Prop Jug
I guess I am speaking to you. The information transfer happens. It is no more than the true love everyone keeps talking about. You are the cool alchemy of the universe. The hand rushing to the solitude as if to a wound. Or what I knew then keeps on transforming. I barely love to make excuses. In service of what? & meaning what? The accidental player stalling the quick-change. A sandbag's feeling. I manage it. The truth in porcelain shards.
Decisions There is a brazen thing that happens to me when I decide to write, and it is the fact that there is no decision. I miss dancing; I miss playing the piano. I miss privacy enough to know I've never known what it means. I miss you who've spent my lifetime being dead. You could be anyone. We just cannot help the facts. It rains sometimes. I remember your raincoat (I think it was a raincoat) like I remember you (I think it was you) in my hometown, which is different from my birthplace, which is and is not where I want to die. I remember waking up on certain recent mornings with the fog of a dream over me, subsequently forgotten. And there is no decision. And the sunlight is sustained.
Those are the two poems (pieces? works? ramblings?) I wrote this morning. I am learning the rhythms of flow state again, taming the temperamental instrument of my creativity.
I made a playlist for winter which apparently hasn’t started yet. Whatever. Where I live, winter never quite means anything, but the thought of it puts me in the mood for acoustic folk and jazz standards. A bit of soul and dreampop, maybe, too. Here.
It’s interesting to keep a diary in so many forms: blogs, logbooks, journals, newsletters, playlists, pictures, messages. Inevitably, some things are lost. Better some things than everything, I think.
The other day, I wrote in my journal that the purpose of a journal is to “meditate on being there… diary as the fact of being and having been (having written). These things happened and were documented. Someone— I, you, everyone— was there.”
A lot of artists seem to worry about being forgotten or lost to time. I never quite related to this sentiment. The present moment becomes about posterity, somehow, especially as our culture romanticizes posthumous adoration of someone’s work.
I mean, I get it. Who didn’t die in obscurity? Van Gogh, Kafka, Lil Peep (kind of). It makes perfect sense to want to see the extent of one’s importance in this world.
Man, I don’t know. I am here, but whether anyone knows it in a year or two or fifty doesn’t seem like any of my business. You don’t remember the name or face of the violin player you saw busking for pocket change on the street corner a few years ago, but in the moment, you smiled at their sound.
I want to be an internet busker. Scroll by my poems in your email or a digital lit mag and forget right away. So what? You smiled at my sound. You liked the post. We’re all gonna die. I love you right now. All we have is right now.