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!
What am I doing, in memoriam? What I do to remember your death is nobody’s business, really. But I want to sift through pictures of you at parties— all the rest of the attendees gather around your throne (your edge of the big green sofa), everyone is attractive, participatory, filled with life— they are mixed among other colorful photographs, here
we’re at the aquarium, here we’re sipping wine at glen ellen, and here we’ve somehow found ourselves walking a golf course, glimpses of the ocean appear behind your vivid hair, ornate fountains
spew arcs that are bent by a breeze I suddenly remember (flashback to
a spirited dance toward your dark straw hat that’s been blown off the top of your head, and to me quickly stooping to scoop it up.
i place it securely atop your shimmering head. What do I do
with such memory-soaked time? How to best put use to
such reminiscences, to gather perspective in relation to
the present and uncertain future. To, as pleasantly as
I can, take it all in, so that I might with purpose and grace, give my best from where I now
it seems an odd time in life, illogical, trying to claw my way out of my head into a healthier era than i’ve been in years, perhaps decades, even as it has been only
two weeks,
maybe three
since mom’s funeral.
but i am indeed healthier.
so i try to be celebratory, after all it is my health. i list in my head all of the issues from the past decade or so (surgery, bad knee, etc., but recovery). i go on long walks in the city several times a week, first time in years. but presently i’m destitute. and
my weekly box of prepared meals didn’t arrive on monday as it has every monday during each of the four or five 12-week cycles i’ve been getting them. tiny meal slurps, i call them. and so i don’t go hungry. not yet, anyway. but i have lost 75 pounds or so in the past year. it’s astounding to feel this good. to send out applications and resumes every day because i’m not having to deal with whatever crisis of the moment that is too all-consuming (it has been three days since i should have
received a box of meals, though). sufferin’ stagnation! my health. i had a mother for 59 years, then one day, no mother. and dad’s been gone for 25 already. gary for ten years. but me, i am healthier than i’ve been in years, yet still incapable of living what i still call normal life. whatever
this existence is, it has long since become
normal. it became life. but i cannot
see it as normal. i hear voices through
the window on the other side of my
desk, but cannot make out what
any are saying. it is just me here.
in this dull but singular, and
now healthier, existence. i wonder what i can scrounge up for lunch. i keep a list, there are always items to check off, and i have already checked several
can we just get rid of this life okay it’s gone this life of an artist thing but wanting to be rich did you see what i did when i said rich was a risk? he went all out with risqué is kaye okay? no she gone like whistle gone like the wind like a windy whistle. got something to wet your wistful (gone west) it is a deadly thing this dehydration don’t you play with me. you’re having a conversation with your dead voice voices like a wet whistle on a dry wind do you know whether there is a term for that or weather a term as deep and mournful as dry wind becomes wet? oh moisture. oh moisture thinks the mouth when how come you can never go hungry go thirsty how come you can never go hungry in the desert because because of the sand because of the sand which is there. the sandwiches is there. see how easy it is to examine the sand to spend your life looking for a water mole to spend your ever day your life searching for a water molecule clinging to a rain of sand like sands because now that is something now you know why you needn’t go thirsty. thirst kills and who laughs? how come you can never go hungry in the desert? because you foolish mirage you are lying there thirsting to death.
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