Bliss

I cannot even begin to tell you how nice it is to have time to shower, shave, and brush my teeth *all at the same time* instead of piecemeal when something gets too annoying to stand anymore.

That is all.

Old Friend

Going back to some of these accounts after the space of years and tending the same plants is like seeing an old lover and touching their face after so long, which too has happened to me lately. It's so familiar and intimate and nurturing, and sometimes worrying or horrifying: WHO died? WHAT happened to you? It's lovely to feel this one sliding to it's natural two-week watering cycle, that one always greeting me so thirstily ...

And then there's outdoors.

For Tillie

Because of that New Years we sat around reading Howl.

Howl - Beau Sia

Allen Ginsberg told me that I was beautiful, in a New York City cafe.
and I thought he was trying to pick me up.
You can imagine how arrogant chinese boys in New York get about love
when old gay white men are involved.

Exactly eleven months later, he died.

The distance between point A and point B can be measured in days,
but friendship hates math
and so the sum of experiences between two people
is not a sum,
It's eating blintzes under trees,
Learning how Cezanne learned to color,
and sitting in bed,
Debating the value of failure in one's life,
and seeing Allen read one last time in front of 680 NYU kids
that had no idea he would spend the next week in Boston,
starting his negotiations
with death.


my friend is dead.
and I dont know how to approach the subject.
my generation has no starving, hysterical nakeds.
I'm a member of the fame whore, superstar-at-any-cost-we-could-give-a-fuck-
about-a-fuck-because-teen-angst-isn't-enough-anymore-
our-self-absorbed-natures-have-overkilled-into-egomaniacal-dynamo-rage-club
and
we dont know
the first thing about
the words
"Selfless"
or "Give"

I mean, fuck the fact he's gay,
a beatnik,
and that I even get bored with his poetry,
The Ginz made Tibet a cause to believe in,
he pushed the angry buttons of politicians for four decades
and he set fire to one-hundred and thirty-seven million minds in this world,
becoming Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Billy Burroughs, and my answer to the question;
"Who has influenced you in this life?"

Sure, some days he came off as an asshole,
but most of us aren't in the public eye enough to be caught in our asshole moments.

But for each of those asshole moments,
There is the simple beauty
of him cooking mushroom ometlettes,
and him exposing me to buddhism (a culture my ancestors taught him),
and his wiley, old man eyes correcting me and saying,
"You have a long way to go if you want to be a good writer."

Dont try to dull my memories of him at point A
I ran with his mind in a 13th Street Loft
because his legs were no longer capable of adventures on foot,
to point B
when I sat silent by the phone,
Listening to him say four days before his death
that he thought he had another month.


point B to point C
is a distance I'm not sure I'll ever reach,
as I try and find straight lines,
reading his books in Barnes & Noble,
and remembering how he talked about his first connections to Kerouac with a certain reverie,
and I dont know if I'll ever realize the scope of the words "Death"
or "Goodbye,"
But I'm getting that little ache under the ribcage
from loss
and the need to finally
tell a friend,
"I love you."