LOVER

the great beyond

The tiny spiders

the birds that sit in my hands

pigeons, slugs, snails, cockroaches, cats

and dogs. Horses, mules, rabbits. Crows, owls, hawks. Fish and snakes, white

tigers and elephants, deer, all the winged singing creatures, all the four-

legged creatures, my head spins

thinking of them - 

 

my life without animals has no meaning. 

You can have the children I never wanted. 

I decided

 

not to, I choose to not. The earth means more to me

than people, the earth is not abstract. Every song

 

I sing is earth, and the ones I don't. Every tear, every tiny

heartbeat, eyelashes fluttering, eyelashes settling to dust. I am

the earth first. We never needed

 

anything else, our bodies

lied and you listened - I

did not. I 

took the hard road, I'm not

lying, I'm not ashamed - it's what

I want. A fever

 

overtakes me now. The throat

swells and the pull down into warmth

keens out. Heavy, featherlight, my bones

leeched out. Dying isn't so bad

when you're just going home - everything

loves me here - 

 

What A Card

God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can't find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain.

Much of what exists on the internet are lists (think about it), it's become our preferred method of communication, perfect for quick jabs & impressions, an easy yet flashy way to seduce or baffle, to lord it over someone less "in the know", to bond w/someone who "thinks like you". It's the Snickers bar of intimacy - quick sugar rush, like what makes twilight sexy. It's here but it's passing quickly, it's well-lit, that ambiguously satisfying lie of not being alone when you don't want to be with anyone in particular. What I gain from this realization is that I can work through my fears of intimacy & commitment (ie complete sentences and paragraphs). The lists I make are in the tradition of Brion Gysin and Burroughs, cut ups, so they're art

1. Avatars
2. Antilogos
3. The inherently contestational energy of nomos
4. The nature of nomadic power in the age of the virtual
5. "The computerization of culture leads to the spatialization of all information, narrative, and even time." Lev Manovich
6. It's time for some Electronic Civil Disobedience!
7. Skin hair knees
8. Searching for the (non)location
9. CAE maintains that the social dynamic of nomos, which generally appears as explosive & unstoppable moments of sacrifice, waste, excess, mania, abjectivity, uselessness and spontaneity must function as a parallel generator of resistance along-side anti-logos. These elements are the center of all individual autonomy and yet they're seldom recognized or discussed by activists.
10. Disrupt the institutions to such an extent that the occupants become disempowered.
11. Power no longer resides in buildings/tombs. Power now moves about as desired. If systems of power/control are challenged in one spatial location they just move.
12. Create a theater of operations that can disrupt.
13. Block the flow of information -vs- the flow of personnel.
14. "Lefty's" continue to act as if we still live in the age of early capital.
15. The rift between theory and practice is worse than ever.
16. Invent a new approach.
17. Nostalgia for "taking it to the streets" is not new. The streets are dead capital!
18. Is the city not maintained because it is of no value or is it of no value because it is not maintained?
19. You can't "see" power, only it's representation.
20. We must evaluate our personal mythology as we evaluate our social lives (am I gonna get laid tonight?) from a standpoint of enthusiastic civil disobedience.
21. "Bein a loudmouthed cunt I guess sometimes since he's been here this fella who 'don't wanna play no more' probably spoke of killin Wild Bill Hickok. Well we're Bill Hickock's friends." Seth Bullock
22. Macro power can only be known as a series of abstractions: "straight white males" "the ruling class" or best of all "the powers that be".
23. The more intense the defense and punishment the greater the power-value.
24. There is still a trail to follow.
26. The degree of access
26. Blocking access to information is the best means to disrupt any institution.
27. Today, domination rests on the abilitiy of an institution to move where resistance is absent, in conjunction with the ability to temporarily appropriate a given physical space as needed. (the government of the United States knows this! You should too!)
28. These institutions insist that unauthorized asccess is an "act of extreme hostility".
29. Cyberspace is far from secure ...
30. "Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker you are a revolutionary." Dr. Crash
31. An activist, theorist, artist, hacker, lawyer = the perfect cell.
32. Since revolution is not a real option, the negation of negation is the only possible course of action.
33. Go

 

 

Where are we are now

I could make a New Orleans tableau and sit in it, waiting for someone to call me on the tin can phone. When they call I will answer and we'll talk. And I'll cook jambalaya. Or curry. Or red beans. I will move the air around, and sweep. I'll play tunes on the transistor radio, drink something with ice, and there'll be candles and stained mirrors. I write and read and make a shrine; talk or wait to talk on the tin can phone, sweating in a cotton dress and straw hat, silver earrings and flip flops, it really has been a mild summer, don't you know.

I dream of one thing and many things: foreign cities. How long has it been since I traveled? When I ate fruit and drank caffé and lived through my camera. I live in flux and am secure in who I am. It's just the way things land. But I do yearn for odd fruit and bitter elixirs; I yearn to lean into the airplane window peering down at where I will stand.

I dreamt I was on a sailboat and let myself puke, which was a real accomplishment because up in Michigan when we'd go out onto the water I couldn't let myself puke & was miserable the whole time with nausea. In the dream I just let go. A part of me that used to be deeply emotional has become solidly pragmatic. My best friend of 30yrs got married on a sailboat. Life is blissfully strange.

Just as there are as many versions of God or death as there are imagined/believed versions of them, there are as many versions of unkindness as there are people to inflict them. Small and large cruelties litter the day.

But I wanted gardenias and didn't pick them from someone else's bush - I didn't want to steal.

When I got home, my stoop was magically littered with gardenia petals.

The earth is cake, moist and dense. I eat it with my hands and feel fine. I feel like there's a goat in the yard, a lemon tree, and olives. Life is blissfully strange.

I spent another day hanging in the Lower 9th with the boys I know there. One of them when he's with me becomes very serious, like a poet, a great thinker - he's a great thinker. He bends his head and talks in a low steady voice about wanting to leave. About the killing. About everybody killing everybody. He stands still, poised, for long stretches of time, while I kick little stones about, touch small flowers, and wind up bits of glass in twine. He's the cat frozen in the tree, stalking or stalked, which is which, does it matter, this world hunts him. 

Of course he's a ringleader, playing basketball, animated, corraling his friends and brothers. Cars pass and he seems unafraid. Cars leave and he drops his gaze. I worry about them at night, I worry about them in the day.

It isn't fair they can't live in Bayou St John with simple worries like where can they get a tire patched or what's for supper. It isn't fair that poor people have to live surrounded by wreckage and they're smart, they're tough, they know how to fix everything, they're the future I want when I think of how children are the future. I don't want the kids of white people running this country; they already do and would you look at that. I want Bo in Holy Cross to be the future. In my country he is.

To Sleep, Perchance

Lullabye

Pastel on Arches

22x30

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