Oh my gosh

June 16, 2022

Lake City, Seattle

Oh my gosh,

Lately, I’ve felt a bit out of control but I don’t mind it. Sometimes the sensation that accompanies that lack of self-consciousness is enjoyable: heart beating faster, blood rising to my temples and cheeks, each breath leaving my nostrils sweet before it hits whatever I’ve selected as the object of my undivided attention. What have I been obsessed with? I’m afraid to tell you.

I’ve been leaving more driftwood tombstones around Lake City over the past month. This is the last month I’ll live here, so it’s time to get rid of old things including the art I made out of objects I found on the side of the road. Scrawling men’s names onto the pieces I made in honor of them and leaving them under street signs in a neighborhood that soon won’t be home feels appropriate.

I make the tombstones for men I will never forget but don’t have space to keep inside me. They arrive unexpectedly, bob around at the center of my vision for as long as they will, then go wherever the current takes them. I want to hold onto the ideas they gave me but I’m wasting my own effort and time — I know what doesn’t belong to me. Whatever gave me buoyant comfort in those moments has moved on. The men belong to themselves; I never did want to own them.

Last night I had a dream I was in France. I flew to Paris by myself and got on the last car of a train without a ticket, rode until the conductor found me. I was kicked off in a town you told me about — or is that a false memory? Again, it was snowing. Can I tell you the sensations of being inside & outside of my body? There was a staircase leading down from the station to a road. Across the road was a beach, and the ocean. A woman praying in her imaginary chapel. My first instinct was to take a picture until I remembered how I hate to disrespect a holy place and I was ashamed.

The last tombstone I made was for Joe. No, not myself: Joe Brainard. Since I started studying his paintings of men with symbolic tattoos in the traditional American style I have been continually confused. How did he know men with sailor tattoos? How would he have known me? I wanted to know who the men he painted were, and why the only preservation we have of them is a painting of them in their underwear displaying a butterfly tattoo. Did Joe love them? Were they artists too, and what did they create, and did Joe care about those parts of them? I am afraid he used them as an idea in his work but never got to know them as anything other than rough trade. I’m afraid that in generations past I would have only been a man who worked on a ship that docked near an artist who painted me — that display of my vulnerability would be the only record of my body.

lust fragment 5

This poem started as an ode.

No, a letter. This letter starts as a poem.

*

No, as words. Hold them on yr tongue,

puff out yr cheeks, swish them around.

*

These words start and end in Honolulu

but live as a dream. This poem lived once

*

in New York. This poem has twelve tattoos

and it got one while it was being written.

*

This letter is a poem written to you, reader.

It is written by you. This poem was written

*

by Lana del Rey. This poem was written to

Arthur Rimbaud. To James Franco. To no one.

*

This poem was never meant to be sent in the mail

or in a direct message on Instagram but it got drunk,

*

snapped a selfie, hit send. A picture of the flying pig

tattoo under its sandal straps when you said you like feet

*

and I’m not wearing any underwear. It smirks.

This poem is a pulpy mouthful of words.

*

Do you feel it seeping between yr teeth?

Swallow it, now. Swallow.

I like being someone’s sailor because that’s all I’ll ever be able to give. A poet once asked me what I did for a living so I told him I worked on a ship. “A great job for a poet,” he said an hour after he told a workshop of students who paid him for his expertise that he wished poets would talk shit about each other again. Everything you need to know about my work is contained in this paragraph, and I learned it as an overeager student. Like the ocean, I’ve been contaminated. I want everyone on the planet to need me but only when I bring them joy. I love to give them shells as a gift but suck the sand beneath their toes. Maybe I have a jellyfish that wants to sting. Maybe there are sharks! I want people to think about me from far away when I’m probably just bobbing under the moon.

Love,

Joe :P