Notes from the Overground

I. And there's this thing about the young and the addled, who ask, "Is there a god and what does he think of me?" - treading sidewalks and ghosting over storefronts, what choice is there? - tramping from hotspot to hotspot, places we are allowed to stop and always looking to turn more places into places we can stop, click the clip lights of our bikes and take off our shoes -  we all just want everywhere to be home, so we can doff our PJs anytime.

So, my angels, and here's that ignoble lining - we'd all take the deal now. Lord love us, but somehow the self got severed from the self sometime after the war (or maybe earlier; we've got our best scientists on it, I promise), which means mustering a lot of imaginative force, which means a lot of tired people, which means a lot of bed-worshipping people, which means people who want to put on their PJs, which means people who would take the deal. In the annals of ignobility, the entire generation takes the deal because if others will happily purchase you in your unadulterated form, maybe you can get some peace, you know?

(Positive side effects of fame include using your imaginative powers for everything except living.)
(Or at least, evidence to the contrary, say the Phoenix fam, gets assiduously ignored.)

II. What the fuck is art for if you want to destroy culture?

III. The question remains, who am I doing this for? The question sometimes becomes, why would anyone do this for free? At worst the question is, WHAT IS THIS? And sometimes, there is a horrible tumbling of, how can we pretend to narrativize that which resists narrative so completely, structure the unstructured, enforce logic on the illogical and the vast, maybe we got a few things right but what if our basic assumptions are wrong spinning us out into some sort of weird collective delusion, there are no names for the nameless, action doesn't even mean the same thing it meant three thousand years ago, but really who am i to say because we move so goddamn slow as a whole, what if stories have to change to catch up with the way we think of the self now which has almost nothing to do with what we do, what of Mac Wellman's recidivist, what of quoting scripture for my purpose, what of evil, i can't even begin to imagine a new form, i'll die if i have reinvent the wheel tomorrow, i'm not ready, i'm not ready, when will i ever be ready, amen.

Ya know?

IV. Notes on tone from N+1: "Women’s websites like the Hairpin created unity among their readers by cultivating the sense of membership in an inner circle, where women displayed their intimacy and cemented their belonging by speaking to one another like high school best friends. The Hairpin’s voice, filled with chatty camaraderie, was sometimes cloying and sometimes engaging when it gave me style tips and book recommendations (“I know I made you all go out and get your Villette tramp stamps like my first day here”); but in articles that took on larger topics, that voice read as distracting, condescending, or even anxious at the prospect of alienating readers."

V.  Off to London tonight, don't really know what to do there. Turns out tickets to the Olympics are real complicated to get. Turns out the Olympics are a moral shitfest.

VI.

Warning, heavy stuff ahead

Saying no to society somehow
has lead me to saying "yes"
In hotel rooms 
To rich white men

feeling bad
feeling bad about the money
my body, the blood on the sheets
their desperate breath as they try to approach
I was writing a poem to salvage a little of myself today
When I missed my next client for 5pm in Chelsea
I lost track of time
Or it lost me
I am lost

(All this desire has been thrown upon me, yet I have none)

I want to throw up
and release this fucked up blockage
See it come out in physical forms
In chunks out of me
I just want the grey out of me

-292 bank account dollars of red numbers
Thousands owed to the state
To friends to hospitals
Everything is red and stuck
But I am blue and trying to move

(For the record, I did not drop out love left me first)

Once again the dead numbers clench
the living red things inside my chest
I worry so the chemicals of worry flow in my blood
My substance is raddled by something vacant
So vacant I can feel it
I turn around
But see nothing

Have not laughed deeply for many many weeks
Ive gone ahead with tradition and blame myself,
assume this unlaughing is my fault
Since the world seems to be laughing
Since the world kind of smiles in a way
Since the world pretends it is getting away with this
It's my fault, plenty of people are transcending this very moment.
These are Decisions I've made, Wounds I earned
I am a child still living under the cocktail table
Looking at adult legs from safety and they drink because
It's our fault we can't convert war into something else

I am trying so hard
But my heart is in a debt of shadows
Obnoxious immaterial dramas
Silly blood silly breath silly ghosts
Sun gnashing at my skin
Eyes drifting into tears
I promise more light to come
Just not today
I know no one likes to see this

No thing
No mouth, eye, dick or bird or breeze
Has said hello to me all day
I go online to download a hello 
from a stranger with a torso and splayed legs 
With tracing paper I outline
this affirmation from the screen
and Now I have something kind of real to show that
I just might have been seen

I go online to say hello to myself
Taking pictures and making silhouettes
Importing other silhouettes to mine
Suggestions of friendship, of beauty
Suggestions of love, of bodies
Of caress and forgetting my name
Suggestions of substance.
The possibility of a new and proper world 
Is more powerful than this actual world.
If the photo suggest I feel good and beautiful
Then maybe will actually feel good and beautiful

In the mirror 
I think about fame and my Art work
If I could polish my desperation 
Into a stand up show
Or a performance of some kind
Of some brutal truth 
Then via fame I am saved
Polish my pain til it turns to mirror
A mirror reflecting something of power
Then I could 
Be the freak on stage
Loved by muggles and men alike.
Then I could be on the cover of Out magazine or
Vogue, say, and have that look
Like I always knew I would be part of the club.
The world will clap and renounce ever rejecting me.
The enemy will be kind of like a friend.

one feeling

coming back from witch camp
2 days later we drove into the city
to go to a dance space
and have a circle, shared breaths,
pushing pullling sweaty fleshy sinews
dance dance
and i feel it so hard
so sad
to dance in the presence of humans as the only life in the room
no roots to tickle my feet up to my knees
no branches to inspire my waving arms
no tall grasses to nudge my inner thighs
no sun shining to squint my eyes
no insects to buzz and "disrupt" with their divine intervention
bird calls
the scent of broken yarrow
non-humans can be our greatest teachers
in this dance of living, of feeling

Gathering independence all private-like
in my room
Still hanging out with a paradise I stole
As a young boy
Panties from a babysitter's drawer
Years and years ago.
Black satin and a fake pearl.
Genitals, the moon
A window on the ugly city
performing it's own oblivion
It's starting again and again
We hold out like an audience
hoping for a good cry

No spell enters me and
No dick, no eyes, no art
All is deflected
By my new diet of weeds, dried meat
Silence and the blood of beet
Every poet in the big book of poems
Dreams of such meager angel food
Poem: Chisel, yearn, enchant.

I walk out every now and then
on the sleeping waifs
And onward to the disinterested realms
silence on the back roads of forever
It is not so serious actually
I was looking for flowers and birds
living in meadows. Even
When death passed me by
on wheels of rotten bones
It was not serious
I called out
"business in town?"
I glanced over to shapes of society
And saw its steeples of time


This body, a wandering rooftop in time finds
crossroads beneath the seasons beautiful

fucking chicago
the kinetic playground is no more!
TO LEASE!
it's swamp-ass season
and every nobody from paulina to cicero
looks like a wet flannel sheet
god damn you second city
all this regionalism is just an act

get yourself a scratch card
and maybe buy an island
even though you have no idea how to take a vacation

i cooked up a soup
1 part music consisting of radio ghosts, trapped in the ionosphere
3 parts overwhelming physio-spatial synesthetic response to sound
1 scrip for repetitive motion sickness
a pinch of a horrifying/edifying run-in with ravel's bolero due to both items above
thousands of digital pages devoted to "the worst generation ever"
the air and plaque from the 2 ventricles of my jealous heart
a short list of the parties i never made it to
936 g-chats (and rising)
a whisper of the smell of the garbage bins down round the back
(which is where all your stuff is headed)

it tastes like truffle oil french fries
sprinkled with parsley
arriving with a side of aioli
and it goes down smooth like middle-shelf whiskey

which is a shame really
considering what went into it

 

It's alright to cry, crying gets the sad out of you!

i wish it were a joke
but this year, that is 2012, has been a bumper year for awful (mostly situational)
i would like to say, inelegantly, eloquently
i'm having a terrible time

but i cried and cried and cried on the phone
about my deep down, bone threaded awful
and i said like a thousand things that didn't make any sense
mostly about how i feel unappreciated, which now, I guess, makes sense
and now i feel sort of okay, y'all

do you remember when we had shame day?
and everybody put their faces in the chopped onion to make themselves cry?
and it was sort of hilarious/great?
slight nervous breakdowns and thanksgivings are different
but hey!
it's alright to cry!
it'll make you feel floaty and nice and the words will come tumbling out and you don't have to listen, you just have to talk and maybe you'll know something you didn't before.

meta moment

also on a logistical note squidfriends
this whole new layout--huh
and i for one for reals like that our posts are tag-ful, i like looking back whatever was labeled "all is onesies" and "pop music fills my blood with ecstasy" and "baptized in ink"

so now when you go to write a post the labels are over on the right side, "labels" and you know
we could use them

i like imagining file cabinets built of fur and bones

midnight mooning, here's the list

1. woah, it's going to be okay!
2. "you should know that even though all things are liberated and not tied to anything, they abie in their own phenomenal expression." (Dōgen--this is actually very comforting to me)
and
3. "as for cities--they are (to those who can see) old tree trunks, riverbed gravels, oil seeps, landslide scrapes, blowdowns and burns, the leavings after floods, coal colonies, paper-wasp nests, beehives, rotting logs, watercourses, rock-cleavage lines, ledge trata layers, guano heaps, feeding fenzies, courting and strutting bowers, lookout rocks, ad ground-squirrel apartments. and for a few people they are also palaces." (gary snyder in the practice of the wild which i am reading and really enjoying right now)
4. idleness and mystery and stillness and the full moon and curiosity are so important. i am stepping off my ambiguity pedestal and toward desire and fire and water and the steam and smoke where they meet and walking mountains and being on the internet at midnight seeing my memories and loves and desires reflected back in a thousand tabs--oh silly but sometimes true-feeling this tool of the modern world, of our increasingly visible subconsciousnesses--i believe in german transqueer radical radio and rilke and bread and work and magic and new tattoos across knowing flesh and pain and slowness and quickness.
5. things have been rough lately and often hard. in a knowingly privileged and marginally unstable kind of way.
6. of place: wood floors. the altar moved to the next room over. it is night and the neighbors are doing some kind of loud popping project in the garage and talking about race on their porch. the walls are red and i ate a tiny plum that dropped from the tree in our front yard. there is an herb spiral and kale plants and lots of tomato blossoms. the cherries are dropping in neighboring blocks and yarrow in flower. raspberries are out, gold and red! and salmonberries! and strawberries too! and oregon grapes not too far (not that those are nearly as tasty but still). it has been sunny off and on, rainy occasionally, gray here and there often, warm but never quite hot per se, the doors are open here in the day and closed at night--it is chilly but i will sleep outside tonight.
7. STRANGERCAT i will write a poem about you soon.