Reasons For Living - March 2014

Plays
Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) - Will Eno
Love and Information - Caryl Churchill, NYTW. James McDonald, dir.
Ten Minute Plays at Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater
The Christians - Lucas Hnath, Humana Festival, Actors' Theatre of Louisville

Poetry
North - Seamus Heaney
Friends You Drank Some Darkness - 3 Swedish Poets - Robert Bly, Ed.

TV Shows
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee - Jerry Seinfeld
Portlandia

Novels
The Names - Don DeLillo
Americana - Don DeLillo
The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

Movies
The Wheel of Time - Werner Herzog
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga - Werner Herzog
Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun - Werner Herzog
Vegucated 
Brokeback Mountain - Ang Lee

Scattered Meditation

-written in collaboration with a robot version of myself

What if I made me
When I was pretty good
When I had no letters cause I hadn’t met myself yet
Practicing for my future life
She says that Those to whom evil is done
evil is done
Great, I think
Really a pretty trap, and their decision to live there

I'm just giving me
I am cause I was a big kiss  
All I don't have lives, they can take it

Janetta, I noticed the broken melody was You
Steve I'm a human being, including the same exact thing
A proud member of the people
Refugees from the ceiling of man Library of shit
He's so sad he can't remember what happens in Chekhov's plays
I understand you
An iPhone doesn't mean you
Sarcophagus noun meaning doglike

I love impersonations of my previous work
but do I have bad dreams about
I'm trying to get some adult education/stalk Corey and his flowering world
Maybe he spent all his time
Sarcophagus noun meaning doglike 

Great, I have lives, they have to burn at the head of service
across this dynamic czar of the chimes at least four reasons why it is.
This might say that
This might be
Maybe not escape, but occasional safe harbor
You gotta have the land of fucking bullshit
Most people don't have lives, they wear blankets because their body temperature lowers
Most people do with anything
Facebook and incoherent imagery, with a bunch of tribute people
Cleveland might have to return to the joys of dry stones
turned off by the parable
a nation insists on the Tree of Life
experiments in the bowels of Christ,
Fuck that we’re merciful in broad daylight,
His flowering world

I'll be starting a fear of contact find me
Learn from a professional kid
That was the future life
Start spreadin' the Dark
Start spreadin' the Shitty
Sadly, even if he's taken on the soil of this
I've tried nothing and he was watching this

Whatever house he builds,
Jesus, I have also spread over
I understand you
It's okay, nothing happens in life
It's okay, nothing is a way

all is well
It is now
Wonder is our money
I'll be at the miracle of all reality.

Following My Nose

The familiar complaints, the cozy ones.
Ambling through the hedges of grievance.
I never know what I'm feeling at any one time.
Usually more of the same. Bragging my inadequacies.

Winter is coughed from the addled coalsmoke sky.
Chimneys chugging ash. Clumps of duress.
Blake's choir of children lying in a heap.
Noontime streetlamps regaled in holly and poinsettia.

A pubic moss enters from the vacant lot, cautiously.
The homeless have been scraped from under the bridge.
Geese call and flee. The snow is flakes of ash,
the sun finally burnt itself down.

Disused meanings are flushed. A carefully wrought
vocabulary we have disabused ourselves of.
Crumbling monologue.
A new grammar forms. Light and Motion dances

from the screen. A panoptican of laughs and serenades.
Sometimes there is a magazine no one has a
subscription to. It is the digest of a human heart
dressed to the nines in thorns and flame.

Reasons For Living - February 2014

Novels
Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner
Shoplifting From American Apparel - Tao Lin
How Should a Person Be - Sheila Heti

Movies
Nebraska
Minnie and Moskowitz
The Grapes of Wrath
The Squid and the Whale

Plays
Intermission, The Flu Season, Tragedy: A Tragedy - Will Eno
Orson's Shadow - Austin Pendleton
The Revisionist - Jesse Eisenberg
America Hurrah - Jean-Claude van Itallie

Poetry
Begging for It - Alex Dimitrov
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart - anth. compiled by Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade

prayer

there's only one prayer and it's
"please"

A Field Study of the American Male

He hated the dowdy sweaters and frumped hair, the strategic dishevelment.
He hated the Grover Cleveland beards and whispy mustaches and whispy arms and legs of the men.
He hated the big plastic glasses which had no glass and he loved the black leggings and neon attitudes so much and he hated them.
He hated the muffin tops foaming from drawstring pants and the overestimated legs sensationalized in pouty dainty shorts.
He hated the immaculate indifference and the eyes permanently zoned in on the screen, the body's premonition like a tuning fork waiting for the keening of the next text.
He was curious about these people and wanted to know why they did what they did and why he was not one of them. He was so close to being one of them. Why did they wear these stupid things that they wore and why did they behave in these offensive ways that they behaved.
He wrote all of these things into his notebook. He kept finding new ways to say them. It was what he did when he was alone, and he preferred to spend as much time alone as he could.

He sat at a table by the window in Philipp’s Luncheonette eating a breakfast of two Coney Dogs and fries while trying to figure out who these people were by writing about them, why he was apart from them. 
A pretty blond woman in jean shorts came in with a bearded man who had a camera looped around his neck. He was disrupted by the presence of other young attractive people in a place frequented mostly by vagrants and old-timers, and he adjusted himself in his chair, trying to get comfortable with their invasion of a place that he considered his. They murmured to each other for a minute and then the woman approached him.

            “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m from Marie Claire magazine. We’re doing an article on men around America, sort of a field study of the American Male, and we were wondering if we could take your picture.”

            He sat back from his red notebook. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

            The photographer got down on one knee and pointed the barrel of the lens at him. He was nervous, but flattered to be considered an American Male, as he didn’t see himself as exemplifying either of those things, “American-ness” or “Male-ness.” He handled his body comfortably before the camera.

            “Do you just want me to do what I’m doing?” he said.

            “Yeah, just write in your notebook,” the photographer said.

            He looked back at his notebook, trying to reconnect to his concentration. The photographer snapped a few pictures.

            “Could you look up?”

            He looked up into the lens. “I’m a little nervous.”

            “That’s okay. Everybody gets nervous," the photographer said. "You’re good at this. Have you done it before?”

            “I’ve done some modeling for some ex-girlfriends. They were photographers.” He smiled.

            “Okay, now, can you maybe look out at the street?”

            He looked to the side and furrowed his brow, trying to appear contemplative. “Where’re you guys from?”

            “We’re from New York,” the reporter said, “We’ve been to Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and New York, of course. We’re going to Portland and L.A.:

            The photographer took his eye away from the viewfinder and began to check the pictures on the screen.

            “So what do women say about the American Male?” he said.

            “Actually, if you’ve got a few minutes, maybe we could interview you and you could tell us what you think about Columbus girls,” the reporter said.

            “Sure. I’ve got nothing to do.”

            “What are you working on?”

            “Oh, you know, this that and the other.”

            The photographer aimed his camera again. “Okay, can I just get two more?”

            “Sure, sure,” he put back on his romantic face.

            “Could you sit back?” the photographer said. He sat back. “Maybe lean up on two legs in the chair?” He pushed against the table and the front legs came off the ground. “Perfect.” The photographer took two more pictures. “Great. Now if I could just get you to hold this up so I could white balance. I could probably use your shirt but—“ He was wearing a white V-neck t-shirt. The photographer handed him a board with a black square, a grey square and a white square on it. “Just hold it up in front of you. There you go.” He took a picture. “Great. All done.” He went and sat on a  vinyl stool and checked his pictures. The reporter sat down where he’d been sitting.

            “And if you could just sign this release form,” she slipped a paper in front of him and he signed it. “So, if I were to ask you what is it that makes a Columbus girl, if I were to put you in a room with girls from all those cities I mentioned, how would you pick the Columbus girl?”

            “Umm, gee,” he said. He didn’t want to make her wait while he thought about her question, so he just started talking. “It seems to me there are generally two species of Columbus girl that I generally encounter: There’s the kind of Hipster girls that you might find in New York, with the big glasses and the bangs and the flannel, except like a Bush League version,” he said, “And then there’re sort of the campus girls. Those are the ones I’d most associate with Columbus probably. The girls in the hoodies and the athletic pants with the—I don’t mean to sound judgmental.”

            “Oh no,” the reporter said, “I don’t think you sound derogatory at all.”

            He went ahead. “The girls who get the Tan-in-a-Can stuff. They’re orange. Which is sad, because they’d be pretty without it.”

            “I know what you mean.”

            “I guess a Columbus girl is the kind of girl who wears a football jersey and drinks a beer and tailgates and all that stuff.”

            “Okay, and how would you describe the dating scene around here?”

            “I would say-- I just spent a month in New York and New York is great if you’re a single guy. Beautiful, sophisticated women in an endless supply. I heard a bum on the train say ‘New York: where the girls are pretty, smart, and they all got jobs.’ That sounded right. Not that they aren’t that way around here. It’s just there’s less of them. Columbus is better for the girls I think. The ratio skews more to their advantage.”

            “Okay, thanks. I think that’s all I need.” She stood up and shook his hand and told him they’d call or e-mail if they were going to use him. It’d be in the August issue which would hit newsstands in July.

            He felt important because someone valued his opinion and it was now going to be validated in a national publication. He hoped he didn’t sound too judgmental in print. He hadn't said what he really thought. He'd watered it down and it still sounded judgmental. He thought maybe if he got famous the article would serve as an interesting footnote in his biography, like an early television appearance of a now established entertainer from when they were just starting out: “Three years before his first major success he appears in a piece in Marie Claire magazine. The interview reveals a frustrated, alienated young artist trying to escape his roots…”

We keep death deep

in our closets. We take

death out when our loved ones

are away for an

afternoon. We put it on

and stare at ourselves in the

mirror.

The father takes an empty

gun out of a shoebox

under his bed. He puts it 

to his temple and 

pulls

the trigger.
The mother tries on
the black lace 
dress. It is most
becoming. It fits quite 
well.