that's....... yea......

Do it now. The conditions are always impossible

—Doris Lessing

# How glorious life is when I can be myself and be loved for it... how glorious life is when *I am* in love.


But I knew it was too good to be real. God created love only so he could take it away. For without it, we come a step closer to understanding damnation.  It's is a shackle - a punishment God dangles like bait from a string. Look! He says. Look at what I have created and taste it. I made the mistake of clamping down upon it, only for my mouth to be ripped open by the hook hiding underneath. **Now, like a fish, I thrash in the wake of my stupidity for ever believing God would allow me to love.**

In Kentucky, he faces the rage of God.



He memorizes Hebrews.

he prays on raw knees



But Nothing happens



outside lie blue turned fields alive with wind and grazing cattle.

Darker woods beyond harbor streams of baptismal water and rags of moss.

the cicada's dull drone seep through his bedroom walls



And each night,

before the navy dark swallows him,

he's shaken with violent sobs.



No one knows why

No one wants to watch a boy cry



He does not care to see again the church in the predawn dark.

The black fence stumps.

The dead deer hung from the basketball hoop.



He wanders down south as far as Newry.

A solitary migrant upon the pastoral and rolling landscape.

then came days of smoke, days of forgetting.

Days of searching for something he couldn't name



Letters come from Kentucky.

you have forgotten the hebrews they say

You are changing

You are not the boy we know



You don't understand he explains

in a language they don't understand



The more you ask

the farther I run

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time.

— Nayyirah Waheed

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab

I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.

I wish you a more mindful, and sometimes, more boring human experience so that you can re-find what matters the most to you.

# **F\*\*\*\*t**



My brother and I born twins of the same



Animalism



a rebellion by breathing by being

heard our voices invented

your worst nightmare dad

and you wanted to



wake up



you took your hands off the  steering wheel

your fingers hacking machetes

your voice a gun whose bullets were whispers

because it's secretes that

murder and dad you



killed us



I didn't know a quivering word could

peer into the future

and ruin two boys

who will try and fix themselves forever

When we over-index on documenting our lives, or infuse it with the aesthetic of cinema, scoring the climaxes, editing out the in-betweens that make up a life, we risk inverting its utility. Instead of being an existential hedge against dying, it becomes one against living. We end up believing things about our former selves that weren’t quite true, or doing it for the gram, or missing a hike before it’s even over. In our search for meaning we obscure it.

loneliness is still time spent with the world

One afternoon, I draped myself on my couch and felt an influx of mental silence that was both disturbing and hallucinatorily pleasurable. I didn’t want to learn how to fix or build anything, or start a book club. I wanted to experience myself as soft and loose and purposeless

In this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies. By poetic technologies I refer to the use of rational and technical means to bring wild fantasies to reality. Poetic technologies, so understood, are as old as civilization.

like perennial flowers during summer dusk

Four yellowed brass chandeliers curl

Above stiff dusted pews

and the organ halts it's hollow howl



Behind the pulpit he

adjusts his scratchy wool suit lifts

his hands, the church is

so dark in the choir closet

where i'm kneeling it’s a clover green ocean



i've done this so many times,

hidden myself inside regalia



flames the color of

Revelations transform each silk robe

and warp the floorboards by my feet

it's getting so hot my

flesh bubbles, i'm

not screaming,

the congregation, with open hymns don't notice

they drone like wood bees



i'm ablaze with God's light

I tell myself

this pain is my price



buck up son



it's my fault the closet's on fire

anyways and praying only makes suffering more

real so

I do the only thing I can do



which is nothing at all

she began feeding peanuts to two crows on her balcony, and found comfort in the fact that “these essentially wild animals recognized me, that I had some place in their universe."

All this town knows is itself,



and September mornings are forever

covered in steel blue frost.



i'm working a shovel beside the tenet's son.

slants of sunrise slip past his elbow

and soak my jacket in warmth.



as if I'm the earth and he

my eclipsing moon.



We lance dry roots wrapped

taught around fence stumps

his lean body reacts with each

elegant slaughter



i'm starring



within every bead of sweat

dribbling under his thick brow

atop his knuckles

between his thighs

I hope to find my reflection



the grazing field holds

a hushed whisper

broken by grass crunched beneath a boot



I didn't know

to hope is to peer in

the darkness of a boy

and find a mirror

Spaces where phones aren't allowed:

\- Any restaurant

\- While talking with a human being

\- When smoking weed

\- On a hike (pictures only when absolutely necessary)

\- After 11PM

\- Before 9AM

\- In class

\- When taking a walk

i'm only 12 but you're



screaming from the boat



jump



the branch in my palm is



wet rocks in between my



toes I can't



leap dad



I haven't been brave



since I took of fmy



skin and danced without



knowing it was dangerous to



peal back scabs



jump boy



don't be scared of cliffs



the climb is always longer than the



fall into madness



but I was in the air for years after



jumping



is an attempt to



soar and dad



I wanted to fly away

The last problem is that if you check social media any time you feel a twinge of boredom, you train your brain to expect constant stimulation. It’s okay to feel bored! Boredom is a skill. The more you can tolerate boredom when you’re doing nothing, the easier it is to rest in deep thought when you’re facing a difficult challenge. - Michael Lynch

“Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn” 

“I want everything quiet and simple. For me: walking barefoot, sitting still, reading, listening to stories, and now and then telling some myself. Eating fruit, drinking milk, longing to create, but with patience and many insights.”


— Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Lou Salomé witten c. March 1904

The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty. For consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions. It even dominates memory.

Every human either adds to or subtracts from the happiness of those with whom he or she comes in contact.

He is an unstoppable force, hurtling towards a question.



He doesn't know



the answer.



But,



he knows the pain of changing,



is a price for the body's direction.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else - that's how you'll get ahead.


(p. 19) Kleon, A. (2012). Steal Like An Artist.

Last winter my
dog died in a hole she
dug under the porch.

when she crawled
through the snow
And into the soffit
I crawled in after
on hands and knees
cold wet dirt slid
between my fingers

And I watched her
shake and then grow limp
but
I never could figure out
why she choose to die
underground

Let the quiet envelop you. Make peace with it; let things flow. ⁠