Clara's First Love

Billy was born so sinister he had two left hands. His right canine was pocked by cavities and his eyes were the color of rust. When he sang it sounded like a train whistle and his only cologne was gin. He was born in a barn and he never left. He could whistle up a wind and draw down the moon and take the sting from a bee bite. He was my first love and I was his last. The train came and took him. Took him whole by force.

Brief Elegy for Delia Derbyshire

Ode to my darling Delia D
How the robots dream of thee
A pale mathematical saint
And in the days I cannot hide
The architecture you derived
Does conspire to save me

Oh my darling Delia D
Writ in water robot elegies
Loops of sound eternal
Wobulate the dulcet tones
Crafting in your Delian mode
Strange and elegant sonic bones




Who is Delia?

Notes I write to myself and find later...

List #1

Is this a checklist, a reminder, or a list of things to do?
I have no idea, and I wrote it...

The Consumptive's Prayer

I will learn to starve an artist. I will learn to feed a fever. I will learn to steal a dead man's coins from the grimmest reaper. I will learn to break a fragile bone, to twist a toughened spine. I will learn to shatter, learn to breathe, transfigure my mind.

Rejected Paragraph From A Short Story

I throw out my entire first paragraph about 90% of the time...that doesn't mean that I think it's a bad paragraph, but the first thing on the page is seldom strong enough to carry the tale.

The moment that the spring turns to summer is easy to miss. It isn’t like the switch between summer and fall; that is, less of an instantaneous change and more of a gentle slope into a haze of leaf smoke, ghost stories, and apples. The change from spring to summer is mostly an internal one. A defrosting of the mind and the lifting of the green bud fog into a different sort of haze. One of heat shimmer pavement and emotional languidity It only takes a moment to step from one kind of seasonal drunkenness to another, but you never notice until the change is complete.

2 New Poems in InstagatorZine

Two of my poems will be appearing in Issue 12, coming out this September.

This is a great litmag out of my home state of NJ. It's available in some shops (check their website for specifics) as well as via ebook and mail order.
Instagator Zine- Issue 12

Monologue To The Flies In My Kitchen

Now, I want to preface this by saying that I am a reasonable woman. I believe in live and let live, but there comes a turning point for all that. A point when you say “You know what guys, enough is enough.” You’ve been here, evolutionarily speaking, for a long time. That’s great. But generational history doesn’t necessarily mean rights. I think that since you only live three days, and I’ve been on god’s green earth way longer than that I inherently get more rights. That may not be politically correct, but it's what I think.

Now I’m not saying I have it rough or anything. In fact today wasn’t particularly bad. I went to work, got mad shit done, I hit the gym, hopped on the subway. I even stopped by that little green-grocer I like. Got some really good produce. I was excited to get to my apartment, make myself a little something, maybe watch some TV, and go to bed.

And then I walk through the door.

What the hell-ass is going on here?

It looks like Beelzebub himself is having a kegger in my kitchen with all the demonic spawn. Who the hell do you think you are? Buzzing around like you own the place! Unacceptable.

The fact of the matter is, evolution aside, you’re disgusting to me. You are a harbinger of disease and torment. You feed on shit and refuse, which confuses me, since I bleach the this place once a week before my mother comes. So really guys, what are you eating? And additionally, and no offense meant here, you’re ugly. Though that isn’t the crux of my Goddamn ire. Roaches I hate too, but they can survive a nuclear war so I gotta give credit where credit is due. You can’t survive anything.

Which brings me to where I am now. Standing in the kitchen with my groceries.

You guys have made a grave mistake.

You are going down. Every last one of you. I am going to the bodega. I am going to buy supplies and then I am going to hunt you. To be frank, you are getting in the way of me making a delicious meal in the comfort of my own home. And that in my opinion should be voted a cardinal sin by the Vatican. I look forward to that meal all day. The crafting of something delicious to eat should not be sullied by the concern of some vicious little poop eating vermin flying into my food. That makes me ticked off. Like, really ticked off.

Now I like the environment. Maybe I’m even a closet hippie. I recycle, I try to buy green cleaning products, I may even be a vegetarian. But don’t you dare think for even a millisecond that I wouldn’t use the most vicious poisons imaginable.

Because I will.

You see, you all made a fundamental mistake. I can’t cook with you all buzzing about in the air. An Italian woman’s kitchen is her personal temple, and you are trying to degrade it. This kitchen isn’t just a place to cook food, it’s a bastion of safety, warmth, and nutrition. You have sullied that. You must be dealt with.


Oh, and I am not just going to put up fly-paper. That sweet sticky stuff that attracts you and then grabs you, makes you struggle, maybe ripping a leg or two off in the process. I’m gonna make sugar traps. Sweet wine glasses half filled with honey’d water, covered in plastic that you crawl into but can’t get out of. So that you drown in that which you desired. Dante Alighieri would have loved that shit. Then I am going to spray all of you with the aforementioned poisons, just to be sure. So that you get delirious and drunk and eventually fall to the ground, twitching and convulsing. A death worthy of what you are.

Here’s the kicker. I am going to catch one of you before all this happens. Put him in a jelly jar and make him watch the flyocalypse that is about to occur. Then I am going to release him onto the street, just so one is left alive to tell the tale. After the contorted horror on that second-to-last fly’s face, he will spread the story to all your disgusting brethren. My name will be whispered in garbage cans city-wide. Maggots will have nightmares of me as they munch through rotting flesh. My face, seen through compound eyes, will be synonymous with insectoid horror.

Fear me.

-from the notebook

Genuine Wild West

Yay. I'm art directing a New Jersey western out in May's landing.

not special / just unique

I had only lived in New York for a year, and in the streets of the city the faces are starting to melt together for me. So many times I have just stopped dead in the street on 5th avenue, the blur of bodies moving around me, thinking, knowing that I’ve seen an old friend pass by. I’ll sneak up and get a closer look and then realize it’s just a variation on a theme I have come to know.

Upon my first meeting with friends from Vermont when I first moved here I mentioned this new phenomenon. One of them, who had grown up in midtown, said that it was just part of the sad truth of becoming a city dweller.

“Everyone” he said “starts to look the same.”

I was taken aback by the statement. It seemed so negative in the grand scheme of things. Though I might have had similar thoughts, I had been coming about it from a very different angle during my time here.

More and more during my short time on this little hurtling orb of ours I am struck by everyone’s lack of specialness and everyone’s beautiful and precious uniqueness. Let me explain.

As any misfit teenage boy who’s read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club will be more than happy to tell you: “You’re not special.” They’ll say it with a sneer and probably do something adorable like skuff at the dirt with the toe of their enormous sneaker. If you get the chance tell them that it’s true, and that it’s beautiful. Because the thing is, inherent in this startling lack of specialness is the reality that we are not alone. Everyone you meet is fighting a battle. Fighting to make a living, to fix our broken relationships, to get to know our kids, to find God, to forget our past, to remember the names of the people we’ve wronged, to figure out how we’re gonna pay for school, to tell her we love her, to take the first step to sobriety, to take the first step out of the house in fifteen years, fighting to find a reason to fight anymore until the fight itself stops being a fight and just becomes living and everything is so overwhelming you wonder how we can even take it anymore and we wonder why people aren’t screaming in the streets and we marvel at the fact that gun metal ever grows cold. And then, when we least expect it, somebody says a kind word, or holds a door, or holds our hand, or trims our hair on a rooftop on a Friday night. It makes you so happy that you just start being. For a whole couple hours you might even just walk when you walk, just eat when you eat, and laugh when you laugh. And then it starts all over again.

Every time you’ve been on the subway and felt contempt for the people around you, someone else was also contemptuous. Every time you thought you were alone you were swimming in a sea of sameness. There is no escape from the great unifier of the human experience and it’s one of the greatest gifts that we receive.

You’re not special, you’re just unique. That uniqueness is your birthright and your curse, the fact of its existence does not elevate or denigrate you. It just simply is what it is. It took me a year of this city to have that lesson ground into my heart. Like a bittersweet mantra it reaffirms itself with every walk down an avenue or rocketing journey though the subway system. The faces may blend together but the people themselves still seem real to me. The city, a coral reef, and all of us building our lives around us. Lives and missions that are somehow simultaneously shells and billboards. The sounds of the city speak it to me: You are not special, you are unique. Love, move, work, play, sleep. And again, and again.

The Kids Are OK

By now I’m sure that you’ve heard about my generation. We’ve grown up hearing that we’re all special and now we are uniquely unequipped to deal with the harsh realities of the world. You’ve heard that we’re technologically addicted and we exist in a word that is increasingly physically cramped and more and more spiritually and emotionally isolated. The beauty of info-share and the slavery of the baud rates suffuse our lives. The newspapers have told you that we’re happy to pose and preen and pretend to be either corporate or counter culture but we’re really just riding on coat tails. That we are too concerned with the creation of our own separate “public” selves to cultivate a private one. I will admit that I have met my fair share of shallow people, but they don’t seem to be limited to the under thirty-something set. There are people who certainly believe that for them the rules do not apply. However I think that it has more to do with the fact that these few (yes few) are crippled by their own hand. Mostly, I am surrounded by people who are desperately trying to do the right thing in a world that is changing so rapidly that the older people that we would have followed don’t even know what to do. Sometimes we are forced to move blindly, and that can look like floundering to some people, even if at the end of the day we’ve moved forward after some sideways shuffling. People forget I think, that this is an untrodden landscape. That the end times have come and gone and that this is the world that we have to forge on our own. And there are no straight answers. And there are no straight paths. And that being a settler in an alien terrain is dangerous, especially when you don’t know what to pack.

Here is my list:

Bring your ideals
Bring compassion
Bring practicality
Bring patience
Bring hope
Bring vigilance
Bring strength
Bring spirit
Bring humility
Bring stewardship
Bring energy
Bring self evaluation
Bring love
Get down

.move.

Scrap