
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.
The sex worker was sitting on the bed. He was cracked out and I was drunk. He offered me the crack pipe and I accepted it and took a hit. I wasn't sure if it was meth or crack. I was really drunk and wanted to see what it would be like even though this was a stupid decision.
Light from the windows entered the room, mixing with the aquatic light. The wares are encased in glass boxes on wood platforms on a grey carpet. Black flatscreens advertise silver, diamond, and gold assortments next to yellow cartoon price tags. I noticed Jeff then. His grey shirt was tucked into his pressed pants, and his hair was ordered to the side. I saw the name on his tag right away. Jeff. A black earpiece added to the serious appearance.I left with a pair of cobalt earrings. Jeff shot the gun twice. One hole through each ear.Depression made me feel like I was looking through a donut at more donuts far away. Sometimes there were no donuts in the distance. I needed Jeff like I needed a donut.Jeff took the donuts off my eyes and ate them. This was after he helped me try on earrings and select a good pair. He made me feel better, with his cheerful customer-service voice and orderly hair. The buttons on his polo were buttoned to the top. Dark hairs grew out of the collar. His face is blank to me now--blank besides the customer-service smile and the eyes. Jeff had eyes like knives through glazed donuts. Black pain stabbed through the irises, bleeding out the pupils. I saw the pain the knives were making. I saw the blood pouring out his eyes.I saw the pain through the glaze. The knives from his eyes pricked me. The sharpness seduced me, like the silver-cobalt earrings across the room.I walked out of the store with the new earrings on. Blue dots hanging off my lobes which are wrinklier now. The earring holes are elongated, stretched into slits. I still wear the earrings. Layla is lapping at her bowl. I circle my tongue around my dry mouth. My lips are flaking off. My tongue is a centipede. Layla is lapping at my hand while I talk to her, eating a treat out of it. I say to Layla: "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."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.
in progress (EDITED IN REAL TIME).
For K: a gay anti-gesamtkunstwerk--
One year and eight months ago I met K."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.You told me about growing up in Saudi Arabia: Islamic school with bullies, your religious sisters and their husbands who also bullied you, men on Grindr hacking your phone and threatening to send your Grindr chats to all your phone contacts unless you gave them 2K (so you had to tell your sister you were gay, and she was suprisingly okay with it), and The Line, a two trillion-dollar smart city being built across the desert. You described that it was going to be a whole self-contained ecosystem, shops, malls, work, leisure, no need to leave. I pictured us pressed together in a compressed blueprint sketch. 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.At your birthday party, we rapped American songs and smoked cigarettes on the College Heights balcony with your Saudi Arabian friends, who wore American brands and heavy makeup with flowing hair. I was nervous. I took shot after shot. We made out in a club bathroom cubicle surrounded by men with frat voices, which slurred like sizzurp. The frat voices were a braindead male vocal-fry soundbath full of sizzurp.--In "Peg," Deli Girls say: "I feel it, I fuck it."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.--I thought it might be interesting to follow you home and be your secret meetup.You wil 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.--K lives in Saudi Arabia now and I don't know him anymore.The false start realizes it can not ever get to know you, and any attempt would be a misrepresentation. It would be different if we had known each other for months, or if we were still together. Then I would know you more; though I thought I looked in your eyes and felt a thread connect from mine to yours, I don't know if the thread-image was mine only. And I will never know. It was a few months in total: just a fuck-fling, though you were K. K for Karim--there are many, so I do not think it is bad to reveal a name. Revealing a name makes you less of an object. It is like breathing out magic vapor, saying Karim. K still works. K is the only letter of the alphabet.--In Masochism and Male Subjectivity, Silverman writes: "object-libido changes to narcissistic libido... when love changes to identification" (193). You can love without reducing the other to an object-fantasy or narcissistic-projection site. K is a subject not an “impersonal object.” The problem with intimacy is making the other same. The problem with intimacy is the inability to fully understand the other’s subjectivity.--I think a vignette can describe you and building a body up can lead to a face again:We stood arm to arm in a pizza shop, with low-res images printed big on the walls--blue and white football players, holding footballs over their heads with cages on. In the one room bathroom, the blown up low-res images were palm trees, instead of football players. On the beach and a pixelating ocean, coconut trees hold flesh balls full of hot juice. Your arm was a cylinder hanging down next to mine covered in a t-shirt, some color. Your cylinder arm connected to your cylinder neck, with a tense and triangular muscle connecter, between the lump of the shoulder bone and the hairy neck. In line, I was barely touching you, my cylinder shoulder, brushed here and there against yours. A girl and her boyfriend in front of us asked if we were twins, which produced anger. Hot red oil cups and cheese slides drunk off a slice into a grate. Do I seem like someone who would be into a twincest fantasy? Why is brother always assumed?I walk a lap around the room while you stand there, waiting in line.I look in the bathroom mirror, and I wonder if I look like you.----------
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." I am aware of the hidden face mostly—not admiring myself in a mirage.Ugly feelings that have no use cannot be absorbed into capital.Kristeva continues: "I... discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved." I trace the past to figure out why I am sad."The eroticization of suffering" saves me from my Death Drive (Kristeva). 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.The lover is incorporated into the body, in a process Kristeva calls Melancholy Cannibalism. Kristeva writes: "Melancholy Cannibalism... 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."
K's leaving was intolerable; he became a reminder of future loss before he left. 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.” 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 K, I wanted to join with him. 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 kiss seals the deal. Can a union be outside consumption?----If K's voice could be here, it would be better.--
"Depressed persons do not defend themselves against death but against the anguish prompted by the erotic object" (Kristeva). The depressed person defends themself against death anguish and anguish caused by the erotic object. The depressed person is dead, until the deadness goes away. I see a light pinhole. You saw light everywhere like you were traipsing round a prairie all the fucking time. "You" is opening to encapsulate many exes. "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, and you said when I painted a portrait of you, which was red with a bent knee, goofy proportions, and a serious expression, like a naive Soutine (I was trying) and lime green pop on a leaf, that no one had done that for you before.--The sentimental wafer molds. I keep the drawing you made of me in a hometown closet. I am sure it was tossed.
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.------K is Palestinian. His family doesn't live in Gaza.--I was raised with menorahs in the window. My parents don't have one anymore, and I don't either. I don't feel attached to Judaism.--In Hebrew school, they said Israel is good. Israel was hung up on the wall next to Shin. In primary school they said America is good. I believed what the teachers said. 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 teachers and classmates feel pride for a genocidal nation?
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The alphabet is not the occupier's.
I question if love can be like the soundbath, that surrounded me and K at the club, while our mouths connected. Can it turn us into the sound in the air? In Judaism, god is everywhere, not sitting on a throne in heaven. God is one trinity part: the Holy Spirit.--Homosexuality is great, because it isn't productive or reproductive. Homosexuality is good because it is oppositional. It was and is bedroom dissent.--The toxic tenets of our civ are written on my fabric.--IN THE RUBIK'S CUBEPoor or abused people don't know who to blame for their suffering, so they blame themselves or self-destruct. The neoliberal state conditions people to blame themselves and fix 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 the wound.People with non-neoliberal beliefs may seem crazy to neoliberal believers, who are unable to see outside of the societal construct. People with non-neoliberal beliefs are 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.Insert trauma confession (why do I have to tell you or provide pornographic proof). I am expected to walk it out. The trauma confession details what happens when you are poor and think justice is real. I am excising the trauma confession, because I think it is too intense and emotional and would discredit anything I say, because it is it too emotionally charged, which we are not supposed to be. Rage concerns people. Openly expressed rage is also seen as “scary” or “angry” or “concerning.” If a person is seen as “scary,” “angry,” “disturbed,” or “concerning” they are usually dismissed, labeled “crazy,” or told to calm down. I try to stay calm. We are supposed to be logical and make careful and logical arguments to be taken seriously. I am also under legal obligation not to say more. The silencing enrages me, yet I sublimate the rage and replace it with a disaffected tone. People like to be soothed and not made upset. If people are made upset, they like to feel there is a message or solution. They want to feel like there is a reason to be upset. They don’t want to be made upset for no reason. If they are made upset for no reason, the person who made them upset is labeled “cruel.” Similarly, if a work details sadness, that is presented without solutions, it is deemed “depressing” and “useless.” Sad people are often socially outcasted. They are viewed as unhelpful and unfun. There is a consensus that sad people should get help. If they do not get help or help does not work, they are considered burdens. The sad person is expected to get better. If they do not get better, they are termed “failure.”Treatment eases life. Medications ease pain and make the individual a productive citizen. “Recovery narratives” provide comfort and inspiration. “It gets better” submits to a progressivist improvement narrative. People who do not believe “it gets better” are villainized. I think of the grinch character (who is coded as gay). He is a simpering antisocial grump, who is relegated to cave-existence, until he is transformed and made happy by the power of Christmas cheer. The film’s message is clear: normalize by adopting a positive Christian outlook, and you will be accepted by your American community.
mid-twentieth century gay villain caricature
LARPing the "pretty boy" villain. The mask fails.
--Despair is a solipsistic trap. The expectation of a happiness performance or transformation worsens despair. Eliminate the expectation for improvement and depressed people may “improve.” I am happiest when the men I date aren’t telling me to be happier. I am happiest when I am not mimicking happiness, or an attractive image.Happiness is still not the goal, or end. Despair is a valid political position to make work from. Depression has to express itself, 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 a viewer with emotional contradiction resists the flattening of aura under capital.
--One can mimic an ideological stance one does not agree with to Rubik’s Cube an enemy ideology. The Rubik’s Cube is not unsolvable; the Rubik’s Cube presents as a familiar object, while being different. The Rubik’s Cube is a banal toy. The Rubik’s Cube is endlessly mutable. The Rubik’s Cube has infinite solutions. No solution is permanently correct. The Rubik’s Cube is a familiar enigma. We see it, and we think we know what it is, but we must work to solve it, knowing we can never solve it forever. The Rubik’s Cube resets. The Rubik’s Cube player struggles to solve the Rubik’s Cube again. The Rubik’s Cube is my ex. The Rubik’s Cube is the object I obsess over. The Rubik’s Cube is the fascist. The enemy is not inhuman; the enemy is closer to friend. What is the significance of a Rubik’s Cube? It is a Thing disseminated. It is a Thing copied. It is a Thing reproduced. The Rubik’s Cube preoccupies. The Rubik’s Cube absorbs time. Every copy is the same and different. The problem with the Rubik’s Cube is that it is still produced in/by Capital. It is still an enemy object. The Rubik’s Cube is a painting I do not understand and cannot complete. The paragraph is a Rubik’s Cube. The paragraph wastes time. The paragraph arrives at no stable solution. The paragraph is the depressive’s preoccupation. The paragraph distracts the depressive from despair. The paragraph is a useless and unproductive tangent. The paragraph kills itself, through deletion, because it feels useless. Tangents are useless, and thus useful to anticapitalism. Still, useless tangents should be abandoned. The Rubik’s Cube asserts its existence. It is different. It diversifies the text. The Rubik’s Cube is made readymade.--
SINCE K (one year and eight months later)I go on a date with a guy who makes it clear he attends the top ivy. He tells me: the best art is more community-engaged. He is a liberal which means he wants to make surface changes to the state without fixing larger problems. He wants to earn a large paycheck for doing so, and believes he 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.” Forman is not addressing our conception of “liberals,” he is addressing people who seek to reform, rather than revolt, which applies to both main political parties. Reform is better than no reform, or backwardness. Reform is necessary, because revolution may be impossible. Theorizing revolution is useful. Revolution may be possible; I don’t know. I do not think my date is “wrong.” When I explain my practice, he sees it as futile. He says good art is images that look like pride advertisements. Pride advertisements are useful in acclimating straight people to the LGBTQIA spectrum. Pride advertisements can be attractive, creative, and well made. I think the Ivy League date would be shocked by the writings of Diane di Prima or Valerie Solanas. I think he would find the writings “dark,” “disturbing,” “pessimistic,” or useless. They are. That is the point. We need radical dissent. We need pride advertisements as well. Pride advertisements may be more immediately useful, but they do not anger or inspire. They anger conservatives, but conservatives may be a lost cause.
I explain that I see art like I see techno: mutable and abstract, queer in its transformative ongoingness and refusal to resolve or settle. Techno was for queers before straights joined in. Techno is revolutionary in its refusal to conform to time and space norms. Techno is made for people who dance alone in crowds. Techno is not for everyone.I think of a dialogue sample embedded in an NTS umru set. The line is snidely slivered in happy hardcore remixes: “I don’t think we need a government.”
Valerie Solanas, celebrity author of SCUM Manifesto.
A socialist would be a better mayor than an anarchist. A good socialist mayor would drain the funds from the top and bloat all the workers. A good anarchist mayor would disband the corporations and allow peasant ransacking.--
NO GUNS DAYIn no laws land, a frat boy can call me a faggot. I can bash his head in (queers bash back). Unfortunately, gays usually can’t shoot guns or defend themselves from gunfire. So all the boys from Alabama come up to Bushwick and start gunning homos down. The pregnant wives come with. The guys carry tanned baby bumps in their jeeps and four-wheelers. The girls shout “roll tide” while the boys are shooting up businesses. The ‘bama Boys sling crosses around each neck: their victims’ and their own. They act like the “first American” missionaries who were KILLERS spraying gospel bullets. The wives cheer their hubbies on with pom-poms and MAGA-Delta-Phi-Delta-8 pink t-shirts. Gays want to prevent this so gays start buying up all the guns and learning how to shoot them. We set up mannequins with MAGA hats and confederate flag shirts and play shooting range.Solanas writes: "There is no human reason for money or for anyone to work. All non-creative jobs (practically all jobs now being done) could have been automated long ago, and in a moneyless society everyone can have as much of the best of everything as she wants" (8).If money was eliminated, we may find our differences are not so great, and work on communal art-farms together. Before beginning life on the art-farms, we stack all our weapons in one pile, a monster mountain, and blaze it. It is a new holiday called “No Guns Day,” though it's not an official holiday because there are no leaders to make it so. Some art-farms get bigger than other farms—the farms with more privileged access to natural resources. Envy occurs. An external force is created to prevent farms from ever getting bigger than other farms. The external force is called government. Government ensures all farms stay the same, and government exists without corruption. The art-farms trade art, crops, seeds, etc. Humans realize they do not need material objects so much and are happier to lay around in the sun, play games, have sex, and work on the farm. Without material distractions, humans produce great works of art in their free time. There is no need to escape from suffering, because suffering is shared. A force greater than government prevents government corruption. A force greater than the force greater than government prevents corruption as well. The chain stacks to the sun and the chain is bureaucracy.I wish humans could not be greedy or power-interested, but many are. To eliminate power, one would have to eliminate the idea of power. Is the desire for power in human nature? Capitalism raises us to think so. Solanas might say: men raise us to think so. Forman might say: white people raise us to think so. Both might advocate a violent seizure of power which is totally valid. A liberal might say: power exists, so it should be more equitably distributed. A Christian fundamentalist might say: God created power, which is a Deus ex machina answer.--James 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 steeped in an ongoing deconditioning. It is attempting to summarize and dissect encounters with the state and its “control mechanisms.” Micro encounters and feelings are large scale power dramas. Two ants fight under a microscope, believing they are gladiators. Police watch the train cars for stirs of rebellion.--My behaviors were taught to me. I was raised to help 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 made and taught. Everything we know and do is a result of what our politicians, public schools, and parents have told us--the panoptical units. Humans are like computers; we can become conscious of our programming. We can hack and delete our programming. We can rewrite our programming with new ideology, or leave the code slot blank, blinking cursor I--I watch TikToks of conservatives talking about "woke ideology." "Wokeness" is ideology; that does not mean it is "wrong" ideology, but it is an ideology that opposes or seeks to reform state-colonial ideology, whose tenets are to maintain social order and American power in the global realm. Conservatives fixate on the "surface skin" of woke ideology. Maybe the problem with "wokeness" and "woke ideology" is it seeks to correct and reshape the surface and illusion of reality--maintaining the Neoliberal order, instead of reconstructing or overturning the settler-colonial state. The settler-colonial state is built on the genocide of Indigenous people, and on slave labor. How do we live with ourselves (we can't)?--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, us together. I die on the text to spite my body and its container.--
How does one reenter and re-participate in society after realizing it is a sham? Why labor to make rich people richer? I'd rather die.
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SUICIDESounds 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 "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.TWEET: poverty kills. America kills. America is a murderer. White patriarchal Imperialism kills its underside. 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.
Robert Indiana. USA 666 II. 1966–1967. Oil on canvas, five panels, 102 × 102 in. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
NO SUICIDESour cream bedsheet is a rope around my neck. I take the noose off. I fray the rope.Two men in a row tell me to be happier like I was in the honeymoon phase. Both men break up with me, because I cannot be happy, while they are expecting me to be happy. Now, I am:)
CORPI write Corp from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. There is not a feeling of being on the brink here. I spit Corp onto the laptop. The Dutch watch me vomit. I put the Hugh Jackman Reminiscence-device nodes on my head and enter memories of Corp.The Corp saw me across the room, with a broken iPhone. Corp looked sleek like a new Apple device in his Apple corporate uniform. He had perfectly shaped hair like a shaggy ken wig, and spray-on-looking facial hair, and an even skin tone.I didn't even know how to navigate home. The Corp was down on the floor of the Apple store. I should have been invisible wearing no designer brands, but you/he noticed me. 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 had absorbed the logics of capitalism. I wanted to fly to the star and stay with it. I was dazzled.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 when I realized he'd constructed himself to be a star.Starpower images are not stars. They are star-toys in star-worlds. They are CGI. Companies want their CGI stars to encapsulate the company vision and coalesce into their narratives. Solar energy signs a company contract and gets flattened. You used to be an anarchist, now you are a face of Apple. I fell in love with an Apple skin. I fell in love with the Apple logo and the more perfect world it promises.CGI stars simulate effect and lack real affects. Machinery produces the image. The machinery is desperate to create an appealing front; because the machinery is machinery, and machinery needs to produce a likable product to prove its utility.Taking Corp's clothes off, was like unsleaving a new iPhone. It was like opening the white box. The top lid of the white box slides smoothly across the bottom lid surface. Corp was rose gold.--I moved into your room shortly after.A shovel scrapes snow off a sidewalk outside. My parenthesis shifts beside me, moving spaces over. I claw my foot, scraping my trimmed toenails against the comforter. Pointless to make observations 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. There is a stream in Williamsburg made of melting snow. I float out on an orange floatation ring. My legs are in the water. The sun is cold. The shoveler continues to shovel. Asleep parenthesis has been asleep for a long time, snoring.--The photograph of a dog in his room—preserved with black eyes, stares down, missing its earth-bone.The shoveler scrapes the sidewalk. 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.--I became your robot; I recognized myself in the movie Companion (buy a customizable robot companion). You wanted me to perform quirky boyfriend at gentrification events. You wanted me to clean up after myself.I embraced my robot role, as a gender-subversion tactic. I tried to be your housewife.Robo-cleaner starts his day with a reel sequence and Megan Thee Stallion on YouTube. 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 mental to-do reminders. Plodding keys in Megan's Piano. I sip my coffee and plan to clean, housewife behavior. He came back to a filthy apartment and said: you’re lazy. I said: today, while we were walking, I hated you. I was addicted to destruction in the past, contemplating Xscape. 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. The light comes from far away, touching what I touch, bright dancer on the TV.On the TV of the apartment in Greenpoint, where I am living temporarily with you, Megan holds the microphone. I have all day to lie here and learn how to be a restaurant host from YouTube videos. All I have to do in exchange is clean and feed the fish. At dinner, you tell me it is better to be rich, and that I should try to be, so I can be healthier and happier, and go to Equinox like you. Yet, I tell you that despite the comforts of the apartment, something is missing, and this angers you, because you don't understand. 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. Go be a low-key opiate addict too if you want. Do you want that lifestyle or do you want to be an Equinox-er like me?" In absence of an artistic love, Equinox is your identity. I am not sure what I want.--Thankfully, I get the Midtown host job, and Corp gets off my back about being a lazy mooch. However, the second day on the job, I am fired for spilling a drink on a customer, and he says: "We need to take a break. I don't want to keep supporting you. Go back to your lazy slobbish druggie-adjacent Bushwick lifestyle. I am embarrassed to take you around my friends. They're all judging you for being lazy and trashy." After this, I began to see myself through his eyes--Appalachia Trash.--I talked to my "cracked-out coked-out" roommate about this when she was doing kitchen lines and I was drunk. She had helpful advice. 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' character 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.----I WAS TAUGHT NOT TO WORSHIP MONEY OR COCK. NOW I AM WORSHIPPING MONEY'S COCK.If all utopian possibilities are eliminated, we must do our best to excel within the stated conditions. I am thinking this at the time of my relationship with Corp. 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."I pimp myself and I am the "pimp" in a relationship where sex becomes work. Sex is allocated space and assigned a time frame instead of transcending the frame. Megan accepts that "sex is the corollary of capitalism and war" and advocates pragmatic strategies to win the sex-money-war game. I try it on; I try to see sex as strategy. I use sex to get what I want from Corp. I withhold sex when I am unhappy. Offensive and defensive strategy. I have sex like a soldier with a soldier. I have sex like a worker with a worker. I have sex like a player with a player. I have sex like a man with a woman; woman with a man. Corp doesn’t seem to understand that roles are arbitrary. I don't want to win. I don't want to be involved in a game. I don’t want to re-perform pornography. 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. Can I walk out of the mirror room? Can production line sex sensate sublimity?
Stills from Björk's All is Full of Love, music video, directed by Chris Cunningham, 1999.
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."Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi... does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into private property." The orgasm is a boundless non-commodity.Homosexuality and heterosexuality are succeeded and viewed retroactively, as dated packaging. When I see a man looking like a man, and a woman looking like a woman, they look like sitcom actors to me. I expect a laugh track to play. Yet, funny bots rule the country now. They are interested in narrowing the gap; making sex vaginal and penile, which seems old-fashioned to me--limited and perverted. Why do they view their bodies as organs and slots? Why do they turn their organs into fetish objects, worshipping girls with preserved sex organs? Why do they regionalize their sexuality instead of seeing themselves as total sexual beings? Are they ashamed of their lusts? Are they worried, that if they did not have a priest telling them how to have sex, quoting a dead man from 3000-whatever years ago, they would find they are interested in WILD TOTAL LAWLESS SEX? Christians are scared of being animals, so they have decided they are not. They are "better."--
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?HELL--Keep up the GOOD WORK. Your job is DOING GOOD. You're doing a GOOD JOB. Language enforces the reality it exists in?
Beginning from a young age, the citizen is rewarded for productive and pro-social behavior.
The citizen is instructed to find a suitable mate.
Robert Indiana. Mate, 1960–1962. Oil on wood and steel-and-wood wheels, 102.2 × 32.1 × 32.4 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art.
I liked being with Corp because he was a "normal man," with a "good income" and "stable situation." Corp was a suitable mate. After K, I decided to focus on mate-finding. Though I still felt love-echoes, it was not the same.--Why are YOU obsessed with genitalia? Why are STRAIGHT PEOPLE obsessed with penetration? Queers often don’t have penetrative sex, yet STRAIGHT PEOPLE can only understand sex as penetrative.----------
I FIXATE ON NANCY MACE BECAUSE SHE REMINDS ME OF CHILDHOOD AUTHORITY FIGURES.I watch a video of Nancy Mace sitting in front of a white board that reads: "Your mental illness is not my reality," while pointing at illustrations in trans children's books and saying: "this is grooming." Nancy Mace is grooming her audience into accepting book bans. She slips these anti-trans library "storytime" videos in between videos of her eating food at a wafflehouse, seemingly advocating for Jews (by endorsing the Israeli state), confessing she is a sexual assault survivor and is interested in protecting women and children (from pedos and groomers and criminals), and shaking hands with white working-class factory workers. Country music with lyrics that glamorize hard work back the videos. She repeatedly returns to South Carolina, her home-state, and talks in a southern twang to signal "I am one of you." Mace uses familiar signifiers and reassurance to create a hospitable atmosphere for poor whites. She poses as a "pioneer" here:
Her Instagram Bio reads: "Mom. Citadel Grad. Fmr Waffle House Waitress. Congresswoman Representing South Carolina. Endorsed by Donald Trump." Strategic strategy to appeal to working-class families with military attachments.Hatred is pushed through the cracks between the posts and videos: the enemy is always the other. The messaging is subliminal: the enemy is non-white, the enemy is non-normative gender-expression, the enemy is mental illness, the enemy is dissent, the enemy is non-conformity, the enemy is the unfamiliar (the enemy is anything that is not "Christian" or biblical). The enemy is the "alien." The enemy is the "rulebreaker," who is labelled a criminal, radical, or terrorist. The enemy is people who do not conform to state power, or are outside a biblical conception of reality. Faces of latinx and black men in prison uniforms flash on Fox News screens. Trans sportswomans flash on screens. Reality-enforcers, stereotypical-looking "men" and "women" contrast the images of gender-fluidity, making the images appear alien. To me, the stereotypical-looking white men and women look like aliens, not at all like the androgynous and mostly black and latinx people who surround me in Bushwick. The aliens on Fox News remind me of home.I would delve into what is like growing up in a conservative midwestern suburb, but I want to protect the privacy of the people I grew up around. Conservatives crave comfort and order; difference genuinely scares them. Individuality scares them. Sex scares them. Diversity scares them. "Normalcy" is maintained at all costs. Group cohesion is prioritized. Outsiders conform or are outcasted.I grew up riding scooters around a cul-de-sac in a small southwest Michigan town and went to public school, Catechism class, sports, and Hebrew school. I was raised to be a good citizen and start a normal family. I was socialized to be a conservative. At New England art school, I felt like I was surrounded by aliens. The aliens turned into friends, then the people back home transformed into aliens I had to disattach from as the political chasm widened. In art school and in Brooklyn, the general consensus was/is: "These are bad racist people. Any and all conservatives are stupid and evil." I feel like an alien wherever I am, and I wonder if part of it, is disattaching from the values of my upbringing, which I partly believed in, yet partially was suspect of. I genuinely believed in God, then lost this belief which stranded me. I also refused to go to church and laughed when they said adultery is a sin.I could never imagine a Bushwick queer at the small-town park. The queer would be stared at, whispered about, and questioned. Blonde parents would hug their children tight to their sides, say to their child: "stay away."As the economic division between poor and rich deepens and the middle class is gradually eliminated, middle-class turns to working-class. White working-class moves further right. I saw this in my hometown when I went back: everyone is a Republican now. And all the infrastructure is degraded. Of course, the country clubs are growing, though the country clubs are VIP-access. Only the top town elite can join, and only whites, with a few exceptions. Suburban white people cling to Fox News stability promises. The people have few migrants in their community, so migrants are what politicians say they are. There are few gay or trans people living openly, so people do not understand that these people are not alien-caricatures, they are humans, just like them. Is it better to be poor in a white enclave, or is it better to be destitute in a liberal bubble? I decide: the second option is better.
We are drawn to images that mirror our reality and reassure us that it is stable and true.
Straight reality demonizes alternative and marginalized realities as products of mental illness and disturbance in order to discredit alternative experience. What they really mean is, alternative experience disturbs them. Bettcher refers to hegemonic reality, as “the overworld.” I am interested in the underworld; I live in the underworld. The "gender ideology" conservatives refer to is really just a belief system, or non-belief system that does not align itself with category, familiarity, and order; it is interested in the fluid, flux. It is not interested in grooming. Characterizing gay people as groomers has been a tactic since the 1950s-McCarthyism, when public service announcements would make announcements, telling straight people to watch out for "gay-pedos" on the prowl.
The same tactic: demonization of LGBTQ+ individuals through attachment to "predatory" grooming behavior (which has nothing to do with being LGBTQ+) is applied seventy-plus years later. Queer literature saves queer children from committing suicide. Does Nancy Mace want young children who do not feel at home in their own bodies to die, because they see no representation around them? Maybe she does.----
I think about Anita Bryant and all her anti-gay activism, which was allied to White Christian Conservatives. Anita used her beautiful image (former beauty queen) to make a hateful politics appealing. I think Nancy Mace is similar--both women also ally themselves to the pastoral and pastoral imagery, summoning associations of Eve.It is interesting too that The Torch posits itself as "revolutionary." Trump was similarly able to posit himself as an insurrectionist revolutionary, an "establishment rebel," who "usurped" the American throne, yet is backed by an ideology of white hatred.
I took this iPhone photo in State College, Pennsylvania. It is from 2024 pride month.
2024 Instagram story. Though this is an "extreme Christian sect," its politics underlie "mainstream" Right propaganda.
Though Kirk claims to accept the "gay conservative," it is with stipulations and erasures. This is the only positive piece of LGBTQIA+ representation on Kirk's feed I was able too find, and it is a straight-passing white male.
I forget who said: MAGA is the subculture for people who have never belonged to one. MAGA is for people who don’t identify with “goth,” “alt,” “indie,” “punk,” or other leftist anti-establishment subgroups, yet crave the same group-belonging. I think MAGA-heads like to feel hated. In being hated by a majority, they feel like rebels for the first time. It is why they nod their heads when a CNN guy says they are racist: they agree. MAGA is an alt-group-gone-mainstream. Do MAGAs basically feel sad and excluded from a nation that sort-of villainized and abandoned them under the guise of progress, excluded them from elitist liberal arts educations and the ability to pursue non-pragmatic interests and live in cultural centers amongst ideas and subgroups they feel alienated from?If MAGA is to be drained, higher education should be made more radically accessible, yet MAGA-heads somehow oppose this too. In TurningPointUSA's videos, the student and the "totalitarian" university is the enemy. A sociology professor raises the issue of economic precarity facing recent graduates. Instead of addressing systemic issues at the root of contemporary socioeconomic problems, Kirk blames higher education's inability to provide students with tangible workplace skillsets. Kirk does not believe in "systemic." Kirk says, "college is not really a good use of time. If the students you're talking to can't find jobs, why are they learning from you?" MAGA youth cheer him. The professor responds with a shrug and uncomfortable laugh that seems to say: fair, fair.Kirk suggests young people go directly into the workforce, or trade schools, so they make money more quickly and directly. While it is a pragmatic response that may yield quick-money results, it contributes to the increasingly manipulability and under-education of an increasingly poorer lower class. If individuals do not learn how they are manipulated by propaganda, and how reality is constructed, they will be susceptible to influencers who appeal to their bigoted sensibilities; the non-higher-educated will confuse likeable sensibility with actual agreement. They cheer the "hero" who speaks language they understand and puts the "out-of-touch" and "leftist-brainwashed" student and professor in his/her/their place. A pro-working-class-politics is contorted into an anti-intellectual politics, reinforcing the inability of a working class to enter into and understand the mechanisms and language of an Elite sphere. Trade school will not provide them the cultural or intellectual capital to surpass their class-position, though they can try to gain financial capital through "hard labor" and an entrepreneurial spirit.
Anita Bryant
A screenshot from Nancy Mace's Instagram.
Anita Bryant
Nancy Mace
A screenshot of a Turning Point USA Instagram post. The American flag erases the pride flag. It is the "Trump."
Gay men cannot distance themselves from a queer community through assimilation or retreat to rich hot gay male enclaves such as Fire Island. It is not so long ago that America genocided thousands of queer people by refusing to prioritize AIDS research. Reagan neglected to publically discuss AIDS until thousands were already infected and dead. Why are we so eager to accept privilege and integration now? 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. There are more of us now, because all the most of the old ones are dead, or were forced to assimilate into straight society through straight marriage, etc.
Conservatives fear that the people they marginalize and dislike will gain power and become the new "reality-enforcers," telling them what is real, forcing "gender ideology" upon them, and turning their children into "blue-haired they/thems" or dick-sucking bottoms which is "anti-Christian." The term "reality-enforcement" comes from Bettcher's book on transness. I am not trans, but I do not have to be trans to advocate for trans people.
--I watch another video of Nancy Mace calling a trans woman a slur repeatedly. A comment on the post reads: "Well, that's creepy and scary! Great job for keeping your cool. 🙌" The trans other is deemed "creepy and scary." Mace is thanked for doing a "great job" cooly calling the trans woman a slur. Mace or her social media team respond: "Thank you for commenting! - Team Mace." The internet troll is part of the "team."
--Queerness and queer expression are demonized because queer individuals confuse and undermine the "reality-enforcers'" conception of reality. The details of queer lives and queer emotional experience haunt the conservative simulacrum. The existence of a queer individual, despite the specter of AIDS death and the alt-right affront is miraculous.
--
AIDS Memorial Quilt
Insert list of every dead queer person AIDS, hate crime, or suicide, USA.
Of course there are many who died alone in alleys, and didn't get spaces.
I'm guessing she did not want to be a fucking martyr.
There are people who think this is the face of evil.
And all this death was for what exactly? A display like the AIDS quilt on the National Mall would be unheard of nowadays. Soon the lawn may be covered in Red, White, Blue, not a full spectrum. Soon the quilt may be wiped from classrooms and textbook American history. Dead queers meant nothing. Dead fags and trans people, so fucking what. Isn't that right, Nancy? I am guessing Turning Point USA's followers' don't even know the quilt exists, don't know a single name, and think the queers brought it on themselves. Nation of victim-blamers. The genocider wraps itself in its victims' cloth. Will a gay death memorial be perceived as an act of grooming too, the mere exposure of "young and fragile children" to even gay death, an act of perversion? Maybe that will be permitted, queer death. The quilt will be paraded as a warning: try this "lifestyle," and reap your fate. Lives reduced to a scare tactic. Did you spot my name on the quilt? I would have been there. I would have seen you there.
And there are people who think this is the face of evil.
Despite disliking her, I cannot help but find this entertaining. I like the way she says "uh huh" with chill nonchalance, and puts the annoying gay guy in his place, but I'm gay and I shouldn't be cheering her on.
Nancy is a good villain. Nancy would make a good queer.
Propaganda is seductive and it can be hard to resist the allure; can I admit to understand why she has attracted a following? It is nice to be in on the team. Does it make me evil to laugh at her earnest kind-of badass-in-a-warped-way white mom bigotry? I admit I am obsessed with Nancy Mace. I am from a conservative culture, and this is the secret humor of whites, which we all know. Though I have re-educated myself, the bigotry runs deep, and perhaps it is nostalgic to see it so openly displayed, like kids on the playground saying "fag," Nancy's slurs bring me back like Proust's madeleine.I watch the video like I once would have. I think: that’s not me. I am different from that.Liberals see trans athlete bans, and think it’s horrible, but there is something worse on the way. It may trail behind a Nancy Mace chariot.
CORP AGAIN,
Corp, 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.
—
CAN ARTWORK BE A SERVICE?
Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2019. Installation view. Photograph by Shannon Finney. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
CAN AN ARTWORK BE ALIVE?
Laura Lima, Gala Chicken and Gala Coop. 2004-2011.
Can an artwork be a living, self-killing document? What is a self-flagellating gesture doing, besides indulging a self-flagellating impulse, or enacting a self-martyrdom?
--------------
My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, 1996, website.
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.
I look for K again and again, but I cannot find him.
My knuckle rapped K's hard door. The eyes. I remember his leg hairs. The hairs got lighter further down his legs, close to his feet and ankles. The hair furred down his neck and then vanished. His eyebrows grew towards each other; the hairs reached across the ridge to greet each other, like we did, when the door opened. Lamps everywhere and a clean, yet heavy smell from burning incense. I wanted to stroke his soft slightly wet eyelids and trace his nose, so I did. I touched his lotioned face and follicles with prickly sprouts extended towards my fingers, creating a fuzz between us.
Who the fuck likes to sing
to dead roses.
I buy a bouquet, and I watch him
Eat the petals like Lays.
While I lay here like a thumbs up.
GOD’s small dot is the teary eye.
I lay on a chip bag.
The crinkle is in my sleep.
--
We can build anything we want and we build the same world.
--
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.----
A professor once said: gays have not faced discrimination since AIDS. I would tell him to leave New York.
------
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?----------
I AM SICK
OF YOUR FUCKING SAFETY
----
I met Blondie at a bar with racing turtles while “Maneater” plays in the background. Blondie was from Long Island. I am from Penn State. I thought: Long Island and Penn State will be a match. I had a “falling in love” experience with Blondie, which exceeded my expectations. For the two weeks before meeting Blondie, I was listening to “I Love You All The Time” by Chelsea Wolfe all the time while thinking about Corp. Blondie sucked my face the first night while queer women danced all around and on the tables. A fight began in the rainy backyard and some girls got booted out. I was pleased by the kiss, but still interested in Corp. Blondie surprised me with artificial love. The love was not mechanical like with Corp. It was not robotic reenactment of a straight romance. With Blondie, it was like a high with a bland comedown. I looked at him one night and the magic was gone. I looked at him in Regalio Deli and felt like I was looking at anyone else. I am sure he had the same experience, though I wanted to respark the magic wand, and he was fine with breaking it. He said: “reality kicked in.” What was the magic trip and why did it occur?----
POEMS FOR BLONDIE
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 my door.
The smile is the lightning on the shore.
The smile is the bleach.
The smiling light he spills on the floor.I see his tanned back covered in pimples. And his bleach-blonde hair with the grey wall all around.I lie and wait. Hook stuck to door and time passes.He comes. 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.Awkward acts turn to disintegrating information swallowed by a pinhole.--White pillows tinted yellow. Saliva turned it. Damp legs with hair glued down. My nose is congested. Blondie likes to comb his hair in the mirror while I confess suicide urge. I hang a chandelier, stringing up crunchy white ribbons from my illness.
--Blondie, I wander the prolapse into past. Past and speculation fuck. Past and speculation reproduce a history of fragments, a history of touches. Past and speculation do not reproduce; the fragments are conjured from the Dead End rectum, the catastrophe site, the DISEASE ZONE spawns a string of recollections. The text fucks itself nonproductively. The text fucks its past.--
I never fucked Blondie. Blondie never fucked me.
--Blondie had bleach hair, he was always combing it, perfecting it. It would frizz up, then he would smooth it down again.--
Blondie was glamour and a cowboy.
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.
TURTLEGreen turtle is in menstrual silk on the roadside. How mean time is. Long too. Road width is subjective, depends on how fast a creature can move, how large the creature is. How fast can a turtle move? Big man scoops turtle off roadside, takes the turtle to the non-material Glimmer in a vision. Sun-baking on the roadside, turtle is slowly dying from the heat. Envisions being picked up by a Fast Car or Carhartt man. The turtle labors over a sandcastle. The road separates him from a desire-mirage. He sees himself there, dancing on the roof of a chrome car with a Carhartt man in the front seat. Chrome car with hot man is a cactus. Meanwhile, he works on a sandcastle until, someday, a drunk driver may roll over his neck. Blood spurt. The turtle decides to vlog his slow walk on the roadside. Sky glint on a candy wrapper could reflect god. Beer bottle shard could pierce him. The mirage is a pane shimmering the whole time across the road. TikTok stardom is added to the mirage. Turtle found a clover on the way, connected it to an anklet. Belief in symbol for now, though no belief in dream. The Carhartt man never showed. The turtle built a room for him in the sandcastle. The turtle sleeps in the sandcastle and it suffocates him. He may finally meet the Mirage, which shimmers momentarily in his mind's eye, undressing itself before he goes.The mirage was the skin on a yellow bath bathe.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. Heaven is that too.
Andrés Serrano, Immersion (Piss Christ), 1987. Cibachrome print (152 × 102 cm), plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine
--Belted to the bed cot in the ambulance, I made small talk with the EMT.--
Alternate title: Love Poems In and Against Despair.
----GROWING DIAGONALByung 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." Despair made me feel that no change or hope is possible. I thought a black orchid might still grow from the black fabric I was looking into. Black orchids cannot grow without sunlight and sustenance which make upward momentum and flourishing possible.In The Accursed Share, Bataille writes: "Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, 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."While growth may be inherent, organic life can grow sideways and diagonal too, not only upwards. 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. Energy squandered on connection and care; arms with hands reach diagonal to grasp other hands. "We are forming our own social contract" (Barlow).------END TIES THE THREADS
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. I begin to understand why so many in Bushwick and art circles want to appear as individuals. I allow an artist to tattoo me. He goes over the bad blurry stick and poke which looked like suffering. It looked like a drunken prison tattoo that spanned my entire forearm. (I gave it to myself on substances at age 19, and then had a period of hospitalizations. After this, I lost the desire to be an individual, but the desire is returning). I self-mutate instead of self-improve. I lose the destroy-improve binary. I lose the healing narrative. I lose narrative. Healing is wandering, not self-help. On the wandering path, we have encounters that make us want to go forward, sideways, or diagonal still. Anything too straightforward is reductive, selling you something, convincing you of something, or a lie (probably).
I read GenderFail while waiting for the book club to start.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.”Money rain down, not on me. Money rain down from the overworld.--The document is incomplete. The document does not want to complete. The document does not want to resolve or be total. The document does not want to enforce a totalitarian worldview. I resist the urge to beautify the document. It would kill it.Like a painting, it continues to be worked on.--I accept I may never love anyone like K again. K's apartment was a cell outside of capitalist time and straight time. It was a cell in The Line; I would have liked to stay there.Circularity rejects the line (or does it ride it round the circle?).I preferred life in the cell with K to my money-world relationships with Corp and Blondie, and life with its et-ceteras.My money-world relationships take place in the Rubik's. Somehow me and K got outside it, until he had to go home to Saudi and get married, and I luckily had to move to New York City and pursue advancement. If I had had it my way, I would have moved to Saudi Arabia and married K, but this is not how "life works." Life and work don't relate.
Cultural expectations are societal expectations, not a subset. The chart is wrong.
--I accept I may be a grinch. The grinch is produced. I stand in the grinch stance.--Despair can be useful as a positionality if it assists a greater cause. Creating art in/through depression is an assertion of subjecthood, and an assertion of queer & abnormal subjecthood rejects commodification.
--
Art is not a persuasive essay, yet art should talk to you emphatically.
--RESISTRural red sea
fish iron
their red hats.
I serve him fish and
pray bone catch in his cut throat.--Who is the "him" here? "He" is the ghost whose name I can't say. Who watched over me in the bedroom with K and anyone, who watches me all the time.--GenderFail writes: “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.“--K, LASTLYI loop back to K who deserves even more, yet I cut it here.--Like Hugh Jackman in Reminiscence, the bad cyberpunk movie I watched on a plane, I try to remember K. There was a sex scene in the movie, that was more trope than real sex--framed and constructed like a pornographic interlude, a male gaze fantasy fruited. Perfect sanitary and well-acted sex with self-aware acting, a raised leg, a dress being pulled up from the knee for the camera man, sex after a whirlwind, an object broke, what was it, Hugh and her fucked after. After the build-up to sex and cut-away from sex, Hugh Jackman peels a device off his scalp. The prior sequence is revealed to be a re-constructed memory: the device allowed him to realive her, and the audience gets to witness the resurrection. Writing can be an act of ressurrection and regurgitation; I don't know what happened to you, so here you are on the page in a fragment form.It is a pointless and sad masturbatory exercise, so I give it up, or I waste years trying to get to know you again. Is this a pointless exercise, or is it useful? Am I? Did I do a good job? Can we fuck outside the Rubik's?
NOTE ON THE STRUCTURE:
The document evades capture. The document opposes power and power's sensibility. It kaleidoscopes diaristic, poetic, and academic registers. It strives for non-totality and atonality.If you are disinterested, I do not give aThe self is recursive. The self deteriorates in the recursive machine. The self is polyphonic instability. Instability destabilizes and disturbs panoptic enforcement. The document cries and eats itself. The document 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, I guess. The citizen is a dollar. 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. I am talking to a priest through a screen. I am trying to craft a Stories sequence.
REFERENCES (WIP):Silverman, Kaja. Masochism and Male Subjectivity.GenderFail. Against Pride Month During A Fucking Genocide. GenderFail, 2024.GenderFail. Manifesto, Profit‑for‑Survival: Discourses on Anti‑Capitalist Publishing Practices. 3rd expanded ed., GenderFail Press, 2021.Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. AK Press, 2004.Megan Thee Stallion. Freak Nasty. 300 Entertainment, 2018.Forman, James. Twenty Enemy Forces Within a Revolutionary Organization That Must Be Combatted. Black Panther Party, 1971.Bettcher, Talia Mae. Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2023.Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson, Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013Indiana, Robert. USA 666 II. 1966–1967. Oil on canvas, five panels, 102 × 102 in. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.Rirkrit Tiravanija: (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2019. Installation view. Photograph by Shannon Finney. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.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.Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy.Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”Deli Girls. “Peg.” Take It It’s Yours, NUMB Records, 2016.Joy, Lisa, director. Reminiscence. Warner Bros., 2021.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.Sargent, John Singer. Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes. 1897, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/12127.
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.
Who the fuck likes to sing
to dead roses.
I buy a bouquet, and I watch him
Eat the petals like Lays.
While I lay here like a thumbs up.GOD’s small dot is the teary eye.
I lay on a chip bag.
The crinkle is in my sleep.