there is a dream new york

i will always carry within me

a comic book collage of pop

a stupid country mouse jumble

of lifted stolen & pilfered imagery

part liquid sky part wolfen

part jacob's ladder part *batteries not included

in a gripping montage Frank McRae

races up the front steps of Saint Patrick's cathedral

a dog whistle in one hand and a bullhorn in the other as

a three hundred and seventy foot tall Romberger portrait of Wojnarowicz

roundhouses the impotent ragefist of chronicling dying of AIDS

a grim hook clean through the flying buttresses and clerestory

movielit piers 'n' spires cracking and collapsing into dust

and my heart stands to clap my love an ovation

new yorrrk, new yorrrk

let me be your winston zeddemore

breaking the habit

That's the trick.  Re-orienting my OCD around something other than my addiction to the Act of Smoking, which is a Whole Thing, the performative, social, voluntary ostracism / my formative experiences of queerness being associated with smoking / my hidden-to-myself secret crushes all being smokers, etc.  There's a lot going on there.  I've been unpicking it all in my mind.  I'm pretty close to being Cured of being a smoker, again.  I had this struggle in my early-to-mid twenties, during my Richmond years, before I moved down here, and worked in a pool hall long enough that it made me into a fucking smoker, again, only worse:  a Smope Doker.  Marijuana rekindled the meditative David Lynch thing where you sit with a fag and you stare into the middle distance and you let the ideas congeal and then you start drawing or taking notes or working bits of doggrel into a poem or song or whatever.  You don't need weed for that.  You don't need a cigarette, either:  but there's something to smoking that, once I got into the physical habit of it, I needed it.  Not for nothing that my old one-hitter & stash (the one that lives at the bottom of Lake Canada, now) was styled on the dimensions of a cigarette.  I really got back into the Habit of pacing with a cigarette and writing when I was working on Painless, during covid lockdown; I had my microcassette recorder and I was raring to go.  There's something about the Habit, the muscle memories, the reflexive hands to particular pockets, the furtiveness, the way the habit makes you see the world through the Lens of habit, how the habit weighs you down, forces your pathways & perspective, where you look.  In the latter days of my addiction I became a habitual Sidewalk Surfer--  "Just a natural Street Freak, eating whatever came along"  --and consequently anywhere my eyes landed I could identify the profile of a joint, a roll-up, a blunt, any partial or even the memory of a jay, any kryptonite green crumb, even ashes.  I could smell the remains at fifty yards.  I would stop at an arbitrary junction, look down, and lo:  the city provided.  At a certain point in Addiction, the readiness, the availability of the drug, locks you in.  Cokeheads don't get locked into being cokeheads because they're addictive simps, they get locked in because they can't get away from the stuff:  all their friends do it, all the places they hang have it around.  Weed became that for me because I'm an old gutter punk who's been homeless maybe too often.  And it's the easiest available drug, hassle-free, without getting carded, I've ever seen, now.  Alcohol was never this available.  If this sounds dangerously like some jeremiad about the availability of drugs being the problem, and if only we made everything illegal and made it difficult to get, the world would be better.  I don't believe that and never have.  But some things, scarcity restores it to sacred.  Weed is a sacred thing.  But we abuse it.  God knows I did.  Because I was predisposed to like it because I'd already conditioned myself to be a smoker.  If tobacco had never entered into the picture, would I be concerned about my lungs now?  Habits are the goddamn worst.  They can be useful, until they're damaging.  It's hard to pinpoint where the crossover is, sometimes.  At any rate I'm pretty sure I've got this thing licked, at last.

the burroughs folio - mikey

 Michael Portman is completed.  Onto Kammerer & Ian & Barlow.

"Down In Front!" - September 2o26

Did I stop keeping these or what.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - dir. by Steven Spielberg

* batteries not included (1987) - dir. by Matthew Robins

Fire In The Sky (1993) - dir. by Robert Lieberman

Communion (1989) - dir. by Phillipe Mora

workshopping a title

God knows why, but I keep contemplating writing a dating memoir.  Something like,

'A Quarter Century of Shitty Men: 

Every Red Flag I Met (& Probably Slept With) En Route To Discovering My Husband'

But then I brain myself with a glass block and the urge subsides.

lessons in light / "light in extension"

There is a strain of thought in me, related to time, and memory, which is very focused on Light.

As I come up on my first half century, my dreams are ever-more focused on the quality of light.  Its nature, its intensity, its placement, its source(s).  Light undergirds all things.  Without it, there is nothing; even night is defined by it.  On a moonless night there is starlight to fall back on.

Memory is comprised of recorded, experienced, light.  We are predominantly visual creatures, humans, for a reason, and that reason is how our brain has evolved--  to record, to trap, to encode, the vibrations and waves and phenomena related to the behaviour of light.  The complexity of our brains, to say nothing of human psychology, has been a staged developmental response in direct proportion to our experience of light.  In previous centuries, there was less of it, and it was less within our control.  Today we exist in an era of near-limitless light, our devices provide a veritable plague of it, such that our sleep patterns are altering--  again!  Light pollutes our lives when our eyes are closed.  Doctors specialize in "light therapy", essaying how light is recognized as integral, how types & bandwidths of it are even nutritional, to our psychological health.

Perhaps because I am older...  perhaps nothing, it's certain.  Being older, I am less tuned to specific devices & their use.  Light has valence.  I prefer a laptop with a dimmed screen.  I prefer a flip-phone without a touchscreen.  I prefer to experience it as completely as possible, eschewing sunglasses in direct daylight.  I categorize the types of light generated within dreams.  And, of course, when it comes to my art, capturing the phenomena of light, how it behaves (or how I imagine it behaves) is central to my mark-making.  It's the impetus behind everything.

There is something delicious in waking, trundling to the toilet, flipping the switch, and being dazzled for perhaps a minute, then returning to darkness; as my eyes re-adjust, phosphene grains ripple their fractal arms, yellow shifting to red to green to blue in a dance of fireflies, all reflected light leaving the eye at escape velocities so far beyond calculation it dazzles the mind.

The last time I visited my mother, she gave me her 1969 edition of 'Konx Om Pax' by Crowley.  Green cover, faintly purple lettering.  'Lessons In Light', or 'Light In Extension' if you listened to MacGregor Mathers.  Barmy book, full of riddles, bad poetry, and hacky imitations of writing styles popular at the turn of the 20th century.  I will say this for it--  and the witchy phase of my teens & twenties  --it aligned with my tendency to view physics as The Undergirding Mystery Behind Everything.  To me, then, the phenomena of light and its behavior, ever-elusive, ever-challenging, particluate or waveform...  Light is magic.

There are many popular writers (qua Warren Ellis, cursed be his name, who honestly just filched a filched notion from Alan Moore) who fuck with the notion that Light Is Information, and said "information"--  its valence --is the base unit of reality.  I recall how, in the late 90s, some canny labcoats shot a laser through a chamber of gas, then flash-froze the gas and turned off the laser.  When the gas thawed, the frozen (trapped!!!) bit of sent information Unstuck Itself and passed on to the receiver.  We froze light.

Fuck me if I can remember the names of the scientists or even what continent this experiment was conducted on.  I could goog it but cheating does nothing for developing memory.  At any rate.  Light is goddamned magic.  I don't believe in magic, as such, anymore.  But I believe in Light.  And I believe Light is anywhere we look for it.  It's a miracle how it clings to human brains.  An absolute marvel, and so completely taken for granted I have to write a dumb li'l blog post about it.

Turning my words into light and sending them forth.

Light is the stuff dreams are made of.  Expressions of light accomplished in a light-tight box, little quantum experiments exploding into imagery, in the midst of absolute night.  What was it that Crowley said, about our divinity?  I'm not gonna fuck with his gendered imagery.  But the Spark he's spoken of, and the Holy Guardian Angel you talk to through meditation, and all that shit?  I dunno.  I'm just saying there's something to all that mumbo-jumbo that I have personally experienced...  And, I dunno, it's the thing that shapes how I think as much as I shape it.

I was an autodidact with PTSD when I first discovered poetry for myself, and it was a total stranger, some redheaded lady at a frozen yogurt store on the town square of Donkey Crotch, Alabama, where Jacksonville High School, no, not the one in Florida, & Jacksonville University, no, not the one in Florida, are located.  She looked me over and for no reason recommended I read Arthur Rimbaud.

I had a runaway, inchoate imaginative facility, as a child, so Rimbaud had the worst possible effect on me because I went directly to the Beats: Burroughs, and Kerouac, and Ginsberg, and Kesey, and Corso-- and in the center of the chaotic patois that developed afterward, was my mind, trying to figure out how to start or end a sentence without throwing up.  I spent a long time wring absolute dogshit, from handwritten to manually typed on manual typewriters to crt screens to the internet and  beyond, and all of it's banal, even now.  Because I learned to think through poetry, in reverse of how one should interact with language, and I wonder if it created (or, perhaps worse, made concrete) certain psychological tendencies.  Chief among them was a craving for significance that would be borne out by synchronicity to confirm personal prophecies-- all which is diarrhea of the first water, to use a jeweler's term for strictly ironical and/or comical reasons.

See, this is why I don't do stand-up.

Anyway.  I already hit you with the actual hard-won wisdom at the end of this blog-tunnel:  dreams are quite literally light & information, proof you are alive, and capable of dreaming, deeply, in the still waters of self.  Light IS the lesson.

dream - o91526: the cold apartment

The apartment was the cold and dark of wet ash.  Not one source that wasn't window.  Sullen light of low atmospheric ceiling, cloud cover pillowy as stained quilting.  The floorboards none too gently warped by time, echoing creakily as I paced.  Noticing the screens over the windows are freckled with punctures from hail.  How long have I been here?  If it's where I think, it was at least a decade.  But the outside doesn't match up; I was at ground level, albeit on a hill, whereas the view would suggest I'm higher than five stories-- perhaps ten.  There is nothing lit in the city surrounding me.  City as cemetery: every edifice, every façade, the overwrought, meaningful blankness of stone.

Brightening the crepuscular dim comes the gentle chirp:  Olive, my last cat, still a kitten.  As I turn she comes bounding across the unfurnished room.  In the dark her creamcolour as a siamese has gone russian blue.  Perhaps Olive shares her soul with Ghost, an earlier, childhood pet.  In this ended world their kind spirit is cojoined.  My child's view of a kitten an uninterrupted lineage of love, one affection-hunter to another linked in a non-finite chain of kinship, reminding my adult self that youth is but the central, irritable grain around which the soul's pearl is formed.  One cat is not all cats, but may be all cats one has known.  Olive presses shoulder to my ankle, awaiting my hand.

"please raise your right hand"

uncle sean

Maybe it's morbid, but right this moment I'm thinking about uncle Sean.  My mother's only brother to survive 'Nam.  He ran a clothing store in Birmingham.  And then one day he disappeared.  Gay men disappeared in the south.  Also men (& women) of my mother's generation, people associated with the Weather Underground, also disappeared.  My mother was associated with the W.U. for a bit.  Mainly because she'd lost two brothers already.  Sean was somebody I don't clearly remember.  He has a face like a forgotten Polaroid.  The light falling on his mustache being forgotten by the photograph itself, by the photographers, by time.  It falls across his glasses like it's being poured from around the edges of blackout curtains, it falls in funnels through the lenses onto eyes that hide their colour.  Were his eyes hazel?  Like my mother's, or like mine?  Did we all have that trait of eyes that were never green, nor blue, nor the colour of cut fall grass?  Everyone knew Sean was gay.  Most of my mother's friends were, too.  One day Sean didn't show up to open his clothing store.  After a week we were all pretty certain he was missing, but no-one knew why.  The bills were paid.  The store wasn't in anything resembling debt.  As far as my mother would speculate, Sean wasn't into anything with anyone.  He was a pretty quiet, unassuming guy.  He had been an artist, and then he stopped, and fashion became his life.  A disappointment to his mother, and an inspiration to his sister, and a ghost to his nephew.  My parents stopped talking about Sean after a year.  And then he never came up again.  A story without an ending.  As simple a mystery as ever lived.  One day is A.  The next day is not-A.  Sean.  No Sean.  My mother never knew.  So I don't know.

Mystery as hereditary trait.  An heirloom enigma.  Why did he leave?  Did he leave?  Or did he get pulled over by a cop, one night in Alabama.  Did he meet someone strange?  Did someone take him from us?

Uncle Sean is a locked, sealed room, labeled 1981-1982?  I don't have the key for it anywhere.

Trust me, I searched.

leading by example

me:  (cleaning)

twentysomething rando:  "You should really get an Instagram going.  Reach out to people and show them what they can do."

me:  "I'm not an internet creature.  I'd rather just lead by example."

rando:  "But people could see what you do..."

me:  "People can see what I'm doing now.  And maybe they follow suit.  I don't have to campaign."

rando:  "Well I'm glad you're doing it.  I saw you working down there, really going farther than you have to.  The gays really make a mess."

me:  "Yeah, I'm one of the gays.  I'm like, 'You guys could really try to keep it nicer, for the straights.'"

rando:  "I didn't mean any--"

me:  "Leading by example."  (walk off)