circulatory system

I'm sick
from the
blood,
belittle
starry-eyed massacres.
flash a gunshot—
burst balloons
downtown.
taste the sole of my
shoe
this old city
is my circulatory system.
I'm the historiographer
I'm the chemical
dissolver.

gusto! she said

winter is
fattening
up for
the long
chill.
gusto!
she said,
or blew
self-referential.
november colors
descend
like rust on
a creaking
Chevy
and I just
get older.

Funds to Help Homeless in Troy Restored

After being initially rejected by Troy Mayor Harry Tutunjian, funding to assist the homeless in Troy, NY has been redirected away from the city and to non-profit organizations directly involved in the cause. $845,000 in federal stimulus money will be funneled around City Hall and to Unity House and Joseph's House and Shelter who will distribute the funds to homeless people looking for shelter and to those who are struggling to stay above water.

The funds were rejected by Tutunjian because the apparent administrative role that the federal funds required of the city. Tutunjian alleges that the administrative cost would have been $42,000 and that the city simply could not afford. Now, to cover administrative costs, $25,000 of the $845,000 will be used by the state to provide administration.

Seems like a reasonable explanation by Tutunjian, right? Well, one would think so until you get to the end of the Times Union article and see what Tutunjian says about the new plan.

"[T]he people in need of assistance will get it, while the cost of such an effort won't be directly financed by the hardworking taxpayers of Troy."

Note his use of the word 'hardworking'. By uttering this he casts doubt on the homeless, insinuating that they are in fact, not hardworking and never were. Homelessness is not a direct result of people being lazy. Also, his statement reveals that he doesn't think anyone should have to help their fellow city resident, regardless of the glaring fact that homelessness is on the rise due to the economic climate. We're all in this together, Mayor Tutunjian.

It is time for the mayor to wake up! His social darwinism is outdated and ignorant. Unfortunately, those who are homeless and are negatively affected by the inane rejection of federal funds (for a social problem that ultimately affects everyone in the city) likely will not vote, considering the history of low-income voters participation in elections.

Thankfully, non-profits will get the chance to help out, with no thanks to Tutunjian. It would be great to see some tangible results.

New Urban Spaces film shorts

I saw a write up about a new series from Babelgum called 'New Urbanism', a series of film shorts exploring the news ways urban spaces are being utilized. As has been heavily reported, for the first time in recorded history, more than 50% of Earth's population lives in urban areas. This growing population in cities will inevitably transform the way cities allocate and use space.

Here's the video clip to give to give you some ideas about what people are doing to reclaim unused or abandoned space.



Check out Babelgum for the short films themselves, should be interesting and good place to look to see what is happening as the populations of cities swell.

Local economic development v. chain stores

I was reading this article about how Bloomington, IN wants to ban chain stores downtown to preserve community character. While I agree with this ordinance whole-heartedly, one part of the article stuck out to me.

"No organized opposition has emerged yet, but real estate professionals are expressing their concerns to Eric Stolberg, a downtown developer whom the mayor appointed to a study committee on the issue.

"I'm hearing from a lot of people that are scratching their heads and saying, 'Why do we even need this?'" Stolberg said."


This quote brings into focus the role of the city planner in local, economic development. A city planner needs to communicate to the public that chain stores not only destroy small-town character and whitewash its culture, but they also take money out of the local economy. Instead of having 100% of profits being put back into the local economy as is often the case with local, independently-owned stores, national chain stores' profits are redirected back through the headquarters, wherever that may be.

A question I am unsure how to answer though is this: why do people desire national chain stores? What do they offer that can't be had elsewhere?

Papergirl

So I contributed to the Albany Papergirl Project, a guerilla street art project that aims to be inclusive with artists and hands out scrolls of artwork via bicycle to random passerbys. It's an interesting project and my friend Sina is really great at energizing people and was wonderful in putting it all together. Papergirl even got a write up in the Times Union, the Albany paper of record.

Before Papergirl hit the streets though, it was exhibited at FLUX, an art and multimedia event held at the restored St. Joseph's church off Clinton Ave in Albany.

Here's a photo of the exhibit. Mine is the one in the middle that says 'GOLD'



Overall it was a great experience. Sina has really got her stuff together and this project showed it. The show at FLUX was also wonderful. As dreadful and cold as Albany can get, the infusion of cool art definitely helps warm me up

unsavory

unwrapping you
like
hard
sweet
candy
is
the most
unsavory
taste
of
the
morning.

fatalism

come
on
marie
tell me the
answer
to the
river.
I won't
tell
the sailors.
I
like their
oxidized
shipwrecks
too
much.

autumns attention

seasonal obsession
is my vice.
the smell of fall,
sure,
is a common pleasure.
the breeze of summer
undoes my top button
and I am more free.
my mind is unadulterated
when I think of
all the seasons that have
passed
and every baseball game
that ended
earlier
because the parks didn't have
lights then.
o what those days
must have felt like!
(any different?)
it's like looking at black and white
photos;
everyone is gilded in
history
but really
would that man
not buy the newspaper today?
he may wear different shoes
but he'd still be
wearing a wool coat
because despite what we think
the breeze still blows the coldest
across the Hudson
and the
hair on your neck
is the first to
stand at
autumns attention.

splinters of conversing

we were older then
than we are now

but that doesn't matter.

we sat on fences.
splinters in our back pockets
undiscovered

until tinted august
ended.

so triumphantly
she passed.

it doesn't matter
that there is no rain

anymore.

we are more fresh
than ever
before.

what is good

I will not eat dinner with Sam

he eats bread I baked

with cane sugar I picked

and yeast I carved out

the sides of mountains

that rain.

I chop wood

for the pleasure

and talk to window washers

not to patronize

but to inquire

about their history

as window washers

and men.

they yearn to live

as I do,

freely,

and all they are doing

is washing windows

for widows

who never bake them

bread

but instead

smudge the windows

again

with nosy noses

that they use

to peek into the

hen

house.

friend of friends

I have not seen you

since you

have begun hiding

in

forests

where tears sway low—

snakes on branches.

you are bitten

I am bitten

you are responsive

and suck out venom

spit it into

piles that grow into

words

sentences

dictionaries

novels

epic tales

an odyssey

of western adventure

all from the poison

that we insisted would be

good for our soul

but what is good for the

soul except

baked bread

and poems?

more red than murder

wisps
of wheat-blonde hair.
your icy eyes protrude from
South Carolina hills,
eyes colder than
water we guiltlessly
slip into.

I hold you, an envelope,
to the eye-colored sky.
search in vain for a name
on enclosed lined paper.

the ground here
is more red than murder.

two blinks from your
eyelids -
camera shutters -
a photo I will not see.

adult sunday sutra

my friends now
are adults.
kids
are
kids.

I came home
and my heart got heavier.
it had time to think.

I went away and
thought out-loud,
burnt my flexing tongue
on coffee,

(adult sunday sutra.)

I got my mind scrambled
in the dark.
every woman
in street light
is beautiful.

sometimes
I go
blind.

Black Mountain

come to Black Mountain.
untie your hair
onto shoulders,
luminescent.

come to Black Mountain.
there are
apparitions
in the
underbrush.

come to Black Mountain.
we built our houses;
they're built good.

a poem to teen idols

mutually assured
resurrection
is the only hope we have
for pop music.
kid, with your celibacy,
are you unaware of
the intricate history of
pop music as
the sex that wets
that desert between
teenage girls shoulders?
I'm not asking for you to
play the guitar with dignity,
or even play it,
just realize your stature.
a seven foot man rarely
forsakes a career in basketball
or light bulb changing;
a blonde boy with swagger
(some may call it precociousness)
should not wear silvery
cuffs around his fingers.
hell,
act a little bit more like
early Michael.
stop being so subtle

Eggs

I didn't eat as many

eggs

as the cannibalizing
hen
house.

I ate just enough to

be strong.
to
be strong.

something to remember

the key to a successful neighborhood is capitalizing on local and peer-to-peer knowledge.

The Associated Tensions

that was the day I wrote What is Good.
at the time not much was good and
it seemed like a relevant question.
it was winter and Jim and I were trapped
in the mindset that poetic young men
fall into when the femme fatales they love
prove their identities as femme fatales
and leave their poetic young men alone
and hungry in the winter of two thousand and nine.

was it a cold winter? I could not tell you.
I left for a month, mid-way through,
and ambled through San Francisco and
Los Angeles, lost. I read two books by
J.D. Salinger in an attic in Portrero Hill.
I smoked cigarettes of short days
in that attic. I read a book by David Foster Wallace;
my favorite story was Octets because the narrator
addresses the reader, in theater called 'breaking the fourth wall,' which is a literary device I like much better
than meta-narration, which is when an author inserts him or herself in the story
that he or she is writing at the moment. I think it's easy and
an escape hatch that an old schizophrenic invented and used well
but now has been co-opted by semi-talented young people
like myself who don't know any better than to throw themselves
into the middle of a sword fight.

understand me here, the previous
stanza (?) is not to establish my qualifications as
a reader, always blooming with book.
or even if you've established that already,
it was not to tell you about who I read because we all know,
even if we resist the notion in conversation, that the implications of
a persons favorite authors says quite a bit about them.
you might have guessed that I am
concerned with the shredding edges of authenticity.
you would not be wrong about my associated tensions.
maybe you would say that I am wordy and I tend to
intellectualize things that need not be intellectualized.
foregoing my pride and self-image, you would not be wrong.

you may have ignored though,
in your quest to tear back my fourteen layers of skin
and reveal my plastic musculature,
the inherent mysticism in these works.
and now what?
you venture to ask me of god?
well.
this is where we end.

bricks in the half-light

to him that eyes deceive:
you are wrong.
no deception is portrayed through
an iris,
no trick played in light.
you say you basked
in thunderstorm half-light?
you say brick,
caressed and softened by July rain,
is more beautiful than the most
beautiful mountain lake?
I assure you that you are right.
Pastoral folks,
in their traditional vantage of aesthetics,
will tell you that a bear
sturdily creeping in a patch of queen anne's lace
is the pinnacle of beauty;
they would not be wrong.
You,
man of the city,
drinker of humanity
of mortar,
of asphalt,
neither would you be wrong
to believe that
a cavalry of headlights
on a rivery avenue is the
great white light,
the center of retinal gravity that
no man can willfully resist.

two new poems!

so it's been awhile since I've last updated. I self-published a book of poems since my last post, I decided to move back to Brooklyn instead of going to Denver, I have read hardly anything over the past month but the past few days Kenneth Koch and his Collected Works have been keeping me up at night. Despite all these happenings or non-happenings or realities or unrealities I have written a couple poems that I think are decent and worth throwing onto the internets. so enjoy, commment, eat them.

I am the ancient well

I am the ancient well.
I have fed your thirst
for a year.
I grew your flowers
so purple against an orange-tinted wall.
I accepted the wooden bucket and
peered passively at your sky
from the depth of clay walls,
melting from the inner heat of earth.
I caught your rain.
I became your rain.
water is water is water.

the romans drank my sustenance.
they fell.
I am not poison,
it was their pride.
do not dip in me anymore,
you too will fall.


if I were more French

if I were more French
I would eat cupcakes glazed with only
pure cane sugar burned on the islands
that some Italian guy explored 500 years ago.
I am American though and my frosting
tastes like the inside of a Sarah Lee container
and it is pink to make it seem regal
or like Marie Antoinette's dresses
which makes me more French
I suppose.

I suppose I could write about a cupcake being baked
and the oven overheating but us and our hearts
narrowly escaping a sure death.
We did not escape.
We pillaged the crevices between our breasts for signs of life;
there were none.
Instead we ate cupcakes and made love
on the back porch as an oven
became flames in a bakery in Paris.

My friends and I have seen Paris.
( I will not mention their names here; they fear the publicity)
Separately we stubbed our toes
in that once medieval city that
Haussmann upended to quell the French spirit,
to extinguish defiance that I by chance was born into,
a Bastille Day baby with a heart of fire
that even the most novice of campers could
control with a paper fan and
rearranging of fallen logs.

I, defiant child, only attract the enfant terribles.
They do not eat pink frosted cupcakes that
my mother bakes,
they drink coffee black and burn cigarettes with the stove light.
I drive them mad with my yearning of freedom from Americanisms
yet I drink Coca Cola,
sucrose anointing my spirit.

My three souls do not indulge sanity
as if it were sweet pastries.
My three souls,
one for music
one for poetry
one for unconventional strangers
did not burn down the apartment in Brooklyn baking cupcakes.
It was my kindred soul, swept in at five AM,
damp from riding the late night F train,
that rubbed brownstone of Old New York together
and lit a surprise blaze that tore through the floor
but left me this poem.

eye, The

eye, The.
iris amphitheater
rejecting your angled edges.
run to me,
smoothly.
be the fluid that
enlivens ocular mechanics.
eye, The,
not a mere lightbox.
eye, The,
produces collects redistributes
unknown.

(your watercolor arms
flail as you run from the
foreboding castle of Mind.

(color too vivid! dilute dilute dilute!)

eye, The.
pinhole camera.
stand still,
I will capture you.

the work

I've caressed sultry women
to the sound of the temptations
at dawn
but you're an
aretha girl,
to you I am the
laborer who
works
for your lips.

I am a journeyman
by trade.
I go
where the work
goes.
if only you would fire me
I could sleep in city,
alone.

but no! a man must
eat and to pay the grocer
he must work!
I will die laying tracks
to taste your lipstick
once more.
I will appeal to
the union
"the conditions are
unsafe!"
but tomorrow,
I will perspire in the sun,
for the work.

Translations of a portion of Poesies by Lautreamont

the gentlemen of poetry
have gone to sicily
and become sophisticated.

the first principle that they
follow:
the wordy trail
of dialectical discussion.

accept, they must,
that greek gods and godesses
engaged in
symbolic
telekinesis.

they be prude and covet
the elementary
understandings of
poetic violence.
they
shun the sex
of their creator!

turn back.
I am incredulous
and prickly.

gentlemen,
you no longer exist
as the arbiters
of poetry.
it is your time
no longer.

I exist!
I break convention and
amble tactlessly
to a lecture.
I do not shave my straggling beard.
I accept that I am not the second coming
of the biggest badness.
poetry
consoles my ravages.
humanity has not been lost
but has become arbitrary.


Original portion of Poesies by Lautreamont


Les gémissements poétiques de ce siècle ne sont que des sophismes.

Les premiers principes doivent être hors de discussion.

J'accepte Euripide et Sophocle; mais je n'accepte pas Eschyle.

Ne faites pas preuve de manque des convenances les plus élémentaires et
de mauvais goût envers le créateur.

Repoussez l'incrédulité: vous me ferez plaisir.

Il n'existe pas deux genres de poésies; il n'en est qu'une.

Il existe une convention peu tacite entre l'auteur et le lecteur, par
laquelle le premier s'intitule malade, et accepte le second comme
garde-malade. C'est le poète qui console l'humanité! Les rôles sont
intervertis arbitrairement.

not a body in perpetual motion

your hair.
a crumbling edifice
of antiquity.
byzantine.
your hair,
not smooth roman lines,
not a body
in perpetual motion.

hospitality
from your
shyly offered
smile.
I, incorrigible,
wearing my hat across the
wooden planks
of your old albany house.
bringing you beer
I had thought of spirits.
you do not drink.
I forgot.

leaving in
early morning
or late evening
or time unknown.
walking to the door,
scrambling in the foyer,
dark.
you grabbing my elbow,
unbending,
half-embracing me.
disinterest not feigned
as well as I thought.
scattering down corroded steps,
ebullient,
curious.

skipping church to pray for rain

as I had hoped
last night,
three AM,
drunk,
for a heavy
and soaking rain,
it did come
and I heard it at approximately
four AM,
not nearly as drunk,
too tired to be drunk
though the feelings may
have intertwined to create
the stupor in which I had
earlier in the witching hour
hoped for rain.
in my prayer I was terse.
(I call it prayer due to
the fact that weather
is as close to a god as I have.
it determines my mood and
my action as if the holy one
himself had bestowed in
precipitation the power
to rule me and pull me around
by sweat-tinged collar
and throw me into wet or cold
or blanket-like heat that
is so hot it becomes imperceptible
to the skin and at which point one can only
experience the meteorology of hell
through pursed lips and
the knowing of the history
of july.)
the wish for rain then was
less abstract idealism
(idealism in rain
is the sound it makes
on pavement
and the smell the pavement
emits)
and more a conjuring of the only god I know
to deliver me the parallel of
how I was feeling.
then today
I awoke not to four AM rain
but ten AM gray,
like the smoke of burned out tires
from a race which had just begun
or just ended
though since you were not there to see
a luscious girl swipe the air with her
handkerchief
you are not sure which it is
so you are left in limbo
like me, this
morning,
unsure of whether the rain had just stopped
or was about to begin again
or whether it would be another two weeks
before it was acceptable
for me to lay in bed all day
in long-johns that,
at this point,
are out of season.

two more poems

a pear

in air
I wait,
still
like air.
summer air
breathing myself.
I wait for
you
to resurrect
yourself
as the heir
to
psychosis.
the hair
you cut
will not
self-destruct
on tile floor
but lies
in separation
from a head
I learned to
deconstruct
as you ate a pear
when you and I
were a pair.


melancholy, hey
hey!
melancholy!
light my candle
my lovelight
my exploding
fourth of july
my birthday cake
my spring hemp
my summer
my summer
my summer
is always too far away
and too condensed
with ideas of rivers and
trees that I've climbed
and been cut in and
loved under and
had hearts broken
and broke hearts.

two poems

lost and found

faces at
grand central
are searching for
the lost and found.

all they find are
mirrors.


situations

the revolution.
ha!
situations are dead and so is debord.
he was a square anyway.
capitalism consuming itself
is like the flame that
catches more fire.
there goes the neighborhood
said mrs. haymarket.

standing on the kegs of
gunpowder
is prime time
for a chinese celebration.
don't buy the confetti,
shred your dollars.

a thicket: robert part two

robert,
vanity I mistook
as your virtue,
as if you knelt for
prayer in the mirror,
not to see god peering
in the window behind you
but to gaze mortified at
the age that
has snuck upon you
in the dark.

you were younger
and just as skinny
and you had a girl
who was yours.
but you singed
her hair with your wayward
marlboro reds
and she
left,
charred and still
delicious.

vanity,
robert,
is your swaggering
heartbreak.
your comb straightens
that which can be undone.
your heart
however
is a thicket.

electric faith

humming hymns
head down
she shuffles
in poverty.
crisis of chic
irrelevant
to the gospel
singer
mumbling
on the f train.
blonde rider
cries
or there is dust.


this is a new york poem. i miss new york

a completed project of mine

this is pasted on a starbucks wall

fifteen years or so

I had a dream last night, well, this morning actually, that really came out of nowhere. it was just a scene from my childhood that I remembered very vividly.

when I was a kid my sister and I would spend a lot of time at my cousin's house. I must have been about 8 or 9 and there was a girl who was in high school, a blonde hippie-type girl, who lived across the street from them. the day that jerry garcia died she made a sign that said RIP Jerry and then put paper flowers around the inside of her window. that was in 1995.

I wonder whatever happened to her. She might be married and have kids by now. I wonder if she remembers making that sign as much as I remember seeing it...

can you hear me?

so I was reading a blog written by this california gal who happens to know how to write a hell of a letter and I got inspired. she writes in an entirely different style than I do but I totally dig it no less. some of us are romantics in our prose and poetry, others are just straight up schizophrenic. here it goes, it's called 'can you hear me?"

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

robert
you vain fuck,
carrying a comb in
your back pocket
like I would carry a flask
if I were a drunk.
I am no drunk.
but you are a vain fuck.

how did I die
last night?
with a migraine
and a belly full of wine.
am I a drunk?
no,
wine is a literary device.
it's red.
imagine it to be red, ok?
so it's red wine
and it's spilled on a white carpet.
soaking in,
party guests staring,
host angry,
sidewalk under feet
NOW!
no no
it's white wine
and it burns my throat
on a cool south african evening
in june.


robert
could you show me
how to grow that mustache?
really, I'm serious.
I'm rarely sarcastic
I grow a frenchmen's mustache.
or a pirates.

no more repeating
it's unflattering.
reader
do you find it as unflattering
as I do?
reader
did you realize this poem
isn't about her?
I know,
all of my poems are about her
even though she is someone I've
invented as if I were a painter
whose brush manifests figures.

as much as I am a drunk
I am a painter.
I paint color,
I don't paint with it
my fingers are earth
and my muscles rain.
that's where color comes from,
no?
reader?

for old times

I'm going to be writing on one of these very soon. computer text is so passe. the sound of hammers hitting paper is satisfying. that's what we've lost in this technological age; things are silent and aim to be further silenced. soon we'll live in a world where all you can hear is wind blowing, which normally would be nice but when it's the only sound that exists it will be the saddest sound we know. 

I cannot explain

but I will try to. 

I haven't felt this good in a long time. going to california and riding the greyhound back east gave me closure on a tumultuous chapter of my life. it was a great chapter. it was a chapter that makes the reader go "ahhhh!' but not scared, just cathartic (maybe a little scared, depending on which lines you read between.) 

I loved Los Angeles. Hollywood was a trip and so was the beach and the smog and the stars and the beautiful people and the not so beautiful people and the glimmer and glam and heartache and frustration and high prices and good smells and traffic traffic traffic and cookies with ice cream and seeing people I love and meeting people I really like.

I want to live there. I probably won't for awhile. I'll visit often, I need to. I am infected by city myth. 

I feel motivated. I got a job as a cleaner in a high school after hours. it's not glamourous but if it makes me dollars then that means the sooner I will be out of upstate NY. not that it's that bad lately. I just want to be somewhere else. I think that will be portland. I hope I get into PSU. but if I don't, I'm moving to L.A. I'm insanely obsessed, maybe because I feel like it's somewhere that is so unknowable that it is my duty to try and know it. 

I'm going to visit owen in brooklyn in a couple of weeks. I want to go dancing and get drunk and ride the subway. I want to find a club that is playing old soul music or garage rock or both. it's new york, it exists.

jimmy might move to georgia. he also might become a gumball delivery driver. 

ashley is leaving austin and is going to work on a farm in new mexico, where I will then pick her up and we'll road trip across the desert and up the coast.

natalie will likely move to portland and we'll ride our bicycles together out there.

alexa is working for a celebrity blog where she gets to have an alias.

the people I know and the lives we lead are incredible. 

is this life as unique as I hope it is?

(I'm finally beginning to feel a bit authentic...reading salinger all the time eventually acts as reverse psychology)

I'm going to design a bananafish and wheat-paste it about town. 

Next week I'm going to start volunteering at the local used bookstore.

I traded 50 books for 

a collection of Harold Pinter plays

who's afraid of virginia wolff

intro to zen

a book of poems by edna st. vincent millay

the pinter play "the birthday party" is frustrating me because the characters are so terse but I keep reading because in their terseness I become interested. it's a complex relationship.

today I was intellectually defeated by a man who has a phd in physics. I commend him. I usually can 'win' a conversation based solely on my charm and ability to talk in circles that get progressively tighter. 

my addiction to the news is subsiding. but I have noticed that obama is getting closer and closer to making us into a socialist country. hooray!

i want to paint canvasses. but only one solid, bright color on each. it's not art, I don't care about art. I want color. looking at a bright color is like drinking coffee.

all the snow is almost gone.

I want some new clothes. it's been awhile and to be honest my insides are telling me that my style has changed. I am still dressing like a new yorker. i want to dress like me. does that mean I cover myself in brown paper bags? no, I'm am an ornamentalist. i like nice clothes.

i'm going to start reading urban critical theory. i want to go to ucla for my phd in urban planning. then I can teach anywhere in the world and research whatever I want. mmm, urban art movements!

a poem I wrote on the plane to visit jim in london in 2007:

You look like scrambled eggs.
Rouge is thinly spread ketchup
with mascara straying under lashes
like flecks of pepper.

in the reality of daybreak
you burn and set off
the smoke detector.

You're beautiful covered in char
and flavor.
With a cup of tea,
I eat you in a hurry,
late for work.

the violent femmes are so fucking cool and it took me so long to realize it. and so are the talking heads. all music has a time and a place I suppose.

i'm shaving my beard tomorrow. my face will feel sharp again.

an L.A. poem

Los Angeles!

Los Angeles!

Your hills are

Not too high.