A giant butterfly flaps its wings like syrup sound says bump in your toe. It is it is feel feel. One crunch on the lay like a map of your mind it is so important ever the archivist should seek that from you and then you’ll be doomed. Dark dark and shiny up your elbow with marks that quiver like your book stops touching your brain the temple has collapsed because of a hello. What am I supposed to do? Do champagne and cards for mom and grecian urns and pomegranate seeds because that’s what they want you to say in the night by the fire her hair jumps too but so grounded her presence like she’s more earth than person or that’s just what she wants you to think. There is a curtain a curtain it would unveil something we all know that and we choose to ignore it because it serves serving us them each other me you she serves away like glass balls on. Does the bush smell like he made it? Its body contorts around our architecture it coats us infiltrates and releases. Should we fuck ferns? Does the sound make you feel something? Maybe like an explosion a rush and a swish and the land is ours but we are the land’s too, and that turns them on. Bright we’re drawn to that light the energy cuts through me and it brings my body with it no boundaries no whole we are all. Don’t you wish you could feel it? All this longing all the time and there’s fear because maybe people don’t have to long they just don’t know how to choose what they want and I know all at once I’m desperate to leave this cave and live in it forever. It hurts. Whose foot is under my head? Has it ever left? Of course not, that’s foolish to think. The helicopter and the butterfly and the smell that is giving me a headache has ever been anywhere else they’ll always be here and they’ve never been here that’s the trip I’m taking them on and gripping gripping hard fast scratching because I’m inside and outside all at once all the time and I can never be just one. So I scratch really really hard until I melt into the carpeting and then it’s silly because who has ever really known their toes in the first place? How will I know when it’s over? Slurp.
Curatorial Positions (2023)
Animal remains is getting rid of Germany and putting social realism on the red jerking off point slowing down to elegance. It’s split east and west but nobody’s wrist hurts in the way a painted shoe looks bloated and still. What it really comes down to is the idea that a radical clicking box only reverberates through a room if she yawns and trembles over it. It’s really just about anarchy. When you think of this idea of individuality it might make sense to the hyper-goose world to watch television and shine silver. Maybe it would help to have a fag in his mouth. Type type type the whole building groans around us and asks us to please give it a break from the words. It smashes off the charts like a sheep’s coat and the echo of triangles on the sidewalk. It’s a glitch, and it’s definitely related. The crooked clock only ticks out loud if you look at it; it needs attention.
Blades threatening toes (2023)
If I keep saying my words in a circle then maybe she’ll walk towards me. We can jump make a little world together like how turquoise is green and other languages tie tongues. Eat grass west of the atmosphere making the self whole. Do you think we have ever done? We just lie there fuzzy blades between our toes and graze. Nails on fire but pain isn’t for me so I feel it cooled and rushed away. Power is like living but better and it hums loudly only for a moment not in ears but in bodies it sits stays looks around and twitches. If my thumb were sticky maybe I would see better and you would feel me stronger you don’t feel you’re just slimy purple and numb. When stickers pick a place they whine and squeal and lights taste like. Sun warmed wood it rings and rings like a grease fire in the arctic and love for an orange. It’s wet and pink. Houses sit hard and push and squish until what’s underneath is all around and it sees juice. It’s smart if it tastes the trees.
Cathedral Imperatives (November 2022)
Sound in a gallery in a museum in a church in a forest singling out senses closing your eyes focusing spirituality in quiet in stillness in long deep hums and whispers and white noise
Apostle of lasting peace for all mankind
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God
Thou shalt love the lord thy God I don’t believe in God
I do enjoy the weight those words hold on my tongue they’re heavy weighed down by the good bad violence pain community creation destruction they make me feel like I’m part of something not culturally it’s bigger more nebulous more obscure it makes me small I’m wrapped in something I can’t see so maybe I am a little religious but not in a Jesus way
I sat in Saint John the Divine and wrote those words out over and over again thirty four times the number doesn’t mean anything that’s just how much space I had on the page I whispered them to myself I was leaning against one of those columns just like a redwood I love to feel small next to them
Wouldn’t it be so nice to live in the little cave at its base I wonder what I would learn if I sat there for a really long time I wonder if these trees can talk to me if they can talk to each other how do I communicate with them is it like praying I’m not sure I know how to pray but if I repeat my own name over and over again in the redwood cave what does it become was it ever anything in the first place what if I’ve been saying it wrong this whole time? I don’t think it would matter because when we were babies we couldn’t say our own names and Annie just kept screaming because she loved these trees so much
She could feel it
Nose Itch (24 October, 2022)
My window is open and it started to rain so I stopped to listen and then the dart on the dartboard drooped and fell in slow motion off the board and the fly in my room flew through the orange light in a blink-or-you’ll miss it spiral path and I am grateful for a nose itch because maybe this is what it means to be alive
Edit (4 January, 2023): As I transcribed this from my journal to my website my nose started to itch
BENEFACTORS OF THE MUSEUM (15 October, 2022)
MICHEL DAVID-WEILL; HELENE DAVID-WEILL; ROBERT MOTHERWELL; MRS*HENRY S*MORGAN; JOHN J*WEBER; CATHERINE HANNON AUCHINCLOSS; TOMIJI YAMAZAKI; MRS*TOMIJI YAMAZAKI; FREDERICK PHINEAS ROSE; ALICE APPLETON HAY; KATE S*EMIL; JULIET COLKET WEBER; ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER; ARMAND HAMMER; IRENE ROOSEVELT AITKEN; VIRGINIA WISE MARX; MRS*HARRY RUBIN; RITA S*RICHMAN; JEAN M*RIDDELL; LOUISE NEVELSON; GUY WEILL; MARY FRENCH ROCKEFELLER; MARGARET MCG*ROCKEFELLER; JANET COOK LOEB; VIRGINIA BEST ADAMS; MARJORIE LLOYD-SMITH WOOLEY; EVELYN SHARP; EUGENE VICTOR THAW; BERTHE DAVID-WEILL; CONSTANCE TANG FONG; SEYMOUR LIPTON; JANE CHACE CARROLL; MRS*CLIFFORD STILL; THEODORE R*GAMBLE JR*; ELLSWORTH KELLY; ISIDORE M* COHEN; MRS*ISIDORE M*COHEN; MRS*SOL FISHKO; YULLA LIPCHITZ; VERA G*LIST; PLACIDO ARANGO; EDITH ABRAHAMSON LOWENTHAL; MARISOL de LA BEGASSIERE; WOLFGANG K*FLOTTL; MARIA-GAETANA MATISSE; BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL; SANDRA PRIEST ROSE; HOPE WILLIAMS READ; CLAUS VON BULOW; GREGOIRE TARNOPOL; THEODORE ROUSSEAU; MURTOGH D*GUINNESS; HALSTON; MARY GRIGGS BURKE; MRS*J*AUGUSTUS BARNARD; VAN DAY TRUEX; GLORIA MANNEY
This is my first poem (20 September, 2022)
On my walk to the spot I’m sitting in in Central Park I was thinking about this poem rehearsing it in my head talking to myself under my breath probably loud enough for people around me to hear but it doesn’t really matter because I don’t know them and they don’t know me and it was all really just gibberish anyway I was planning that first line I just wrote about what I was doing on my walk and I thought I would say how many minutes my walk was but I don’t actually know how many minutes it was because I walk to this spot all the time so I never measure it and my phone is dying and it doesn’t even really matter how long my walk was I just wanted to include the length of time because I thought it would sound cool and poetic especially if I made up a number like 17 minutes because that’s how long it took for me to be born after my sister was born and wouldn’t that be so symbolic and deep if that’s how long my walk took and wouldn’t that make this poem important in some way or have some greater cosmological meaning it would it definitely would but it would all be made up to make it sound cool for when I read this out loud to everyone because all I can think of even now as I’m writing this is what everyone who hears it will think about me based on how profound and well-written my poem is which is ironic because I’m writing this in my journal and nothing in it is ever meant for anyone else to read except for this I guess but if I’m really honest sometimes the act of journaling is a little bit so people look at me and see how mysterious and smart and attractive I am but mostly it is just for me and it’s probably clear now that all of this that I’ve written is about me being afraid of this poem because is it even a poem how do I even write a poem I’ve never really written one before and I certainly have never written one for public consumption and this sort of just feels like prose and I knew this would happen I was thinking on my walk about how I would cringe at trying to write “real” poetry with metaphors and verses and whatever so maybe I could give myself a task like taking the dos and don’ts list from my Costar everyday and trying to turn it into some kind of poem about investigating the everyday but I don’t really believe in astrology although I do like it and I find it interesting and I read my Costar everyday but mostly because I think the bot who writes all the text snippets is funny and nothing it comes up with really makes any sense but still I do sometimes get shocked at how accurate it is so instead of doing that I decided to just write because I didn’t know what else to do and I want this poem to communicate something vulnerable about me and on my walk I was thinking about how I could talk about being sad or anxious or hating my body or not eating because those things are intense and sensitive and cause me a lot of real pain and that would all be really deep and vulnerable of me wouldn’t it but the thing is that I would probably tell anyone those secrets that aren’t really secrets at all because you wouldn’t even have to probe me too deeply for them even if I like to pretend that you would I would actually probably offer them up unprompted in fact I just did that here and the thing about all of that is that it doesn’t really get anywhere vulnerable within me because I often just throw that kind of information at people but it’s a romanticized filtered version of that pain that I give people to make them think I’m multi-dimensional and interesting and honest and probably a little too intense sometimes but it’s all just filtered and I could try to explain the unfiltered version except no I can’t because I’m writing all of this with the intention of sharing it with a group of people I don’t know very well who I definitely want to impress and even if I explained how often I like to avoid all of my responsibilities and not answer my texts and lay in bed all day and skip meals on purpose and pretend I’m looking for a new therapist and tell all my friends that I’m actually doing really really well which most of the time is true but I’ll still say it when it’s not and I could keep trying to explain all of that but it will all always be filtered even when I’m trying to write just for myself it’s filtered because how can I really fully wholly entirely put into words what’s actually going on in my brain? I can’t. So that’s what I was thinking about on my walk when I rehearsed all of this.