Hey y’all,
Happy May Day! Next year we feast on billionaires’ marrow.
Anyway, I’ve got a small poem for you. I rather like it. I hope you do, too.
I also have a longer piece for you, with a photo set of collages. [CW: a couple of the photos have piss. No nudity, but piss, so, if you’re not a yellow hanky boy, scroll?]
All of it’s about…well, you know.
I think we’re going to call this the end of the first series of <you know, i don’t know>. That literally means nothing except I’m mentally drawing a box around the first twelve of these and saying, “There, that’s a thing.”
Well, no, not quite. What I’m trying to say is: nothing’s changing but also maybe it will. Routines need to be tinkered every so often. This thing will probably be a little different in the next series. That said, this stupid thing will remain always free, often gay, and sometimes good.
Take care,
KJ
freestyle
you crouch to meet the squirrel eye to eye.
he wants bread or pizza crust, something,
but it’s been a couple months for all of us,
even him, so the rhythm is a bit off, a kiss
where tongue meets tooth. the spring heat
has curled our hair, left our masks soggy,
made our pits so ripe that we’re glad
everybody else has to keep six feet away.
i lean in to take a picture of the squirrel,
me staring at him staring at you staring
at him, still no bread, still no pizza
crust. he gives up and runs away, hoping
someone on the trail remembers a time
before government-sanctioned walks,
touch-free delivery, Zoom room intimacy.
“you know, my favorite thing about
squirrels are how their tails look like
a thousand exclamation marks—“
just like i feel when i lock eyes with you
over our bandanas, just like i felt during
our first kiss, at the bar, when we still had
bars, all rhythm, tongue meets tongue.
guided meditation on playing with trash
1.
breathe in. you are going to accept what you are doing for what it is: you are playing with trash. you are not reclaiming discarded items. you are not reinterpreting waste. you are not redefining what is and what isn’t refuse. you are playing with trash. you are simply playing with trash. breathe out and say that word: trash. trash. trash. let the word fill your nose, just like the stench from sunday dinner scraps still sitting in the bin: weeping onion ends, muscle bits grown smeary, mixed berry clot-colored slurry. trash trash trash. we are playing with trash. you are playing with trash. we are playing with trash.
2.
breathe in. breathe out quickly and accept that you have nowhere to go except for your apartment, that the bars are closed until god knows when, that your friends and lovers are indoors, too, that you work in the nonprofit sector so frankly who cares when you ever come back into an office. it is just you, the cat’s shit, and this trash.
3.
breathe in and look around. realize that your home is filled with trash. not like your grandmother’s place, of course, an apartment reduced to crawlspaces and cedar balls, then a trailer, then a soiled twin mattress. nor like your grandfather’s place, cabinets filled to the brim with knives, books and books and books in farsi and other languages he never spoke. still: you own maybe ten things and three of those are kind of trash. mail comes to you and it is simply trash. you make coffee and the grounds are trash. apple scraps, the mountain of beer bottles, the notebooks of poems and drawings. breathe in and think about the first time you saw yourself as trash. breathe out and realize no matter how many degrees you have or how many bills you finally pay on time, maybe you’re just beach town trash, a little faggot with a handlebar mustache and a cheap dye job. breathe in and out until those tears crawl back up.
4.
breathe in and think about the end of the world. let out a laugh. what is the end of the world? who is at the end of the world? why is the end of any world never without some historian or journalist or poet or shithead on the other end? who exactly is watching the capybaras roam around an argentine neighborhood? who is marveling at the restored color of venice’s canals? where did you find that retweet of unmasked meemaws at the denny’s banging their fists for jiggly eggs and buttery toast? breathe in and think about the sights and smells of every other end of the world: the vaporized flesh from the atomic bombs; the distended bellies of yemeni famine; the pieces of a bride after a drone strike; the first achoo from pizarro’s horsemen; the charred bones in tulsa and rosewood; every kaposi sarcoma lesion. an ending for whom? an ending is a decision to say it is an end. an end for whom? an end is a choice to say the story is a story and the story is to be ended. ended by whom. who destroys. breathe out and think about what you will have done to be at the next end of the world.
5.
breathe in and think about that time two weeks ago your grandmother came to you in a dream. she was a black bird, one eye. she said you soon you would be together again. she laughed. breathe out.
6.
stand up. hold your breath this time. think about the end of your world. breathe out and think of a useful phrase that will anchor you against a current of despair. “you are a burden and nobody will miss you—“ not quite. “your friends actually hate you are a terrible person—“ not quite. “your talents are limited and nobody you know has the nerve to say that to you—“ not quite. “you are here and then you are gone.” say this again and again as you rub your hands together, slowly, feeling the rough edges of callus each other, again and again until it is a gloss rhythm in your palms. you are here and then you are gone. you are here and then you are gone. you are here and then you are gone. you are here and then you are gone. you are here and then you are gone. you are here and then you are gone. listen to your palms as they whistle along: maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe.
7.
breathe in or out, whatever, and realize everything i said in meditation one was a lie. sorry.
8.
breathe in again and stare at your hands, your fingernails, the fingertips, the veins and knobby bits. breathe in again and hold some trash in your hand. crumple the junk mail and see which way it want to be folded. listen to the trash. listen to the trash with your fingertips and see which way the trash wants to be ripped, bent, torn, rubbed. look at the trash and have it tell you all the lies and cowardice you are still holding onto. make it do something, anything. nobody said this had to be good. just listen to the trash and figure out what it wants to do for you, listen to the trash with your knobby hands and figure out what is the actual thing you want to say, you are looking and saying what is this shit what is this shit what is this shit until your hands reeking of onion figure it out. breathe in and repeat. breathe in and repeat. there is nothing magical about this and in fact the longer i talk about it the more i ruin the process for you. find some goddamn trash and play with it. breathe in and repeat until you are staring at something that is not quite trash.
9.
breathe out and throw it away because you are inside and it is quite late and you have spent all night playing with trash. let the smell linger on your hands a few minutes before you wash up.
Let’s do this again soon. And in the meanwhile, if you didn’t hate this, let other people know about it. See you soon. Well, soon enough. —KJ
<3