hi this is a short story hey!

These words hold what is and disregard what could not be. Over a kitchen table, all that is irrelevant becomes displaced, like dust in the cosmos—some background image that can never truly be seen. It is 8 AM. The scent of sleep mingles with hazelnut coffee. The silence yields to the clatter of awakening. Something is expanding, something is. At 8 AM, there exists only what is.

Three rings are laid out on the kitchen table. Danielle picks them up, one by one, and slides them onto their respective fingers. The sky has been blue for hours now, but a storm is coming. Even in the center of the city she can smell the leaves turning, exposing a different green to the clouds.

To be so small is a blessing. When you are so tiny in the world, every drip of coffee (hazelnut) is just yours. The singularity of your insignificance is so gigantic that words can barely hold on. But Danielle is slipping rings on her fingers in the kitchen and there is the sky now hovering only inches over the building and oh!

Everything just is. It is so simultaneously satisfying and accusatory. After these few minutes of Biblical peace, the desires begin to filter in with the new storm. But who will fault you for your good intentions? Clutching the coffee, the halos steams cleansing knuckles, a thin elixir. Who could confront you for merely wanting an easier or less guilt-stricken life?

As you sit on your bed and lose the simple clarity of only 10 minutes earlier could you even begin to guess the language that would spill from you further to your future? The stunning night will fall. It will.

Preparation for the day can also occur in that time where everything is again. The muting of all else under a veil of consideration for the perpetual sleepers. Subsisting. Stark. Gentle.

Who will fault you for your good intentions? There will always be things that you must accomplish. It will never be enough in those few moments of sky and harmony in the universe to just be along with all else. There is movement in the coming storm. It aims to take you with it.

It is important to be just. If you cannot be just, be arbitrary.
If you cannot be just, be arbitrary.
If you cannot be, be.

It is still 8 AM in New York; a storm will hit today; someone is asleep. The three rings are steady and silver. Danielle’s eyes reflect the glow of inconsequential news on a laptop. They glimmer like stars, moving further away with the expansion of the universe.

I, the prodigal roommate, eclipse half the window with my rising.

Oseberg Ship

Your inscrutable face, dishes of ash
lain on a bedside for thousands of hours
following the knotted sheets down
the fire escape. Lakeside river meets sand
at a romantic belt buckle overturning
the ends of conversations to find bugs,
little bugs to crawl underneath fingernails.
Good to remain tiny, good to pull out
infestations, good to roll up the fields
and smoke them into bits and pieces. Yes,
your festering body, vulgar slang’d
the rest of the night, regardless of every
landscape mentioned or rebuked, but I
kept my arms in good time, and carried it
all away like an eventual Viking. Down
to the water we slept darkly. Across rivers
there were more anthills lovingly
thoroughly appropriating each morsel, arthritic
but watching.

Similarly I have sat bedside stricken
with the joys of being intransitive, coming
down off a sky so blotched, I could not
overcome the easiest means of thinking.
Heels scraped in the center of a murky
park folding a membrane found previously
to a something they might if you
really believe you have nothing. Venom
puddles in elbows brown good to be close
enough to your face, heaving stones over
and over the river, cornering the new
insects on islands we can hardly touch,
can hardly tie down. The too-religious
praying mantis. The orbiting scorpion.
Yes, with a cinched moment I see again
pretty daisies on a shoulder, a following
guttural oh no. Given I have not remembered
taken I can’t care take off this shiny
metal buggy you little moth you tiny cockroach,
I have not remembered the last inch of
shore to the rivers on fire.

Mostly Drunk Musings

3/19

Church bells don't alert anyone to anything important, except for the time. Six o'clock. Let's settle down now for an evening's worth of the same. Familiarity, to some extent, is evil. Moderation as well. The stepping & stopping of standing around, staring in the sun. Here, the bells last. Everything tiny is significant. Even the sun is personal. The same radio stations play the same songs but the stereo is never reprimanded for such an act. Nor is it turned off. Things are replaced when they fall apart, and only then. Don't ask "What are you doing?" - you already know. Welcome home.

3/23

It is important that every is as close to intentional as possible.

"Someone will stay with you until you are well enough to be on your way, or you are in good hands. You will not be left alone."
-Subway advert re: sick on the subway

3/27 - politely inebriated in greenpoint.

Je n'ai pas du probleme mais ou est ma vie?
Where is my life? Is this really what I have become? Polski Bridge sitter, drunk as usual. Why can't I ever leave my body the way I want to? There you are again, Empire State Everything. Is this really where I will live and die? I'm stuck in English again, I'm a slave to my native tongue and it's Too Bad. Give me something harder--let's get me out of my body, do it for real this time, I need to think down a seperate stream of consciousness. Why am I stuck inside when everything real is outward. Acknowledge that what has happened is the truth & the full truth. This is nothing but real. Yes this is the past but it is only a fraction of the future

remembering & forgetting constantly

...

It is equally comforting and disconcerting to realize that no one in the world will ever be as disgusted with me as I am.

walking down university.

when i look at a particular angle the two pigeons look like they are covered in blood.
i had a hard time keeping myself from picking up a stranger today, physically
holding them like a baby and running off.
i really had to restrain myself.

Trying to make this work for me.

LATE SPRING TWO WAY MIRROR.

I'm sure you, of all people,
would know how it feels
to fall asleep alone and wake up
next to a seething Shiva
who with a lurch of his sinewy hands
twists your insides ominously
within the ring of a bedside telephone.

As you walk to the oven to set the kettle
on a flame, a fire submerges you
and everything in a quick chaos.
It leaves you, alone and whimpering, amid
heaps of cooling ash and warped metal. (I hear
this is how you were found. I hear
a lot of things that I choose to ignore.)

Then comes the settling, the immense
stretch of inevitable starkness. Shiva
deserts you, appeased by
your silence. You are purely
with your cup of tea at the table. Yet fools
rush in where you recline in the kitchen,
head bent, weeping, oblivious.

I'm sure you would know how it feels
to fall asleep forsaken and wake up
alone again. The half empty cup of tea
cold and stationary, to you as gigantic
as a canyon. Through the debris you
gather your things and you leave,
because now there is no other
decent thing to do.


THANKS.

who even lives here? honestly, someone has to take care of that stench. what is that? where is that shit coming from?

tip toe tip toe over floorboards. oh, it is the beating of that terrible heart!
catbox confession-a-tor-y. messy mess mess look at this.

dirty heat grass-stained pants sweat and breathe hard faster harder.
who even lives here? whose yard is this? come on, peel up from the ground
get this show on the road. let's get this show on the road.

all this hot slippery slickness just out of me, hmm. express gratitude.
well you did something nice for me
might as well

what is that smell? who lives here? who takes care of this place?

snippet of O'hara

& isn't it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming.

one new thing out of many old things.

trying to lay off the you me and everyone else sister mentality;
the sidewalk today was glazed with crinkles
like a sheet of paper and
I don't want to think of the city as dirty anymore
but the empirical evidence states otherwise--
it's only because I can go a whole day and a half
without touching anyone else but
I can't go even an hour without
looking in a mirror or writing something down
which are both equally cathartic
to be honest
I want to be temperate but someone
else is crooked in a loft bed
keeps on with the goings-on
with the "go out and see everyone
see what they can take from you!"

Found Notebook Entry of 10/13/08

MAINE - you came back!

A year ago I slept here. Northernmost; though, cold too and silent; to this extent it fueled the sleepless. But just to say "this was" is a triumph. To lay claim to a past that will not allow "this is": a triumph. To the movement now. Not once I swore unworthy, I hope only for these, striped with my affection. My indifference to the roundabout has solidified. My circles won't be spoken because I don't have anything to teach yet.

I slept under a touch of paper and bites from one familiar mouth. I slept under warnings of frequent masturbation and a bucket of ear plugs. I stood and preached my moment to a spectator who was, and drank myself into rest. The unanimity is untouched now; we will never have a falling out.

I blazed down their spines, promised many abstract notions: "remember to remember me." It seemed an easy chaos then, but to return would incite wounds once more. I haven't the time nor the will to reshuffle opinions of me in all these fastidious bones. All I can do is hope I never meant as much as I thought & humble myself before tantamount stretches of time.

This indulgence of such a strange urge is a gift. Someday I won't have enough energy to transcribe my thoughts as I do, to gratify my own whims in language. This too is a triumph. I can sit and detach and make something. I'm winning now, but I'm subject to change.

Dumb

One,


"Keep it easy," keep the insecticide,
fourth shelf on the left,
keep the couch disheveled
because you keep sleeping on it,
anyway, and I wouldn't be surprised
if the carpeting followed you
out the door, when you leave,
the carpeting and all of the booze
in the freezer
-
I find your eyelashes everywhere.
I know they are yours because
even when they aren't on your face
they are beautiful. & lush.
Or maybe they are mine.
Maybe they were always mine.


Two,

don't lay any old expectations on me.
the moon is a liver
it filters out the day's disgust
so.
the night is simple for sleeping
anywhere. even if that is
next to you whom I do not feel
is fulfilling and may be past
these few things not even interesting.

Return to sender.

you were not there for the beginning you will not be there for the end therefore your comings and goings are not relevant to me

An Old Experiment vis a vis Eliot

New York light is different.
It holds much less in the daytime;
it is not dappled nor full.
It contains the droning lull;
this sun is turning more
fully to compensate
for our rush, abstaining from
brilliance on the hours
to this island.

At night (though we forget
that which brought us to life
& simply entertain the dust
creeping beneath streetlights),
we retain our creations after
the day's dissipation.
Why not let the sidewalks
shine faster than the stars?
We must forget that what
is now will not
forever be ours.

no news is good news

i.
I just think you ought to know my lines aren't public domain
keep breeding insects in the basement as long as the elevator still works when you get out I'll have my maths together
on the top bunk as long as everything goes according to plan.
Be patient with what's left behind, the imperfections of your experiments,
what can you do but suffer them to live

ii.
This Is A Test of Proximity

All holy veils and Turin intrepid,
smooth finity of fabric,
the lights to lure inside are
even more brilliantly dark than
what space yields between us
All blood and flesh and
blinking, eye lids flipped
up for a ceiling,
(and knees for kneeling)-
It is a ratio of squares
& a one-two movement
placing arm to leg to
face to face
It's understood, this can
be a clear entrapment.
Supposing, we never intertwine.
Supposing we cannot escape.

hit the ground, splinter.

so the trees stole the rain sometime overnight
and now underneath canopies of barebones branches
the water drips as if it is entitled to, like it knows.

inside there is more breakfast to eat and a canister
of coffee to find on a shelf, and when i put a spoon
in the sink, i see the butterfly preserved in a plastic bag.

on the crevice between sidewalk and natural slush
a line of ice smashes, fallen from the electric wire
overhead. the ice breaks into small rectangles.

if i fan out like a snow angel i could touch every piece.

ambien.

Accidental sleeping pill hallucinations, a collection.


2:45 AM

Under construction train station dorian gray they all get small when I need them to roll this is so hard to explain!!!

2:46 AM

Everything looks good until you turn the lights off

2:47 AM

She's yelling NEVAH!!!

2:49

So hard to explain the UPS box is making faces at me I'm worried about turning the lights off

2:51

Big ambien rose petals, she said. All breaking up the brain's a-workins.

2:56

Everything is oval, I accidentally hit the phone off the cradle and it doesn't know who I'm trying to talk to. Everything is ovalish.

2:58

Pumpkin trains purple wheels moving so small and fast over the hill this is a long process but where are my notebooks

3:02

Well I guess you can put your finger between an object and its double when you see it my mind is not going to sleep!

3:19

Praying mantis with glowing appendages how is this happening... wait it stopped I think it knows

Highlights from letters to a young poet

The best advice you'll ever get from a dead guy compiled in one blog post.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these letters to a 19 year old aspiring writer from Feb 1903-Nov 1904. Here are my favorite quotes from this series of correspondences.

Letter of Feb. 17 1903

"Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse."

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches."

"A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity."

Letter of April 5, 1903

"...for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone..."

Letter of April 23, 1903

"Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism."

"Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights."

"(But that is one of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence!)"

Letter of July 16, 1903

"You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language."

"Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy..."

"...love life in a form that is not your own..."

"Don't ask for any advice ... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it."

"But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths."

Letter of Dec. 23, 1903

"You... are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear..."

"What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude."

"What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love."

May 14, 1904

"We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

"But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being,--then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much."

"...this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."

Aug. 12, 1904

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise..."

"If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, ad the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing."

"And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside."

"It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own."

"What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us."

"We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life..."

"But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down on a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens."

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them."

"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?"

"Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen."

"Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far beyond yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words."

November 4, 1904

"All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you."

"Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right."

"Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing..."

I don't even know who I like less

Someone shot me a pine tree
And it got all hot heat hhhhhighlights

I remember what it was 'cause
I dripped the way home yes and umm

I may make it downtown again yet
Yeah I might

anyway here we go another
Tuesday night and it's me getting drunker sorry
to say

yeah I remember the time you found me
contorted face hot heat high
lights

and the sordid Christmas tree yup and
the sprawl on the deck, the spraaawl

no need for those it's all over your face
it's all over your clothes and your nose

we gotta make this a different place
we gotta we gotta not even know what it's
like not to go back to you

& I guess I don't remember
when we got all interested in
totally uninteresting things

...

I slipped on black ice on the walk to my dorm and faceplanted and felt incredibly embarrassed even though no one was around and no one noticed.

Magnapinna Volume I

Joint thing
I’ve got too many, too
slip under the desk of
an anatomist
so I sunk under
water, I said nothing because
compression
darkness moves upward
from the underneath.

I’ve got too little for
a speckled island,
and you’ve got too much
just to be, anyway,
don’t feel so badly
about years of isolation.
I used to have a camera
but it wouldn’t
have seen you

Anyway,
I’ll take the heat
when you’ve got
the freezing stuff
keeping it all
together, flexed &
elongated
taking a brand new
face on in
a jelly memory.

How mg

You are sleepy, but you don't mind it. Then you might realize that sleep is sometimes an impossibility lately, but you don't mind that either. When your mind is clear, it is entirely clear. You feel like a better friend because you can devote more time to actually caring about people.

When you can't write, you don't mind that either. Everything you need to do doesn't overwhelm you any more. You feel dispassionate, flat-lined. You feel clear and analytical.

You feel like someone else, but you don't mind it. You are not happy; you are not sad.

When you wake up in the morning you feel like you can't blink your eyes. The events of your day lay out like a game of hopscotch. It's the easiest thing because it is nothing.

When you are drunk you start to feel things, and you don't mind that either. A few hours of swirling can make up for a week of stagnancy, right?

How many more of these things can I take before I just turn into a living zombie.

Look Here

I don't think I'm going to blame myself for this one.
If you feel better now I'm not going to take it from you.

But just remember how tiny we are and how infinitely solitary we are and remember that I am here with you and I could be a part of your aloneness if you'd just let me witness and protect you in all that you do because I love you dearly and I think I always will as long as I am capable of loving.


The heat is crawling through the fog and peeling off all of my clothes and I'm always naked on the subway and I'm naked in the park and I'm naked while I'm walking down the sidewalk and I'm sweating the dirt out of my body and leaving little puddles of mud everywhere I go.
And I've never felt more yellow and green I'm a wilted something.

The heat is creeping up the sides of this building and we decided to open the windows and I want to scream no no keep everything out keep it all out it's okay I'm fine with the stale air where do you think it will all go after it is done with us? It's just going to sink further in and lay underneath our beds and grab our ankles when we are trying to sleep.

Just one long arm leaning over the side of the bed could spell doom for us all so shut the fucking window.

There are four wine glasses on this table and one bottle and one CD and one phone and I'm waiting for one of them to ring guess which one? Every time I'm displaced I'm missing something but nothing happens simultaneously unless we can all agree that they did right in front of our little faces and what does it matter anyway when I'm standing in the heat and the windows can only open about four inches just in case we are possessed to throw anything including our bodies outward.