May 2024
"Last exit in the United States" - how could I avoid writing about my arrival to the esteemed city of Buffalo, New York in this very May of 2024...
in search of that elusive sober disorientation,
And here it is! In the carved wood of the bench on Marty's patio, in the empty streets and the trees lined up on winding sidewalks.
But most of all in the dusty dive bars in the city where everybody knows everybody, and walking miles with strangers laughing
harder than I ever have every three steps, it was like this:
The Subterraneans
Now, my best friends I've only met once
I find I don't have the poetics I used to to describe these subterraneans, these meandering oomfs because I suddenly stepped on their
patch of fabric decorates this whole city they call it polyamorous, here's Seafood Dan outside the bar on the way to another
and he's just one but holds the whole scene together in his hands ("useless really, totally useless") and Sophie's coworker with long
hair skateboard and Louis Vuitton tattoos on his face, white rappers named Nick buying up ads with the mayor father's money and
the sheriff just shot himself in that beautiful blue house downtown where the gays and revolutionaries live, real people people people
I want to hold to collect I can't, I'm passing through here but it's all passing show, I'll work at the library and maybe become a carpenter,
why not? She's unionizing the museum, they're increasing access to lead detection, paint scraps, fading fading
systematized reality because here on the corner a pay what you can diner and it's a quarter for the shopping cart, you better have
some quarters in this city but that's okay, you can sleep on the couch four of them for a round of pool with some guys I thought would kill me in New York
but here have midwest accents and don't care if we're too drunk and messy spitting all over the table, only one guy sniffing in the bathroom
I feel safe and I'm caught up thrust expanded but certainly not in any rush. I can't write it down so eloquently because can a flashlight point at itself?
It's one here so clearly and adequately One that all my yogi stories don't feel like lies but just another Tuesday to the vivid reality of this life life life:
Let me tell you about biking to Allentown, going to see the art gallery and professor Joel and Joey ("I think I like him, but when I see his lips, BLAGH!") and "I know
you get happy when I call you a futch" and "faggot faggot faggot can you tell me the directions to Prospect Ave?"
the metaphor is never knowing your enemies behind darkened windshields but they see you and who cares, kill me so what I'm a queer
I'm liberated in this lifetime and all who see my face may fall in love - that's it, it's falling in love with, which implies the
myth of the two when it's really uncountable it's only falling in love over and over again with infinite possibility a playful interaction it's
hard to handle myself because I want it all what if it's gone tomorrow? It won't be, it's here and empty streets reverberate on unknown footsteps
criss crossing left and right adding those dozens of "faggot miles" as we stumble towards home holding hands unafraid.
Are you gay because you don't like
his mouth? Are you gay or are you just liberated? Like I said, assuming everyone's in a polycule or wants to be, biking on empty streets, dive bars, walking home winding off the path, subterranean conversation is always a reference to Richard Siken, Jean Genet, Wagner, Verdi, unionizing workplaces and forgetting it's 5am on the
floor eating cashews with strangers. Polaroids on the fridge and life unbound to
any responsibility but to ourselves yet taking nothing seriously no one holding on to anything knowing it'll be gone tomorrow so why bother rubbing bodies,
metaphysical relationships take precedence but still staggering home in the dark, we stack three bodies into one... I'm leaving today, south to structure. I must finish
painting my room and wrapping up but - don't rush, let it unfold.
Adventures in the 2nd Chakra
Yes, someone would be on the couch... one of these days we're going to have to break off the love / sex association and just let things be from a distance.
Or enter into one giant polycule. It's never going to work! I fell in love in Buffalo, I knew I would. I fell in love with, with... with is subjective with is coercive
with says I'm with you and you're mine all mine and no one can touch you but me how absurd how disgustingly antithetical to in-loveness can't we be here,
in love together in the space of love without running and heaving and pulling each other onto the floor? Mine, you're mine and I'm yours we yearn for the
dissolution of boundaries but will never let go of our bodies and our pride our needs and our drive and it's just never going to work! I am in love in Buffalo
and it's ripping everything apart, no, I am in love in Buffalo and it's infinite space if only we gave it a chance it's walking each other home holding hands it's
tenderness and sweet, open arms, it's guiltless it's free, if only if only if only we could allow ourselves to be just be...
Yes I am in love with you when I say that I mean I am in the space of love when I am with you - but guess what I live here and
you can live here too it's not just me please oh don't think it's just me we can be conduits maybe yes a doorway in to love but it's not me
it's not me, I am not it! And so, revealed, why am I so afraid because I feel guilty that I am in love with the world and you as part of that and of course vice-versa
and I'm scared downright terrified that you are in love with me and the world as part of me? am I just an egoist or what? what? I love you and
I know who I am when I lose it and when I don't - added nervousness that I don't know how to conclude this thought.
Back home...
Struggling to find the words I give it all up to you, Mother, remind me, here it is - I went to the farm this morning and did three things
I rushed there (here, rushing, for you) I tilled the fields and tied the tomatoes listening to a distraction (for you) - I'll stop. It's yours.
Have it. Here's one more - struggling to find the words, and my head spinning three hours later, in love again, what is this? It's yours.
5/19/24 - Morning at the communion
We left the communion, we church-goers, and was it the fear of God that caused every well-dressed and well-meaning good boys and girls of the lord to avert their eyes
from two poor kids asking for money outside, not even with their Word but with a sign? Or was it simply because we already gave all the cash in our purses to the baskets of
the parish? The kids have hungry bellies to fill - we have insatiable guilt. The priests offered a kingdom of eternal glory in the seat next to the lord, and besides,
haven't we done enough good, been holy enough for one Sunday?
Evening in my tent
I am now 19 and turning 20 tomorrow, 20! I did my prayers and ablutions here in my tent in the yard, until I felt my pulse hammering in my flattened fingertips,
then I stopped to read a passage of Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love which I hardly understand. Genet's words are inspiringly old, wisened you might say,
chock full of literary references and Stravinsky, Debussy, real poetic analysis, self-critique minus the "self" but simply commentating his own words.
I think the style slips into mine in fact, I'm sure of it. If I've retained nothing I've retained the style of prose my favorites so entice me with, why?
It's like Genet said about music - it's like a deep, hidden song is uncovered from within and rises up bursts joyfully from the lips, like Plato's TRUTH or rather re-remembering what's already known.
I feel as if I've known a few things enough to not tout their truthness in incandescent free-flowing form (oh! freedom of the senses!) but rather
that a knowledge is vested upon me enough so that I might be able to potentially trick myself into having any sense of confidence at all. Look how nicely,
how freely this pen moves across the page, filling in emptiness? Or is it the emptiness that I am erasing? I'm tempted to "recapitulate" my teenagedom but feel a sort of ignorant?
artificial? unbothered-ness to it all (I've felt this before, maybe last year, maybe in waves), so I'm tempted to again again again! as I do, write in contradiction
to my plans and in doing so describe exactly my teenagedom without one statement of fact whatsoever, only arrogant self imposed censorship and/or cynicism.
So here we are we made it - 20 years a cynic although now I consider myself a "writer" too, (is that so different?) I call myself a poet and consider it the only decent thing left to do,
poetry, and to pray for all sentient beings, of course. So Now That I Am A Poet: and my pen flows so smoothly across this page... what will I write? I've been through the following:
-Orange glow of streetlamps at night
-Critique of reference and motif
-Love in the time of Corona
-Delusion, universality of sin
-Acceptance and apprehension
-(Most of all) fleeting graveyards, ephemerality is probably the most used and abused and now redundant of my writing. Now is the time to go beyond, as in
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi swaha
Beyond the beyond the beyond - Genet didn't bring pen and paper to Palestine he only experienced, lived, was (is) and wrote it down 10 years later,
what "changed me enough" or "made a meaningful impression" came back to him.
In 10 years, what will come back to me?
The thing is, I can already feel this statement fading into emptiness, you see I'm becoming quiet enough so that when I do stop writing and just "be" (am) nothing comes up.
It's blank. It's getting more spacious. And there isn't much more of me left... Oh! Here we are. But I cannot deny the fact that I am a hopeless romantic - so here,
past and future and you in all your now-ness, here are the scenes that have lingered through metamorphosis:
Dot, Devon, Emely and I watching music videos on a projector - our friends and inspirations alike. Tiny corner room in tiny Bushwick apartment in probably 2022,
and four strangers in this heartbreaking, fragile arrangement, who are you and have we met and will we ever be as close as we are now as strangers? No, never,
never strangers again. Connection kills the heaving what-ifs? and who's? of a warm unknowing. The in-betweens. That's all I'm chasing and you know why? Cause I'll never catch it.
Obsessively reading Genet's poetry getting ready to stretch before going to sleep when I realize I'm too tired and is it because I've been awake, stretching all day anyways?
And wondering about the latest micro-neuroses - at the moment it's the fashion of style - keeping things in order (how it looks) desperate need to switch to a pencil
so I feel more secure about my writing style and what it symbolizes. Switching and immediate relief. Wondering about sexuality and what place it has in my
philosophy and are chakras really horizontal? Either way sex isn't all encompassing and I'm bored of it in writing, sex power war and the penetration of a glorious death etc. etc.
is the endless well of Freudian symbolism just an accident or is it really the Everything? I know it's only second chakra and aren't you bored, Genet?
I know you know there's so much more. Every proclamation of atheism is like an accusation of fragility slipping into an indifferent cosmos, something more comfortable, perhaps?
Or just playing with it, playing in all encompassing Freudian understanding because it's only a fun game? I can't tell if everyone's serious or incredible actors
or it's all just a reflection of where I'm at (Note from Sept. 2025, definitely a reflection) probably that, reflection found in the scrawl of my pencil,
tone of voice or dialect or voice in my head upon re-reading thought pressed to page, look, it's not mine to choose. I'll have to think about this more.