I am beginning to worry my parrot is ill, but he dodges interrogation. I'll say how are you feeling today, and he'll say how are you feeling today. I'll say do you want a Ritz Bit, and he'll quote Nietzsche. (Sara Brody) In the first essay of Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche claims the lamb cannot separate “strength from expressions of strength,” that the lamb holds the bird of prey “accountable for being a bird of prey.” (Bradley Penner) We felt the sun for the first time against the curve of our cheeks and the shield of our brow-bones.… It hurt to keep our eyes open. It hurt even more to blink and miss a thing.… The awe was everything we’d hoped it’d be. (Maya Sisneros) Revel in the delicate balance between expansion & destruction / between pushing too far and not far enough… (Tomas Moniz) It is not that we seek to break the fleeting, feathered things: we only want to hold them in the cradle of our jaws. (Maya Sisneros) But it is impossible for me to be alone in this city, not when I have the Tuesday noon siren; a lucky penny on the sidewalk outside the now-closed Lucky Penny diner; the kindly tone of the lady reminding me (for my own safety) to keep my head up and my phone down while riding MUNI; the voice of the BART station assuring me all the elevators are working; every one of my disembodied companions — if you know something, tell me. (E.C. Messer) After all, lillipads can't make themselves. They have little dogs and the little dogs have little dogs and the dogs of the little dogs have even littler dogs, and they all have fleas, and the fleas have fleas, and so on… And so on the backs of a many-backed creature do we build our many backed beds. And so do we call them dams, and them damsels. And I can manage most of that, an understatement for a comforter but no top sheet. A two hour window, a sunset. I came into a shit bar and there are parts of me I really don't like / saying the word love / it's like trying to cover the ocean floor / with a single bucket of paint (Evan Karp)

if i am my own reward and you are yours then why do i want you to bend to me crack your face into all of your mirrors at once and then sing to me of everything you cannot grasp or hold onto? i went walking in the woods and found a clearing not made by men. i sat down in the middle and offered myself to the afternoon when over the fog the clocks find reason celebrate people interpreting and misinterpreting trying at best to listen only opportunities / to welcome them i do not believe in individuals but personality is the reason the best people i know get out of bed. i once went four years without sleeping in a bed. i've been telling this story my entire life, if that's what you mean. i don't know the difference between capsized and capitalism. help? but you don't care. like business on a leaf. one thing i can say for sure is i believe in always having a sound pair of shoes. and rubber bands are for wrists. if you tell me you like what i've told you, you can cut off all of my hair. i appreciate all of your time. we're gonna end this thing. it's lasted way too long. good night, wolf. goodnight wolfenstein. may these tears never dry. you got babies yet? not yet, but they're on the way. as we enter the labyrinth for the final time, let us welcome the minotaur and sing more sweetly than we ever have. to be… in the end… the minotaur! goddamnit. kill screen! kill screen, and all the filler, and good night, and too many thank yous. see you in the alley. see you in the alley for sure.

This call is a reminder that, as of today, your Alhambra account is past due. If you have already submitted your payment, please disregard this message. If you would like to speak to a customer service representative now, press 0. Or you can. Please wait one moment while I transfer the call. Please have Evan Karp call Alhambra at. Again, the number is. Thank you. Goodbye. When everyone says you're too qualified. When your shoeholes stink from rainwater tromping dried into stains on yr cowhide. When metaphors aren't real enough and dreams a waste of time. I have forgotten what it's like to be funny on purpose. I have forgotten why i fingerpaint on bathtub tile, timeless and erasable, ties for closed minds say smile and say cheese for your future. My feet hurt because my heart is heavy -- shutup! I am overly qualified for your classifieds?! What I do is beyond the realms of comprehension by the standards of this day and age. I reflect the very truths of your founders -- all founders. I am the sound you hear when you stop self and cry in the corner -- any corner. I am the thing you respond to, the hum of yr childhood visions the cheer of inanimate things when you humming cast light on the world it is only a matter of time before you rupture. Give me the job already! Designate your belongings to yr would-be descendants, they care nothing about your dreams. Hurry up and convince them. The family concession parade the world deems fit for sharing, at best, this is the day off from everything stolid, a reservoir of my curbed enthusiasms, wellspring for everything honest. You are the only thing that matters … until this poem is over // when i am / you are // out of time / no longer important. All poetry is discord with the world, the only beautiful thing anymore. Cross the final frontiers you imagine through the eyes of your peers on the nights you can't afford to keep the lights on. If you have already submitted your payment, please disregard this message. There is a way to end suffering without death. You have found it many times.

when you talk about a person, about what they are, or to glorify or pay tribute to the life they have led, or whatever it is they have done that has put that feeling in your chest, … and it wasn’t because you had some personal connection to them, although unquestionably their life’s crossing with yours was transformational, in the sense that something became more than what it could have otherwise imagined it could be—you did that, before you had devices, the world did that to you… it’s because you were paid to edit his youtube videos that you really watched them, saw a man not for his suffering nor for his devotion to living a life that could fill us with that feeling, or not just that, but for his challenge to do something with that feeling, for his devotion to make that challenge honorable to us, and to make us want to take it and share it with the people we think could change the world for the better, which is everyone oh yeah all of the time! oh yeah, remember how you used to sit down and have to focus from the poetry, just to keep going with your life, how you would go on and on, adding, going around things, connecting them in your attempts to define other things, how you could still do that, are probably even wanting to do that right now… open a new word document every day and save it with the date, like 12012015 for december one two thousand fifteen, or save it December1201Five if you want—however you want to do it, just be consistent, make each doc as radical or as interesting or as exactly the same as yesterday's while you can, just call them page 1 and page 2, and so on, don’t get cute and start calling them page 1 again or page 69 revisited. that’s how you talk. that’s how you process information. to be clear, how you talk and how you process information is not by getting turned around, which is what would happen to you if you starting getting cute with your titles, or the way you refer to your days or your pages. you could write stories. you could recount your life in stories… you know, anecdotes real or imagined. but if you told your life in stories, would it be interesting? would the stories be interesting, i mean. do you not live astounding stories because you're afraid of not doing the stories justice? or do you not tell stories because you don't know where you are when you tell stories: in the story, or in the body telling the story? you go back and forth between the story you are telling and your casual interrogation of its means of being told, how you marvel! when you're pretending to be listening, which is partially all of the time, you are usually not tuning out so much as you are in… excuse me i'm so sorry—i have to admit i was really just having this amazing idea—but i don't want to interrupt what you were saying!—and also i can't remember what it was because i never said it i just saw the formation happen in my head and then it was gone, not like a cloud but like a chemical cloud, like all clouds are chemical clouds, duh—about the whatever it was… but then i would throw out some indication that i really had been listening, and usually—and sometimes to my surprise—i'll discover that i had been tuned in enough to repeat what had just been said, and to have an opinion about it. meanwhile, i could start to dissect my newfound understanding of the way my brain might work, just worked, or is currently working, stamping certainty into an unknown amount of dimensions before disappearing… or changing so much as to be unrecognizable. it happens fast. faster than you would think. you aren't who you were and the people around you never knew who you were. no one knows who you are. don't go existential on me and say no one ever did. especially if you honestly think no one ever did. tough for you—or good for you, i don't care. the thing is you keep going. it's not that you might one day be unrecognizable but how far you must go as a stranger. is that what slows you down on a tuesday evening, is that what you think about to induce the right amount of breaths per minute? the deep exhale and a new world focus? oakland streetlight off asphalt and through a new display window, same light, artificial, but passing through you now, and part of you is that asphalt, and part of you is that new display window—the things you notice on a night you try to distinguish from the rest: are you done with distinguishing? are you going to finish that? or is that what you try not to think about, like when is this voice coming back around, what will it do to us if it has nothing to say and we know it and we have to say it anyway? or choose to. what if we have no legitimate fears? what if we're afraid to ask the stupid questions! or mis-punctuate to make a point? the main point is to attack head on—you'll always have to move to be able to see, oh to just look at the thing, to let the feelings pass through you, the waves of nausea, of regret, disappointment, discomfort, dissatisfaction, even, with your energy level or with your degree of feeling it, anything other than what you're feeling—even if that's apathy, even if you couldn't imagine a more fulfilling way to spend your time than to personify some intersection, one that doesn't see much traffic, just the sun rising and holding court and eventually setting, the occasional travelers passing through, various species, some lingering too. some making homes there, at that intersection, some never leaving, and some yet still who outgrow it, who spend years stomping over the same sewer cover, maybe lose a ball down there they wouldn't play with now anyway, but the disappearance of which at the time could have ruined an entire summer evening, a whole night without the interactions that ball made possible, another part of the night left up to a child's own devices, knowing even then your willingness and even eagerness to play the same game over and over with the same players was a way of affirming the pointlessness of resisting it—even when you were bored, how you could exaggerate how bored you were and love nothing more than that, just that shared exaggerated boredness could wake you up and make you pound your glove: let's say the shared pass-phrase in a knowing toner! humminuh! come on, batter! humminuh! and you would hum with toner too. we still do this. we still hum with toner when you hum with toner. and you hum with toner when we hum with toner! we've just all gotta hum, man! yeah, with toner, man! with knowing inflections we pass through doorways and into family lines, folding our possessions neatly into our laps and putting off our request to be excused from the table. we hold court like the sun over our foibles, with the benefit of your atmosphere. we long for you not to leave us. perhaps we can burn them off if you just keep talking, uh-huh? it's not that we're afraid of facing our fears or our shortcomings—we believe we do that constantly—it's that we might not overcome them that bothers us, and that we would be just fine how we are if we didn't.

There’s nothing holding you back, but there’s nothing holding you up either. Be honest you will be profound. What is gone with us, what is longing? The wind always has something to say, when it isn’t in motion it isn’t. I don’t ask what the truths have to do with each other, i just recognize them. I don’t know what to say because i’m still climbing but i’m sure the view is nice, and i’m just excited to be here. This is where i line break i guess. Remember to hurt, hope / to hurt. Don’t be afraid to make love to yourself like you used to. It’s still just as good for you. The happy expressionist walks around the room looks in every eye every person is a christmas tree waiting for presents, a vessel awaiting its gold, watching silently as life becomes something you watch. You pour. Touch everyone before you leave.