[goodgravity]

My Story

I have horrible things to say to you Id rather take the bus Id rather be broke nd live at my moms m petty nd success is the best revenge when I strike it rich youll suddenly feel differently about me its not jealousy I dont envy anyone anymore I dont miss anyone anymore flood my DMs so I can crush each one of you like a bug its not me who lives on the internet if I so much as see you smile at me I am lifting the thickest cockiest arm unlocking the longest finger and mercilessly unleashing the longest string of slurs I can yr convinced liberalism decency love understanding are the underpinnings of some idea you have of how society works you are a smile nd a nod i will demonstrate what runs New York is me I will show you society

[stayuptight]

[stayuptight]

To accept to gain favor? :/ :| :( ( ;) )

[stayuptight]

A tells me about his friend who holds things over him. He has a money issue rn but he doesn’t want help from our friend B.

B holds things over people in a way, it’s not easy for her to have you reject an offer.

I’m excited to tell him I agree with him, not because the news is good, but because I’ve felt guilty feeling the same way.

I talk to B later that day who asks about A, does he need any money.

I tell her that he does but he’s not comfortable accepting money from her right now. She asks me why, ‘I thought he needed it.’ I tell her a white lie I don’t know. But then my conversation with A is fake now, not because of the lie or because of telling her something A told me privately, but because if you look at the past conversation from the present honesty, the situation in the past is entirely different.

The future can change the past as much as the past had changed the future.

That’s a fucked way of manipulating you. I just introduced the suggestion that because the meaning of the past is different than the future that it might be more important.

It’s not.

It’s not healthy to think this way all the time.

This might be introducing a whole lot of paranoia.

[stayuptight]

I’m not dumbing it down

I’m dumbing-up a lot of genius ideas.

[stayuptight]

Trying to make things more interesting than they are is actually a huge waste of time.

It will drain you of your energy.

[stayuptight]

Conquest Urge*

CHET BAKER HUFFING A GAS RAG Born to feed Born to thrive Born to breed Born to die

II.

Who’s going to love without asking you to drink their Kool-Aid?

III.

Ask me what it means. Like you could ever forget your purpose. The scent of your breath on my skin: it all rushes back to me, like Chet Baker huffing a gas rag.

IV.

Fuck your abusive parents. You’re perfect. CONQUEST URGE the unenlisted drop outs in drag half-faggot deserters need a place to put my conquest urge apparently it is not gay sex. here I am after his cunt is gone and you could bottom out here all sanity like a shanty child in some back alley miracle my life has brought me to my cradle to be lulled, finally, into the warm blanketing hands of flawed self-love eyes wide open screaming to see blind as a bat a vampiric youth in your old friends glow a makeup fuck w no makeup an apology to the ones you buried in justifications. Mirrored in intellectualized drug use. II. Because, yeah, of course you fucking miss me and I missed me too. I’m holding my hand now, wailing, like that wounded animal I was but bleeding bleats and untamed whild savaghe the animal you want to poach but whose beauty haunts you like some ragged angel bite my heels and try to drag me out. We’ll talk but you can’t keep me.

____

These poems were originally published online at Expat Press and will be featured in Your Aeon.

[stayuptight]

Amerikoans II.

It’s an okay song [for a girl to sing.]

                                                 becoming a better me for me.

becoming a better me for you.

becoming a better me for me.

becoming a better me for you.

(no petals left.)

                                              "I feel like you have to be dumb to be that in love."

"I’m that dumb."

"I want to be dumb."

"Everybody wants to be that dumb."

"I’m dumb."

                                              People making money to do things that they end up never being able to do because they’re so busy making money to do things that they end up never being able to do because they’re so busy making money to do things that they end up never being able to do because they’re so busy making money…

                                               Stability: by definition, inflexible.

 Inflexibility: by definition, maladaptive.

 Maladaption: by definition, extinction.

 Extinction: by definition, forever.

 Forever: by definition, the apex of stability.

 (Forever never ever ends.)

                                       Selfishly, someone to look inside me.

              someone to [want to] look inside me.

[stayuptight]

Nature 1*

“I’m scared of the ocean.” I said, looking mostly into darkness at the irony of a glowing cherry bobbing through space.  She walked closer to me and gruffly plucked the cigarette out of her own mouth and blew down.  

           “You’re a pussy is what you’re telling me.”

           “I’m not a pussy! The ocean’s God!”

           She stuck the nub of her cigarette back into her lips and untied her shoes, almost falling over in the sand.  Here from years of change.  I had no evidence that the ‘what goes around, comes around’ concept of karma actually existed, but in birth in birth-and -death, you find sand.  Sand is the result of broken down stone.  Same as cliffs eaten by the salted teeth of waves. Eventually sand would die, to be born a different sediment, hardened, back into stone—the resurrection. Everything on earth works by itself. It feeds itself.  It recycles itself.  It shifts it’s contents into perfect balance, one wave at a time. Animals like us would evolve eventually to gaze not at the navel but into the womb.

She was running down the beach now, just past the line drawn where the tide would crawl up. I watched her walk in, towards the horizon, where I stopped to stare at what wanted to be a reflection of the moon over the water.  It’s light rippling over, the way T.V. static moves, waves plucking their heads up to catch coast, breaking in series, whiter and larger, emerging from each other, multiplying like cells, dying on impact.

I untied my shoes just to barely let what I expect to be freezing cold water by September under my toes.  It’s warm—it’s easy.  I feel myself anchoring in even as waves eat sand out from under my feet, the shape left, smeared like oil pastel of a print.

Looking out again, a girl turned, smiling my direction, letting waves beat at her legs.  I smiled, feeling salted air across my face, peeling away pretense.

           I’d once read that looking at the horizon was a dopamine release, physiologically proven now, not just a natural fact from the experience of crushing absolutely all remnants of the urban perspective through sight alone, that a life alone might be 100 years, outlived by some tortoises—outlived by all roaches.  Our problems are small—the mind makes itself bigger.  But we’ve built cities as replacements in hopes we might feel the same.  Those cities filled with readers interested in the incentive of looking at a horizon.  The opportunities we have to debunk every natural wonder in hopes of it revealing its truth, so that later we can bottle the feeling.  So that later we can sell it back to you.

           I stared, straight on, at the hard line.  The details blurring, into murky midnight blues.  The rushing feeling of the sound of waves filling you.  In sequence, surrounding, one ripple after another, the hands of wind sounding out, like one long breath. I don’t swim, all life comes from the sea—the sea is God, he giveth, he taketh away.

___ This piece of fiction was originally published in the now extinct Metazen.

[stayuptight]

Portrait of A Successful Girl*

PORTRAIT OF A SUCCESSFUL GIRL:

 Independent when fed,

call the shots,

pull your own weight.

 I’m your anchor drowning,

 blamed for being myself.

 You

will be

washed ashore

four years older,

with an older

man, and—aspirations

ground and

scattered like dust—

 Hourglass:

you slip through your

own cold fingers.

�02��0�q

____

THIEVING

 Can never be certain

what she’s feeling

 even when her mouth

opens

old thoughts

like treasure.

 I wonder if I am

greedy.

 Share greedily,

speak greedily,

hear greedily.

 You can only

give her so much

 before she starts to feel

full

and

robbed of herself.

��1���

____ These poems were originally published on a now extinct magazine, Whole Beast Rag.

[stayuptight]

Nostalgia is A Masochist’s Regret*

One day you’ll call me.  You’ll be the first one.

Walls will freckle in artificial suns by the time it takes you too.

I will get an ulcer from all the thoughts of you I drink at my desk.

I will fill notebooks with thoughts of our potential only to be disposed

of after hidden like jews under the hardwood, if hardwood could fit

a person—in a choice-illiterate Utopian society—

and I had a reason to hide you.  Or someone to hide this refuge from.

Embarrassed by the sheer act of will it is to keep you in my memory as

opposed to my childhood—

must have replaced it with you, and how you make me feel.

All the best parts of forests and baseball and skinny dipping instead

of showers, and fireflies on the walk home, and glowing war paint from

their guts,

and you were like school to me, in the margins of an education.

Hoping that the stars on one night would be swallowed up by light

pollution, and pollution pollution—Los Angeles is a good place for

people who want to die.  You’re the girl I write my wills to, my suicide

notes are in your mailbox.  All my sappiest truth drips from it.  Bled

out into your ears with all the strength it takes to put a cigarette out.

[Under your heels, on the sole of your boots, on the soles of your soul.]

And I know you’re older—and you’re even older now.  It’s not just that

the world bows to that walk, or that Marin is either meth or empire and

you’re neither—and that fucking slob you called a boyfriend—

you were so tired of being what makes a man lucky.  You can count on

me. I’ll love you like every man before me never could.  I’ll make you

wish—follow me—if even with your eyes.

Then you can point, brush your thoughts over me with a white finger, call

me out, a wonder, and ‘how bright’ I am and ‘how fast’ I’m gone,

you can wish, you can pray on me with your eyes and watch me

reigning down just one more time, like a nest of hungry hearts, your

party will chirp slack-jaw-awe down to the blonde one, Dee—

and you’ll send me all the drawings you promised me and you won’t miss

me the way I hate you now, anymore. Okay? But I don’t hate you.  I hate

the way it feels to miss a stranger.

U�0�K�S

-----

This poem was originally published on Housefire.*

[stayuptight]

ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR ART

right now feeling out of touch with the full body usually I’m really tight but have been drinking a lot of sugar eating a lot of sweets, had ice cream last night that I was so convinced was going to be burnt off by a long walk, I walked like crazy, I biked like crazy, I am blown away that I do not weigh significantly less, wonder if I need to eat EVEN MORE

today I feel really stupid–not ashamed or embarrassed, but that I’m actually a little lazier, a little more easily annoyed, that people are less enamored by my energy, and that people can recognize a sort of spoiled mediocrity that’s emanating from a little patch of fat, it’s not quite fat, I can’t tell exactly what it is. It has an attitude, I’m carrying it with me, this morning I was arrogant to my mother, kind of snide, but a little more on the stupid side. Not quite a jester more of a jackal. I have this sudden awareness of how important it is that I’m tight. That I stay tight in order to be who I am as a person. if I am not thin and dog like, I start to get out of touch. Being thin and dogged allows me to better respond to my identity, body has an identity, falling out of it means it’s not responding to itself very well. Everyone has a body-type that I think might actually be a part of who they are and it’s different.