Something unseen

Negative space feels luxurious in a world of clutter. Invert the narrative with me. Let’s call it positive space.

Hone in on the air around you until you’re treading through it. Look not past the air at any point but through it to get to that point.

Invite the smallest sounds to tickle your inner ear. Welcome them as the molecular vibrations they are, physically chain-linking in the same air you tread.

Inhale deeply until you catch whatever small scent billows around your aura. You may be used to it—overcome autonomic rhythm, pick up the olfactory off-beat.

Place your pointer finger on the least interesting surface within reach. Apologize to that surface and tell it how interesting it truly is. Swirl in small, slow circles or find a pattern to produce gentle friction.

Find a wall and care more about it than anything on or against it. If outdoors, gaze skyward until your perimeter drops to an ocular meniscus.

Make a small sound only you can hear.

Nod imperceptibly to all that’s not yet has always been here.

Cleaning unwritten drafts

While headed towards a Chinese restaurant, I held my notebook tucked in between the warm fold of my arm. The notebook is a go-to object to grab when headed out the door on a solo excursion where I know I’ll be occupying a space meant for more folks than one.

Surely enough, I was sat at a four-person table in a packed place full of cheery, chatty citizens. I opened the brown, cloth-bound book and didn’t know what to scribble in the time before my tofu peppercorn dish would arrive.

Thinking of what to write had me writing down topics I could possibly write about. Here are those topics.

I’m also including a slurry of pending post titles to clean up my drafts folder. At one point I thought these words would spur well-wrought articles, but instead they’ve occupied a digital graveyard. In case they might be a source for future thoughts, I wish to preserve them—while not allowing them to crowd the sacred canvas, the digital abyss, the zero-bit brain bin dot txt.

…

• What it means to break from comfort and why it is the absolute most comfortable
• Whether it is necessary to deviate from your authorial style after you are almost certain you have established one
• What it feels like to imagine the magnetization of attention and why it is a lie
• Embarrassment toward certain potential writing subjects and why those are the most authentic and therefore essential
• Pseudo-intellectualism, uncertainty in one’s craft, and how to be sure you are not simply a savvy buffoon
• Jealousy towards cheery people and how a single phrase can open wide the otherwise unaffected
• The daunting thought that everything has already been written and you are wasting your words

…

Beach House, Bummly, Capitalization Crisis, Deletism, Discontent, Fructose, Giddy Prompts, Literary Blue Balls, Milk, Plants, Principles, Privacy, Self-discipline, Stingray, Superstition, The Horween Wrist Wrangler, Tiny Concerts, Ukrzaliznytsia

Amateur poetry club

This is a retro-post from a newsletter once associated with a previous email address I’d been using. Uploading here for archival purposes so it’s not lost when I stop paying for the old address.

How are you? Hope you’re well. The birds are singing. War’s a-brewing. Hell on earth tastes like empty days of laze laced with strawberry rhubarb beer and the unscented waft of no one near you across the table, or in the bed, only awful far-ness filled with a nose of naughty daytime explorations of the uninterpreted self.

I wrote a poem last Sunday and recorded a reading of it. Blasted the bitch with unrelenting edits only to realize it’s a waste to want well-meaning art to have any modicum of perfection. So fuck it. Wrote another poem today, a week from the last. Recorded it with the unharmonious hurling of laundry in the background. Uploaded to the tube. It’s unrefined, and it’s mildly glorious. Forcing fewer internal outcries of unrequited care. It’s writing for no one’s sake. It’s non-fundamental narcissism—the kind that comes in a can these days.

Here’s a lopsided load of liminal observations one afternoon in the park across the street.

And here’s a maddening maelstrom of mind puke from lack of sunlight. It’s an elegy to the happy-go-fucky Sunday I could have had, but instead chose to sit inside my own mind and observe the park from the caddy-corner cave orifice at the end of the endless hallway of my lavishly barren boudoir.

Thanks for indulging in this interruptive, unscrupulous, and inexplicably loquacious liquid-spill of word meal. March on. Munch on some vitamin D. Dunk yourself ultraviolet. Go play with the bees.