some poems written during the winter of 2024-2025.

Like casting stones

Like casting stones

Things move

At their proper pace

Charging money for zines

Do I recognize you

Or am I forgetting

Writing in ink I can’t see

Watching Anime

I roll out of bed at noon

Try to make tacos, but the damp tortilla folds into the flame

I drink my coffee

Supine on the couch

Karama tucks the death plant seed

Into his open wound

It blooms

His body

Collapses in growth and decay

Vines that cling

To the edifice

Of a hallowed building

How many gardens will grow

From my cuts and scrapes?

What flowers will erupt

From the kitchen knife confusion

As I slice an avocado

For my dinner alone

Before The Honored World

Not all seek blessings

Not all seek wisdom

Lovers fade

Into the pastel garden

“Why are you going to the Met?”

“It’s fun?”

I can’t speak

Without the shadow of potential.

Lesions on the arched back

Of the stained marble mare.

Not all run for speed

Not all look for beauty

I forget that my eyes are weak muscles

Strained by flashing lights and dully fantasy.

I’ll leave before finding the temple

Not all seek a destination.

Wisdom Teeth

I know enough

To know

What I do not know

My students

Know enough

To think they know

Everything they need

To live a life

That’s unknown

My students

Don’t know

That my heart breaks

When I hear the distance

Between naive optimism

And fascist pessimism

And so I lie

Disguise my advice

As faith

In the sacred fragment

Of the story

Of their life

Bar 169

Sometimes, I’m fun.

Sometimes, I’m not.

That’s ok.

I try to remember what brought me here with E. Beyond the cheap beer, I always felt a frenetic energy, a way in which our conversations spiraled out from each beer and shot. I remember one time I brought F; the three of us drank and drank and drank. Maybe that’s part of why some friendships no longer work.

Those were chaotic, but affirming moments for me. In the slippage past sobriety, where that uninhibited flow led to delusions of grandeur, aging writers, relationships that didn’t quite fit but we each held on to the possibility of enduring love–somewhere between whining and yearning, spread across every stop and start, I felt us fumble toward an understanding, a friendship.

But there were always worse hangovers, irritated intestines, and snoozes on the train. Less the flaming out of youth, more the implosion of self. A flailing rather than a splashing about.

Passion v. stability, another drink v. the hangover, emotional tumult v. the simple life, a complacent self-protection reflected in the empty cup.

3.23

On the rooftop

I want to watch

The towers tilt

As the cracked light

Spits out

A crooked line

I want to watch

The skyscrapers bend

But from this rooftop

This party

All I find are the arrows

Becoming fractured asterisks

From the clenched jaw

Of erect titans

That fail to fall

Valentine’s Day

In the green blonde speckle

Of the misheard turn of phrase

Where I snaked past

Breath unfurling along

The railing that stretched past

My exasperated feet

Falling to the street that kept running and running away

In the orange gold glisten

Of a face peeled off

The unexamined impasse

That dripples b/w

Some codes remembered

And newfound locks

How do the shapes

Bend into the same

Marbled curves

That used to cradle

An unremembered name

In the walk from Hester

Past the goth McDonalds

On the way to the vegan dim sum

But not quite

It is the fragment

Of a step

A forced remembrance

No Sex Last Night

I felt each mechanic’s visit

Roadside rescue

Outstretched hand to a stranger

Of suspect origin

How does a film blend the banal emotional intensity of a failing road trip romance with the narrative thrust of unrealized desire?

A good documentary is about the conditions of truth. It stands between the disorganized everyday and the soft focus of authorship.

I read that the filmmaker views her art as the aestheticization of oversharing. There’s an intense vulnerability in having a camera strewn about in a cramped, broken down car. The vantage intrudes in the sullen silence, half-finished arguments, and unremembered proposals.
I want to make a movie that’s between fiction and documentary, unsure of what is being presented as truth versus what is being constructed as artifice, an after-image of real fantasy.