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I was in Colombia while reading Muse & Drudge by Harryette Mullen. I went there for the RBD concert, and to spend a long weekend with my longest friend, my cousin Santiago. The combination of physically being in Colombia and the book's impact on me really got me thinking about the direction I want to take in my own work.
Until now I haven’t been super political with my work. So many topics feel like they’re not my place to speak on, while the ones that are I tend to mask behind prosody, and a young voice that obsesses over being metropolitan. Yet the idea of Court Jester poetics is so intriguing to me, and I did write a poem after finishing the book, albeit in Spanish:
Me arde la espalda Marica
De ver tanta gente en bola
ComiéndoseAquí las cosas cuestan tan poco
Que me abro de patas al ver
Lo tanto que me pidenQue les diga Hello
Hello…Contigo hay manera de saber doler
Colombia. Hay veces que no tenemos
Que hablar ColombiaSolo decirnos que más que hubo
Cuanto tiempo corazón
Si nos habláramos más a menudoTendríamos menos por que parcharnos
De manera tan linda…
Sos tan linda
Que me brilla el cuello cuando llego
A tus poquitas
A tus ganosas
A tus nubes chimbas
Llenas de incendios y chivasAl final veremos cuanta plata te toca
Ya que de que sirve tomarse un guaro
En el Peñol si tu vierasCuantos pendejos quieren
Comerse tus buñuelos
11/2/2023 (Jala Jala Poem)I was trying to memorize this poem while I was there and my cousin had to bear the brunt of listening to me repeating it, but he actually told me he thought it was hilarious. He is not really an artist at all, and doesn’t know much of my poetry because he can’t speak English, so through this poem he was learning my style. Through the conversation we had about it, his conclusion was that: “I see, you want to be funny, but political, but not actually ironic with your poetry.” Which I let him believe, but I actually would have never described my poetry like that. I would describe Mullen’s poetry that way however. In the poem above I used so much Colombian vernacular that it carried the “humor” of the piece, yet the topic is of the push-pull of immigration, and it is very direct, with zero irony. There’s a kind of street artist in Colombia called Cuenteros, which translates to storytellers, who are essentially guerilla style stand-up comedians, who stand on streets or in small stages in parks to tell humorous stories for money. Growing up, there was even a TV show a la Saturday Night Live that had competitions for these Cuenteros. My cousin compared my poetry (this poem) to their style.
Because their goal is to make money, their stories are seldom outwardly political. Yet their style is very much Court Jester, making fun of themselves, MCs and people in the audience. A lot of the times they wear extravagant costumes as well:
Colombian culture is so heavily language-based, which is part of the reason why I believe I am drawn to poetry so much. I grew up in a culture where attention spans are a little longer if you know how to speak well. There are thousands of metaphors in everyday conversation, people appreciate big dictionary words, I’ve even noticed that tik tok influencers from Colombia trend towards making long skits and monologues that are heavy with language, as opposed to American content which peaks fast and ends fast.
Thinking back to Mullen’s use of vernacular speech to create dynamism, sometimes humorous but mostly staunchly political, I see a way to link the youthful voice I have with a cultural marker that can produce more political commentary in my work. The alignment of the readings, the poem, and the conversation with my cousin was very enlightening, as I tend to get lost in the insecurity of “can I speak on that?” or “what does that way of speaking/ writing have to do with who I am?” Yet here is a part of what I grew up with that I can feel comfortable claiming, the voice of a Colombian Jester. Now I just have to find that voice in English… If I can write the Colombian Jester version of Muse & Drudge, or at least just the following few lines, I’ll be a happy:
Devils dancing on a dime
Cut a rug in ragtimeJitterbug squat diddley bow
Stark strangled banjo
11/8/2023 6:40pm
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Ridiculous that I should spend all this time with a headache. That I should miss anything. That I should console myself with writing. Ridiculous that I should avoid certain streets because I’ve seen you in them, after the fact, which means that I’m invoking you which is ridiculous. I hate getting close in the first place.How long has it been? Not long at all you might say, and I’ll run up Hancock St. to off myself. Then what do you call the ten people that I’ve been, one of whom was cynical enough to summon you?
You are infuriatingly good. I am the cold North, and you are South. When we lived we always raced, and never ate, always drank, never fucked, never talked, just exchanged all the eye contact in the world. Then you asked me if I’m real,
But it was me who was obsessed with your silence, manic about it. Does it make sense that I would text you so you wouldn’t respond? Just nod me into existence.
We let that last silence push us out of the compass rose, and I ridiculously have no way of knowing you down there.
Is there ever any noise in the South of our world? Are there berries, or thoughts of me?
Maybe my mistake was giving myself up in the first place, because I tried to be a part of your space. I understand it’s not alluring when they want you, too, but that time I had a nightmare I was so embarrassed that I pretended to sleep while you held your forehead to mine. As if the antidote to torment involved breathing in your air. As if it was an emergency to calm me.
I only think of you in perfect ways.
I had never been absolutely nice to anyone before you.
My memory of you is independent of me.
Just that we shotgunned beers made a fire broke and entered never ate never fucked snorted coke to read poems to hear poems to hear music of which you knew the best of--
Ridiculous that I should remember anything else. At least to the south there’s always Rockaway Beach, if in our compass heaven we shant meet.11/9/2020 8:50PM -
Oh no, you shouldn’t be, not skimpering across obvious lines: this is the heaviest place to have me, under the sun, toasting like an almond. Wouldn’t it be so Mayakovsky of me to speed Future into loving you America, but you must go?Future, future! Exactly the movement we needed, the right kind of trampling. Postmodernism killed the revolutionary, made us culture-obsessed, popularity obsessed, drowning in Marilyn Monroe. We’re sick of it, the New-Contemporary Person has the bronzing of turmoil over their eyes, because the sun is easier to forgive than a bastard institution.Down with the discourse on originality, on irony, on the fear of metanarratives. We must have epic poems about activists, or else, how else are they supposed to become legends? We must paint their dreams, and put them on Broadway, and let them decide what the revolution looks like. Otherwise our kids might think that insurgency looks like Peter Doig…We need a Black Lives Matter aesthetic, an LGBT rhyme-scheme, an immigrant opera style; Otherwise, the revolution will always be political, while our culture continues to write in the Jeff Koons and Damien Hirsts into the textbooks of posterity. We can’t just have laws, we must have myths for the revolution to stick.FIRST we must end the cynical idea that one must either be entirely original, or painfully obvious with appropriation. This pandemic has taught us that it is possible to share the same experience separately, anywhere in the world, and we don’t have to find new ways of saying it. Our voices are stronger when amplified, and we need to see a pig eating a dove painted a thousand times more than a man with an umbrella on a clear day.SECOND we must legitimize artists' collectives and create more of them. Artists and writers must not be afraid to look up to each other, or intimidated when others wish to build on a style that they created. The only way to achieve a movement is communication, and if someone tells you oh man, I want to write just like you then you should teach them without fear. They will never write just like you, but they will write the way you do, and together you will be the Future.THIRD we must align our politics to our art. This involves writing manifestos, explaining that I photograph this way because of democratic-socialism. You and all your people must be vocal, and educated, and in constant awareness of what the other is publishing. This way when your art ends up in a textbook it can’t be separated from the revolution, or the other way around. This way our kids will never idolize a $58 million blow up balloon dog, or a social media makeup brand. Art must be inseparable from politics, or else the culture will forget when the influencers regain the spotlight for their Dolls Kill ads.This is the obvious line! That of galleries and auction houses, of pop songs about break ups, and of fashion brands that only make clothes. We are taking over streets not just to leave with marks on our foreheads, but to eliminate the celebrity, and make of the New-Contemporary Person one that actively creates its legends. No more TV presidents, rapist production houses, or leaked pedophilic black books listing hundreds of the world’s creators of culture!We must demand that the activism of our time be legendary, not reduced to silk screens in five colors, or two-paragraph blurbs in Social Studies textbooks. We must not let those in charge obscure our need for a revolutionary culture.We must let go of universality, which blankets us with false notions of safety, of easily digestible pop music, of shitty polka-dot paintings and homogenous Celine ads. We must expect more! We must do more!We must build a cultural revolution, and end the long-overdue Postmodernism, and its famous-for-money celebrities that then go on to believe they can rule our nation! Future! This America must go! Future! Future!6/15/2020 7:07PM
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Avert death, if death is near help us to advert it, I beg you to look upon me with good eyes so the world will be favorable to me, may they not die young, avert death, protect me from death, when I kneel may it be that man has agreed with my opinion, or I am lost, but not dead, advert death, OKOnly to not have forgotten the beginnings of Your-- Only to have the shit beaten, kneeled over, OKOK… I am lost within your aversion, your protection, my hands are up to make more room to breathe, so that I may receive your protectionSo that you may be favorable to me, and avert death if that is your opinion, may it be so or I am lost, or I am dead, may it be so,May it be that I make it home, death averted and with no eyes upon me, and may it be that when I kneel there is power,And may it be power that brings my knees to the ground, not hatred, and that at home I am in no need of your protection, exactly so,Or I am dead, but not lost, that if death cannot be averted may I not be lost, and that the world is favorable to me in death,And may your eyes then look upon them with goodness, and advert death, and may you let them live long and see their hair turn white, and that they be black,And if you are near may they not be lost, or in need of protection, may they breathe even with their hands down, and not have forgotten the beginnings of Your--Let them live long, and see their hair turn white,And may they be black,And may they be young,And may they be lost,May it be so, may it be so, may it be so.​6/3/2020 1:50PM
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I’m definitely meaner than I’d like to be. I don’t feel the need to apologize because it’s most imperative that I follow my emotions out to their absolute edges. The way this plays out always involves some impulse on my part to expand my private life, as if the bigger it gets the deeper my thought process. And it makes sense: if I’ve had to experience something and that which I’ve felt gets buried until bloomed relevant again in a poem; then it is the process which becomes malignant, then therapeutic, then the sole commissioner of the work. But this work is not about the process, rather about what it isn’t, which is only you.First I need to explain the nature of grand gestures on paper: it was so dizzying to see your body not in-my-mind. I couldn’t hold you all together enough to make you visible. Because it’s not easy to digest a body that only feels soft and firm, when it also feels like Summer got an accent in Pays-Bas. My hands needed to make you.I think you exist only to convince me of how impossible I am. I can’t stand me. But it’s fun; remember that one time I felt so hard that a meteorite fell from a building onto our bench?Maybe I’m supposed to believe that showing you all the things I’ve ever enjoyed is unfair to me. What if you like them too? Talking makes me like things less, and I’m a bitch for that.Even now I am writing this to not text you.Because you are too big for me.Because I’ve been sending letters and I don’t have the right stamps for you.Now the business of the world is slow, so slow, orbiting air and huge swaths of sea. I can’t pretend that I’m distracted, or lamenting, or out skateboarding to the beach. One after another a family of birds visit my window and I form grand relationships with them, to see if maybe then I’ll want to draw them. Mostly I don’t, and they just sit and pose while I get out of hand:Oh baby! I lost my pen and the room is on fire, just a kiss will do--Resentfully they fly away. One time a cardinal flew right in through the netting doing laps inside the walls, spinning dives, and landing axels on the ceiling fan. This one I drew! I swore, and my neck was so horizontal that I tried to hold him in my hands but the room wasn’t amusing enough.Fine, you dumb bird. I have you down! I have you where it matters.But back down on the page my hands had made you.Could it be that if I told you this I’d have lost the poem, senselessly venturing out of the process into an apathetic grudge? No, noAgain,ThisIs about you.Which is the opposite of myself in confidence which is why I’m telling you about it05/06/2020 6:45PM
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Dying before everyone I know prevents me from suffering. If it’s so sensible to assume that because I breathe I should respond to illness with fear then why can’t I? Every object in my house speaks moronically about me. I must be made of indifference, of apathy for gore, of no one knowing me at all; And I will set my face against you:Everything looks like a movie in a way in this face-masked world of Spring. Beginning with the Hero getting his hands covered in air-dirt from opening the front door of his building. Prophecy after prophecy predicts his demise, but this hubris is a lot more simple: all it is is going for a run. The sky must descend anyway; first, it is only the front of the ankle that warns him, but he knows better than to believe that he won't get used to the pain. To reach his park it is all cemeteries and cars creeping up to the sun, trees not yet green behind flowers, and how he runs that interminable hill--No one else runs at the park, people just lay under the reverb of branches rubbing in the wind. What difference does it make? Health is no longer something that happens outside the home. The Hero doesn’t care to breathe better, he only speeds up to beat one day his time mark, which falters every time his feet go unused because of rain. He reaches a sharp corner on the lake and smells it again, smoke rising out of cremation (Every time I’ve smelled this smoke there has never been a procession, a conversation heard, or even a face-mask littered on the grass after soaking up tears. One time the scent was so vague that I prayed for the person to get out of it alive. Then I knew that the corpse was me, a conclusion which I came to later on that same run, which led me back down an empty street which no one lived on, on which there was a minivan exuding black smoke from every seam, which I didn’t notice until I was directly next to it, which was a minute away from exploding, which did explode a minute later, which led me to beat my time mark that week from sprinting), smelling like stillness feeding green into the trees.The Hero now looks up while running and it makes smiling so easy. This is it he presumes, he listens to the warnings of his lungs molting off: He accelerates to the speed of breathing everything at once, the air-dirt lines his body in a rage, that which consumes the eyes, and causes sorrow of heart. Then flat! He falls onto the ground, and rolls down the path onto a patch of grass where finally with a stranger he can watch the trees consume ashes from the smoke.But even in the safety of my home, it’s disarming:You invite someone in to break the edges of the room with some teeth, and what can they offer you? Asymptomatic liquor I suppose, undetectable weed, and such nice hair-- At the end of the day there are no lymphatic shields, just pills to avoid taking other pills, just medical certificates to prove that not this time, and your smile to their smile to simply smiling that this life could be worse, it could be the 80s, it could be fervently political, and terrifying, and everyone’s business. Luckily this time it’s not, this time being Spring all they did was drag dry leaves into your room.Then even further in, where I’m not translucent enough to show you:My doctor won’t allow anyone in my body anymore. Not until this is all resolved. You see, man oh man I am a man whom man still enters, whose nice is splendid and monitored. The truth is, I’m growing a child and we can’t have some dog poking his head. Look, look, let me explain, it’s more effective to despise the thing in silence than give myself a hard time. One after another I amwhat I am,sure, notnervously enough,just laughing it off,however, strength is volatile: haven’t you ever been so heavy that the ground drums slow beneath you? This is exactly what I mean. Once, during the rainy season I fell into a creek of tadpoles with my burgundy suit on after trying to pick them up with my hands. It was sweeter than I imagined, the rain warmed the creek so that it felt the same as lying face up in the grass. So I laid there with my black children sticking onto the linen until my brother walked back up from the lake, and when he did we just laughed off, and I rose, and the tadpoles scattered silently over the grass.Oh man! I should not suffer. Could it be that I am to be afraid that my plants, too, will turn against me? I overheard the hamper cough sickly from my sweat so I put my headphones on away from death and so it is, that even in illness I should be outstanding--​4/23/2020 7:40PM
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A terrific confusion has taken place! Look out your window, could it really be? The sun is something you see with your skin because it hurts your eyes to look on it. Of course I think about confinement, fear of my own fascination for large crowds, every day I wake up in pain from deep sleep. Could it be, could it really be? That growing trees indoors keeps them from breathing--Today I’ve managed to say good morning to God and saw Him take revelry into himself and his angels. That’s fine, oh sure, once during a happy wine-tequila blackout I swam in Jamaica Bay and don’t know what I saw. I woke up in my bed smelling like its fish, and it was so that waking in my own bed felt like cornering a legend behind verity. I’ve lived my VIP days.Thus with such enlightenment I’ve come to tell you how it is that we are approaching it, THE BEGINNING. You see, I am not confused. I am delighted! Inspired. Waning between the Earth and their party. Who cares, let the angels have Paul’s Baby Grand. In this BEGINNING there will be no room for mortals vs. spirits, or my good, his bad.Here is how it works: Deciding whether it is sensible to breathe on someone is no longer in the realm of prerogatives. What I put down as purpose is the purpose; I can’t determine how warm my white is without the blueness of you. However, listen to this,O drumO mythO toilet paper and hand sanitizerThe symbol is wasted on youI am pleased to be the bearer of good news. You don’t have to wallow, why, when the trees outside don’t need you to bloom, nor the sun need your skin to know it shines. Nothing needs you out there. In the end even the pain and solitude of the whole world won’t cause it to stop spinning. Now we begin to see the terrific dust we are, and how well God cleans up after a party.Ah, leaves. Green which green will be, sick and losing pieces of lungs we’ll be, soft be, no longer in need of disaster be. Every day I run 6 miles in preparation.Turns out I was right, the quasi-Romantic bullshit of internet poetry would breed our new Modernity. Look at me! Look! I’m ending the world as we know it. Now we’ve all been forsaken, confined, depressed if that’s what you call it. Now stop. Now look at God partying without you. Now look down at the cat down in the courtyard, what does he think? He doesn’t need you. Now squint your eyes. The tree branches look like they’re growing from his fur. A hundred long, thin cat tails reaching for you. Reach out your hands, reach them, and then say you fell down in a poem. I’ll read it.Tirelessly enough, O BEGINNING. There are no days where we are. Just artificial lights, just plain water, and bleaches to clean with. To further plagiarize Carlos Williams:There is nothing ! Emptiness stares us once more in the face. Whither ? To what end ?Surely in isolation one becomes a god. Can we just move on? At least one becomes something of everything. The pictures in the room know better than to arouse me now, when I’m drenched and naked. It’s not immature to believe that this is in the end what it looks like to be dead, in your room forever.Today on my run I saw the ominous city covered by a red sheet of sunset, nothing happening. I know that to be distant means seeing things from afar, whereas seeing them makes you jump, and heave, and scream I’m here! O City, O magnificent capsule of pulmonary lepers, here! And I came back to my window to wait for the cat to catch a bird, then process it, then sleep next to it under the tree.That which is the purity of art: nothing extraordinary about you, my friend, even Peter Thiel is on our playing field now. Now the clean branches that the wind blows move sexual, or paranoid, or kaleidoscopically, and everyone sees it. Whither? It ends,Surely now you’ll stop, and the cat that didn’t think before now sings your songs and you don’t know what to do about it, except smile, except push language forward, and tend to your trees who want to breathe outside more badly than you. Now you see the terrific dust we are! To what end? Nothing needs you, but if you say it striking it ends--4/2/2020 2:16AM
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I think it’s time I regained consciousness and rebelled against the eye-sore of The Symbol. I actually have nothing against the butchery of humanism, I’m a firm believer of lying for the sake of poetic justice (and to avoid confrontation). Yet, the way you see me has nothing to do with a harmonious interaction between two mutt-dogs. It has to be complicated. It can’t just make sense. You must make me haikus about the moon when you know it really doesn’t make a difference.I try to avoid the second-person because it lets you get away with never naming that said person, but I’m putting a commanding foot down this time. Loading up in case I have to kill you in the name of Vorticism. Which you hadn’t heard about anyway, which spun too fast for your taste, which didn’t wait for you to see the landscape in its title. Here’s the thing about The Symbol:I know you’re realExcited to beThinking. With force.Exactly how do you pretend to know something real about me? Remember when I dressed in all green and said it’s the color of money, and trees, and weed. You said and envy and I almost knocked your teeth clean. Instead you let me laugh as if I’ve ever been jealous of anyone. Now you’ve told me to stop using the word ghetto which to me means just don’t speak. You see why I won’t name you.Apart from the vivacious center of the body where else can you feel from? You see, my feet have the greatest perspective. They love most places they stand on. With force! In Bushwick where the moon lights up the gravestones like lanterns between evergreens, we hear the dogs all present around us. It’s intense, isn’t it? There’s more significance in a leaf blowing in your window than holding my hand up to your chest.Okay, now the subtlety of Image makes you sad. I know you’re real excited to know someone like me, as if we’ve mastered an outdated way of locking eyes when speaking. We will convert Jeff Bezos if possible. A Vorticist Amazon? Why not!I’ve taken control of the situation. Closed all borders to deceit. My teeth are small like they are small, but I am still famous, and young, and confident in my speech. It doesn’t make me angry to mature into one spinning world after another, in fact it is most welcome, as I can so balance on my feet that they seem to float. That is not The Symbol speaking, as a kid I learned twelve ways to fly.Exactly how do you pretend to know something real about me? It’s all an act if you look at it with measure. Want to see me do a haiku? It’s cursed:BLESS the libertyOf Man to write in meter.Even if it sucksThis is the Absolute Metaphor. One where you can’t interject in my vers libre, or in the thick black lines of spirals on canvas. Oh we will spin, Sir Jacob Epstein! Like Sun Gods on a rock in a plain damp night which is the blood in a Garcia Lorca. Yes, and at the end of the week you’ll be cast off to live out any colloquial expectations on a low-lying table, with a dog that barks in rhyme and your 5-7-5!3/12/2020 1:11PM
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Even before I could refuse to accept an American identity I had already been blazoned to be black, fit and young. I like Nadia’s family, I do, as much as an Inca warrior is supposed to enjoy a family of industrious German-Jewish émigrés joining for dinner on a massive circular table in the penthouse of a tower in Belgrano, Buenos Aires. The room inflamed every time the thunderstorm drove a ray into an adjacent building, at first we cheered but after a while I sat out on the wrap-around balcony to blow cigarette smoke into the clouds.Honestly, it was a little odd. Eyre-ian even, no pun intended, just Berthian, mad-woman-in-the-attic half Inca this time, this time an alliance between what? Corn syrup and steak? Good thing it was sushi we were waiting on for dinner.Then Nadia’s cousin’s boyfriend came out to speak to me about free verse because he heard that I had studied poetry in college. Apparently rhyme-schemes were still a thing for Argentinans, or rhythm had resurfaced, I don’t know. Were they talking about me in there? He was definitely Italian. He started naming poets with Germanic last names who wrote in Spanish and I just let him speak, compared a thing or two to Borges because what else was I supposed to do? Being strong and tan only means I can work the land. Being smart in another language does not conversation make, and how the hell was I supposed to know what iambic pentameter sounds like in Spanish?I wanted to have sailed into the Rio de la Plata myself while eating dinner with the Berendorfs, but having trailed down the Andes from its northernmost point only made me more of a mountain person and a drifter. Metropolitan that day must have meant light-skinned and tame, and exaltedly speaking on abortion. In New York we can abort is all my opinion was, so I said something about Spring Awakening which was dumb, or too modern for their taste. I can’t make out an ignorant chuckle from a Nazi one.Stutter after stumble after fuck up, the blacony’s many doors were closed and rattling from rain. I looked at Nadia and all I saw was the perfect goodness of the world, not spiritual, not resolute or looking for candor. Could her family have believed that because the dollar was so high I’d consume her? I couldn’t possibly have talked about the economy: can you imagine? Every week the peso goes down I go to the supermarket and get us a salmon. Or the first day I was here we bought a brick of weed sold it in a week and rejoiced!Every time my Spanish failed me I’d look at Nadia and she would say what I meant with as much passion as if she had lived it herself. I was too full to be drunk, and the conversation kept going. Her patriarch uncle sat in this stunning red Eames throne, jumping his feet over the ottoman into all the circles. Her dad was humbler, in a soccer jersey, jeans and never looking out the window. I still think he was proud of the idea of a green card marriage between his daughter and I, imitating my accent and hugging me instead of the customary single-kiss. His sunglasses business depended on the value of the dollar. Then Uncle Berendorf turned to us and said All the kids these days want to go to America to make a decent living, I could see thunder hitting buildings in Puerto Madero almost 10 miles away, at least she’s in good hands.Good hands? I looked at them and they did not respond with gratitude, just darkness and strength. I thought about Quispe Sisa, princess of the Inca Empire, being married off to Francisco Pizarro, the main conquistador of Peru. I thought about the Conquest of the Desert, Argentina’s genocide of native tribes. I thought about Nadia holding my face in her hands and telling her cousin He’s American but obviously he speaks Spanish, just look at this Latino face. Good hands, good hands, and on our way back to Almagro I composed this poem In Good Hands:Gah! Tremendous apartment!Once daytime fills the wind withLight I’ll see you all warm!Not blue with thunder.
The inevitable penthouse floatsAnd the guests look down at the liceIn the head of Buenos Aires--
What sushi to fly 18 floors up! WhatSimple order to button a shirt and talkOver wine when the dollar is up. No,Down. What really is the difference;
Inevitable! Someone must have it,I think it’s lovely to sit here withYou all and share a laugh and talkAnd smoke and talk and play no music--
But through the night I have lessTo say! If my voice won’t txsch enoughI might never see a sunrise overBelgrano, and just be myself
That loser, that bus-taking heavenlessInca, whose one night in the cloudsBrought rain and no treaties with my people3/5/2020 1:46PM -
In part it was my fault for coming out before him. Diego and I both knew I had it easier, my mother (his godmother) was a black sheep that married a white man in an international family because she knew that way she’d get away; his dad (my dad’s cousin) wasn’t from the enterprising branch of their family, but rather the missionary one, marrying my mother’s most devout sister.The way I see it: my father is an atheist longing for a daughter in Spain he couldn’t raise, with a latent fascination for femininity. His father still isn’t a pastor, gifting bibles after every conversation he has. Our mothers now are essentially the same.As a kid, Diego and his sister would take turns, six months at a time staying with us in our big house in Queens, carefully maintaining their tourist visas. But the whole point of being international is to speak English, isn’t it? Some weekends he would lock the door of our room. I was six and he was twelve the year Shakira put out her song Whenever, Wherever in both Spanish and English. We’d play them on a boombox and correct each other’s pronunciations, while moving our hips in circles, obviously.It’s not that Diego and his sister wanted my parents to be theirs, but that our blood was just so almost the same that how weren’t my parents theirs as well? My brother and I saw it the same way. We shared the same families with each other as we did with them. The same heights, hair color, skin tone. Diego and I were both gay.Still, it was my fault for coming out first. Diego and his bracelets, those frosted tips, bright after bright jean my grandma would say to me when Diego was a teenager. I thought he looked like the attendants at MoMA PS1. Grandma says you look like an anime character I remember telling him once on a night I slept over at his house in Colombia, you know, the popular one, sometimes mean but always hot.In many ways we wanted the same things out of life: grand metropolitan lifestyles worthy of being written about. Athletic bodies, impeccable hair, soft skin. Both did the little fashion thing for a bit, which he stuck with. In many ways we lived parallel lives.For example: the last time I saw him I was 19, and I flew down to Miami where he and his sister had permanently moved to. I went with my boyfriend at the time, a Colombian with identity issues. One night they came over to our hotel room with strawberritas and a man I didn’t know. We all got drunk and high and even drove around Miami at night for a while. The man was never introduced as anything other than a friend with a car and the connection to weed. He was also Colombian, with a haircut just like Diego’s. I think Diego also dressed him— my boyfriend, and his, liked the way we looked too much to want to look like anything else. I could tell it bothered him, too.The next day we drove in the daytime, just Diego and I on the highway from downtown to the beach. The wind blew in through the windows. The sun came in from the roof. We played Shakira and looked exactly the same. It made so much sense: I also introduced my boyfriend as a friend.When I came out two years ago it was just a formality, everyone in America and Spain knew because they didn’t need me to tell them: so I just said it to Colombia because it was a Wednesday and I was getting bored. You’re ballsy Diego messaged me when the word got to him a day later. Love you.It wasn’t courageous, really, I was just sick of being third in line in that family, waiting for two older cousins to come out so I could write about whatever I wanted, even in Spanish. Maybe I came to resent him for it. But it was his place, he was supposed to be the trailblazer, not the martyr of escaping-to-America.A year ago on this day I was desperate and drunk covered in charcoal crying over a sketch pad on the floor. It dawned on me that I had no siblings, no parents, no cousins. It was just me and a magnum bottle of wine in the quietest apartment in the world. The darkest. The deepest in the ground. Everything I drew had hollow eyes and lived in smoke. It all pointed a finger at me. Page after black page.But then I did what I hadn’t done yet, I wrote his name (what had I been so inconsolable about, my own loneliness?). It turned a light on in the room. I stood over the huge pad, and maybe I was drunk, but there were colors undulating out to the edges. When I told my mom about this the next day we both cried, she asked me if I drew the colors and I did. Just like how he used to dress she said, That is God at work. I didn’t point out that the name looked like Die Go.Then I had this dream. In the first home my parents built together I sat at the dining table surrounded by all my cousins as children. Oh man, it was sweet, shit being flung around, the round table perfectly receiving the sun through the skylight like it always did at 1pm when I lived there. I remember lifting the dust with my shirt to make the room beautiful, and cool. Santiago and I shared a chair, I blew dust, he glued shapes into a notebook. My brother sent cars flying to hit the wall. Mateo sent the cars to hit my brother’s. Laura drew with four markers at a time. All our older cousins, but one, sat in the living room.Where was this fabled last cousin? It didn’t matter. I could mold the dust with my hands at this point, which I sculpted and sculpted, standing on my chair, into a curly-haired bust of fiery glitter in the sun. Whose head was it? It didn’t matter. The cars disappeared when they entered it. This beautiful man-head felt like the end of my own life, like perfection has this deep grain, and decidedly bright edges. I reached higher to sharpen the round nose, but then I slipped—From the back of my neck like a kitten Diego caught me and lifted me into him. We were silent as we looked at each other. What was there to say? That the world never recovers from the loss of great men? I couldn’t figure out how to bring him back to Miami, because when the dead are in your dream it is always a visit. Just silence, stillness and silence. Then he held his hand under my chin, and from it grew this grand cookie. I didn’t understand. I didn’t want his legacy, or his energy, or his blessing. I wanted him in Miami one more time after I came out. This isn’t mine Diego, I know I said to him. Die! Take your cookie. Go! He assured me that gifts aren’t yours to begin with. I ate the cookie, so warm and magnificent it almost tasted like flesh. No part of my body grew for him, not even spit, but maybe it didn’t have to-- I still had my hands. I climbed onto the table and the bust still stood. It’s yours Diego, it’s yours! But when I pushed it out of the sun it disappeared. He was gone, too, and I woke up feeling so sick I puked.2/20/20 10:43AM
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I’m hellbent on the tip of creation. This is exhausting. Out of the blue isn’t what you expect when everything around you is in flames. Watch this:Into you into you into you you you--Je m'appelle SoleilY me encanta.Thoroughly though, just breaking things into different dimensions has never been productive for anyone. I see the way the sky looks when the gas prices get above 4 whole dollars. The week after Sandy it looked like Calder spun the cars into Astoria, and hung lines of people from the Speedway. I don’t drive so it was sweet.Am I supposed to know who the market for my hands are? The things they make. Salut, Je m’appelle Soleil et ce sont me mains. Voilá!Sometimes when it’s warm outside I scream in desperation. No one looks at me.I am unreachable.Sometimes a car is louder and I don’t compete. The lights make contact with my teeth. Brooklyn wins.It’s wonderful, isn’t it? That a crosswalk can be the space between two open arms. Sometimes it receives me, most days I j-walk from an elbow to a hand, unloved.I’m hellbent, yes, fucking furious. I don’t care about anyone wanting to love me, all bullshit, all inflammatory, all a sequence of intolerable determination. Then again, again and again, it’s you, it’s you, it’s you you—Maybe my market looks like an episode of Mad Men, stuck in the 60’s diadem of Modern culture. The one time I watched that show was in Buenos Aires, and I repeated the accents for my friend Nadia because it made her laugh. My Kim Kardashian is better.Now you, signore Fontana, hatch me up! Please. I hate it here. Only the wind blows. Je m'appelle Soleil, vos odiaste Milan, on a canvas I could be your art. I’ve been everywhere you’ve been.(I want to be sliced open and framed, a la Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, in case that went over your head.)“Marry a writer,” oh Kenneth Koch “but don’t tell him your secrets.” I want to go where Park Avenue flows, directly into a building. “Marry him late, when your balls don’t work.” In a yellow cab straight into the MetLife, “your hands are all he’ll get from you.”Me encanta. We’ll blow up into the sky and hang from it, be Modern, be angels, be red and black circles; these are my hands oh lord, it’s you—Despite this, it’s delusional to assume that I have a stance on generational poetics. Nothing is beyond me. Nothing,Even a hurricane can take out the sun, you see, and spoil it.I’m under the impression that it’s finally my turn to be the disaster:This is a formal announcement of impending implosion.Of cynicism in the name of Spatialism.Of Poetry.Of hands making unhand things.As little contemporary as possible. Less than little. Just me with some dirt nails and the secrets for my epic. This is how it starts:Canto I...2/14/2020 6:43PM
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From the second I got off the bus in Puno I knew I’d be unamazing there. I only chose it because the bus to Copacabana was full, and still I waited hours at a bus stop for the morning route in case at night the roads were too dangerous. I shared the other end of my big soft backpack with an older Quechua lady who at some point rubbed my prickly bald head in her sleep. We were on the floor, and I almost held her hand; black mountainous cold around us.There were no taxis or trolleys or even bike cabs, nothing, everyone off the bus just walked in all directions. I followed mine along some train rails to my hostel, white people everywhere. I almost believed they didn’t go there. But it had me thinking, what was there to do in Puno then? I knew there was the lake. And I might score an Inca vs. Spain chess set for cheap.My dullness first showed when I walked to the boardwalk that afternoon. In the sun my head glowed, in this part of the world it was usually my height that got to them, if not my accent, if not my camo pants, if not my army hat— come on. Nothing was working. No one even looked over. The ice cream lady didn’t even wonder if I was Venezuelan, or Brazilian.The water catches light with reverence in Puno, two lake hands together in the sky receiving the sun’s heat. Every color belongs to it I hear the Titicaca say. Each one. I found the perfect bench to sit on, near a group of kids playing soccer in the marshes, so close to the water that I watched just to see if they’d throw the ball into the lake because maybe then in the cold one of them would swim for it. There were two brown horses in the marshes too and they played very softly, pushing their side-heads into each other’s bodies.Yes, yes, this is what life is about I thought, the high, masterful lake reflecting the sky back into space, hiding the kids in its folds horse after nautical horse—“Ah! No! Jueputa! That shot was so close!” A man about my height in half an army uniform had been sharing the bench with me.“Hey, you’re Colombian?” I knew the answer already.“Oh shit, yeah I am. What ship are you on? I haven’t seen you at any meetings yet. For a second I thought you were one of the Chileans.”I just stared at him with nothing in my eyes. Maybe two whole minutes. I didn’t know how to even begin to understand what he had just said to me. In the middle of his second ¿Y, entonces? it strikes me that the army pants and boots might be for real.“Are you in the army?”“In the Navy, actually. But they let us wear army pants too. You’re in the army?”“No, no.” I let out a laugh like one lets out an I’m scared. “I am Colombian though. Thank you for your service.”Apparently, many of the South American countries station military ships and personnel in Titicaca to hold war games, training drills and other nautical exercises in this, the highest and possibly coldest navigable lake in the world. The lake forces light into space from its metal pieces, too.“Why are you dressed like that then?” I still didn’t feel like an impostor.“I don’t know. These pants are Carhartt WIP, which is ten times more expensive than regular Carhartt. They fit nice, and can handle me falling from my skateboard. And they’re also just cool, a lot of people where I’m from wear camo.”“Where you’re from must be the only place in the world that thinks looking like a soldier is cool.” He has a point. “Where are you from?”“Cali.” The truth didn’t feel right with him. “You?”“Florencia, in Caquetá.”“That’s like, the Amazon isn’t it?”“Did you fail second grade geography?” He crossed his legs and drew open his arms on the bench. “It’s close.”I know that in that part of the country is where all the things you think happen in Colombia, the coca cultivation, gangs and paramilitary groups, actually happen. No one from there just joins the Navy. So I didn’t ask any of those questions. But I started to think, why were we going back and forth? Was it having someone in your same clothes, with your same skin and nose, and same voice on your bench and having them be nothing you are? Like a good American I asked:“What are you gonna do, you know, after all this?”“All this, you mean, the Navy?” It sounded stupid when he said it. “Personally protect my parents’ lands. They own so much of it that the ELN hasn’t found a way to terrorize the whole thing at once.”“Well then, have some kids and build yourself a little army of your own.”“That’s how gangs start.” I couldn’t tell if that was a joke.“Right. In Cali the rich people have men guarding their properties with machine guns behind big walls and gates.”“Those are narcs.” Definitely not a joke. The tan of his face took perfectly the colors of the sunset, sucking it in. If I’d met him then I’d think he had red eyes. The horses still played in the marshes, not owned by anyone in Puno. Like the fish in the lake they ate, drank and lived in it, and when one climbed onto the other and stayed there the wind stood still too— until they started to run again through the grasses.“Parce, you ever tamed a horse?” Excuse me? “All you do is jump on them and try to keep them steady.”“I don’t think that’s how it works. I’m not doing that.”“Come on! Don’t be a faggot. Come on. Come on.”We ran to them, herding them to where the kids had been playing soccer. The marshes were huge once you were in them. He told me we were going for the bigger horse with darker hide, and to never get behind it. The horse was calm but running in small circles. We finally got on both ends of the horse, and walked toward it slowly with our arms open. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen then, what did we do now that we actually cornered this wild animal? Then he screamed ¡ya! So I rounded its neck, and shot my body onto it’s hard back. He landed behind me, clutching hard on my waist. The horse stood and neighed, jumped a little, trying to push us off. But quickly it stopped, and just faced the lake with heavy breaths. Their bodies were the warmest thing I’d felt since ascending the black mountains, so I just stayed there with my face on the horse’s neck, and his face on my back, until someone else was ready to move.“See, that wasn’t so hard.” He spoke into my sweatshirt. “Now you can tell the people where you’re from that a Florense taught you how to mount a beast.”“What’s your name?”“Danilo.” He put his hands on my sides to lift himself up. “What’s yours?”The night in Puno was purple, magnificent, like the sunset never stops pouring into the lake. I wanted to sit there with Danilo all night, maybe dip our feet in the water and have them freeze off, two soldiers injured by the battlefield and honorably sent back to our families. But I hadn’t eaten all day, and it was time for me to venture into a market.“Oh okay, well, do you have a phone?” That question would be offensive where I’m from. “Take my number. I have an Airbnb by the university over there. We could hang out after dinner if you’d like.”He put his number in my phone. It was a Peruvian number, so I knew it wouldn’t work once he was in Colombia. Our similarities, too, would’ve been unamazing in our country.At the market no one saw me but now that I knew why it felt powerful, I was a warm soldier swimming through mountain people trying to get some eggs. Some tomatoes. Some bread. I remember wanting to make the most boring sandwich.Back at the hostel a big group of them were watching the Bachelor. I realized most of the hostel was Anglo, probably British. I can’t tell most those accents apart. Three girls were in the kitchen while I cooked. I had my headphones in and didn’t care to say anything the whole time there, not even it’s cool after an excuse me. They sat together at a table, and I waited for my bread to finish toasting. I saw them look at me and then talk, so I paused my music and heard he smells like a wet horse. It was obvious they didn’t think I spoke English, and I felt sorry for them, how would their parents feel if they heard them speaking of someone in the Navy like that? I walked over with my plate and stopped at their table.“Excuse me, can I borrow that pepper shaker over there.” The proudest American accent. George Washington leading the Continental Army to Lake Titicaca. Their dumb faces moved back as I leaned my musket body over their food. “Thank you so much.”That was it, I just needed to cover myself in the lake to finally be amazing.1/27/2020 12:49PM
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Any dot outside this canvas is beyond me. The roundness of the world has flattened and multiplied, a river of colored marbles flowing downstream, photographed by a great bird. The wind must be on fire, my first thought, black is the outback’s desert-foam. Under what circumstances are painted dots not pointillism? I think the painting just called me ugly and stupid, it has set me ablaze, piece by piece each dot laughs the way the earth laughs when sweltered: in vibrations. They move! I’m shaking, you dimensional, breathing pale ball of hair--“That one’s an untitled,” the painting can’t speak in the presence of white people, “It’s one of her most important works, especially after the whole Hirst ordeal. I bought it before then.”Am I supposed to have an opinion here? The truth is, Damien Hirst is my guilty pleasure, and I can’t even pronounce Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Four consonants in a row insults my dandiness, and well, the painting did too.“He posted this picture from his studio while he was working on his dotted paintings.”“Oh yeah?” The Collector is old.“In bright pink underwear.”“How come?”Is an artist supposed to give meaning to everything the public has access to? This could get out of hand. Maybe I should compare it to a ménage á trois between Max Ernst, Paul and Gala Eulard. Or Chris Burden getting himself shot in the leg. Or Emily Kame, barely leaving her Utopia in the center of Australia.“I don’t know.” I have more to learn.I’ve been to three gallery openings featuring the solemn desert dots, lines and curves since Steve Martin The Inspirator discovered Australian Aboriginal art. During a meeting in December The Collector and I browsed the Sotheby’s catalogue for the first auction of this art in the US. Page after page of soft, geometric shapes and muted colors. Soemone ugly and stupid might say it’s derivative, and then something about Paul Klee.“Now this is Contemporary.” The Collector folded the corner of a page showing a black and white piece by Wentja Napaltjarri. “Now it is!”As opposed to what, the Arts of Oceania wing at The Met? But even that gallery leads directly into the Modern art, straight into Picasso. What gives?“Is Steve Martin on the board of The Met?”“Excuse me?” The Collector doesn’t look up.“Steve Martin, which one do you think he’s going for?”“Oh, probably the cover’s painting. But he keeps his collection so private. And never sells. Never compliments you for buying, either.”Standing in front of this painting, all red and orange and yellow and black, I’m convinced that Untitled is an indiginous word for Bushfire. It has nothing to do with Untitled (Surrealist Angel) by Salvador Dalí, Untitled Film Still #21 by Cindy Sherman, or the untitled poems by John Ashbery. Sitting at the table facing the painting, a bead of sweat enters my eye. Before it can fall into the stew I ask:“Do you think the fires in Australia are affecting the market?”“What do you mean?”“You know, the continent. It looks like a lightbulb from space.”“Oh, no. Did you see the auction results?”Sotheby’s sold $2.8 million, more than they expected. He was right, Australian Aboriginal art has entered the contemporary, gaining independence from the land that bore it. These artists, most of them don’t live, their paintings had no place in Utopia; they are to be curated, fire-proofed and in the hands of dimensional, breathing pale balls--“I got the one I wanted. The black, with fine little white dots, that made squares” The Collector gets his iPad out. “Let me see, do you remember?”“Yes, yes, of course. You called it contemporary.” Not a joke but he smiled. “What was it titled again?”“Hold on. Ah, here it is.” The Collector turns the screen to me, and the sold price shows as well. $22,500. “Untitled, 2006.”I was right! Black is the outback’s desert-foam--1/19/2020 6:51PM
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I figured I had all the time in the world to figure out what made my dick wet. Because, you see, when I started training to be a swimmer I was 9 and it immediately formed this intensity for bodies in my mind that couldn’t be explained off as attraction. My mom understood how much better my brain worked in isolation so she never forced me to work as a team and instead my coach’s bloated, marked abs decided for me the uselessness of beauty. It was the opposite of cynicism though, that this focus on my body and its delight as the water curved faster around me year after year meant that the need for affection only came to me near the supple, thin bodies of my girl friends, because I never worried about how fast they ran or how deep their voices.I was a bullet in a one-boy gun held by the Poseidon whose hairless body took me under his fin. Oh yes, maybe if I had been a water polo goalie I’d be straight now. But I couldn’t possibly have looked at another man’s body and felt safe, only resistant, and compared. There is nothing homoerotic about five boys in speedos all watching each other work out. Nothing. In fact, during the outdoor competitions I couldn’t stand to watch the other boys get slathered in sunscreen by their own coaches. We always had aerosol, and after the butterfly races when my skin burned and the pain melted the muscles off my bones, even then I only let my coach massage me a little bit; I knew it wasn’t sexual because it didn’t turn me on.You know, when you’re young, we’re all guilty of acting like the crowd does because it’s just easier to say oh yeah, that Camila came back from Brussels with her tits blown in even though what I felt for Laura fit perfectly on her flat chest. The first time I went to her house was after training because we realized she lived across the street from the Tequendama Sports Club, and we had to learn the choreography to Summer Nights from the movie Grease to teach to our dance class. I couldn’t tell if she liked me or if I was simply the only American boy who could move his hips, and maybe the song after 40 times just gets that sickening that we had to move the romance to her room, where she went around showing me the relics her parents sent her from all the countries they didn’t take her to. She’d only been to Venezuela, once, and said it was too much like Colombia. In there, she didn’t have to touch me to make me sweat, and when she did, it was with these colorful, scented markers; You smell too much like chlorine, I hate it. She drew banana stars on my arms, blueberry clouds on my stomach, and a big, strawberry sun on my chest. Man, for the first time I was wet there, not just hard. Then she pulled her neckline down where I placed my hand, and I traced it with an orange.After four years I finally quit swimming because it had made me aggressive and strong. The more intelligent and effeminate I got, the more the school counselor would call my mom telling her I needed to make friends with boys. The thing was, most of my friends were boys! They just would call me shit like marica and then dare me to kill them, and training three times a week meant that I could. I wasn’t afraid of them, this massive piece of crap Carlos always forgot that his fat wasn’t a shield and that if he was jealous enough that my legs looked buff in Rothko jeans, I’d make his belly button kiss his diaphragm.There was one boy in my class I never had to wrestle with because I honestly would’ve lost. Alejandro was the tallest kid in the class, and he had this muscular body, too muscular for a seventh grader. Unlike me though, he was docile and sweet, like a gentle giant. We got along inexplicably well, I would help him with language homework and he’d help me with math, he’d race me when the school’s pool was open, and his mom would sometimes pack me an extra sausage with his lunch. Some Sundays we’d meet at Tequendama and play any sport we had a ball for, but now I realize it was mostly volleyball, which we stayed in our speedos for after a swim. I don’t know if he looked at my body but I have to confess I loved his. Loved, not resented, or envied. One time we laid in the sand drenched in chlorine-sweat with our torsos drumming the sound of our breathless bodies, pointing at clouds. Each time our arms moved they touched, his sweat dripped onto my chest when he raised his finger, drawing cool lines, oh man, it felt like having a body I didn’t want as my own. Drying out in the sun like that made me realize that it was the pools that didn’t let me feel the wetness in my speedo-- so I quit. That summer Alejandro’s parent’s switched him to a German school to prepare for the recession, and I moved back to New York.1/7/2020 4:44PM
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While in earnest I can assure you that it is the butterflies who don’t return that hit most emphatically, in January I have stayed to perform for you. A missile lands on a soft dune in the desert, it does, while the Strait closes in on our curtain of blue dust whirlpooling its sweet oil.Uh-huh, it drives me mad to keep my white clothes on. The quality of the air is putrid, oxygen-rich and enough for everyone? Watch me throw my seed into the air,uh-huh.There.Where a caterpillar can mistake it for a leaf. Now for these clothes--It could be that the salvation of my soul depends on the Maker’s inclination to judge me against the virtues of my nation. How could a jacket be more than a pair of wings that die on your way south? I set it on fire, and into the air it goes.The thing is, I am angry that people have to die for me to have free 2-day shipping. In the end we haven’t figured out how to make blood obsolete, and bland shirts are exclusive to the culturalists behind the reigns of Agnes Martin. Thus, into the air it goes.Now the buds of my chest grow sharp enough to cut my fingers as I run them on my ribs with the delicacy of 10 bug-legs landing on an iris bloomed. It’s wonderful to drip when it’s my fault and the Maker can judge it, it, my own blood striping down my pants. Haha! Into the air then.It’s not cold no, just uncomfortably north. Couldn’t the butterflies return before the sand blew up and I am left here in the smoke of my own white clothes in a delirious dance of sweet, sweet oil? Amazon’s cotton is my underwear, which I deserve to breathe too.A missile that lands in a soft dune lands in the Appalachian too! And one falls in the Rockies, in Lake Eerie, and the Delaware River. I could burn my whole house and a caterpillar won’t grow, the air won’t be smoke, and my packages would still be delivered.1/3/2020 8:31PM
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I think it’s important to note the gravity of the situation. I can’t sleep with any of the men that attract me. Can you imagine me at 17? I invited over one of the fire fighters from my district because his bald head reflected the spring sun. Neither of us knew how young I was, and he thought I was the visiting-son of a woman who burnt her balcony roof over a grill. Ha ha, he was also a paramedic, so I waited for my dad to divorce her and for the house to be humongous and victoriously alone. It was almost summer then, and his station was only three blocks up the cemetery.Something about Queens you might not know: the streets look solemn, and two nuns might stare at you for smiling at them, but in the turn of your fence no one knows you. My whole life my neighbors were estranged, so were the park rangers, the cops, and the firefighters. So when I saw him while walking home from school I hid my backpack in a bush and said hello. Wouldn’t it be nice to drink something? And it was cool to drink sprites in a big house with no one in it, until my brother got out of detention at 6pm. I didn’t know what to say other than the hole was fixed and the furniture is gone because my stepmom took it.There were so many empty rooms in the house-- I shared one with my brother because we couldn’t separate so soon after the womb. Two bedrooms empty, living room empty, dining room, two bathrooms and a kitchen. There was a six-foot space by a window near the oven where he took my pants off while I looked out to the wilderness of the backyard, exactly the spot where my mother taught me to like ham in 2002. She waited hard until I ate it; He knew exactly where my face wouldn’t hurt pressed up against the window.Had he been there when I was seven? Could my mom have burnt arepas onto the breakfast nook enough to have her son’s round cheeks perfectly placed onto the curtain? My own saliva had his dick in me. I could feel my mom, brushing my short hair against the grain while he pulled my bangs, my brother throwing plastic things into dead Maspeth, my dad taking turns for his sons’ opposite games.I still can’t sleep with any men! Maybe lust is something for teens. Tonight I feel like massive love is against me; I can’t get out of bed for someone whose pants shape remotely like a penis, my face hurts slightly, Bushwick is only a block away from Queens. My window suddenly gets dewed at 5am. In Holland where the morning clears the street brick to stone my love awaits his blonde hair ending in the sun; I see each time he clears the sink of dirty knives because his window faces west into my room.Could he see me in that kitchen too? And a firefighter in the smoke gets the blessing from my mom. The government job is hot, never love someone on a visa; the sprites went flat after only two sips. I’m not allowed to sleep with any man my parents didn’t make space for in that big house, no matter how Dutch, with wings, or tulips on the bedside. Tonight I’ll dream alone in my brown bed, and in an alien I’ll hide everything that doesn’t fit in those Maspeth rooms, where my neighbors who don’t know my name know me fogging up the glass as a hand covers me in fingers from above.12/28/2019 5:20AM
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It was about time I saw the sea. In a life this distinctively silver, sometimes so green, it is the Atlantic that knows how to heal a disaster. Today I woke up early enough to see the bend in Miami, the horizontal light drawing palm trees on the walls, a christening of gold over the city. I can’t find joy in seeing this time of day: it is by an overwhelming someone-else that I can’t sleep, the beach hobos (Florida’s main attraction) lay undisturbed and dewy on park benches, the air blows too cold to swim.I am here for the same snob reason everyone else is. I wish I could say it is to listen to the Atlantic crash into foam from a cuban restaurant on Ocean Drive, but it is the first week of December. The warm sand is just inconvenient to a CVS run when you’ve spent four days in a booth, the art on the fake walls taste of tars and metals, each day the sun finds new places to hide.On Friday I took a detour while running an errand I knew I could use as an excuse for a long break. In the sun the blonde earth blazed, I was wearing this grey suit and black boots. I walked in the direction where people red polka dot the sand, I only saw white beyond my black bangs, there was the smallest ringing in my ear; a delusional gallery assistant dropped in the desert after an opening reception. Except it was impossible to sweat-- I felt trapped in this dehydrated skin, exhausted and deranged, convinced that magic bred inside the canvases and frames not the price sheets, not the business cards or dinner invitations. I hated the Edition Hotel! The Patek Philippe watches! Talking about tape on a fucking banana. Nothing was more profane than green until a wave hit my knees; I only saw two splendid, squeezed blues.Last year on Christmas day Queens felt more distant than usual. Had I taken the A train so far that my life couldn’t reach me? I realized how much I liked that. So please, get on your skateboard and go somewhere, for the love of God, anywhere. It was the magic that pulled me south, there was no cold in the new places you go to, all nights are bright, you’re not alone, just unknown. I only knew the bay in its summer green, and when I rested at a canopy after its first bridge I cried, I swear, and in the lights from the airport I faced glitter back onto the dark bike-highway.Could it be that I had been in my own delusion, that whole time? How when the stars are out they aren’t actually blinking for me. How none of this is inherent, and my body moves simply because I tell it to. What about the last bridge, the one past the boat houses and all those irish families, did it remember that for the first time in ten years I was crossing it? From it you can see the perfect black of the Atlantic. Whose was it, then? If the Rockaways can’t fit from teeth to teeth, and a woman picks up seashells for her husband on their beach; then I’ll lay there in the sand where the crabs feed, the foam reeks, and the moon will be the only one to know me.12/25/2019 6:15PM
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The world is better off when I’m in love. It’s not that I choose to be the light in a villainous situation, or that only your worst nightmares turn me on; rather I am sensitive to the hostile visions of the world, the ones that are too mean for you. Here is what I mean:At the Metropolitan Republican Club the masses flow the way rocky rivers do, surrounded by Antifa. What bullshit amount of attention to give old white ladies dressed in Lord & Taylor, but then I heard the protesters had a name mixed into their chants: Gavin McInnes. He was the reason we were there as well, so they recorded us as we walked in which I enjoyed, wearing Helmut Lang from head to toe. They tried to make us feel ashamed but obviously they read Vice too—The four of us sat in the front row of a mezzanine that looks out on the audience. The room was relatively small, while Gabby and I were big. You have to understand the massive pedestal we were on: two tall peanut-colored 22 year olds sitting on the raised thrones of Bohemia, the sibling royals of Egypt refusing to clap or laugh over a sea of Greek frat bros. Oh! It’s wonderful to drink white wine and disagree with everyone. We were actually so entertained. Every despicable thing McInnes said was a new thought none of our friends could have, Gabby fantasized about him doing something that could shock her, I squeezed my boyfriend’s hand after every joke so he knew I didn’t laugh because I understood.Even with a correspondent’s hand over my leg McInnes felt his act was threatened if he didn’t pay respects to his mixed-race monarchs.“I don’t think I’m very amusing to these two.” The world is bitter, “What are you guys, the wonder-twin Antifa spies?”Close, except we were too stoic for that. Everyone had already been laughing and looking at us anyway, so we held our chins where they had been, above everyone, and said nothing. She and I know how to deal with mean. My boyfriend’s hand let go of mine which turned me on.Two men below us wore those red MAGA hats you hate, well many of them did, but these two had to egg it on with fucking Antifa and a predator stare. One of them had prisoner face tattoos, the other one was a 2009 guido. As if we shared one brain we finally put our chins down to taunt them with our big black eyes-- our superpower, not moving a cell.The hour ended on a high note, the grandmaster Hipster blessing everyone as they prepared to belly the wind, his hand pointing to the door like a groomed Moses parting the sea, leading his Israelites into the mass of protesting screams. You could tell that for the whole time we were there they never stopped, it was us that they were feening to eat. And what of it? My logic was that of Rihanna dismissing her paparazzi. It felt good, but then halfway down the block my boyfriend turned around ready to engage.No one said anything to him, but I could tell he believed someone had. There’s such little depth in being a public figure, your mind starts to hallucinate this person you put out as real, as decisive. Most times it’s exciting but this time I just wanted to go to the afterparty and do K--“The train isn’t that way.” The world is cruel, “and nobody cares about you.”The way down from E 83rd street was strange, some of the Antifa protesters were also on the same car with us, two brown us are more to see than two white them. They didn’t hear us either, we even said McInnes a little; could we really be so safe?But then the next day we heard the news. 9 Proud Boys had been charged with assault and rioting for beating the absolute shit out of a group of Antifa. Pictures were released of the two who started the fight, their mean eyes unchanged but still weaker than Gabby and I’s. The world is good, oh man! I gave my boyfriend a big kiss on the cheek, because I was more powerful. Then a week later The Guardian: Proud Boys Founder Gavin McInnes Quits Extremist Far-Right Group. And so it was, the world was better off.12/3/19 8:00PM
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It’s not as didactic as it seems; in this life my biggest fear is that I’ll end without knowing everything. This translates to a fuming anxiety for ignorance: I remember the first summer of my childhood I spent with a computer. My curiosity about South American native tribes, present and throughout history, was relentless. I read what little there was online about the Muisca’s and their empire of gold, the Tayrona’s aggressions, the Quimbaya’s tombs. In every family library available to me I looked for anything about them, but it was in the house on the corner that I found a book of Amazonian myths. It was there that I became obsessed with the dragon living below the Orinoco River, sometimes seven headed, other times spinning the wind into the jungle. Hole after deluging hole I ended the summer reading Plato’s Timaeus conversations, to know Atlantis. Then the fifth grade began,In my history class we learned about MesoAmerican native empires. Every lesson upset me because I didn’t know! And I could’ve! I went east when I should’ve gone north. It was the K’iche who baffled me the most, and while the lessons moved south toward the Incas, I read the only translation I could find of the Popol Vuh, in Spanish, which I had only learned to read a year before.Most times I like to assume that everybody feels this way, but the same person who knows ten pre-colonial native tribes knows little about Oscar Wilde-- which is fair. Specialization wouldn’t let a podiatrist replace a pacemaker; but my instinct sees a foot like it sees a heart. This puts me at odds with others sometimes; it bores me to not speak. I’ve learned not to, and it’s lucid to learn something that isn’t for them.This may be the paramount therefore of me: therefore, I can’t end without being a creator of knowledge. How could that be possible if my brain just wants to research? I’ve always thought of a sponge here; it absorbs, yes, but it also exudes. Everything can be soaked in then let go, brand new! Oh man. This is why I study poetry, unlike anything else. How else do you aestheticize intelligence, the search for everything?A painter at my gallery is also a mathematician which is cool, but he can only paint equations. Another is an architect and he only knows destruction, or perfect uniformity. Picasso himself was bound by style, even if that changed a few times. Journalists don’t aestheticize, photographers don’t speak. But then you have Allen Ginsberg:“who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,”Only a poet could know everything! And we don’t have to speak— mouths can be so vile and in front of you, so needy for excitement when they can barely elicit a response. In a line, I won’t care if you understand the irony of Blake-light tragedy. I won’t know where your eyes are when you read it, if you’ve heard of El, if you can’t help looking it up.I am led to believe that language to me is the way it looks like on a sheet. I can draw, and print, and speak for hours if you let me, my voice is sweet. But I think about the great aesthetes of knowledge: Shakespeare, Breton, and Ashbery; worms doing backflips on their throats, and the grand possibility of them just being scholars, or painters— how many things today we would not know.Thus, we know because it reads well. The poet is the highlighter of culture, the master collagist, capable of singing every song. “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's,” William Blake writes in his epic poem Jerusalem, “I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” The poem is an amalgamation of biblical references, British mythology, and complex cultural and political themes of the early 19th century. It is in fact a story of the whole world, through which Blake’s endless knowledge creates more. This must be the highest purpose of art! Of poets, of myself: to know so much that the only way to know more is to make.11/27/19 12:57PM
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How spectral is vision? On one end of it, I see a clean room, oil paints that don’t reach the ground, the empty middle. I see seven palms lined up against one window, and can picture daylight drawing veins on the round leaves. I see The Artist pull out a lime green canvas on a charred frame.“Tonight we are making something, all of us.” He runs his hands on the frame, then stripes the canvas. “Who’s next?”And there it is, the other end of the spectrum: braille. On almost every canvas, every sculpture, paragraphs of it. The Artist sees. He does; one of the guests lays down his sweatshirt, which The Artist places a stencil of a braille phrase on, then spray paints. This is the moment when I see it: everyone around films the transfer, the owner of the hoodie hides big teeth behind a small hand, elated, like those videos of Virgil Abloh signing Off-White.Standing in front of the key piece in the studio, a massive canvas that’s hanging from a 10-foot ceiling, I’m trying to see. Am I ignorant? There’s an essay in front of me that I can’t read. Yet looking isn’t how you do this; and even if I could read braille, the letters are so massive I’d need two hands and someone else to guide them, assuming I was blind. Then the oil paint would turn directions on the lines, thus to read is to destroy.Art must be for the seeing. It must, but then what of those who can’t? The Artist makes art about accessibility, then makes it inaccessible to everyone. No one reads in this world, my need for words leaves a hole where my eyes should be, I almost jump at the canvas. Has The Artist found a way to turn himself into god? Stripping language from braille disintegrates it into a pure aestheticism of squares over an image. I think about the pictures of people in Asia wearing t-shirts with profanities in English, or Americans with ‘water’ tattoos in chinese characters. The wine suddenly tastes rancid.In another room there is a painting unlike all the others. There is no braille, and it wasn’t until I got close that I saw it wasn’t a picture. It’s a grand portrait of a black man from the neck up with his eyes closed, and The Artist confirms my suspicions: the man is blind. Maybe I’m averse to talent but hyperrealism doesn’t turn me on, and this piece replaces all tactility with irony. It does take incredible skill to paint what feels like a photograph, I imagine the subject to say.In this room I see the angels of art playing in their plastic Eden. It’s not oily, it’s not messy, the cleaners came by today and left the DJ booth spotless. The women have lip fillers and the men have big rings, everyone smokes cigarettes. I feel like an angel too: I see myself dressed up for the occasion, these places only excite me for a picture, I speak these languages, I also don’t know braille. The Artist talks about filling great rooms with blind things, I hold my face in my hands as they talk. Oh man, it’s wonderful to be so warm in SoHo, where the short buildings let the wind down from the clouds. But in the reflection of a crown there’s a face turned black, haha. I spent the whole night with my ash hands and not even for a second I looked down to see—11/21/19 6:37PM
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I hate these. I hate these. My brain can’t process anything that my stomach won’t churn. I feel truth. It sucks--“I want to know everything about you,” my lips spin in my mouth, “I just don’t know how to ask…”Honesty cannot. It can’t. Five dancers under the hot light know bodies in a way they don’t know face:One hand holds my chin before it hits the ground. Boom. The dancers jump into the center of their prop-bed.My chest beats in the shape of a poem I’ve been trying all day to get memorized:Black sweet blood mouthfuls,Shadows.Something else
Hauls me through air--Thighs, hair;They break in their heels. No absolute movement they’ve done has helped me not love him--From this platform my feet can’t reach the ground, I’m definitely flying and it feels true, if only they hit me with a leg-gustI wouldn’t have to be so honest, no, my mouth tastes like it can’t speak. There’s nothing real about saying what you don’t want to feel--Five dancers under the hot light can’t see me. I taste invisible. This is the absolute:
I’d rather not touch you. I don’t care to know what wanting someone more feels like. I’d rather not know you at all. Four dancers in these lights will see me, one won’t. I’m under the impression that in the darkness my bones glow, my skin reeks, you still wouldn’t hit me.“I want to know.” My teeth burn, “everything about you.” but the cold air freezes your thoughts, I continually make grand mistakes that feel like decisions, I hate these shrooms, I feel truth, my lungs spread my ribs like chest-wings ah--WhiteGodiva, I unpeel--Dead hands, deadIn the deceiving darkness without answers I will stay.11/19/19 6:40PM -
I’ve been conscious of it. It’s grand even in the smallest of denominators: in the simplest terms I’m senseless.Imagine this. 12am in El Alto, Bolivia. Only the foreigners will say more than two words to me, but they, too, need the bus down to La Paz. They don’t speak Spanish as I speak Spanish, my bald head and camo pants might make me look like a Colombian marine stationed in Titicaca more than an American yuppie, if only I could get the accent right. A round man took the bait, he called me a taxi, and even packed my bag in the trunk. I swear I saw him salute as the engine started, and the Europeans couldn’t get the signals on their phones to start. I told myself I couldn’t let them on out of loyalty to my country, but in reality I just forgot to ask.Every day that week I found a new reason to unlike the French, they were like a plague in that city. What is it that attracted them so infestingly to La Paz? I watched one boil a whole chicken in a pot then eat it with a pound of rice, everything gray on his plate. Bzzt. Another smoked three cigars a day in the patio and had been in the hostel for a month, with no contacts for cocaine. Bzzt. The few times they spoke English at the dinner table was when the Uruguayan kid lit a blunt in their presence. Bzzt.“Oh my god get me away from him, he’s from the North,” said to me the only French girl who wasn’t white, who I made better friends with, about a boy behind us while we walked back from a club.“Isn’t American worse?” I knew how cool she thought I was for being from New York.“Nothing is worse than France, north of Paris.”So it wasn’t that they wanted La Paz to be a sleepaway camp for their compatriots, and most of them fucked off in all directions anyway. This same brown french girl had spent some time in Buenos Aires before fleeing the humidity up the Andes mountains to a cold and dusty Bolivia.“It was too much like Paris, it sucked.” She said to me one night after I told her how excited I was to go and live along the Rio de Plata. “I didn’t come here for that.”Were these French escapees sick of each other, too? Of course I couldn’t ask that, so instead I asked:“Have you had the indigenous food yet? I don’t think salt and pepper are all that popular with some tribes, so everything’s just... different.”“Oh no. I mostly cook here. I bought enough pasta in Salta to last me the month.”That made sense. What didn’t was how impossible it was for the males to turn me on. Everything should’ve drove me to them: they were sweet, and fit, and enlightened from backpacking. They had big hands, and were tan. We were all below the equator. But if you’ve ever seen the honey mountains in La Paz you’d know that there isn’t a chance they don’t affect the magnetic field of the city. All ions must be positively charged, so much so that on my first night out, the most lion-looking one of them bought me three beers, and even in his beauty I didn’t think to know more about him than his name, Jacques, and his Lyon tattoo.It made sense that I couldn’t feel but I did. Valeria was impressively Chilean, with an American accent she had acquired from the show Seinfeld, although she’d never been above that Equator. One time I had to beg her to please, speak to me in Spanish; and while she did that one time, I realized she didn’t see me as one of her’s, but she understood I wasn’t one of them either.So I would correct her accent every time it fell because she asked me to. We talked about American things, she wanted to know too much about New York which is fair, about real rock music and guns. I wanted to know what her parents thought of Pinochet, for which she never gave me a clear answer.“What about Bolivians?” I asked her while the French shouted around us. “You’re here because you like the way they do it, right?”“I’m not planning on getting hit by a truck.”It wasn’t that I planned on sleeping with her, or even holding her hand while drinking coca tea from the hostel roof watching the moon turn the brown snowy peaks blue (that one I probably did heavily imagine). No, it was the thin air that I wanted her scent to swallow. I wanted to see the ribs inside her jacket, see them turned, folded over her stomach, bent over her back. I couldn’t explain it, I remember working out on a mountain that looked onto ours, not waiting for her to leave, but often seeing it anyway. I wanted her to want these things from me, despite my unavailability to her.How could that make sense? Out of the french there grew this flower, and I knew I couldn’t cut it, so I wanted it to snap in half for me.On the last night before our departure, we gathered the three other non-french in the hostel, the Uruguayan and two Israelite women, and we descended our high white mountain to a reggaeton club. I was stunned to see all the lines on her face lead upwards in the red lights, she smiled at everything, and getting through the crowd with her meant sometimes holding that mythic hand--I remember thinking about her hips making the cliffs crumble around us, two condors genetically connected by the glorious Andes, I wanted to be so drunk I’d kiss her but how could that make sense? It didn’t. I swear on everything she asked me to do it, in the middle of the dancefloor with the mountainous gravity to plant her a kiss, she did; I realized I never spoke about my obligation to men, and even in her perfect ignorance I didn’t think to say yes.In the early morning she left La Paz for the jungle, and I fucked off to the desert.11/17/19 11:32PM
