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.

Ray spotting

Burning daylight in the rambunctious underground rat hole. Squeezing cheese between teeth an swiping whiskers with microfiber. Artificial candle light licks dry eyes and withering thighs whip against wood grain chair seat. Billow blankets on unmade bed unlaid in with love twists. Fuzz fill the air, soften lungs and settle on coffee cup. Fill table book stack instead of books back to back with letter-shaped pen scrapes. Take a mad nap with a burlap sack stained with generated heat. Battle the bold outside winds wrapping tentacles of air into infinite curls between Twin Peaks perked up with the wealth of a hundred capital-craving captains of some unimaginative industry. Blend mold-bearing manuscripts of nature. Take tote bag out an open its folds to tug at the sun strings sapping from above. Suck in the entirety of every corona blast the size of Olympus Mons volcanic bursts down to match-stick miracles flicked on with a finger switch. The light is yours now!