80/twenty

HP, Washington Square Park, NY.

Just because everyone says it doesn’t make it a universal truth.

Toronto, Canada.  Apparently, this is the largest television in North America. The fact that it is in Canada should offend Americans.

From the beach, beneath the rides, in the late afternoon, settled against an ocean breeze, with fingers sifting sands mixed with broken shells.

Fulton Street, Brooklyn.  

Show me the proof…

The G train, Brooklyn. 

One of the great accomplishments of art is that it sometimes becomes a part of one’s own memories. A part of a personal permanent collection. We can be touched, moved and changed by an otherwise purposeless production. The quiet gift that art can move us.

Too big for its message.  Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

London, UK

It takes a village they say. But that’s only where kindness came from.

It took a village to get here. From here we don’t know what it takes.

Often I find that the smaller the event the more it tells me about the person.  Everyone wants to be a hero, few people want simply to be good.

The moon is full outside.

Settling in the sky like a streetlamp,

hanging over a canopy of undulating clouds.

Below.

We coast along the dark, empty boulevard of our night.

The descent has started,

we fall into the treasure box of the lighted city.

Bejeweled Below.

Bright with early evening hope.

Embankment Park, London

Outside London

Maastricht, the Netherlands

When you make yourself you know yourself. And only then can you fix yourself or love yourself.

Border of Belgium and the Netherlands

Belgium

London, UK

She doesn’t need to be fireworks, just a sparkler. She doesn’t need to wow the crowd, just you.

You’ve spent so much time in the shadows you think the world a dark place. But something casts those shadows. Something stands bare, exposed. A world in the sun.

You’ve been living so long in the shadows you think the world’s a dark place. And you think you know what it takes to survive. But there are many ways to live.  There are worlds in the sun.

You haven’t been exposed.  All your lessons are based on hiding.  And so you don’t really know what you love.

“As a means of uncovering truth, the experimental method is superior to intuition.” - Vaillant

I didn’t really live today but if I died today I’d leave more behind.

Bordom is a kingdom easily reached.

Brooklyn Navy Yard

Hudson Valley, NY

Miami, Florida

I wonder today what it feels like to be a migrating animal in a zoo. With the turning of the seasons, do they feel a longing they don’t understand? Some unknown pull, deep inside, left unheeded? Unheedable. A sense that something is supposed to happen. But it doesn’t. It can’t.

In some ways this must be one of the loneliest feelings in the world. The rooted sense that it is time for something, some change that rests known but unknown, felt but without a concrete thought to reason.

Do they, these animals in zoos together, share in empathy over this mysterious condition? Like a colony similarly afflicted.

Of course in other ways we are all in our cages, it’s hardly like we can just go anywhere. It’s all zoos.

The accumulation and protection of great wealth, wealth beyond reasonable use, is a frailty of the human condition. It implicitly reveals an underlying fear that once lost, the fortune may be beyond reach.

Someone once said that most men are in their lives like the carpenter whose work goes so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he has not the time to sharpen them.

The June sun sets stubbornly at this height, “at 35,000 feet” floating east toward home. The cabin lights are low, no smoking and seat belt indicators glow like streetlamps down the rows. Everyone around me is asleep. The awkward posture of airline slumber consistent like a military protocol: mouths open, chins forward.

The setting has a quiet intimacy, a romantic calm. The sun has largely been put down, inaudibly exploding on to morning somewhere far away. The hues of the set mostly absorbed and refracted by the earth leave the sky an inky marine darkness. Another day surrendered to the inexorable invasion of time, aided treacherously by my eastward journey.

The urban dusting of light below reveals fields, streets, dark paths, neighborhoods and thoroughfares. A thousand little theatres, stages. One cannot see people from this height, only possession and control of the land. It is vast in scope, accumulated ownerships like snowflakes blanket like snowfall.

New Delhi, India

New Delhi, India

…a pattern for a purpose.

…a theme for a destiny.

Imperial Hotel, New Delhi

The girl next to me speaks a Quebec French. She is thick but small.

Attraction stirs, but is incomplete; not compelling but present.

I want her casually, like dry snacks at a long cocktail party.

Underground, New York

The mood word tonight is elevate.

Lifted.

Up.

Icarus?

No.

I don’t think I’m free. Or boundless.

That’s not my delusion.

A simple reprieve.

And I know it.

Unshackled from a watchtowered mind.

That still watches.

For good behavior perhaps.

But not. Really.

The mind does no favors

Its grip eases only as it secures itslef.

Like we share food when we hunger not.

Clinton/Washington C train, Brooklyn.

Fort Tilden, NY

Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

he could build

a paper airplane

which when the wind was right

could settle on the air

like a confident gambler

rumor had it he got one to go fifty yards

the dogs would tire waiting for it to land.

DUMBO in La Guardia. 

The Clerkenwell, Lower East Side.

Rockefeller Center, NY 

cornerstoned as i round

a bend

in my years

marked by calendars and

lines

on the edges of my eyes

i arrive at a place in space

and time unfamiliar

i hear

the easy chatter of my

youth

back around the bend

but i can no longer

see it

not turned away

but turned around

a corner

in my years

less impressive but stronger

founded perhaps

not floating

cornerstoned

not cornered.

Maybe Nashville, I forget.

a dry river trickles across the landscape

30,000 feet below me

a tan line

worn into a brown valley

mere memories in the land

of a dry river that ran

Guggenheim.

I have a subscription to incompetence; it’s just one issue after another.

Ft. Greene, Brooklyn

Toronto, Canada

If you have been under fire for long enough, you start firing into the wind. The sounds of a normal life have to be relearned.

Outer Banks, North Carolina

Clams don’t smile

or care

about you.

it’s not indifference

or apathy.

if they had clam hands

they would not hug you.

with clams mouths

they would not talk to you.

At the bottom of the shallow sea

they bed

concerned not of you or me.

cupped by the large earth in displaced sand

they exist for themselves.

you cannot win them over.

you simply don’t matter

to clams.

Nags Head, NC.

Nashville, TN

a frayed edge of a toothbrush

or a rug

tell me i’m truly alive

in case i doubted which

i do

it wears on me

time

like my teeth

on brushes

or my feet

on rugs

i am being erased by

these moments

and i bristle, but this encourages

my erasure

the present cleansed of me

by time rubbing against me

and time recalled to shine again

as always

while i fray.

because time has an appetite for memories.

Looking the part just gives you more chances to fail.  We want things to make sense.

To watch TV is to watch people die.  We took the peaceful world we fought for and recreated the violent world we overcame.

do not be influenced by the charms of youth; but do not lose sight of the fact that they are charming.

… brown skirts on strong hips

… kindness that could probably be friendship

… lingering pale yellow pulp crusted and clinging to hastily cleaned steel-ware.

Amagansett, New York

There is so much to challenge the mind and keep it from task.

Fire Island, New York

… small faces eating seasoned corn.

… old dogs and old owners lonely in streets that have forgotten their names

… plates of plantains, sticky and loud in their smell, resting in a bowl too large for one.

One cannot predict from hope alone how two people will get along.

Central Morocco, from the train.

A giant macaroon in Paris, France. 

Lac Ste Croix, France

Provence.

collected wisdoms are like bookmarks, often used to keep one from getting lost in the story of one’s life.

New York

James Hotel, New York

Miami, Florida

The Arno and Florence, Italy

Tuscany with my brother.

London

dawdle about with concepts

touch, test, tickle, ideas

play

until they smile at you

and show you their teeth

then you know you have them

strike

betray

steal them for your own

and cage

then

show them to your friends

ha!

look what i have

mastery

command

of a pocket full of thoughts

that i will use

to make you smile, too

so that i will feel better.

Brooklyn, New York

Sydney, Australia

All the structures that shelter the poor are made of straw.

There are two types of surrendering: surrender with and surrender without.  It is so hard to know which is the better path.  Without echoes courage, with whispers compassion.  Both demand acceptance, which is the hardest part.  But sometimes the struggle simply needs to end.

This isn’t automatic.  Like talking.  The words aren’t effortless.  Is it practice?  The permanence derails me, perhaps.  The notion that these words are launched irretrievably into “space”.  Once fired they wander like wind forever.  It’s daunting, because I care.  I care about what is permanent in the world.  The indelible is the only thing that matters in the end.

Sometimes things get lost in words.  There is a presumption that communication is inherently clarifying, we talk to understand.  But sometimes the better route is to stay quiet.  I’m terrible at this, but I know it’s true.

Today I tossed my iPhone on the couch and a message came up that said, “nothing to undo”.  Untrue, iPhone, untrue.

Today I came home early and watched TV.  Every afternoon in Sydney they show episodes of Mork and Mindy, Happy Days, and the Brady Bunch one after another.  Today I watched all three.

Mork released the full range of his feelings, learning how to manage the complicated landscape of human emotions.  In Happy Days, the Fonz realized from his friends that he was fighting too much and learned to control his anger.  In the Brady Bunch the youngest son won a bet against the oldest, but learned that managing winning is as important as not losing.

I learned that TV really was different before.  In all the episodes the morality was unforced and kind.  It was human, not divine, in its source; humorous and not didactic in its delivery; genuine and not artificial in its sentiment.

We’ve lost this these days.  On our televisions our kindness is violent and our violence is extreme.  To watch TV in the modern world is to watch people die.  Mostly anyway.

Sintra, Portugal

Sydney, Australia

Wineglass Bay, Tazmania

I don’t know if I can want you to be anything less than what I want you to be.

It is better to control an army than to be a good soldier.

You feel the heat of the sun and you feel it shines harder on you.  But it shines always and inexorably in all directions at once.  And so it is that the actions of the world are so rarely personal.  Even where we are chosen, it is always a byproduct of available choices woven into the moment of election.

my slightness rubs up against the largeness of the world.

Los Angeles, California.

Sir Thomas Moore and Diogenes get into a bar fight while talking.  Who wins?

Diogenes.

Right, but why?

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you?

Estragon: You let me go.

after plot

i reflect on ideas

i had

about us

you and i

we were going to do

something

we didn’t

i don’t

know what i thought

i don’t

think what i knew

i shrug

i’ll understand later

i assume

like finding the lost keys to a car

long sold

there is nothing to do

and besides

only the sun announces

its intentions

and does exactly that which it promises

i don’t.

seeing inches in time

little spaces

linger

or jump

connecting larger space

making conversation

fuse and bind

inch of time after inch of time

life then is an allotment of inches

circumstances

formed by inches of temporal spans

a sigh

a snort

these are obvious culprits

red hand the inch is had who snorts

at a funeral

or sighs

at a wedding

but is it not more exciting

and even romantic

to exalt in the more muted inch of moments

a lingering hand

a slow withdrawal from embrace

how we pursue these tiny pieces

these fractions

the two by ones in lego we search for

at the bottom of the bag

blistering, chaffing, scratching our hands

for the glory of the smallest square which

makes a difference

not in use

but in wholeness

they are the sequins comprising the vestment of our sum of days

the pageantry of relative perfection

after all, we die in an inch of time

only then made whole

people always clap for the wrong things.

you should embrace failure early in life so that you may grow old with dignity.

Investing in a moment’s moment I write.  Not expecting much and without destination in mind; a farmer walking his own, untilled land.  The paths are not well known, but worn enough to follow.  Like the melody of a once heard but largely forgotten song.

The problem with technology is it’s neutrality.  It invites all behaviors because it really only augments the abilities of the user.  And the user is us.  Frail but hopeful, conflicted us.

The afterfun moment’s calm after the special has be memorialized.  Tonight has been realized, now release me from the burden of reaction.  But, if you can, bring me back.  Reinspire tonight.

I know what’s on the other side of that rainbow, and it’s not a pot of gold.  It’s as heavy as one, but that’s not what it is.  No fortune for me there.

Physical growth considered upside down as the lengthening of a suspended drop; at last falling into nothing.

… what we hoped.

… the culmination of events beyond our control.

… sufficient.

… how we expected.

… what we should have known they would be.

… what they are.

Achievement keeps me entertained.

I didn’t do it.  Like Shea’s parents.  I didn’t run back in.  I didn’t stop it.  I didn’t save it.  It is such a complicated map, this life; I have drawn it so large.

Forsake adjectives.  Surrender color.  Stale the phrases in a typist’s palette.

Actively pursue words, chase them around the corners of sentences, through the rabbitholes of paragraphs and across the chasms of chapters.

Be bold in pulling letters from the void of imagination, from the shelves of like items scattered about the superstore of the mind.

And through an exercise, strengthen and empower a language which begs for no descriptions, that is confident in its nouns, purposeful in the richness of the color of itself.

No more love stories.

“But what do you mean by ‘a return to normal life‘?”

Tarrou smiled. “New films at the picture-houses.”

- Camus, The Plague.

How many mistakes do you have before you’ve made too many.  How many chips have been played.

The same range that burns us makes us well done.  The burden is on us to manage our exposure and understand our thresholds.  Lest we burn, releasing what we had to share, failing at whatever purpose our potential promised, and rendering what we hoped others would consume with glee into an ugliness.

We feel the waste of good meat more than most other wastes.  Somehow we see it could have loved, hoped, lived, cried, helped, played, sang and danced.

You opened up a sense of wonder in me.  I’ll miss this the most, the grand limitless potential of our wonder.

I’m not sure if you’ll understand all this and I suppose it can’t matter either way.  But I just want to remember it a last time before I forget it.  Not the words, which are saved, but the feeling.  How close we were to the wonder we wanted.

You have carved such a small hole in the blanket of your preconceptions.

Floors above in the urban canopy, I see me in this evening reflection. The cities bright night lights twinkle beyond the glass.

So benign in the day, my window and my beautiful view, but in the evening there I am clear as the image in a mirror.  I think of myself over the years, swiveling on an Aeron chair as the clock moves past the twilight hour, when the window closes back on me.

Watching myself age in that reflection, it is not enough.

The shrapnel of exploding love has scarred me.

The human world is built on the frailty of human nature, defended by the good fraction.