When you think of it

I'm in this movie:

http://www.notnostrums.com/iss3/investigations.php

Poems

I have some poems here:

http://www.notnostrums.com/

So, Zachary Schomburg and I have collaborative chapbooks that are going to be available for the first time to the public at AWP, Chicago, February 11-14. They are being lovingly published by Factory Hollow Press, and will be available here afterward.

Summer NYC

Zach Schomburg and I had a show on friday night of a series of drawings I made to go along with his poem The Pond. 

My friend Mark Leidner has a new book of his poetry out called "The Night of 1,000 Murders"  and I think that  he/it  is pretty great. Everyone reading this should go buy a copy.  Here is a sample:

The River

The woman told me the saddest thing I had ever heard. I

told her I loved her because of what she had told me. Her

expression soured. She warned me not to love her for her

telling me that. She told me it was okay, and maybe even

good to love her - only not for that. I responded that I

did not love her for that, exactly, and that she had

misunderstood me. I admitted that why I loved her was

related to what she had told me, yes, but only

tangentially, and was that alright? She asked me to

elaborate, so I told her that I loved her, not for the thing

she had told me, but for the courage involved in telling

someone something like it, something that sad, which

seemed to me to be a great deal of courage - and I told

her I also loved her, though far less than for the courage

part, although plenty still, for the way in which she told 

it to me, which I explained had been, in all seriousness,

eloquent and mesmerizing. She had a small build and at

that point she laughed like a flower, wilting and 

blooming. Her nose was in the center. I decided to show

her the river. I picked her up in my hands and carried her,

crisscrossing back and down through the steep and

elaborate cragwork of the slope of the riverbank. When

my feet were finally in the water I looked at her and said

the river is deep, and fast, and it drowns many people,

but I still love it. I still love the river, I told her. But I do

not love it because it is deep, and fast, and drowns many

people. I love it because it runs behind my house, and I

have lived above it forever.

NYC pictures

Fog

Other NYC Pictures

Thanksgiving

Dinner @ Thordis and David's

Thordis B-day

Fangoria.

Gia

To the best summer ever. Suntan on nipples, L'avventura, Sparky's, me wearing Helmut Lang on the Woody Allen set, porn, you buying almost all my meals, the concert at The Dream House...

I think that most art which begins to make a statement fails to make a statement because the methods used are too schematic or too artificial. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying, not what you set out to say.

-Jasper Johns

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Eric von and Conny, so nice to see your sweet faces. I'm coming to Amsterdam whenever you guys are ready for me. We COULD kick and spit and play in the mud like the old days. Roll a couple pillows down the street, race around town with cans on our lids.

Ditto, Kiddo

How brave you are! Sometimes. And the injunction
Still stands, a plain white wall. More unfinished business.
But isn't that just the nature of business, someone else said, breezily.
You can't just pick up in the middle of it, and then leave off.
What if you do listen to it over and over, until

It becomes part of your soul, foreign matter that belongs there?
I ask you many times to think about this rupture you are
Proceeding with, this revolution. And still time
Is draped around your shoulders. The weather report
Didn't mention rain, and you are ass-deep in it, so?
Find other predictions. These are good for throwing away,
Yeaterday's newspapers, and those of the weeks before that spreading
Backward, away, almost in perfect order. It's all there
To interrupt your speaking. There is no other use to the past

Until those times when, driving abruptly off a road
Into a field you sit still and conjure the hours.
It was for this we made the small talk, the lies,
And whispered them over to give each the smell of truth,
But now, like biting devalued currency, they become posessions
And the stars come out. And the ridiculous machine
Still trickles mottoes: "Plastered again..." "from our house
To your house..." We wore these for a while, and they became us.

Each day seems full of itself, and yet it is only
A few colored beans and some straw lying on a dirt floor
In a mote-filled shaft of light. There was room. Yes,
And you have created it by going away. Somewhere, someone
Listens for your laugh, swallows it like a drink of cool water,
Neither happy nor aghast. And the stance, that post standing there, is you.

-John Ashberry

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

-James Wright