On the afternoon of the eclipse, the guy I don’t remember texted me. 


He said we met ten years ago at the bar at JG Melon on Third Avenue in New York, where I used to hang out drunk and alone. It’s a clubby boîte with good chili that attracts prep school types. 


He tells me that I brought him and his friend back to where I was staying then, and how we drank wine on the floor and played Guess Who?


It was surreal to hear my former self described.


Sad and electric. 


A long time ago, I had an idea for an art piece. 


Piped into a curtained room would be the soundtrack of a violent storm. The only thing in the room other than the sound of the storm would be a small oil painting of a boat tossing in waves.


The room would be dark except for a spotlight on the painting, just off center. 









In-N-Out Burger recently moved its corporate headquarters from California to Franklin, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. 


I was surprised to learn In-N-Out prints bible verses on its packaging.


The last In-N-Out I went to was the famous one under arrivals at Los Angeles International, which was a majestic experience.


Grace says for someone who doesn’t like clubs I take advantage of my proximity to them.


All of me, why not take all of me.


My friend asks if I care about the craft of poetry. 


I like to keep sentences short, like they could protect me.


I never stopped thinking about parallel lines as a metaphor for people. 


I have no idea what Calculus is.










Page uses words like dookie, nympho, and happy. 


I didn’t realize how many words I avoid until Page and I started talking a lot.


On a rock on Stinson Beach last fall, I read the most recent poem I wrote, “Flounder,” to some friends.


The big takeaway was that it sounded smart.


Next to us a group of old men were playing nude frisbee. 


It was a dramatic, funny scene. 


Somehow all the skin and gaiety didn’t distract us from the reading. 


Later, someone used the term “body bliss” to describe the feeling they seemed to have, sprinting  around the beach expanse, glimmering in the sun. 


I thought of the Robert Graves poem “The Naked and the Nude.”


I thought about how some of the women in Nashville don’t leave home without their face on.


Historically, nude refers to form, beauty. 


Naked does not.









When Alex named a painting in his show “To the Harbormaster, for ML” shortly after he broke up with me, I thought I might die. 


The metaphor of the two lovers separated by sea had always been a framework for what I thought about in the studio.


When the show got reviewed in the New York Times the writer noted his use of the poetry of Frank O’Hara.


After that, “To the Harbormaster” became like a park bench I used to cry on, and now walked blocks to avoid.


In a gallery, the title “To the Harbormaster, for ML” functioned like signage, or a perverse inside  joke.


It was meant to look like a romantic gesture, but for his benefit, not mine.


The irony is that no one but me would know.


Making art is an exercise, like any other.


Its boundaries shift depending on where it's seen, and by whom. 


It would be misdirected to consider this a failing.









I don’t much anymore, but I used to go into my brother’s closet and run my hand along the shirts that still hang there, nearly all of them the same shade of blue. 


No blue feels like how it felt running my hand along some shirts in a closet.


I could even resent blue. 








I’ve been listening to a lot of Lenny Bruce lately.


If I miss a line at the beginning, which I usually do, I end up not following how he goes on to build the joke. 


But I love the way he talks. 


I love the way he sings “All Alone.”


Lenny Bruce said his humor was based on destruction and despair. 


You really hear that in his voice when he sings all alone. 









There’s a line I can’t find in a poem about the poet’s ear not being attuned to the sound of the Grateful Dead. It felt obvious the particular poet wouldn’t like the Grateful Dead. 


It’s curious what assimilates ears to some things and not others, and how what people like and don’t can imply status.


Once I understood what some of the status things were, it was hard to know if I liked them, or just thought I should. 


I met a curator recently who said “like” doesn’t enter into it, what art he likes or doesn’t. 


In the music world, what type of lanyard someone has determines status at a concert. You wear it like a necklace so security knows what entry points you have access to.


When Leah dated the 2022 Deadhead I felt bemused by her late stage “Dead” phase. I also considered how, as an artist with a certain audience, she could chill on the association.


My therapist has a ceramic plate propped next to the chair in his office with the phrase “this too  shall pass” carved into it. When he told me a patient made it for him, I felt like an asshole. 


It also shifted how I saw it.


My assumption would be different were it in a gallery, and it would depend on which one. Is the sentiment meant to be ironic, or serious? 


Context tells me how I should understand it.


I remember the first time I heard the live Dead version of Werewolves of London, the Warren Zevon cover, in the back of a Suburban driving to a horse race in Virginia. 


A werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s.


Now nothing could get me to a horse race.


Leah doesn’t care about being smart, or cool, like I do.









In April, I got a psychic reading from the actor Selma Hayek. 


It was unexpected to us both. 


Among other things, she asked if I want to be a “poet” or a “light of the world.”


It was the kind of setting where a question like that felt moving and reasonable.


It’s funny because Selma Hayek is definitely psychic, like the one she played in House of Gucci.


I would know since I’ve seen a lot of them. 


The guy from the eclipse tells me that his friend was a famous actor, and that he tried to assault me that night. I lay there on the floor. Like a rapefish. 


I hadn’t heard the term. 


Apparently, it’s also an actual fish, only with an unfortunate name, like the seed oil, or rapini. 


I thought of the old men on the beach in California, and how the alliteration of body bliss makes the words more blissful. 


I thought about why, for a long time, my version of body bliss was seeking out possibilities for harm. 


It’s strange because the friend played a little asshole in a movie I just saw. 


The kind of guy from somewhere who’d later move to New York and hang out at places like JG Melon.








On a rock in Dumbo Park, Alex and I talked about how the personal is political.


The famous Carol Hanisch line.


It came up because I’d just bought a shower curtain liner for my new apartment from Restoration Hardware, instead of a perfectly fine one from the dollar store. 


I told Selma Hayek about “Flounder,” but she wasn’t interested in my writing. 


For one thing, she didn’t know the word flounder, or the fish, English not being her first language. 


What she did do was massage my throat while I wept.


Like a lot of creative types, I’m motivated by ego and insecurity.


If I knew more about Calculus, it might alter the parallel lines metaphor in some surprising way.


The problem is I’ve needed my versions of things to write. 


It was strange because Selma Hayek knew that.


In Munich, by the theater in Odeonplatz, I walked by a near-dead pigeon that had shit itself profusely and was having a hard time breathing. 


I hovered around for a minute, but there was nothing I could do. 


I told Selma Hayek that sometimes I dream about Nan Goldin. 


She said to stand with my feet pronated, like a pigeon, to remind myself who I am.


It’s funny because it works. 








In Quebec, up north where the Bay of Chaleur flows out to the Saint Lawrence, there’s a road that runs parallel to the water.


Borges said every word is a dead metaphor. 


The phrase “this too shall pass” is a collection of words that make a dead platitude, which is why the ceramic plate in the therapist’s office broke my heart. 


That and how I judged it.


I like how, when driving, the narrow sliver of land across the bay from the road resembles the flashing tail of a comet.


It appears to rise and fall, as if breathing.


I like how gradually it thins before disappearing into the mouth of the river—like the abrupt ending of a flip book.








When Brendan Fraser accepted the Academy Award for the movie “The Whale” he used the word whale enough times that it was awkward.


Whale of a team, whale of a project, wail.


The problem with metaphor is it absorbs too much. 


It doesn’t require specificity.


I didn’t realize that “hard alee” in “To the Harbormaster” was a reference to O’Hara’s dick.


Maybe it’s not and that’s just something someone wrote.


As love from lies or truth from art.


The waves that kept us apart.


Parallel lines are lines in a plane that are always the same distance from one another.








A long time ago, on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, I remember the feeling of my mind pulling apart like the hands of an old clock.


I never liked the way artist necessitates non-artist. 


In the book Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs writes that whales can be thought of as the world’s most colossal lungs, drawing its deepest breaths.


Whales get polluted from their environments, so when eventually they fall to the ocean floor, at certain depths, they explode. 


I’m not sure I care about the craft of poetry.


The critical lens makes it hard to feel.


You don’t have to write poetry to be a poet.








A long time ago, my friend gave me a book of Robert Hunter lyrics. Robert Hunter was the longtime lyricist for the Grateful Dead.


My favorite song was “Althea,” which means healer of wounds. 


The motto of the boy’s school in Nashville is—Gentleman, Scholar, Athlete. 


On Friday nights in the fall, I can hear a faint din of the football announcer’s voice from my house. 


Thinking a lot about less and less, Althea sings.


We never liked the same music, not really.








The boy’s school sends out quarterlies with news of the alumni. Who got married, who died, who gave money. 


I remember the one that contained the notice for my brother on a kitchen counter. 


I thought of the people all across town who would scan the quarterly for news—the marriages, the money-giving, the deaths—before throwing it away.


I remember feeling an incalculable distance between all those people, and me. 


The other thing about depression and the San Jacinto Mountains is how their majesticness can make you feel worse, like a spotlight. 


Art, poetry, music—was that way for him.


The other thing Lenny Bruce said is that satire is tragedy plus time.


It’s ridiculous, if you think about it, Lenny Bruce said.


In the art world, a status marker I’ve observed is that sentimentality is frowned upon.


As if nude, satire requires context.


Tragedy, as if naked, does not.


It’s not supposed to be serious—the way Lenny sings all alone.