summer 2025






There is none like thee among the dancers

Logorrheic in crisis

Stands in the corner dangerously

the ephemera is still in suitcases and I can’t yet turn to it to locate me when I’m scared. It’s impossible for me to keep my whole life in mind and unbearable when I’m reminded by too much of it. I think I need to exist to myself.

”Ethan I’ve been drinking. I hope I am, I hope you are, a ghost wearing the skin of an angel.”

I will always regret cruelty more than misplaced kindness. I will always want to forgive you. I will always admire you
you in the deep end of spirit.

It was an interview with Henry Miller, his point was about having a Tibet within- A birdhouse in your soul?- Yes exactly- They might be- They might be, they could, and they are.

jaws wine (not a typo); the only araki movie I didn't torrent in high school

She’s got all her worldly possessions in her backpack and that’s including spray paint. They’re sitting next to a church and he says why don’t you paint that wall? And she paints cockroaches and jellyfish. And he says that’s pretty good, and he paints skulls, and she realizes it’s him. And he leaves her a 14 million dollar painting. Which she’s loved since she was a little girl.
That’s pretty awesome.
It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. Listen to this: ”...They’ve never met, but it doesn’t matter. Art teaches us to mourn one another.”

Entering rabbitholes and staying there for days. Not breaching for air or making recourse to baseline.

What you think of me is up for investigation

the last notes section was 5,180 words and 3,018 of them were mine.

Like at easter when they swing the thurible, and there’s wood and lillies and tall candles in the hot talent show spotlight, and he’s in a black suit if you can call it that, it’s a kind of unconvincing black, linen black. his hair is full of sweat. I want to write with that kind of heady simplicity. I wrote something immediately after I heard it the first time but it doesn’t really matter without sound. I miss playing piano at school so bad. I wish I was a baritone. and I will find you who has nothing to say.

”Fern and mercy. Form and dream destroyed. Need the cliff torn down. To hold hands and stare down the raw void of the day.
Be my contraband.”

real true dichotomies

”Ryan has done a, a work of literature in my private messages.”

It’s always good to have something or someone you don’t understand: spooky action at a distance

I spend the day going back and forth on the red line and not telling anyone. I spend the day looking at beech trees and wondering whether it’s worth it to buy cigs up here. Sometimes I think everything had to happen the way it did, and at the end I wouldn’t change it, or forfeit aftermath. I think about inevitability and distances, and how somewhere there’s a number constantly calculating, classified to God, until it’s 0. Though one time it infared into the negatives.
My dad wanted me to get an earlier train and thinks I’m hurting myself. I played the end half of Heavy Metal for him as we trespassed through wild green warrens/12 1/2 mph driveways, trying to see the lake. I’m ok, I’m glad I got the late one. Harvard and trees. I think I’m ok. I wish I had more time to go to the playground or mycelium or something with n/t/m, but I wanted to be able to see the graffiti along the railroad. I’m ok with just existing. Same as going to anything else alone. I should stop avoiding it so often.

Though I wouldn’t really wanna meet someone who was

It’s turning off the ac to hear the music better

Deep down, you would not rather be taming horses.

”to me the best kind of art paints a target in the silhouette of the artist and fires with impunity”

so up her alley I thought I was in her backyard

Remember, when you’re dancing, to leave room for sex

I look like the part of me that loves this

long island has produced a stunning monopoly on contenders for gayest diss tracks ever

between your f-stop and your other F stop

your writing has good posture

Last Two Speakers of a Dying Language Refuse to Speak to Each Other

I am riding out desire. I am so violating the biological imperative. I am dickriding for Audrey Hepburn. I am at work, actually, and dancing on the clock. I am buying a red bean bun from Harper’s in shiny quarters. I am going to the party later. I am screenshotting a video you posted, captioned ”am I not uniquely brilliant or uniquely depraved...?” because it’s funny and you are both of those things. I am taking the train to Coney Island and walking down the entire boardwalk next to the stationary alabaster sky and getting fuck all out of it, except a couple spots I could probably sing as loud as I wanted. I am on a mission. I am eating shit leaping over the Allen St garden strip and my palm is bleeding. I am downloading grindr and deleting it after 45 minutes. I am pretty sure my friend forgot this White Light/White Heat t-shirt is actually theirs so I’m not saying anything. I am trying to take a deniably provocative photo of mosh pit bruises. I am writing something (not this) like David Wojnarowicz’s ”Someday this kid” because my mom sent a photo of me when I was 2, where my birthmark is red and raised and my eyes are almost solid dark blue and I have never been in love with anyone and the only songs I know are You Can Close Your Eyes by James Taylor and Cinnamon Girl by Neil Young. I am pretty sure the best song you (another) will ever write will be something like lidocaine. I am happy about how the opposite window also loves de Saint-Exupéry. I am running out of ink on top of freight trains. I am pulled into hugs by faces from the dark swell of the tunnel. I am skimming the published version of the interview someone sent me and grinning because as far as I can tell she changed absolutely nothing. I am concerned about how the last several times I had sex it felt like I was doing psychic terrorism on myself. [A month ago] I am on the train wearing, like, cargo pants and a t-shirt, a normal t-shirt, and an hour before I was basically just physically and psychologically torturing someone. I am not giving myself a 9 for the paddle, as they say. I am not thinking about stuff like that when I get off, though, I’m mostly thinking about the river of your hands running through my hair on the bed in my old room, which is not good and probably a catastrophe. I am avoiding getting off for the time being. I am on the roof. I am throwing the keys from the fire escape. I am crying because Brian Wilson is dead, and it’s silly, but the sadness is so simple and unanimous, because he made beautiful music and now he’s dead. I am deciding to learn to read sheet music. I am pretty good at writing in languages I don’t actually know, you know. I am reserving practice time at Greenwich House. I am thinking about jeans pressing against each other and freckles aligning. I am adding I See Myself to a list of songs to burn a CD for and play in a car with blue Tennessee plates, when it visits. I am hanging out with Clive Davis class of 2025 and appreciating the way they talk about pop music.

I was so internal. I was writing in spirals and I hated myself so much, and all the time. I’m doing blackout poetry on my crisis center intake form from 2022. I never want to feel like this again.

You mean the Nazi who dumped you over Fourth of July weekend?

It makes me happy that my sheets are clean.

I saw you walking up stairs underwater, mysterious green, light refracted, clarifying auburn, wearing white, which you never did. I saw you at the worst times, a few months out before and after, and only happy in the ones with time travel. Actually, maybe it was in all of them, but in different directions. What I want for you is the opposite of time travel.

God emperor of yonkers

”tiny Emily Dickinson so big [gestures] that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a passionate little woman. I feel better.”

”I would’ve much preferred fucking Records for Bushels of Kale...Records for ConEd bill. Send em some Beatles LPs once in a while.” -Josh

It’s the difference between walking and pacing

Quiet son’s public meltdown

In pangs that reverb until fading

”Sometimes a gun is just a gun. But not this time.”

So try to be what God wants you to be
And say that ”I love you” again

sleeper hits for weeping dipshits never rang so true

There are some things you can only say on paper but other things you can only remember in your notes section.

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

Someday I’ll Love Ryan Taylor

But the shortest distant between feeling and action is still probably breaking the plaster, is sound, is cum, is crying, is being 17 reaching for the car door on the way to church, is reaching for your hand.

”Well, surely someone does.”

between two streets with the same name in separate boroughs, you transfer trains at marcy av. you would like to have a talk with the universe. you won’t get one.

Trust that I’m taking you as a warning.

With two minute long intros to weed out the weak-souled

They were gonna haul me in dead or live bassist

”Every underground space- be it a warehouse, ballroom, or derelict punk house- is a portal that collapses time.”

I want you to be more than who you are when you’re scared

Swimming across a lake we’d gotten kicked out of by fretful park rangers a couple nights before- takes about 20 minutes of persistance. I am slower than Yumi but faster than Viv and Ellis. Only two or three things left in the world. We stop for ice cream and a monk in a saffron robe tells Ellis he can’t control anyone else’s actions, only his own. On the way back to the city we play the High Kings live album, and I know the words to all the love songs, and Yumi knows the words to all the IRA songs.

During intermission you resolve into friendship. Back at mine you say I need a therapist who’s really smart, which is probably the nicest and funniest thing to say about it. You determine that 50 year old you would be a good therapist for current me, because you should be wiser but do understand my codes. And this true.

You already know they’re different, but it’s more obvious on an old frontier.

You are hiding on the L-I-double-R, which you used to do enough to get good at. You feel like a pro coming out retirement for One Last Job. The scent of this bathroom is something you memorized and forgot until the relevancy resurfaced, like the Latin ablative case. You’re trying to keep too much of it from entering your body. You’re trying to breathe as little as possible but it’s ok. The conductor sounds like he’s got a big muff on the intercom and you make out: ”Aaaaand have a fantabulous evening, no matter the weather outside. Just walk in between the raindrops; it’s as easy as walking on water.”

She says something like, you sound fine, you’ve been doing it for so many years, you just sound androgynous. A while ago she told me that crew at HQ didn’t know what sex I was until they saw me in piss alley. I would like to believe that what’s in my pants is a trade secret but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.

All I want is the end of falling out of love.

How can you believe an idea over your own body?

A white boy with curly brown hair is walking behind you and talking fast in a southern accent. At first you don’t think he’s serious and then you don’t think it’s for you. But it is and for three blocks. He’s talking quickly rising in pitch about faggots and mutilation and piss and the day of judgment. It’s a really beautiful afternoon in Seward Park. He looks and sounds like someone your sister might know from UGA. You don’t even know what he thinks you are, but you sure know what he thinks of it.

you probably are american for better or worse. you’re trying to be for better.

a flicker of clean fire

Triple incandescence

Baby, we are New York nonfiction.

”Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t.

Mandatory closing of eyes. Hard radiance.

you covered your face with your hands and started crying so fast the tears weren’t even hot.

-I was friends with more crazy people when I was your age.
Did they stop being crazy or did you stop being friends?
A combination of those and a third thing, which is some of them aren’t on this planet anymore.

Every time I’m alone I think it’s forever

Is it wrong to wish on space hardware

monitoring my top tracks this month like I’m my own field medic. I can listen to this song over and over on September 18th, 2027 but not until then

Hail the Panasonic! Hail the inscrutable engines of chance! Hail Cybele!

Wow, I Can Get Intertextual Too

I, I think I’ve had enough of this delayed release hypocrisy

I’m trying to gauge the right questions. The book in front of me says, ”You mean that they know how to live because they know how to choose?” Not bad.

Very few stories are narrated either to idealize or condemn; rather they testify to the always slightly surprising realm of the possible.

A man at the bookshop is talking about an Anna Karenina b-plot and you have to move

my self consciousness will ruin my life but I’m hesitant to let go of anything that counts as self awareness.

impossible theatre wikipedia page

Yeah, you shouldn’t interrogate others’ desire, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want someone to interrogate mine sometimes.

you bet I see the river and raise it

”Now we are entering a part of the night called the finale, where the band is not a name but an idea, or a concept.”

um, bloodsport?

it’s a puzzle and like good puzzles true any way you solve it

I want to sit down in the pews and press my tongue against your jeans until there’s a wet spot. Through the dusty sunlight I look at you. I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire.

I need to know exactly what everyone wants from me all the time before my bpm can go below 110 but tampering with plausible deniability is worse

There were no lights. This was in wartime London. We walked a long way in silence. If you have to cry, he said, and sometimes you can’t help it, if you have to cry, cry afterwards, never during! Remember this. Unless you’re with those who love you, only those who love you, and in that case you’re already lucky for there are never many who love you - if you’re with them, you can cry during. Otherwise you cry afterwards.

I don’t want to lie awake thinking
”Oh, is that what that was about?”
Because everything falls into place
So late, so late, but I gotta wanna figure it out

I feel like I’m recording on top of a cassette from last summer and I still hear it in the gaps.

the magic combination of songs to complete the secret greatest Manhattan cannonball run ever unrecorded

”The more evil I get, the more and more I like Ryan.”

There’s a little kid on the train who looks like what you would logically assume I looked like in kindergarten, although I didn’t. This might be part of the reason his dad sat them down next to me.

Housing for Jesus players
Dens of inequity for team Satan players

Like prisoners and shepherds, many of them didn’t care who they had sex with, the idea being that what happens in the dark stays in the dark.

”cuz they’re from the planet of being alive and connected and feeling it a lot like you are / but everyone’s from different regions” -ellis

there is only dance music in times of war

you don’t say what you mean, but you sure say it like you mean it

I don’t want you to be the angriest dog in the world

”A lot of people I know think that there is nothing more important than making a song. Fortunately, this belief arises infrequently in their conversation.”

some things are more important than fear

”Why do we play guitar in these fetid basements? Why do we make up games to hypnotize? Why do we paint on the ceilings?” -Rose

asked what I wanted from her and I don’t even know how to begin to answer that question, or whether it’s the right one. To walk around bodies of water every 3-7 months

properly scan and upload homefree + maybe jcli + thing with journal + figure out what to take out for - even though you should just start a different project if you feel like any of it should be different