I Don't Know You

(Orphan Image for Adaptation, 2009)

I don't want to know you. I don't want to learn of your childhood, and your "firsts". I don't want this feeling of loving a stranger for being exactly that to fade away. And let's keep it like that. I won't tell you my name and I won't ask for yours. We'll promise each other to spit words of now, looking into each other's eyes, holding the flesh of the other, and pulsate at the beat of our souls. We won't have friends. Fooling around, drunk and stupid. Running down the street, screaming. I curse this, you curse that, we'll curse each other, create a moment, destroy a moment, cry and laugh, drink some more, watch the black-black turn blue before pink, and we'll spend the morning with each other. It will feel like love for a moment. Shut up mind. I'm not the past.

She.

No.

And I'll ask for silence, as I grab your hand tighter and scream this moment.

Now.

Now.

Again.

And we'll see each other soon. I haven't met you yet. But I have already fallen for you.

Burn It Twice

(Beverley, The Great Escape (Expansions II), 2009)

Kill a bird, then two, with a stone, a rock, or even a pebble. Cover the cadaver with tricks of disappearence; once you see it and now it is gone. The times are passing, here, here, gone. In a flash, in a strike of magic, with swift hand movement, the slight of hand, look here while I do this with the free hand, showing you illusions. I am only playing a game of entertainment. I am only keeping you here, dancing with tap-shoes with raining scalp and burning legs. For you to stay. Keep coming back. And to satisfy.
This show ends and begins with you. With magic on one side, as I keep you thrilled and wanting more, I feed you my heart on the other side, telling you it is the wing of bird, the shell of fruits, and the texture is only a technique of masking the substance. It is after the show, when you come find me in the backroom, with hair down, bowtie loose, and buttons undone you ask the secret of my tricks. To others I say a magician never reveals his or her tricks, for the magic would be gone; replaced with the salt of everyday rationale. But to her, I say, everything, in the greatest detail; accounting each stroke of the brush. I confess all until her eyes form slow lakes and ponds, and there is lost deep inside her. I took something away from her. And the blame is not in the curious, but in the holder of the truth.
Guilt is when I don't hold regret, I don't back down, and be tamed by my actions in remorse. Guilt is having no other way. At the end of the day, I can rest, I can sleep; knowing that I no longer lie each time I see you; knowing something you don't. Something you should know. Something I can't escape for it is beyond me. And as my words fly passed your ears, I know by your confusion they are also beyond you.
For each stone to be thrown. A bird must fall, for you to know the truth. To sink, to fall, as I fall apart.

Upon A Pond

Here you go, and here you go.

T.L.W.O.T.M.N.D

(Slow Death (in stereo), Adaptation, 2009)

"I see", said the Blind Man to the Deaf Man who tapped on the shoulder of the Man Who Lost All Feeling. They all looked at each other with fever in their eyes and thought of their friend who was lost somewhere down the way. They buried the Man Who Knew Everything But Could Not Share A Word (For He Was Mute). His hands were no longer used for writing, and his face displayed fear and courage all at the same time. They often wondered what he had seen, heard, and touched that made him so complicated to understand. They saw him through the haze of jungle heat in an aura of mystery. And they knew all their questions would never be answered, and in turn this would form a barrier of silence around him. Each step he took was noted, each object touched was seen as blessed and cursed. Vegetation grew and died as his skin slicked the surface of earth, and he mumbled to himself over and over. He was insane, he must've lost his marbles. And so he died alone, as the four turned to three, and walked on, leaving a kneeling man to find peace and war, the stars and skies, and the last remaining word to choke the throat.
On an island, on a desert plain, in a sequence of events, the three walked on with slumped over backs, resting on their hips as their heads bopped to the rhythm of their pace. The heat would melt the first layer of skin away, peeling it back like rosebuds in bloom. When thirsty they'd drink each other's urine. That was the only thing they learned from a survival guide the Man Who Lost All Feeling had with him. They grew old walking the earth, seeing the sunset and sunrise, the desert transform into rich jungle sweet with moisture and life, and mountains and hills, valleys and rivers, everything and everything as they passed by, like mourners. Together they might have shared the meaning of life if only they weren't heart-broken loners; thieves of other men's wives, and cigar boxes of stories to boot. No, they gave up hope a long time ago, their stories were told over and over in blues melodies accompanied with sad harmonica rhythms. There would be others to join them and then eventually they would part ways, and they too were miserable loners looking for existence sadder than their own. They found home with the three old men walking their eternity away.
Eventually this must all stop, that this world must end as soon as your eyes desire change. They'll close over and over for the briefest moments and the world will still be here when they open again. You will do this billion times before you die. I tried to hold her hand, and tell her everything is going to be ok. And then I continued to walk, I had friends now.

Introducing Bogard, The Homeless Devil

*some meat to keep you coming here, you are very important, without you, none of this would happen. Keep with me, I got something good in the works. -b

The Sound of Your Voice (Without You Being There)

(Untitled #03, Philm, 2009)

Rob Pauly and I were once held at gunpoint. We were fifteen.

Sitting on a bench, I remember wearing sunglasses and feeling older as I told this story to strangers who invited me to live with them. This would be my first place I would live on my own. They didn't bother to call, one of them, who I had forgotten his name years ago, said they wanted someone older. And this memory just came to me like the smell I haven't smelled in years, and I can instantly remember when the last time I smelled that smell.
Elephant hills are hills common in New Mexico that slope and then ascend with nearly doubling the adjacent slope in degree of angle; this was easier to explain with my hand forming a wave of pavement sloped down and then pinching upwards sharply like an airplane reaching to high altitude. I flew in the air and broke my wrist on an elephant hill once. I was twelve.

"You know more about me than my mom does." -Mr. Ghost

I wanted to stop the soundtrack of your voice, it was the beauty that made me sad. I rested my head on the bridge of crossed arms, and I looked down to my feet, and thought you were half an inch away from biting my leg and the fur that covers it. Instead you licked my elbow and said we were playing Sharks. I said Tremors. You replied to my words with a question, and I explained to you that in the movie, which starred Kevin Bacon, Tremors, there was an on-going act of jumping from one giant rock to another, and furniture to furniture because these giant worm things would rip through the ground or floor and eat you! Some kids called the game "Lava", you called it Sharks. I wondered what your childhood would've been like. I told myself I would trade my entire childhood just to know every detail of yours. I realized how much you mattered and it made it worst. Your voice continued, that made it unbearable as I listened on. I was confused. I looked for you around my shoulder, underneath me, and perhaps in the bathroom as I knocked on the door. No response.
My words felt so small to your voice; you spoke in poetry without trying. You were honest, naive, and just you. I knew I couldn't be that, that my words were all attempts to get closer to you. The soundtrack ends and loud upbeat lounge/club music reminded me you left a while back. The room fell silent as I paused the player, and thought of writing a response to what you left me. This is the only way I could tell you how much the record of your voice and your stories mean to me.

Did you hear me say goodbye before the elevator door closed, I said it this time, as I walked back, feeling indescribable. Am I still a phantom, am I still a ghost? I was twenty-three.

GUNZ

(Bamboo Forest, Maui, HI, 2007)

Perhaps now more than ever I should tell you this. And this is how I will feed you clues, hints, or stabs at something that perhaps I don't even know yet. But we'll get through this.
Was the image attractive enough, was the title alluring? Either way you're reading this, right now, and my hands are no longer typing away, I don't know what they're doing.

It is up to you if this next paragraph exist, if you are giving that much more, giving me the time to finish what I just might say, what I might get at here. I almost lost you there just now. Thank you for staying with me.
It isn't just the factor of the stranger or the anonymous, and how I escape your name, my faceless reader, it is an act of bearing everything I have, without knowing truly why, and just an act of action. It is the way the words come out, as if a thought ran its way across my body and through my fingers in these dexteral movements; pressure here and pressure there, as these characters appear. It is how their represented, how the formation of them is iconic, and how they escape aesthetics and mediate on exactly what they are, language of communication. I want to talk of communication, how a stone is thrown in the air and travels to another surface to scratch it, to push it, to make its mark, and to transfer a movement and energy once completed within it and now is transcended through its direction, its collusion course to another rock, and that rock is now moved; taken in by the energy of another, as it now moves where one stone stopped. I ask what is this whole system, this dance, for? The stones eventually erode each other until they are frail and can no longer bare the impact of another, but their will to stop does not hold back the world around them, and with or without that frail stone's approval, another stone will come flying at that aged surface and crack and break apart that stone to dust. What remains is not lost, but the reminiscence of this dance, and when we look closer we can see the kiss of every stone to fade this surface to dust. We see the places this rock has been, the earth of distant lands, and the many rocks that have crashed into it. We start to see the history of an existence as we study its age and experience, and through all of this that pile of dust and tiny pieces of stone are put back together and taken with us as we collide with other surfaces, chipping away, and resonating with the world as our bodies echo a dance that has been going on for just about forever.

I wanted to share this to you.
Thank you for coming this far.