Jim Goldberg

The Precise Moment

i should know the precise moment when you stopped loving me
only today i recognized that you might
you could have been gone now for all i know
i might have woken up like in some sad country song to find a cold cup of coffee and tire marks in the gravel
instead we walk down the same windy streets
we finger the same books
at the same book store
everything is the same
but your lips are a little colder
they forsake your quiet unspoken truth
i recognize their frigidity
yet in bed at night while you sleep i kiss your back
i wonder if in your slumber
are my lips cold too?
do they chill you to the bone?
figuring into the folds of your legs i seek the warmth that we still share
oh god please dont ever leave me
oh god please love me the way you did before

Jens Lekman

Jens Lekman recorded and released much of his material privately from 2000 to 2003 on CD-R. Because one of his songs during this time was entitled "Rocky Dennis' Farewell Song to the Blind Girl", Lekman was mistakenly referred to as Rocky Dennis for a while (the song was actually written from the perspective of the main character of the 1985 film Mask). Lekman says that it was a "mistake": "someone thought that was my real name cause I had a song about him, and then radio picked up on it, and I never had a chance to change it".[2] He put the confusion to rest with his Rocky Dennis in Heaven EP (2004).

His self-released 7" vinyl EP Maple Leaves caused a big stir in 2003, mainly due to sound files circulating on file sharing networks. When the same EP was released on CD by the Swedish independent label Service Records in the autumn, he was already a well-known name. The songs "Maple Leaves" and "Black Cab" (TV Personalities)were heavily played on Swedish national radio. He soon signed a contract with the American label Secretly Canadian for releases outside of Sweden. Heavy touring and his debut album soon followed.

His first album When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog was released in 2004, and consisted of recordings made between 2000 and 2004 (some tracks had been previously released independently by Lekman). The album attracted attention among the alternative music press in both Europe and the US. The song "You Are The Light" was a successful radio hit, and a video received some rotation in the Nordic MTV and ZTV. In Sweden the album reached #6 in the national chart. Lekman was nominated for three Swedish Grammies, three P3 Guld and three Manifest awards, as well as dubbed album of the year by Nöjesguiden.

A concert film shot from Lekman's sold-out show with José González at Göteborg's concert hall in December 2003 was broadcast by Swedish national television two times in 2005. In June 2005, a compilation CD of Jens' first three EPs, with extra tracks, was released as Oh You're So Silent Jens. Lekman also has a cover of Scout Niblett's "Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death" on Secretly Canadian's SC100 compilation.

His newest album Night Falls Over Kortedala was released in Sweden on September 5th 2007 and worldwide on October 9th, 2007. The single "Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo" preceded the album's release.

Live performances by Lekman have differed in style; at times he has performed alone with only a guitar and a CD player, sometimes doing a cappella versions of his songs, while at other times he has been accompanied by a choir and string quartet. Recently, he has toured with an all-female back-up band, dressed mostly in white, that provides basic rock instrumentation as well as horns and backing vocals.

Vanessa Beecroft

Russel The Chicken Boy

Junior High School is a dirty and deceitful, dark...dark den, where surely devils are born. I am misshapen and flat-faced, forever in tune with nothing. I walk around foot- blistered, with boils instead of mere pre-pubescent pustules. My face was the underside of a broken brick in a neglected garden, neglected by all save the worms. I hold my books up and over my chest like the girls do, trying desperately to hide my boy titties, burning from the hateful sweat streaming down their stretch marked slopes. Russell The Chicken Boy was a special boy, a man really. Twenty years old and still in the 7th grade. He was a freak, a treat, and a sideshow toadie, always good for a laugh, displaying his grotesqueries for all who might inquire. They found him, that is, they discovered him with half a brain living in a rusty old bird cage, his brittle bone-thin appendages folded in and on themselves, put there by his mama and daddy until he was nine and a half, then deserted altogether when he just got to be too much. When the welfare took him, he could not speak a lick, only balked and clucked, refusing to take any food unless through a tube or thrown down on the floor. The welfare cronies, chasing their own bureaucratic tales for nearly a year didn’t know what else to do, so they just kept him in his pen. Until one day, his neck outstretched, a low cawing from inside it, Russell The Chicken Boy...decided to step out. I was in the 7th grade when one day I discovered that Russell The Chicken Boy was following me. Block after block I'd turn and catch him in what could only be called the most sincerely retarded of maneuverings. But I wasn’t completely cruel like the rest of them. I knew how it was. Boys and girls, rotten skunks, filthy little shit pigs! Always flicking me hard in the titties, throwing snail guts in my hair. Once they got me in the middle of social studies. This one boy yelled out, once the teacher turned his back to us, telling everyone, in a voice which was meant to mimic my own, matter of factly, that I had sperm in my hair. The teacher turned and scowled at me as if I'd cussed his mama, then, looking down his crooked chalky nose, sent me to the toilets to go and wash it off. I could hear him, Russel, breathing behind me, his mouth a desperate funnel for oxygen. Stupid mouth breather! I knew that all I had to do was run up to him and wave my arms wildly into the air, and Russell The Chicken Boy would squawk and flap his arms in fits of sheer fright, then screech away. Instead, I don’t know why, I really have no idea why, but for some reason, I let him follow me. And all day long he done it. Then he followed me home! This went on for almost an entire week. Until I finally had to turn around and tell him, “Go away! Go away…Russell The Chicken Boy!” But he just looked at me. He looked at me like I was suddenly a cold hard meat cleaver and his neck was on the stump, not so much as twitching. Then his eyes boggle out all goosey, and he’d throw his bony ass up in the air and took off walking down the street all hurt, turning around like he was waiting for me to throw him some god damned bird seed or worm guts! Then I'm in P.E. one day, in the locker rooms. I stood, shifting foot to foot, forever the nerve wrecked quick-change artist, apprehensively eyeballing the other boys in the showers, staring into the white void of pulsating shower heads, when suddenly, the great Hun, boulder-jawed Coach Ross stuck his head out of his office and summoned us all to the gymnasium.
Gymnasiums were like cathedrals to some, holy places glistening and stained with hidden, spilled seed and the eternal echoes of The Steve Miller Band. Where space cowboys gyrated through many a rented tuxedo and the glint of a homecoming queen’s rhinestone tiara matched the sparkle of her eye just before the lights went down too low. It was Sadie Hawkins Dances and the annual sock hop or prom night for some, but not for me. For me, gymnasiums were great coliseums of torture, of mayhem, of utter annihilation. For some, whenever they’d enter these hallowed halls, they might hear the hushed and soothing tones and harmonies of say…Earth, Wind and Fire’s, “Reasons,” and imagine lovely painted cardboard and glitter stars. But for others, people like me, people like Russell The Chicken Boy, we only heard, “Bad Company!” We saw bloody noses. We heard the rude rush of hormones, the snarls of a thousand pugilistic snouts, the snap of tibia, of fibula, of clavicles...the crack of knee caps. The coaches would make us play this game they called “Bombardment!” They would take all the 6th and 7th graders; the misfits, the puny, the skinny-assed and bony, dirt head stoners, the wheezing and the gimped, the fatties daydreaming of Hostess Snowballs, and line us all up along one side of the abattoirs. Then to make matters worse, they’d make us all take off our shirts, stand there…and then wait. We’d stand around for ten or fifteen minutes, hollow eyed and jaws jetting, in nothing but piss stained jock straps and purple J.C.Penny cotton shorts. Shirtless in the middle of winter, our arms crossed, chests caved in, breasts sagging, shifting, left foot, right foot…waiting. Then they’d herd them in. The Gladiators. Great hulking, muscle bound beasts with brains as big as their scrotums, hormones oozing and demanding release. We were freezing, but shook more at the site of their entering. The dreaded 9th graders, thick and hairy legged, with red knuckled hands the size of baseball mitts. They now stood on the opposite side of the gym, stretching and laughing, pointing and making signs of what could only have been, the devil. But this one particular day was different. Something very, very different was about to happen. i could sense it. As we were waiting to be obliterated, maimed, destroyed, suddenly the coach, The Hun himself, did something far and beyond what even any devil might grudgingly call cruel. He slowly walked back toward the gymnasium door, and with great pretense, pleasure, and hammy theatricality, I swear I heard him giggle, opened it, went outside, and moments later, reappeared, quietly escorting Russell The Chicken Boy into the gym. Russell The Chicken Boy was wearing these long bright yellow shorts and his shirt had been removed. If he weren’t always shaking, you’d think he was about to freeze to death. The coach motioned for him to get over to our side. He hurried over, neck craning, pecking and squawking. And then, of all places, of course, he had to stand right next to me. dead ducks. Murder most foul! The 9th graders, blood thirsty and merciless, suddenly jumped to attention as the coach began throwing to them, and only to them, what seemed like an immeasurable amount of volleyballs. And then the game commenced. They never threw the balls at the ones who had the nerve or the audacity or the stupidity to throw it back, the ones who actually tried to play the game. They would wait for the kid who was not paying attention, the ones caught off-guard, and then proceed to pulverize them ruthlessly and as hard as they possibly could. There was this one kid, his name was Jake, and he was the cruelest of them all. He, like most of the other jocks, played on the football team and was, suffice to say, fucking gigantic! He had a head the shape of a Vidalia onion and a body like a Sherman Tank! Years later, this kid Jake would make the local papers for landing up in the hospital after consuming too much acid. Eventually, after numerous overdoses of yet more lsd, he would finally turn his brain to mush. Not that he ever had much to start with. Years later, even after kids my year went on to graduate, Jake was often spotted riding his bike around the high school campus looking to score yet another hit of acid. I could tell that he was zeroing in on Russell The Chicken Boy. I could see it in his narrowed, sunk-in, thick browed monkey eyes. Of course, Russell The Chicken Boy was clueless and kept his pin head down close to the shiny gym floor, looking at his own reflection I think. Jake was getting closer. I could see that he was just about to go into one of his infamous wind-ups and let one go. I watched Russell The Chicken boy, and then I looked at all the rest of them. Knock kneed nerds, clueless. It was at that very moment I realized how Russell The Chicken Boy was no different than anyone else. He was no different from me. He was no different from them. We were all bouncing around, shifting left, shifting right, spoils of war as they say, waiting to get pinged in the head. Then I looked across the gym, and I could see that several more of the coaches had now gathered into the gym and were all laughing their asses off. Then I noticed that the coaches seemed to be throwing in more balls. And then I saw something else. Some of the balls they were slyly tossing in had something shiny sticking out of them. It was then that I figured out that they weren’t volleyballs at all, but those hard ass tether balls with those steel stems sticking out of them. Jake was winding up the coil, aiming, taking great pleasure in his sizeable advantage and strength over…everyone! I felt my heart drop. Jake had his sites locked onto Russell The Chicken Boy and there wasn’t anything that I could do about it. And then I started thinking about poor Russell. The Chicken Boy. Poor, poor Russell The Chicken Boy. And I watched him. Of course I could only pretend to understand who and what he was. What he’d been. I tried to imagine the cold-checkered impressions of steel wire across my cheek, a cold trough instead of a warm breast or even a rubber nipple, a dark closet instead of the crook of my father’s neck. I wouldn’t…I couldn’t fool myself into imagining a cage, instead of a cradle. But then…then I realized, lost in irretrievable pubescent empathy, that Jake, acid head, boulder shouldered, ball pulling, slack-jawed Jake, was not aiming for…Russell…Russell The Chicken Boy at all! He was aiming for me! Right for me! The overhead light caught the glint of the silver stem revolving a million times per second. I tried to move, but by then it was way too late. And then, all of a sudden, Russell…The…Chicken Boy…took one step and…casually and altogether matter of factly, stood right in front of me. The ball contacted, landing square in the middle of his face. I could hear…I could feel his nose crack. There was blood everywhere. His whole body turned, spinning around and around. Then he collapsed onto the hard wood floor, sprawled out, motionless, just as the bell rang for the showers. The truly sad, mind you, not the saddest part of the story is that I never ever became friends or even friendly with Russell The Chicken Boy. How could I have? Was I supposed to sit next to him in the cafeteria and somehow learn his stupid clucking language? Once, from the other side of the cafeteria, I nearly vomited watching him eat, throwing back his head to get the creamed corn down his neck. Was I supposed to flap my arms joyously every god damned time a migration of birds flew east?
I never did find out or even ask him why he followed me around. And I never found out why he did what he did that day in the gymnasium. No, that’s not even the saddest part. What’s truly fucked up is that if I’d realized in time, that is, sooner instead of later, that Jake was aiming that ball for me, I would have used Russell as a block anyway. I would have let him take it right there in his stupid chicken face, and later, have to be taken away on a stretcher to the school nurse with everyone watching. I never thought about it until now. And somehow, I guess I still don’t feel too bad about it. Devils.

Tony Feher

Tony Feher (b. 1956, Albuquerque, New Mexico) received his B.A. from the University of Texas, Austin in 1978. In 1981, Feher left Corpus Christi for New York City. The artist began exhibiting his work in 1980, and by 1991, was showing both nationally and internationally.

Rooted in the legacy of minimalism, Feher’s work emphasizes the importance of seeing objects as they are. The materials of his art derive from the incidental, the ordinary, the commonplace, and what many are apt to regard as the mundane. Feher stacks, dangles, arranges, and aligns detritus and ephemera. Repetition, materiality, and the architecture of his surroundings figure into his work. As the artist once explained, “I look for the ‘trick’ in materials, that indescribable something that allows me to exploit an object for my own purposes: a reflection of light, a color, a play of density versus transparency, a little something that sets it off.” Like the poet William Carlos Williams, with whom he is often compared, Feher’s work enables the viewer to observe and appreciate the beauty in the ordinary, everyday objects that surround them.

A compendium of quotes by Jonathan Swift

A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.


A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.


A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.


A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.


A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.


Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.


As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.


As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.


Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.


Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.


Books, the children of the brain.


Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.


Don't set your wit against a child.


Every dog must have his day.


Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.


For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.


Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.


He was a bold man that first eat on oyster.


He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.


Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.


I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.


I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.


I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.


I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.


I've always believed no matter how many shots I miss, I'm going to make the next one.


If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.


Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.


Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.


It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.


It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.


It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.


It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.


Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

May you live all the days of your life.


May you live every day of your life.


Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.


Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.


My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.


No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.


No wise man ever wished to be younger.


Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.


Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.


Observation is an old man's memory.


Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.


One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.


Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.


Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.


Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.


Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.


Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.


Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.


Proper words in proper places make the true definiton of style.


Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.


The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.


The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.


The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.


The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.


The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.


The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.


There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.


There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.


There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.


There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.


Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.


Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.


Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.


Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.


We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.


We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.


We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.


What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.


When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.


Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.


Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.

Michael Clark

Michael Clark (born June, 1962) is a British dancer and choreographer.

He was born in Aberdeen and started attending Scottish dancing lessons at the age of four along with one of his sisters. He later went to ballet classes in Aberdeen. At the age of 13 he was given a place at the Royal Ballet School in London, but after he graduated at the age of 17 he turned down a place with the Company. He went to Ballet Rambert for two years and developed his interest in modern dance. At the age of 22 he formed his own company. His performances also included flamboyant costumes by the bisexual club-goer Leigh Bowery. At the time Michael Clark lived with his lover, David Holah of Bodymap, in a council flat in King's Cross.

It was David Holah and Stevie Stewart who designed Clark's outrageous costumes. Michael Clark fell into a decline with the abuse of alcohol and drugs in the late 1980s and he had to retire in 1988 at the age of 26 because of serious heroin addiction. His mother moved down from Scotland to look after him. In 1989 he met and fell in love with the American dancer and choreographer Stephen Petronio, and he began to dry out and pull himself together.

In 1988 he collaborated with The Fall on landmark rock ballet "I Am Kurious, Oranj.

In 1991 Michael Clark appeared as Caliban in Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books. In 1993 he produced the dance work Mmm, and then in 1994 its companion piece O. In 1994 his friend and mentor Leigh Bowery died and he became seriously depressed. He also had a badly injured knee and had to cancel his show "Roots II". He returned to the village of Kintore 20 miles from Aberdeen where he was brought up, to live with his mother. He returned to dance in 1998.

Les Georges Leningrad

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley (born 1954 in Detroit, lives and works in Los Angeles) is an American artist.

His work involves stuffed animals, textile banners and carpets, and his output also includes drawings, objects, assemblage, collage, performance and video.

His oeuvre is often discussed by critics as engaging with the concept of Abjection. He staged his most ambitious show to date in November/December 2005, "Day is Done," filling Gagosian Gallery with funhouse-like multimedia installations, including automated furniture, as well as films of dream-like ceremonies inspired by high school year book photos of pageants, sports matches and theater productions. In December 2005, Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz cited "Day is Done" as a pioneering example of "clusterfuck aesthetics," the tendency towards overloaded multimedia environments in contemporary art.

Kelley was born in Wayne, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit in 1954. He was brought up with the city's music scene which spawned such bands as Iggy and the Stooges, and he was a member of Destroy All Monsters.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1978 where he attended the California Institute of the Arts and started to work on a series of projects in which he explored quite a loose or poetic theme, such as The Sublime, Monkey Island and Plato's cave, Lincoln's Profile, using a variety of different media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, performance and writing. Kelley started to gain recognition outside Los Angeles in the mid-eighties with the sculptural objects and installations from the series Half-a-Man and have since then exhibited in galleries and museums in other countries^{[citation needed]} and participated in art events such as Documenta 9. Fans of the music group Sonic Youth will be familiar with his work from the cover and booklet of their 1992 record Dirty. There was a retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1993. He has been showing with Metro Pictures, New York since 1982.

Kelley was also in the band Poetics with fellow California Institute of the Arts students John Miller and Tony Oursler.

While at CalArts, he said he admired the work from some of his teachers, including John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold and Douglas Huebler.

Kelley's work is inspired by as diverse sources as history, philosophy, politics, underground rock music, decorative arts and working-class artistic expression. His art often takes up class and gender issues as well as issues of normality, criminality and perversion.

Kelley is currently a faculty member in the graduate department of fine art at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Lynn Emmanuel

Ordinary Objects

"Hie et ubique?"
Hamlet to the ghost

I am letting them stand
For everything I love

The light's unsteady scale
Acrosee the glass, the hard

Brown grit of ants among the roses.
The bittersweet--

Everywhere I look I will see
Italy. The flowers will be full

Of prisons and churches,
Of women in black dresses. full

Of motorcycles and geuflecting.
The nightshade's dark, crooked stem

Is your street
And the water in the vase the sea's

Horizon tilting with the tilt
Of your ship. I am going to let

The daffodil be your mistress.
She is tired of you and stands

Looking at her feet.
In the fan's slow wind

The curtains reach for you.
I am full of grief. I am going

To lie down and die and be reborn
To come back as these roses

And wind myself thorn by
Thron around your house

To fit into the nutshell
And the flat seed, the sear.

The door, the road, the web,
The moon's bald envious eye

Staring at you through the drapes.

Thomas Hirschhorn

Thomas Hirschhorn (born in Bern, 1957) is a Swiss artist.

In the 1980s he worked in Paris as a graphic artist. He was part of the group of Communist graphic designers called Grapus. These artists were concerned with politics and culture, displaying impromptu creations and posters on the street mostly using the language of advertisement. He left Grapus to create the hypersaturated installations he is known for today, using common materials such as cardboard, foil, duct tape, and plastic wrap. These installations are often site specific and outside the gallery, and/or interactive. Unlike much total installation work, the viewer is an observer not an actor in the spaces he creates because of the way he continues to offer messages in his work as he did with Grapus.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

3/4 time

Four beats to the measure

But when the measure is different…

What if ya need more time

Do ya just do with what ya have?

Settle for less?

Be less?

I love a waltz

It’s best for dancing

You can hook your hip around it softer

You can sway and take up much more room on the dance floor

You will need it

I do love a waltz

Everyone loves a waltz don’t they?

Put your face deeper into the crook of love

Hide away in the darkness?

Make everything go away

I love a waltz

Doesn’t everyone?

i love a waltz like i love a cliche

i am the biggest cliche that ever shook his ass on a dance floor

it is a place for an ass to be an ass and to stop counting

1...2...3...

1...2...3...

Yes ¾’s for me

Give me less

And I will try to not take more

But if I do, it wont matter

Because everyone makes excuses for me

Even if I am not

Even if I don’t believe I need to

¾ is just perfect

it’s just perfect

and everyone loves a waltz

everyone loves a waltz

…everyone loves a waltz…

Joel Sternfeld

Loretta Lux

Francesca Woodman

untitled

the front of my head seems to exist all unto itself while
all other parts have at least half-way shut down
my eyes are stuck in one ambling position, disinterested in periphery
all else sinks like shit down a pipe
i am cut off
nubs anchoring me to the floor
a true balancing act
i might topple over any second
oh it would be funny
it would be fucking hilarious to fall face first and not even then
know
but i dont topple, i stay put like a sack of clay bricks
waiting for someone, something to move me out of the god damned way

too drunk to write

whatever the inspiration
we dont speak of that now
does it really matter any how?
i will shake it all alone in my apartment
i will shake it on top of the mountain and not really give a fuck
full of dust and
just like those hymnals so far away
i used to really shake it there
we dont speak of that inspiration either
a real sin
too drunk to write

lost in a fog listening to...what the shit!
stupid
my liver tucks in resigned to my idiocy
stupid

Uncle Jay

it was a long time ago.
my brother said that his head had been flattened with a shovel and that from chin to scalp, when they found him his head was nearly three feet long
he used to call me faggot before i even knew what a fucking fag was
god damn i hated him
he was my mom's youngest brother
he was a big Kiss fan
i can still see him sticking his tongue out like gene simmons
what a dick
my mom would get mad at me if i didnt call him uncle jay
he'd wait for her to turn her back and then make that universal bend of the wrist sign for homo
i guess i was a real homo when i was seven
he'd stashed a suitcase full of cocaine in my parent's attic
my mom found it
walked to the creek out back and emptied it into the slow stream of bad decisions
the decision that got my uncle jay killed
the decision that gorged her heart mercilessly at his funeral
forcing her to remember his toe head and jagged eight year-old smile
the decision that she stumped out like a cigarette and tossed onto a gravel driveway

Sprig of Thyme

There is a small sprig of thyme standing frozen in a small glass inside my refrigerator.
I'm sure that it's been there for a while.
next to a twelve pack of beer and half a can of mole that seems to last forever.
It makes me think of this empty can of coke i once saw in an elevator shaft at some shitty hotel in San Francisco.
i wondered how long it had been there, then.
now, it stays with me all these years
later.
elevator up!
elevator down.
i think of a particular old drunk who lives on sutter st.
he once made me some sort of beef concoction with balsamic vinegar he'd slow cooked for hours.
it was delicious.
i once woke up in his apartment and walked into his living room to find him riding the cock of some dirty derelict ten years older than he was
as if he were a young bronco at the rodeo.
i wonder what he's doing right now