why did i not see this coming? its that time of the year where i spend all my free time hiding in my room trying to convince myself that its a good idea to get out of bed.
where is my mind?
❝
- Chad Anderson, “Liars, All of Us” (via squandered)
All the poets that you love listening to
love lying to you.
I’m not that egocentric to make you believe that I’m not one of them.
I lie all the time,
mostly up here.
See, I’ve been doing this for a little while
and I’m starting to understand things:
poetry is not about telling you the truth.
It’s about telling you the version of a story
that gets the most reaction,
the one that flows the best on the mic,
the one that has all the lines
that the audience is going to like.
See, maybe the truth
isn’t supposed to rhyme so well.
Maybe it doesn’t have to rise to a crescendo.
The truth
never sounded like sound bites
and name dropping.
I promised myself I wouldn’t write poems about poetry,
but I woke up at 3 AM the other morning
and started spitting out all these lies that I couldn’t roll off my tongue
and thought that maybe at this hour
I could write a poem about honesty
without having to choreograph the hook at the end.
I woke up at 3 AM
and I’m having trouble remembering how to spell the word “wouldn’t”.
Four years ago, I featured at a youth slam in Jersey City,
and tried to show some children how poetry is supposed to sound cool.
Jessica sat in the front row
thinking I could teach her about spoken word.
I lied to her, in metaphor, for a half hour
only to hear the silence of a fifth grade explosion;
Jessica explained it to her thirteen year old peers
how rough her father’s beard stubble felt when her was drinking
and how a foster family is just a fresh coat of paint over stucco
when you’ve been running against the wall.
She didn’t actually say all this.
Not like I can.
But I could hear the inhalation of truth
in between breaths of her poetry.
Her name is not really Jessica.
I don’t remember what it is.
But for a moment, I can make you care about her,
even if she’s not real.
Don’t ask me.
You wouldn’t know the difference anyway.
I don’t write poems about honesty.
I’ve written three poems this year to make me sound cute to girls,
but not one about the medication that I’m taking
because there are some things
that I don’t fucking talk about.
Why am I 33 years old and still trying to sound cute to girls?
A couple weeks ago,
two friends asked me how my roommate is doing.
I use the word “roommate”
instead of referring to her as the girl I’m afraid of falling in love with
because she is the most beautiful overturned school bus that I have ever seen
and I slow down sometimes to watch the trauma.
And because she knows me.
Like how she knows that I look in the mirror too much,
and I always eat the last peanut butter cup,
and I fuck girls with my poems,
and use the word “roommate” too loosely.
And the poet in me
should’ve told them she’s doing just fine,
but I hadn’t memorized all the lines yet.
My best friend is not doing fine,
and I can’t fix it.
The students in my class
like me because I say the word “bullshit” during my lectures
and let them out early.
They don’t see that fear has me losing focus on the bullet points
when I’m thinking about how many slit wrists I’ll return home to tonight.
My roommate’s not suicidal
But it sounds sexier than saying
that she closes her eyes sometimes
when she’s changing lanes.
I lie.
Because it keeps me driving to work
instead of holding her all night and crying.
I need somebody to talk to
but poetry helps you meet people who want to fuck poets.
Who do you talk to when your best friend is biting off her cuticles,
while other girls are sharpening their nails?
I need to go to bed now.
I’m sorry I lied.
I’ll write the rest of this poem tomorrow,
when I can differentiate what’s none of your fucking business
and write poems with hooks that rhyme.
It doesn’t matter what you believe.
I’m tired of being the strong one all the time.
- Chad Anderson, “Liars, All of Us” (via squandered)
(Source: pigmenting)
so bad news. i went to the cup to apply for the summer like they told me to do back when i asked about it months ago and they said they dont need summer help because they already have a lot of temporary summer college people and now theyre looking for people to be here long term and thats obviously not me because i go away to school but i filled out an application just in case but that still sucks because they probably wont call me and i just really want to work there and im prob not getting hired by starbucks because theyre notorious for not wanting to hire temporarily aka for the summer and i dont know man id be a great employee and youre totally missing out and im fantastic with customer service and my moods never get in the way and i put on a great face and am super nice to everyone but i also follow the rules and am good at judging what to do in stressful situations and ive been in charge of a whole fucking gift shop once and nothing bad went wrong and a gift shop is a hell of a lot more difficult to manage than a small starbucks stand in a mall because a lot more can go wrong and just someone hire me ok?
good news is im working with my dad tomorrow and getting paid pretty well for it. its a one time thing most likely but still. money.
im so broke it hurts.
“Rain Room” at the MoMA
An interactive installation where visitors can stroll through a storm without ever getting wet. This looks amazing. I hope I get to see it in person.
last picture in oneonta for the semester!!
I’ve officially been up for about 4 minutes :)
we are leading very different lives, you and i hahaha
ive officially been up for twenty four hours.
its five eighteen and i am still awake and the sun is coming up.
three forty seven and im still awake. this all nighter is going swell. im slowly packing. its giving me great anxieties. packing is always the time i question all my life decisions.
The Body in Nature: Unusually Beautiful Photographs
Photographing the nude is just about as old as the camera itself… from cheesy pinups to surreal body landscapes, the form has been explored in just about every way imaginable. That’s why, when I ran across the work of Arno Rafael Minkkinen I was truly blown away. His work is filled with almost magical abstract forms created using just creatively positioned figures in the landscape and his well placed lens… nothing more. Each photograph is a revelation, something to decipher for its mysterious form and appreciate for its lyrical beauty.
Making these images even more astounding, most of them are self-portraits. Minkkinen says he does this because of the often underestimated danger in creating such images (which sometimes involve hanging off cliffs or staying under frozen snow for long periods). He also uses no assistant to position himself in the shots, so he must click the shutter button and accurately dance himself into position in just 9 seconds before the shutter fires. For more difficult shots he has sometimes employed a long cable release which he throws out of the scene before the image is taken.
Perhaps this is the element that makes Minkkinen’s images so incredible: he whole heartedly embraces reality. He has been working since long before photoshop and uses the image as it was taken by the camera with no manipulation of the image. He explains his thinking:
“If you are going to be under the snow, be under the snow. ‘Out of limitations new forms emerge,’ Georges Braque said. My translation: know what you will not do. For me this means embracing reality as a collaborator in the invention of the image, not overlaying multiple images to create such impressions. In the end, my negatives will never give away how I made any one of my photographs. They will always print with the same information as found in them the day the negatives were made.”
morning after
thoughts about the impermanence of a hook up written in permanent marker in the places he touched
by Lindsay Bottos
