& since you’re a charming creature please stay that way —Micah Ballard
when you feel a presence in a room electrical a cross between a premonition and a giddy shiver the warmest gushing
but i don’t think you’re having a heart attack now with a stance built with terror who are you here for? with a voice that fills the room like a backed-up
toilet but you light right up crimson life for
whom are you here? those big moments interspersed through
out your 20s and 30s the ease with which, when first ex
periencing that piercing flutter upon entering a crowded
room becomes a kind of a return to familiarity all fluttery
define shallow? reeling in the five pound catfish with flair like
it’s a fancy new acting exercise the drama class you took for
the experience of commingling artistically oh he’s the cat’s
pajamas mom always said that the way to a
man’s heart is directly through his stomach red cork bobbing a mirage out on the shallow river this after noon i’m not much of a cook not much on
cooking rarely do i get an even somewhat clear drive i
cannot recall firing up the oven ever to be in charge of a
home-cooked meal so i brought the wine
seeing at least two books by david sedaris on the living room
bookshelf almost put me into a tailspin how much of a
disappointment the last half a dozen (or so) were he is
trying to remember he is pursing his lips in an effort to
shape the voice of a certain human’s name i knew him
you never did i knew i knew the stilted
living room in the house that held you safe until you were
seventeen he is out of here a safety i had no idea
how to gain meaningful employment I've given a bit of scrutiny over the past fifteen years or so.
These have been the years when, rather than having
the luxury of full-time, permanent employment, I’ve
been that uncredited cog in the corporate machine doing contractual, or short-term—finite—work. Pedro Pascal, Tony Gilroy, Eva Victor and Will
Arnett are being interviewed by Justin Chang for the new film, Behemoth! on the monster
screen at the foot of my bed. I have picked the magazine’s first poetry submissions for
issue 42; and there now visible proof of life
that can be witnessed if one happens to find
themselves at the website today, which no
one who happened to visit in several years
has witnessed (actual construction, actual change)
in years. It’s the middle of the night, as it often is
when I am at my most productive. Even more regularly
when without the structure of a regular paid work
schedule. And I am determined to see the upcoming day
light hours reversing or at least easing the precarious
financial turmoil that has been unrelenting and all mine
for as many years as I have not been putting together
new magazine issues, which I have just confirmed
has now been a stretch of thirteen years between
the completion of issues 40 and 41. Last week
was basically an elongated interruption of a
hopeful headline that came unexpectedly (literally
out of nowhere) and promised at least a momentary,
significant, immediate, positive change to my financial
situation probably for the rest of the year, during a
week in which a box of fourteen fresh meals was slated
for delivery to me, as one has been for the past fourteen
weeks now, on Monday. But this week the box never came.
Despite the fact I waited anxiously all day Monday for the
arrival of no box, no money. I even sat in the lobby of my
apartment building being assured multiple times over a two
hour period that the box was soon to be delivered (this was
over two hours after the deadline by which the box had been
promised). That, plus non-event that has had me anxiously awaiting a bit of incredibly needed dollars, cash that I had not expected might come at this time. It as not even a
remote possibility. These two things have taken up my
focus this week. They introduced a series of expectations
and hopes, filled with a lot of nerve-jangling hurrying up
and waiting. The news of the unexpected cash came
to me a week ago. At least I do not think it is mere
hallucination, the excitement of which has been
quelled by a forty-eight hour stretch of no food, two
days in which I ate absolutely nothing. So this set
of events and non-events have twisted me out of sorts
in ways more if more elevated stress than I have seen
during a pretty stressful year, during a couple of years
in which I have been rendered inactive due to an absolute
lack of cash influx (I feel more broke than I have been in
a decade and a half, essentially). In short, this vapid
lyrical hodge-podge that I have erected for you, therefore, is an effort to get my ducks in a row so that my focus is
solidly on making this week and the following several,
to turn the weeks and days into knock-out, fantastic, pro
ductive periods of time, one after another after another,
with the primary hopeful consequence of such focus
would be to see obvious, calculable, ascertainable results,
the kind of productivity which I have almost forgotten into
non-existence. I hope they have me flying like some fancy
firecracker from the static limbo that is, cumulatively, the
shitty swamp of the past thirteen years and soaring into
a new galaxy at the helm of a shiny spaceship which I can
use to bend time and maneuver myself up and away and
out of here. So I’m doing great, even better, really. Soon,
I will, as if a witch or a magician will make all of the
depression disappear. This is, if, indeed, I do get the funds
that have been for far too long such impossible plunder.
It is now a new Monday morning. A morning that sits atop
what is going to be a spectacular and profound week.
The Arc de Triomphe as seen from the Places des Voges two afternoons subsequent to turning forty. Oh, no, you can’t take that away from me. Or
can you? The sandbox, being the entire plaza, can be escaped. Somewhere simul
taneously, the photojournalist arrives to
snap the shot (the four of us pictured w/
in the tractor tire with Mom, who somehow has a hand on each of the four of us, more of a steel grip, at the scruffs of our necks? My sister’s lopsided pair of pigtails does a
kind of see-saw balancing act as a result of the mother’s connection. “Sit still. Look pretty. I’m no feminist, but without my graveyard shift at the toy factory, would
this tire be filled with such fine sand?”). This feminist fantasy goes only so far, but what a pretty black and white photo, the five of us have never looked spiffier, four
kids in our 1970s-era hand-me-downs, Mom somehow in one of her gingham button-up Western shirts, circa several years later, after she’d switched from the
factory of toys to the factory of shirts, graveyard to swing shift, carpal tunnel problems a smoldering spark on the horizon, like Footloose, and the glitter-laden Roman
I was just thinking, with regard to the “Again,” of Glen Ellen, of Sonoma, to walk Sonoma Square, and of touring the Benziger Family Winery again. That’d
be fun. It always was. As for places I’ve never been, which are the places I was first thinking about, there’s Spain. Barcelona. Especially since it turned out I enjoyed
Italy as much as I did (I was very surprised). And I want to go to Thailand, to Cambodia; that’s a pretty big spread. I’d perhaps stick to
the city in Thailand, much as I could (Bangkok,
surely?), but away from the city in Cambodia (Angkor Wat!). I miss Los Angeles. But find San Diego to be pretty boring. I’d go back to
South America, beyond Lima. Uruguay,
perhaps. I’ve always told myself I’d love to go
to Mexico City. I love a place where it’s so easy to get lost. I’m assuming Hong Kong is nothing like it was when I was there before,
but Tokyo, that’s a teeming city. Or maybe Shanghai. I have also always wanted to go
to Budapest. I’d go again and again back to Montreal. And Vancouver. I really could
keep going with this list. The more I think about
it, the places I’d love to see multiply until the list
begins to be exhausting, thinking about all of the
places I want to visit for the first time, or see again.
I turn the page and it’s the poem “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara. Which isn’t actually that surprising since the page I turn is in The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara. And I’ve mostly been trying not to be morbid, been trying to maintain a positive sense of self and a hefty sense of humor with what I’m thinking, what I’m watching and what I’m writing this morning. But how not to delve into the maudlin or the morbid, me? Is this just today? Is it lately, I wonder? Have I been this way always? But my first thought is my mother just died. And she was a lady. And this gets me to thinking about my mom, who recently passed. I’ve yet to begin reading the poem, have decided to save it for a while (yes, I’ve read this one before, why do I suddenly feel you are judging me?), but as my eyes come up from the page, I see this portion of a line about halfway down it, “(first
name Linda I once heard)” – and I think that perhaps I’ve been this way always, as I am suddenly reveling in the fact that my mother, who just recently passed away, was named Linda.
let us evaluate the comedic intent of [in a childish whine]: “You started it.” nasal prepubescents that remind us of a certain teacher’s pet. this was fifth grade or around the time of Steve Martin. if only. in actuality, Cheech & Chong. oh, there were so many laughs. these lies mold our impressions about the present. maybe they blow you up. this afternoon, dropping by my apothecary to pick up some more of those amazing gummies that I take to reduce anxiety (not only is that my cover but it is quite true), this place that has a marijuana lounge that, as I was noting to the cashier, always seems to be quite busy. the immediate response from the cashier was “yes, because it’s Latin music today.” very exciting, but she wasn’t finished. “but on Friday and Saturday evenings we have comedians.” and I’m thinking, hmm, stoned laughter.
Born on the Fourth of July with egrets, which almost sounds and looks like regrets, and in this poem that similarity might be helpful, but is absolutely
unnecessary, at least not in mine, but, regretfully, where I got the egrets, well, they come from the sky, these things, it could be while you’re cooking (I am
not a big fan of cooking, myself; I’m a huge fan of eating, of eating well, of people who cook, I used to surround myself with people who do that well),
or you could be walking through (up, up, and around) Alamo Square Park for the first time in a few years. I’ve been here at least once since making
that music video, friends, former friends, “I feel the need...” for a tirade, one of my tirades, to pour out the heat about former friends, but then I get wistful, wishing for
a friend, for one to appear in this instant. Quickly looking up the country’s most famous drink, which, as it turns out (obvy), is a mojito. This wavering on the fringes
of anger, that red-faced temper so familiar during those formative years. The abuse we thought we endured. Only to learn, only to learn, decades later, that we’d
learned nothing. No regrets, though. Sly tells the adept interviewer that if anyone says they have no regrets, well, that’s a bullshit artist. That’s not exactly what he
said. I keep changing the channel. I mean, I’m getting into long form videos, kind of the opposite of the direction we all thought things were going, right? Right. Learning something
of nothing. I’m a photographer. I’m principal poet. What is it that tells me that these words, like laundry hanging on the line via clothespin, airing out, as opposed to what I could spin play
ing the role of a thespian, actor vs. lyricist, actor
and so he takes an orange and sticks a lot of cloves in it and then he looks at it and realizes that he’s killed the orange..... Orange is lying bleeding in my hand! —Frank O’Hara
He’d had a bunch of vivid dreams. When he rose from his disheveled bed, he quickly had a pen in his hand and a typewriter in the other. And with those he reproduced his sweet, cherubic dreams of pythons and fruit, which he laid out poetically, in as accurate detail as he could muster, the fantastical memories fading as he scribbled, vanishing as he typed. But what dreams they were, filled with the sun and with snakes and with fruit more orange than he’d ever tasted. Oh, harbinger of great taste and designer of endlessly repeatable lyrics, may such dreams come true, and with zing, which is even better than aplomb, and sweeter and tangier, too. Dreams that with us all, oh prophesier, are brighter than the past and (we pray so hard) are swifter than the future. Quick, before we are torn from the margins.
not wanting to be from another time and therefore knowing my very own uselessness in this one. but i’ll stay here. for history, the fly on the wall nobody saw but you, who’d probably swat me into oblivion if you really did. but honestly, more flagrantly, for you, in human form, my wildest aspiration to inhabit your space, oh, to see you merrier for it. and then that swat, or a slap, or a slammed door will do.
I go through photos, tagging them, editing the date and location of them, it’s a thing I do. I have hundreds of thousands in my collection, mostly photos I’ve taken, but there are numerous family photos, too. Pictures from before I was born, of my family. One might analyze this long- established habit, as I sometimes do. I photograph to remember just as I write to remember. For most of you out there, with memories unlike mine, this might seem a stretch, or it might even sound outlandish. But it is true, absolutely. It’s a way to stir up a past, to jog my memory about a thing that literally happened in my vicinity, to me, around me, however-many years ago. I do it out of the desire to build a genea logical web, my family tree. There is perhaps
more than a hint of nostalgia, but I never do it strictly for nostalgia’s sake; although I suppose the habit sprung from moments that were more nostalgia-based, which would be any holiday my family and I spent at my maternal grandmother’s, in which we could always count on looking through several of the family photo albums that were housed in the living room. This would transpire between a
first and second indulgence of dessert. Even then, I could interject that my participation was an effort to piece together the history of me, just the time I spend
doing so in the present is for much the same reason.
It is building this unfinished history of the person I am
that has me most grateful for going through photographs, makes me most grateful to have taken all of these snapshots over the years, that I have horded as much as I can of those
my family had or took in the years before I was able to do the same. This has me often pilfering through the photographs,
tagging, editing, remembering. I could bore you more with
how this works, like how just today I discovered who I was
in the year 1993, which was someone and someplace altogether
different than the person I thought I was that year. I was literally
missing an entire year. And how delightful to discover this truth.
I could just say I enjoy looking through the photographs. That
one of the primary reasons this habit exists for me is that these
are my keepsakes—as I’ve nothing material from before I turned fifty, all of that stuff having been lost for good thanks to life and its upheavals. Or that as far back as I can remember I have had a strong case of obsessive compulsive disorder. For which I’m grateful. Whatever the case,
as far as I am concerned, it’s a nice way to pass the time. And in the process I get what I consider an
it’s hard to believe that i would do this to myself. but look at me, i’ve done it again: put the blame for my troubles solidly upon yours truly. sometimes i think, what a fortunate life i have, but not usually. not lately.
i can remember feeling lucky, feeling blessed. as i rise this morning from barely making it to upward mobility and beyond. the vector was never a straight line, but it averaged into one with a pretty steep incline. then came the crash. like a stock market or cardiac arrest. like an automobile that has veered off course and slammed into a tree. some time later,
when i had all but recovered,
another disaster, and then yet another.
until i was stumbling, but barely, from
one instance of bad luck into another. that’s just the way life goes, i suppose. but nobody taught me how to lift myself up from such a fall. i mean, i do yet exist. and, granted,
i have days much better than the past few,
and i try to dwell on those
instead of what i presently can’t but think are too similar to the distinct majority of all that i’ve lived through since that great stumble and fall.
it’s just the way life goes, i suppose. surely (if only it felt that certain)
i will soon find myself back in good spirits. it’s always happened before. but when i find myself feeling such a no good perspective as the one i presently have, it’s sometimes hard to convince myself that i’ll make it to that next rush. oh, shush! i audibly say to myself. what good is expressing such? but, dear diary, i’m so obviously ill-equipped, this heart-on-sleeve
wreck that is me, to swerve from this misfortunate path. and so it’s the blues that get relayed from me to you tonight. isn’t that the way life is sometimes? i suppose it is.
It’s early morning on the 16th of the month. I just drank the last drops from what had been a two liter bottle of Diet Dr Pepper. What was left filled one of my medium sized sea green colored plastic cups (I have two of them; did I start out with three, four?). I’ve no money left
for the month and won’t get my tiny subsidy
check until the first. I could lean my head back upon my pillow right now, unable to sleep, but to meditate on existence with no income. I could let those thoughts (that thoughtlessness) overwhelm me with anger or into resignation, or I could instead close my eyes and use my mind to move time, to either make it go faster, or to
slow it down, feeling my body,
feel it inflate until I resemble
a gigantic parade balloon in
the faded image of a cartoon
character from my childhood,
expanding easily to squeeze
myself into the moment until
I’ve pushed time out through
the fringes; or I might carry
the moment along with me,
and then speed ahead of it.
These are methods of existence
I have developed in order to weave
in and out of time’s typical cadence,
a timelessness within which I might
sway in relative peace. Until I begin
to remember that no matter how much
I bend or fold it in order to exist outside
of its realm, usually in an effort to cope
with my diminishing value, inside of my
skin-sack of nothingness, I will still continue
to age, to grow older. These tricks are of the mind, are mere delusion; the peace that makes its way into the dim crevasses within my head is but the airy entropy that I am always becoming. I’ll fight again
to lift my lids, to squeeze my way back out of this stasis, all the while a polluted airiness hisses its way out of
my nose, my ears, eyes and mouth, the gassy stuff
of me. Until I am unrecognizable, opaque, impossible to lean into or upon. No
After how many days and nights? Am I cognizant of how disturbing—how scary— that what I leave behind, having accrued a few things since less than a decade ago losing
all that up to that point I had, the ephemera,
only to replace the lot with these few pieces of
furniture and a dozen or so reams that, individually
and in summation, are but a heap—garbage—like
the inevitable carcass that was once me would be, at
least to whomever would arrive to take it all away,
to dispense with me and my detritus. Who would
understand what each of these relics had meant
to me? Who’ll consider the bias I had for each
piece of this mess? No one. It’ll be someone who
arrives and makes a dispassionate, democratic list, more than likely (surely there’s nothing here
of any significant cash value).... // Yuck. Damn.
Rather than find my way toward fresh perspective,
I’ve trailed off rather morbidly, haven’t I? At the outset, I thought I’d work my way humorously
through the horrors of my greatest fears. But how bland I’ve been lately. Perhaps I’ll put this down, switch on the television, like I did around this time yesterday to watch the Emmys
(in which newcomers and personal faves Pluribus and Widow’s Bay all but swept). How might I diminish my fears with laughter or pleasant thoughts? To relax the tension between aspiration
and reality, to redesign goals so that, should I tap into an as-yet-unfound pocket of energy, I can meet them and move forward, ever forward, while this life yet remains spirited. Here I am!
