ahead of his time

Richard Yates had true courage to write the truth no matter how painful or unpopular, to live the truth no matter how short lived, to expose the hypocrises of the American Dream.

speechless

longing to be a visual artist
words so tired, so poor, so arrested.
not sure what being a writer means any more.
without an attention span what's left?
recording for the sake of it
validating the alphabet
creating new syntax
for what?

why not?

there's always this vague suggestion
of meaninglessness masquerading as dependency.
i don't know what to do with it
because of course it's meaningful,
and there's no path, nothing
circumscribed, nothing definitive.
there's now and then there's
nothing and we're supposed to figure
out how to navigate in between.
that thought, that touch, that sound,
that space, that breath. this is it.

the deeper resonances

In retrospect he finds it hard to believe he was actually capable of giving life... remote the more he thinks about it. The life force that seems to come of its own accord, free of premeditation or constraints. He wishes it was infectious, her vitality, her confidence, her devotion but knows she's paying a price she can’t afford. If anything, he has to give her more. He has to find a way.

reality check

forget the paycheck. time for a reality check. to check in
and see what's really going on.

1. am i doing what i really want to be doing with my life?

2. if not, how can i redirect?

3. and with all that excess energy from doing what I want, how can
I help someone else do...whatever.

what if we were, no, are happy? what if...

is mother dying?

i really can't ignore the plaintive cry of the Long Island Railroad anymore, especially in the middle of the night. and when i lose all patience, lose all sense, lose all focus, not for anything in particular but for the cumulative effect of life itself, i have to admit (unlike my parents) i know nothing. i do know...i know nothing at all.

i beg your pardon

we're not talking about belching here, we're talking
about the new president elect. can't obama wait until he's
sanctioned before he has to solve the world's crises ?
no. we're scared. we've had it. we're f--ked. we need to know.
so forget about all those scumbags Bush has pardoned.
let's move on. and up. there's hope in the world.

above and beyond

do you get the feeling that the universe is in retrograde?
have people lost their ever lovin' groovy minds?
can we not reason or relate or contemplate any more?

these are the questions.

we fail to succeed, succeed to fail

gross national product?
measure not a value that is immeasurable.
a point
that is infinite.
a cause
that is just.

no ratio
can adequately explain
human behavior.

we try
we fail
we try again.
we fail
we succeed
to fail
again.

can we possibly understand what this is about?

ask all you want
the answer is an illusion
because there is none.

how can we tolerate the ignorance?
how? or more accurately, why?

fall from grace

The snap and crackle of the bacon grease doesn’t capture her attention but when Brian drops the jar of mayonnaise on the kitchen floor Gracie wakes up.

“What the fuck!”

He turns around and waves before unraveling paper towels to clean up the mess. She protests the disturbance of a good night’s sleep even though it’s 4:30 in the afternoon and she has the look of a street urchin after a two day bender.

in my right mind

Blown away by the read through, crippled after sitting for three days at my desk. SEPTEMBER 10TH is everything I hoped for, imagination at work- my raison d'etre, family as unpredictable as it is, love, true love and all its traps and trappings, compassion for our place in the world as precarious as it is, clinging at once to individuality, that thing that defines us and defies genetic imprints and to our collective identity, that singular force that encompasses everything, more than our individual consciousness affords. No escape. It's that big beautiful velvet stew of life on the edge. Of what? Time, meaning, existence. Even history can be false.

$$

Grant. Sounds so religious, so unattainable.

conditional love

I shot you and

you shot me

in a wave of violence against humanity

and all we had were pictures to show for it.

I need your shot. You need mine.

I keep wanting to give them up. Yours, I mean.

To say I don’t belong

to these

pictures.

And then…and then…we keep showing up

in them

together.

Despite,

in spite of ourselves.

We keep showing up

to be together,

in spite of ourselves.

We can’t help it;

we can’t recant. is this love?

Is this love?

when thoughts don't matter

how hard is it to write something original when there is no intent? that's what i've been thinking about lately. when it's not a novel, a screenplay, an essay, an article. when the road map doesn't matter. like taking a trip to nowhere. no plan, no destination. just go. to just let go.

excerpt from September 10th

The crack of ice reverberates like a dissonant intruder moving through the loft-like space. Pacing the site line from the euro kitchen back to the drawing table seems like the longest walk of the century, his only solace in the smooth jolt of transparent liquor diminishing from his water glass.

untitled

dying to write. dying to live. living to die. why?

in the darker days of our humanity

Early morning blends into liquid day

of paint and shoot

and the trickling of words

in between explorations for love and money.

On the stairwell we wonder

if the mind is ours to keep,

if we need to grasp a greater reality

or fall deeper into the mesmeric trance

for the longing breeds the perpetual dance

of time honored and time lost.

Fear not the iron grip

bound and without boundaries

the uphill battle, the down hill slide

past the politics of cruelty,

grazed but yet unchanged.

Hope fades like so many sunsets

in this other worldly place where inequity and injustice,

proof after bold-faced proof (substitute “lie”)

makes a mockery of us.

Timelessness=agelessness

our narrow escape,

stoned on life’s expanding universe

touched by universal truth

but then, what is truth, what must we know

and then to know, how can we live?