The second thing

Underneath the irreality of the dream come true
There is the second, finer thing
More difficult to digest and to know 
What is
I wait for the oracle cards to tell me I don’t go 
In for another reading — this time, I read within

I steady my self, for the body is recovering

I jumped and the current was cool and fine 

The air is plenty but nerves abounding I 

wonder how I made it altogether it’s a 

matter of mindset

I had been asking and wanting telling 

to ask is 

For experiences, only the sign says 

Sheer carnivale

Here in new York I am remembered at convenience

At least when it comes to friendship…preoccupied with their mirrors I 

Release mine in swoop

I want to go where I will be remembered, thought of

Cherished?

for all I Am for all I might be for what 

together we refract

Ladyfingers

On my way home from French class, talking to the Artforum lady who is at that wonderful age of being ripe for us to ask, or is she still a girl?, I recognize why I need more practice at making let alone speaking about my art, showing her photos on my phone as I have done countless other times, I sensed my third energy center collapse inwards and while the verbiage around the paintings, the black ground pieces versus the tiles which might be more ready for reception, was quite correct, the images themselves, the details, what they represented, were not yet in order, meaning they or I were lacking a conviction in their legibility as Important and worthwhile, meaning that if the viewer, the first viewer being myself, is at all tentative about what I am placing before them, that feeling-state (mine or theirs) becomes absorbed into what I show and how I show it, instead of what I should be doing—via, as Viki says, my "dragons": surrounding the work in a firelight of clarity of being and awareness. 

No wonder I have been having a bit of trouble (relative) preparing to go back to school. This is the most important lesson of all! That the work will continue to get better as I continue to bulwark it, as I and it together become impervious to what might be called the violence of conveyance, rather than reverting to a veneer of invisible and ineffable. Phoning Rachel earlier today I laughed at how I must have thought I would take up painting and BAM! success—success in what or whose terms…I made her promise to hold me to the promise that by the time It All comes, I will not care whatsoever, but be so integrated in totality with my own process any acknowledgment is irrelevant. Now how long will that take, what did I set myself up for…Carmen Herrera. So naturally the evening brings with it an illustrative situation. Also, bonus, after I gave her some context on the exhibition we were in, the writer said she was surprised I was a painter cuz painters don’t normally articulate themselves too well…so of course I did something exaggeratedly jejune and formal at the end I actually shook her and her roommate’s hands.

always

funny how in a certain kind of book there will always be a female George along with a Beth...not in name, necessarily, but in concept.

whole heart provisions

Three meals a day

Why the completionist fantasies
to find more ease, more options
The therapist says it’s about my —
about authority stripped bare
and returned to this time, the soul’s task
The magician’s workshop woody, cluttered, I hover there in must and
fetters stillborn dolls aglow his wife and daughter
in the kitchen
waiting for the broadcast

Her eyes all large and googly from behind glass
Eichmann in Bacon’s box
Ariana is a cup overflow’th, angel man had said
the technology, it's so potentially amazing she tells us until they fuck with it
the soul needs food Ariana says
J— volume is what she has, I say
Creasing a crest

I don't know that she knows anymore, more than the rest
I know what I know,
you know?

I remember when Grimes discovered three meals a day
She was surprised it made a difference
She was surprised it filled her and that it didn’t
The lobes grew bigger and bigger but
her jeans still fit