Captain's Log

#devinhamilton / writer & artist

[sleepin]

[mrs-alicejones]

Disposition.

[mrs-alicejones]

The greenery on my walk to the cemetery. It is provoking to see this sort of flourishing in this season of death.

[poetryriot]

Free Will & The Chain

I pray and play and bleed for her,

Break and snake and crawl beneath her

I starve for her

  My madness dresses her in roses

My fear tends to the path below her feet

I will be king and you will be queen

I was king and you were queen

  I make and take and sing for her

I shift and rise and level for her

I paused

For you

  Remember?

The sun threatening to burn your edges

I dove

Descending from my conquest,

A falling star escaping the firmament

Carried you to the shade of an oak

And decided to keep you

Or

Test my ankle against steel traps

A consequence

Of blood stained wings, cracked cartilage

And desire

  I decided

To

Sear, and strain, and stay for her

  Medicinally dedicated

I shudder, and howl, and wait

[mrs-alicejones]

Thanks to Poetry Riot for publishing my poem. You can find more of my words like this here. 

-Devin 

[mrs-alicejones]

Just me, my little pink bathroom, and the blood of my enemies.

[mrs-alicejones]

The Taxi Driver

I transported a lady with the lost beauty of youth from a performance. She tells me it was a sold out show called ‘All Life Can Be Seen In Our Children.’

“What makes a good show?” I ask.

“It must linger in memory” her drunken slurs whisper at me from the back.

We ride in silence for a time after that. Wheels churning, wheels un-churning, stopping, pausing, moving, we make our way to the destination. I was being paid to move. I live in a world where moving is necessary. I’m moving clockwise every night; if I moved in the other direction no one would pay me for my moving.

We arrive and she’s left her purse and wallet at the show, but everything is okay because she has a gentlemen friend in the building she calls and he says he will come down and pay for her. I glance into my rearview mirror and notice the lady is almost asleep in the back seat. The glittering black dress that was designed for marvelous younger woman is hoisted around her knees in what I am sure is an offensive manner to the millionaire who designed it. Her head is leaning on the side of the car, eye lids closed. Then suddenly her friend is walking down the steps of the front entrance and towards my car, he reaches an arm through my open window to shake hands.

“Thanks,” he says, “for getting her home safe.” He can tell she is drunk from outside the car.

“She’s consumed by a distorted view,” he says  handing over money as the woman makes a dramatic departure out onto the curb, “but it makes her the life of the party,” revealing a great complexity about woman.

He steadies the woman on her feet.

“How was the show?” he asks.

“Fabulous. It had me experiencing sensuality and disgust equally,” she tells him. The woman twists in her friend’s grip and turns back to me. “I think you should have your car in shows, it would be marvelous, so bright and pristine.”

“I might consider it” I tell her. She takes a good look at me while her man friend holds her straight.

“There is an ease to living in this part of town where others aren’t allowed.”

“She’s talking about her apartment,” the man quickly explains, “she’s just had a decorator redo the entire place, and that is exactly where we are headed right now. Good night.”

“Goodbye” I say and I start spinning my tires against the pavement and head out toward the streets. This is what I love about being paid for moving. You help put the world back together in some way every night.

[cinderelladotcom]

[mrs-alicejones]

cohabitation

[mrs-alicejones]

[mrs-alicejones]

Oscar Wilde’s Outsider Philosophy

Phrases and Philosophies for use of the Young, by Oscar Wilde, is one of those pieces you dig through the book shelf to find when you feel as if you have lost something that cannot particularly be named. In it he proves that not all philosophers are old men who have had their heads sculpted into slabs of marble. The ones who truly have insight, who can inspire, are more often than not men and women who have been punished for their convictions, men and women who probably know how to have a good time. Living in an era that was overly concerned with correct civil propriety Wilde eventually found himself on the butchering table of English society. Throughout all of his work he demonstrates how standing apart continues to be necessary. Too often people become ceaselessly lost and dulled by the wave heading for the horizon. Putting too much faith in an agenda takes the fun out of life, and turns off the mind. Enjoy tonight even if it doesn’t help you tomorrow, enjoy yourself without a particular motive, learn and grow without a reason. Re-evaluate the designated path that has been entrenched into the landscape. There lies the damages, and broken bones, of everyone else who forgot to take a look around, and that road has always been heading in the same direction. Here to offer encouragement for the outsider, one of my personal favorite devils, the pondering of a highly intelligent beast posing as an English gentleman.

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young by Oscar Wilde

-The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

-Wickedness is a myth created by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. 

-If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.

-Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

-A really well-made button hole is the only link between Art and Nature.

-Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.  

-The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

-Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance. 

-Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.  

-In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. 

-If one tells the truth, sooner or later, one is sure to be found out. 

-Pleasure is the only thing one should live for...nothing ages like happiness. 

-It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes. 

-No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.

-Only the shallow know themselves. 

-Time is waste of money. 

-One should always be a little improbable. 

-There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon. 

-The only way to atone for being occasionally overdressed is by being always absolutely over educated. 

-To be premature is to be perfect. 

-Any preoccupation with what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrest in intellectual development.

-Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

-A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it. 

-In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer. 

-Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body. 

-One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.

-It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.

-Industry is the root of all ugliness. 

-The ages live in history through their anachronisms. 

-It is only the Gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

-The old believe everything: the middle ages suspect everything: the young know everything.

-The condition of perfection is idleness. The aim of perfection is youth. 

-Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure. 

-There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful procession. 

-To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. 

[mrs-alicejones]

Corridor

Eternal summer exists in the mystifying shadows found inside the coiling inner tapestries. As fragile and important as a lone flickering flame on the portentous shores of an empty night. Serving as the beacon that ignites the watch tower, calling the menacing, leviathan sea. Mine. Those days were mine, belonging to me, and so did I. In one sun drenched afternoon I lived entire lifetimes in the strangest of corners, places we now ignore. We, a feral gang, would explode into the echoing hallway of the apartment building, feet beating the cement floor ceaselessly. Wherever, wherever, surpassing past the endless night. 

By Devin Hamilton 

[mrs-alicejones]

To die wild is not an accomplishment; it is galvanic resonance, inside, full, creeping continuously to each little particle with the intention of a fluid wave swelling through and sweeping over the top of the damns and the borders of the little lives living separately inside shoulder to shoulder. Natural and slow when you stop attempting and take a seat on the ripped couch to listen to the purr, growl, carnivorous steps deep, uninterrupted. Lay lady lay, the kill comes shortly. 

[nefer-nefer-nefer]

[mrs-alicejones]

Spending a day with my own version of the classics. In homage to one man that created noise I can reconcile with. I still have bruises from the first time he hit me.

[mrs-alicejones]

[mrs-alicejones]

New Years In The Attic

I think I left it in a public bathroom. That must be what happened. The mattress has been overturned, all the corners inspected with a flash light, I got down on my knees, rubbed my belly on the floor, searching, searching, searching, and every back pack and purse has been unzipped and gutted. Hell, I even found my favorite purple lipstick in the bowels of my grandmothers red crocodile clutch. . Losing my glorious black leather bound notebook has tested my awareness of my own levels of possession. Fuck, my girl was beautiful. Stiff as a brick with a spine that worked like hinges, overlain with an inky black overcoat that never once rippled or tore. Her pages consisted of a simple cream with a grid, instead of lines, dissecting the soft thin paper. She was all dominatrix on the outside and spring within. It was love at first sight in the aisles of Target.

Once, due to my own carelessness, the backbone ripped down the center separating the guts from the protective coat. I employed my father, an engineer, to surgically stitch her back together. He sat across from me at his kitchen table, pausing the glass of whiskey moving towards his red lips, my soap stone rocks clinked inside his glass. He eyed me, suggested I buy a new one. “That’ll fix the damage,” his jovial laugh came out as he washed down his drink. Relating the bond I’d created to this magic book to the one he’d carried once upon a time on his sailing trip to Africa, I convinced him to take up the project. Apparently, all it took was a special glue running down the spine, and a night under a spring bed. 

It has been perhaps three months of saying ‘yes, yes, she’s gone’ to myself when I stand in front of the bookcase and my muscle memory points my eyes on top of the geography books where she use to sit. The turn of the year reminds me of the contents I placed inside that I lost. It was around this same that I sat at my favorite wild coffee shop with my familiar notebook flipped open on top of the scratched tables. The bustle of business men, artists, and gleeful non conformists hummed around me and, hungover in more way than one, I penned myself a list of 15 goals for the new year, the amount was in homage to the changing digit on the calendar that year. But before I did that, I bent my head forward and whispered truthful secrets to my black notebook. The thought started as a consideration of the entire social phenomenon of setting and almost immediately forgetting fanciful wishes, year after year. 

“What is your New Years Resolution?”  Intention is a beautiful concept. Inspiration is a necessary driving force. Crafting plans and recognizing the measures to accomplish is what can make the difference in elevating a person to their next level. I do not scorn the process, nor do I defend it, because -as is most often the case- these processes are neutral in and of themselves. It is the morality, ethics, and motivations applied to any concept that skews it towards white, black, grey. 

Two scenarios play out like a broken record. The, first is the popular tribal notion to be reborn. Current practices shy away from fire and death, though. The clock strikes, the numbers shift, and inward millions of people lustily whisper now with glassy eyes staring up at the clock. They have planted a foot and marked a spot to either metamorphasize into their intrinsic self that has been denied to them, or change into the person they have desired to be for too long dammit! Their battle is identity. The concept of the self evolves and updates, but it never overturns all the way to the foundation, erasing the past. Believing this is possible, and more importantly awaiting an inception instead of finding one, orchestrating one, is to buy into the ultimate scam, to sip on the poisoned kool-aid of Egypt. 

 The second, is the commitment again to change, but this time in the physical realm. Do you feel bloated after the holidays? Becoming self conscious about all those Christmas cookies, carved ham, sugary cocktails, and the deprivation of the out of control proportion of decadence you willingly partook in when we told you to buy it? I bet your blue jeans feel like a blanket of shame when I show you an exotic toned beach babe. Well, we have a new solution for you to pay for. If we can’t get you to directly pay for it, we will still manipulate your emotions and self worth because, fuck, this will still indirectly help us to get you to hand over your money. 

 An interesting modern phenomenon is occurring in which people publicly lie about their desires. Suzie says on facebook: In 2016 I intend to graduate from college with new experiences that I will remember forever. Translate this and really, Suzie wants to experience cocaine and have a thrilling experience to relay one weekend when shes brunching. Scott instagrams an iPhone photo for his followers that reads “This years I will run out of pages in my passport,” a pair of leather shoes and a bike can be made out in the background. The thought that truly dwells inside of Scott's mind is running away from the guilt of making excuses at every turn, and barely spending more than a day in a half at the apartment of his dying grandmother. She left him a travel fund. Scott gets upwards of 300 likes. Betty snap-chats a photo of her pink running shoes with the caption, “Already at a great start of having a healthy and happy 2016.” She spent $350 at Nike after 15 minutes surveying her own naked body in her mothers bathroom mirror. When you translate any of it there are only three New Years Resolutions. I don’t want to die. I want to be important. Fear is an enemy.  

Now, the picture I’ve spelt out feels like a blue toned Picasso piece hanging alone in a dark deserted museum with the security guard jacking off in the Greek nudist exhibition to the left. But when my pen worked across my black notebooks pages, the tone was anything but. My lover and sister were sitting around me laughing, my latte was hot and delicious, I felt swollen with a serene sense of accomplishment putting this idling thought into action in my journal. Remember, also that although I started off inside her pages in my cynical way, that I followed it up with a giggling hypocrisy: I preceded to create my own 15 New Years resolutions. Our planet completing a loop around the sun is pure magnificence, I think Christians say miracle, a real reason for Animalistic, balls to the wall, champagne spilling celebration. The problem is that it has become another smoke guard, another great marketing accomplishment. A new way to keep smart peoples attention on the superficial and spread this like a disease. The common cultural phenomenon of designing a New You each New Year is not evil, but it is a one hell of a trick, the important thing is too make sure you have the last laugh. Do not take the whole thing too seriously. 

 I closed my baby girl confident she’d be here for this moment with me. Ending those New Years thought, for the first time, I penned a little loving intention just to her. I told her of course that I was well aware it was more than likely, perhaps even intended, that none of the 15 goals would be remembered or accomplished , but that I couldn't wait to open her a year later and laugh together at them. The one distinction, I put it to her seriously, was that I completely planned on getting a magnificent hat to crown myself a pirate king. I told her not to be jealous when I became attached to that as well. Well the hat is here, but she is not. Its sitting on the chair next to me and looking at it I can't help but wonder if my pirate hat will make it to 2017.

[mrs-alicejones]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Pag-NPJE8

SOUNDS OF PLEASURE PRESS UPON MY COLD EARS AFTER THE SUN HAS HIDDEN ITS BLUSHING CHEEKS. THIS SOFT WHISPERING OF AN OLD FRIEND REINSTATES A WILD CRY. I WOULD BE NOTHING WITHOUT THE MAJESTY OF WINTER AND THE OUTSIDE.

[mrs-alicejones]

Remember?

I’m all about a little bit of pale surrender

too many white lights and not enough cunning conversation 

melting in the corner of the room 

not entirely, 

because my body floats to places I didn’t give it permission

lips pressing around secrets 

a mouthful of pleasure 

[mrs-alicejones]

Aftermath Blues

Shivering on a cement ledge as the remaining raindrops patter on top of a closed lid of a metal garbage across from me, and siren pass by, I light another smoke. Brown leaves are stacked on the edge underneath my boots and the wet fence my back rests upon is decayed and cracked open two space to my left. I don’t like the scurrying of noises I can hear seeping from this hole; flashed of the raccoon I encountered dining in the graveyard from an early part of summer wash across my brain. I’d rather not find him maneuvering about my backyard in the biting cold of winter. No happy meaning could be contrived if he sent one of his desperate paws through the underside of the open part of the damp brown two-by-four. But I sit without stirring. because this outside wind is too damn intoxicating with its mean, cold, kisses. Three pens lie inside my pocket, but none bleed correctly on the sorted page I dragged outside with my weary bones. What has it been? 45 hours since I last slept? 29 hours since my flesh pushed back upon my skull in submission to the tirade of a colorless gust of cold. I did it. I met the soulless deadlines, cemented from my vantage point like a marble God only able to offer endorsement. Yes, I do believe my lungs will inhale all of this cold promise they can get. I can’t say I allowed myself to waste away on a dark winter night, it was a pleasurable greed dripping down my spine that locked me at the center. 

[mrs-alicejones]

"Submerge" Devin Hamilton