Don't Move Like the Trees

You don't feel it. You're inside now.
As I walk away, this breeze
wrapped tight around my neck like a scarf,
playing with my hair,
kissing my cheeks, licking my ears,
is reaching for my inner heat.

But the trees are still.
They don't feel it either.
Do they have an inner heat?
They have a secret:
It's not too cold standing still.

The breeze is artificial, just
the wind rubbing hard against skin
as I pace through its solidity.
It's reaching for my inner heat.

I admit it's fiction.
(Not the cold or the feeling of a breeze or my inner heat).
I admit to dressing up a mechanical anthropomorphism as a poetic device,
but only because I feel guilty.

I'd tell you why I did it, too, but
you don't feel it; you're inside now

I'll tell you why I did it if
you stop. Moving like the breeze
wrapped tight around my neck like a scarf
playing with my hair
kissing my cheeks licking my ear
reaching you I'd tell

That Book I've Been Writing

So anyone who kinda sorta knows me knows I write. I don't want to say a lot--it's definitely not as often as it should be--but fairly regularly. At least in an on-and-off sort of regularity.
A few people who know me a little bit better than that, know that it's been a life goal of mine for a long time to write a book. Though I've never really said it, I think most people assume I meant novel, or maybe collection of short stories when I said that. I haven't been particularly productive, though. Nothing I write really sticks. It doesn't stick to me. It doesn't stick to anything else I write.

To fight this little problem, I've made some rules for myself:

This book I've always wanted to write will be twenty-one chapters long.

Each chapter will be in two parts. The first part will discuss a game. The second will discuss a character in the main character's life.

The chapters will be titled with numbers. The first section will be titled with the name of the game discussed. The second will be titled after a phobia, mostly for an illusion of connectivity with the first chapter I already have.

This main character will not have a name. He will serve as an excuse to explore other characters.

Every other character must have a name.

I will complete this within a year.

I've had the 2nd part of the first chapter for a long time. In fact, it would probably be the exception to what I said about nothing I write sticking to me. Hopefully it sticks to the rest of what I write. Here's the first chapter:

The Game

The rules to the game are simple. When you think of the game, you lose. Whenever you lose the game, you must announce that you've lost the game. That's really it.
You can't win the game. Nor can you reasonably not lose.

Bibliophobia

He lied last night. I envisioned his brown eyes locked on my green ones, and read aloud his text message. I was waiting for him.
“You’ll have to go in the morning.”
Not so much a warning, as a reminder. Not so much thoughts as words. I hate text messages, especially his. They’re always just empty words. I didn’t go in the morning, so what do I do now? I could sit here, and just wait for him. I could write him a love letter on the back of his note telling me to lock the door, like I’m some sort of idiot. I could just up and leave, and refuse to lock the door. I could leave the door wide open, and tape his note to the front of it.
I woke up at 10:27, and haven’t left his bed. It’s 11:02. I’ve been staring up at his plain white room; down at his plain white walls. The carpets are grey-yellow, but were probably white once, long before he lived here. This place is old. My mother lived here.
Not this place exactly, but this building. She was one of the first tenants. I can’t put a year on it, but she was a little older than me. Now she’s a lot older than me, and this building is still here, and desperately needs to be recarpeted.
My mom was the one who recommended the building to him. She told him the rooms are small and quiet, and as long as he’s quiet, living here will be fine. When she lived here, most of the other tenants were teachers and students, people who couldn’t afford more than these closets of rooms.
That’s what these apartments are really like. Closets within closets within closets. Down any given hall, there are four or five identical doors. Open up any of those doors, and you’ll find a fifteen by twenty foot living room, with a sink and stove against one wall, and two more doors along the opposite one. One of those doors opens to a bedroom, and the other to a bathroom. The bedroom’s just a box, and the bathroom a box with a sink, shower and toilet. There’s one more door between the bedroom and the bath; it opens into the shower.
The funny part is they forgot to put in trash shoots. This building should have been torn down years ago, but somehow, no one’s filed any complaints. I guess my mother was right about quiet people.
I stepped out of Mark’s bed, and pulled on a pair of jeans, lying next to his bed. I didn’t really check, but assumed they were mine, because they were at the top of the pile of clothes. I knew they were mine when I didn’t find any underwear in them. Mark pulls off his pants and underwear in one motion, leaving everything bunched together in a wrinkled figure eight of fabric.
I sorted through the pile. Found his jeans and boxers, just as I thought they’d be. My boxers were just to the left of the main pile, and my shirt drooped over the crotch of the figure eight, my right sleeve leaning into one of the leg holes. His shirt was underneath all of that.
I pulled off my jeans to dress myself completely, and folded his clothes. He kept clean clothes in a dresser, and just piled dirty ones on the ground. He must have done laundry recently, because all I could find on the ground was a pair of boxers, and a jacket.
I made his bed. I folded the jacket and boxers, and piled them with the other clothes I folded.
Searching the top of his dresser for the note he always leaves, I noticed something. He had one of those page-a-day calendars sitting on his dresser. June 5th. For some reason, my first thought was not to peel off the top page, but to throw away the entire calendar. It wasn’t my calendar, and I couldn’t really take that liberty, so I just pulled off bibliophobia, to uncover June 6th and agoraphobia. Calendar of fears, I guess.
Then I realized something. The year. The calendar said 2006. This was 2007.
I sat on the bed I just made, creating a tornado of wrinkles in the comforter, with myself in the eye, and considered the date. Maybe I should have just thrown the thing away. Something about the date seemed eerie, almost evil.
I held the calendar in my hands, and tried to look it in the eye. I tilted it back and forth, catching different angles of light, trying to find some vestige of a face. I think its eyes were closed, because no matter where I looked, nothing looked back up at me.
I couldn’t trust this calendar. Dead for over a year, but still it sits, proclaiming the date mindlessly. Something about it though, something was inspiring. It’s tenacity of spirit. Holding it in my hands, it felt like a ghost, wanting some sort of revenge.
I peeled off another day. Necrophobia.
I felt a strange closeness to this calendar. It must have been the way we were both discarded. Both just left here, sitting alone in the morning. I peeled off another page. Amaxophobia.
I had that page half off, when something struck me. There must be a reason this thing was sitting there untouched for over a year. I thought back. I tried to focus on the date. June 5th. Nothing stirred me. The date seemed arbitrary. Then the page was off completely. Didaskaleinophobia.
Words and dates blurred together. Nothing really made sense. All I knew was this calendar wanted something. I considered and decided that there was really only one thing to give it.
I looked over Mark’s makeshift desk, the top of his drawers. I couldn’t find a single pen. I knew there were pens somewhere. He was a student. He must have at least a single pen floating around this apartment somewhere, and the place is too small to justify not finding it. I dragged the calendar with me, out of his bedroom, away from Mark’s smell.
There was a pen on his living room table. Snuggled up close to a notepad. I picked it up, and sat down, holding the calendar close to my chest, bibliophobia, amaxophobia, didaskaleinophobia, all ripped away, in my hand. I dropped half a year on the table.
I pulled one of the loose days close to me. Necrophobia. I flipped it over and began to write. “A couple of people wore black. . .”
This was all I could give the calendar. I hope this is what it wants. There will be false starts. There will be lots of errors, but I’m going to give it great stories with lots of blood. With suffering and pain. I think that’s what it wants.
If I were a calendar, that’s what I’d want. They just sit there, expecting nothing of us. We abuse them. Use them as markers to keep track of all of our problems, our concerns.
Do they have any problems or concerns of their own? No. I’d breath life into this calendar, and give every day it’s own special pain. It’s own life. Loneliness. Derision. Isolation.
There’s really nothing special about these emotions, yet we still mark them down. We give them fancier names like Christmas or June 5th, but really, that’s all they represent. Schadenfreude. The occasional laugh. Glimmers of hope.
This calendar was made of fear. It had plenty of fears to work with already, but I’d add more. It only knows fear of words. I’ll breath true, living fear into it. Starting with fear of death. “. . . but more or less, everyone . . .”
Hopefully I understood the calendar.

Done.

Party

Where?

Here

Where am i?

I dunno

So how am i supposed to know where here is?

Because here is where i am not where you are

Exactly. How am i supposed to know where you are? Especially considering you didn't tell me when i asked.,-?

Why ask me where you are then? That doesn't make sense. Anyway i'm in my room with eugene.

I asked where you were. You confirmed this. Quit switching subjectivities.

Where am i? Your message.

That was me asking thinking it was in my realm of thinking, my here. But then you told me here is where you are.

That really doesn't make sense

It makes sense. Let's stop for now, and i'll explain it later.

Real Faux Art

I must say, the title is app. This is my college essay. Please don't judge me on it; I really wanted to go to Brown. I meant every word of it, but would never have presented it like this, if I wasn't told it had to be an essay.
Essays, to me, are lists of details. Essays describe concisely, then move on to new thoughts: somewhat related; related enough to be in the same essay. This is my essay. The title is app, but seriously, don't judge me on it.

When I was eight, my mother asked me if Chris Ofili is an artist. Ofili is the famous painter, much sensationalized over for using elephant dung in his work. At the time, I said no. I didn’t understand his work. I hadn’t seen the infamous The Holy Virgin Mary, and couldn’t comprehend a painting with scat. I’m ready to reverse my answer.
Sometimes, it takes a lot of patience to see art, and sometimes great pieces leave the viewer shocked by the approach. The best artists spend hours rooting through what others dismiss as either mundane or crass, digging for the art nested within. Creativity lays in the ability to wallow in poor art or incomplete art, and sift out all the inspiring bits.
I learned this in a field often considered to be completely removed from art: science. Not just any science either, physics: the ultimate numerical simplification of beautiful things. In class, I made quick friends with the top of the class, Ryan. We shared two other classes, honors precalculus, and stage band, and worked together as lab partners. I discovered in him true inspiration.
To Ryan, equations and measurements were just ways to analyze. He could illustrate any equation as a simple picture. He could write out the steps to an equation’s derivation, and explain them not only mathematically, but verbally, in the simple physical terms anyone can understand. Ryan could see art where I couldn’t, and because of it, he outperformed me in physics.
It took more than just getting B’s in physics to drive home the point though; it took writer’s block. For two weeks, I found myself unable to produce new material for my creative writing class. The night before I had ten poems due, I searched my life for simple experiences, and turned out a batch of poems that I am especially proud of. The topics ranged from biting my nails, to being a mediocre guitarist. I managed to take a lot of things that most people would have passed over as boring, and breathed artistic life into them.
Approaching life as varying degrees of art lends me an optimism that others lack. I cling to difficult problems, searching for elegant solutions. There is always an elegant solution. New subjects draw me, almost magnetically, to search them for further inspiration.
This tenacity of spirit is a real asset, as seeing art can be very difficult. Rarely does differentiating equations in calculus class seem artistic, but deep down, the simplicity of it is engaging. Math is like Japanese poetry, laconic, and loose in meaning. It’s a passive object, waiting to be explored and interpreted. If one searches hard enough, there is likewise art to be found in the poorly tuned instrument, and even the most incomprehensible written material.
Now, I can see that Chris Ofili is a wonderful artist. To the eye wise enough to be indiscriminate, everyone is. While sometimes I feel like I’m straining my eyes, pushing them to hard to find art, I know it’s for their best. They’ll thank me, when they can stare unblinkingly at my own art. Until then, they’ll work hard to dissect the world, and find the beauty in even what seems obscene.

The Electrocution of Benjamin Marks

Anyone can write a story. Stories are so blasé. Story-telling is the automatic response to diving three or four beers deep. You start rambling about the last time you had that much to drink . . .
Stories are also weak. They get trampled, squeezed, crushed, butchered to the point of dismemberment. The greatest stories have all been told and retold—occasionally by the same person—innumerable times, just like the story about the last time . . .
But stories are weak. Life shouldn’t be about stories. Art definitely isn’t about stories. It’s story-telling—that automatic response once you’re three or four beers deep—that is art. Good story-tellers are admired. Good stories merely are. They’re just there to be told.
Benjamin Mark was an excellent story-teller. Brilliant for his age. His stories moved people to love him, which is the general goal of telling stories. His own story, like all stories, isn’t especially impressive, but he always managed to present the details in a beautiful way. Despite the fact that all of his stories have been told before, he managed to turn them into sparks, beautiful sparks, hypnotic, fire-works of action and words. Something people liked him for.
There are an infinite number of types of story-tellers. There are just as many types of stories, but they can all be categorized and organized. They’re all either happy or sad, but story-tellers have infinite dimensions and ranges of happiness and sadness within them. They are the massy knot of all the stories they’ve told or considered telling. Occasionally even stories they’ve lived weave themselves into the tangle. There are story-tellers who paint with big bold strokes of detail, or craft a pattern, rhythm with words and phrases. Some position pauses mathematically, use driving calculations to push along some character or creature or thought. Benjamin was this calculative sort of story-teller. Really, he was a master of psychological traps. He knew when to say what to build and release tension, stir laughs and, of course, end. He spent the most time planning his endings.
The end was important because it had to be both subtle and satisfying. If the story didn’t accomplish something, there was no point. Likewise, if he ruined his tone or energy, he’d ruin the whole story. He strived for resolution. No more, and never any less.
For him, the story-telling thoroughly paid off. He felt that way until the day he died, and then he was far too distracted to be thinking about stories. His stories enabled him to lead a compressed life. Whether his very stories ended him, or were just a symptom of some greater symmetry is not meant for any story-teller to decide. It simply isn’t exposition material.
Benjamin Mark wasn’t especially attractive. He was as pale as the sun would allow, skinny to the point of androgyny, and his short, brown hair always leapt up in awkward directions, as if some current was running through it, magnetizing it in weird ways. Yet he was still popular, because of his skill in telling stories. He may not have been the most popular, but he lost his virginity willingly to a willing girl in eighth grade, and there were no repercussions. That must count for something. It definitely did in his high school.
How one seduces a girl in eighth grade, is far beyond the comprehension of most of us, but most of us see seduction as an instant process driven by some secret force. Benjamin knew that seduction was just a matter of telling the right stories.
He told stories about working for his father. Minimum wage is a lot in eighth grade, when an hour of work can buy a week of lunches. He talked about all the interesting people he met in his father’s bakery: the men with beards and tattoos; the women with gaudy jewelry, bulbous rings and shrill voices; the old lady who always gave him a tip; all buying his dad’s bread. He rarefied his position further by telling stories of how complicated the register is, and how stupid the customers are. How this one old Asian lady asked him to pick out change from her over-full coin purse. He mentioned secret ingredients in some of the bread, but stopped those stories short, leaving everyone hungry for more. Especially her.
Then he chose her, and told stories for her, the one with the hungriest, brightest imagination. He told stories that would make her laugh and maker her comfortable. These stories were pure fantasy. Magical lands where I love you forever and the like, but he told them well. And he listened like only a real story-teller can to her stories: fantasies even more deluded than his own.
One night they were in his room, but she was in a fantasy world. Which one, Benjamin couldn’t say. Stories are incredibly weak, but when given control, they run magnificently quickly. Three or four beers deep, this girl relinquished all control to some story in her head, and it ran her magnificently quickly.
Later on, after more nights like this, Benjamin had to start telling new stories. Stories about how she was so immature, she couldn’t keep up their relationship. Stories about how they were thirteen, but she expected to love him forever, and it was just crazy and unrealistic. He never complained. In stories, she was still entirely his.
There were more like her. There always are. Every good story is told an infinite number of times for a reason.
Benjamin Mark learned monotony early in his compressed life. He knew that school didn’t matter. He had work and women, and kept up with school. The first two years of high school were utterly indistinguishable, as the about a third of his junior year. He did well in English and history, being such a master of stories, and mediocre in everything else. Then he picked up a guitar.
He was terrible. At a party, with a girl, three or four beers deep, he had the electrified thing forced into his hands. He couldn’t make sense of what he was playing, but after someone forced his hands to hold and strum an A5 chord, it all seemed to feel right. Not good—it certainly didn’t sound good—or bad, but right, and that’s what mattered. It could never work as a story, but if felt right.
He bought a guitar, and it replaced the girls. Benjamin no longer noticed the monotony, for now it was comprised of an infinite stream of beautiful notes sparkling through the air. Even when the guitar wasn’t in his hands, he’d practice, run it through his head, and out his fingers. That music, every note, was beautiful not for how he presented it, but for its own ring. Its own voice.
Benjamin Mark became my story one hot day, when we were both three or four beers deep. He was over at my house, playing guitar. I streamed into his life with guitars and music; we played together. Benjamin was no longer terrible, but he wasn’t great either. He was having a very on night, but didn’t know it was because the outlet his amp was plugged into had a faulty ground wire. His whole guitar was electrified, pumping him full of current. As his fingers danced over the strings, I saw sparks leap from fingertip to string, shining like notes made briefly physical, floating in the free space of reality.
He unplugged the amplifier only to die. How it happened, I really don’t know. It doesn’t make any logical sense. The best explanation I’ve heard is that his previous charge drew the current to him, but that seems like a stretch. I think it was just his time.
Death by electrocution can’t be too bad though. So much energy bouncing around, the very force that makes hearts beat in such great amount, it’s lethal. Really, it’s not an unpleasant death. In fact, some have said it feels rather like an on night playing guitar.

New Poetry

On Moments of Arrogance

“Are you always such an arrogant putz?
Most people don’t appreciate it.”
Maybe I am, but
I’d never say that aloud.
Most people wouldn’t appreciate it.

It’s an arrogant thought, but
arrogance isn’t hubris.
The word though, it’s a
conversation-stopper. Mutually destructive,
a social dirty bomb
slithering in multisyllabic pride straight
to its target.
The speaker keeps it
hidden
in a briefcase, or backpack, or shoes then
“Arrogant putz” and
we’re both on the floor
reduced to writhing monosyllables:
proud and putz.

We’ll both get up,
but the ether us in the space between our
internal shouts are permanent shadows:
stretched tall, hand-to-hand, either grappling or dancing over
some surface I can’t see.



Breaking In

Stephen, I want to break into your house.
I’m sitting on those stone steps,
your porch, I guess, considering
climbing over, or around or maybe straight up,
onto your roof, and jumping into the pool,
but maybe I’ll knock a cinder block off
how you did, and bruise my knee.

I’m not sure if your parents are home,
or what they’ll do if they see me,
or even really, who they are without you.

Stephen, I want to break into your house.
I’m sitting here, wondering where that
invisible line

is.
Which side of the clearly wooden gate?
Or did it follow you?
Is it on vacation too, too far away from me?

I can’t find that invisible line.
I can’t find the limit or the definition.

Trying this again

So, someone asked me to post some of my writing in a blog. He's a cool guy, and I'm fucked up and probably trying to seduce him or something creepy like that, so I'm listening. Anyway, here's some poetry:

Concave / Convex

In the glass
stands but a smear
the color my flesh.
Pocked with the same
black hairs, but
in a gentler light,
diffused through the dew
of a steaming shower.

In your glass
must stand a rigid outline.
No approximation.
A mirror image lacking
nothing but
the gentleness of nature,
like the dew
after a cold rain.

Elegy

Boy A is dead.

His body, severed from his mind.

A spiritual lobotomy.

His body walks down an empty street.

It sees the sky on the ground;

all echoing the streetlights.

The sky-made rivers buoy his naked feet

an eighth of an inch

above the knives of asphalt, lusting

after his spoiled flesh.

It trudges on, distracted by the raindrops:

each, a cold wet kiss until

shattering and drifting

down his face like a tear he’s never cried.

His mind is awash in the roar of rivers

and their screams

as storm drains swallow them.

Supposedly, this is the end

of the universe.

His mind imagines it’s a lot like his cigarette smoke

drowning in the rain.

His body is ambivalent,

but prays that the smoke rips through his lungs and

pours from his back,

into fluid wings.

It wants to fly,

and hand deliver prayers.

But really, none of this matters, for

Boy A is dead.

Cashed

Burning—but not like a candle—

thick, green, living

smoky tendrils grab at nerves and

tickle every sense into submission.

Rising like a flower:

soft, green, young

tendrils grab like vines and

roots reach deep into the earth.

Dirtying their fingers,

blank, sweet, young

spit-puffing ash into the air and

watching it fall to the dirt:

submissiveness burning—but not like a candle—

in the knots of nerve tendrils.

So sweet and young and falling

onto the soft ground.

That's it for now. Go watch Adaptation.