Starving Insomniac

Here’s a roundup of the watercolour paintings I made for my solo show ‘Aspirational’ which ended this week. You can read more info on the show’s themes here and the titles of each piece are below! 

**I’ve got a few of the framed original pieces for sale, if you’re interested you can contact me on [email protected]**

- Every job is a self portrait of the person who does it, autograph your job with excellence 

- F.R.I.E.N.D.S Fight for you. Respect you. Include you. Encourage you. Need you. Deserve you. Stand by you.

- For one minute, walk outside, stand there, in silence, look up at the sky, and contemplate how amazing life is

- Travel doesn’t become an adventure until you leave yourself behind

- Yoga is not about touching your toes, it’s what you learn on the way down

After Dinner Mints…

i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live 

most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person 

He told me through a tripping tongue and dry eyes he’d just gotten out of jail. Well, not directly; a recent acquaintance of the both of ours informed me behind a flat hand in hoarse monotone while he was wobbling back with another beer. He was trying to sleep with the older lady down on Pine Parkway who waddled out in the late evening to feed hateful cats. She never had anything besides cheap so-called “lunch meat” of a deviated and questionable quality. However, she had her wits about her enough to deny his feeble attempts. This only spurred  him onwards to grope the middle aged woman in the foam wedge flip flops and the two piece aquarium  thrift store find from the mid-nineties. She was cheaper than that three dollar disaster of a suit and she somehow finagled her way away from him too.

Now he’s grabbing you by the face; you aren’t interested when you aren’t intoxicated. You aren’t into getting wasted and shit faced like they want you to anymore. You type a few notes into your phone and get up to go. The whole time he’s been babbling in the background. You imagine how the scenario would’ve gone had the toothpick stripper in the neon yellow had come back instead. You dip out and start off down the hill, realizing what a mess you seem to have made over the past decade. Well, that was an exaggeration, but the past ten weeks at least. And now you’ve signed a lease and you’re repairing all those leaky holes that caused you to think you needed liquor and limitless interaction. As you debate your music selection for the impending walk home, you ultimately decide everyone’s bored and anxious for something that will never happen. You envision derelicts in the night, lurking behind over grown shrubs and hedges, ready to pounce. You’re contemplating the fairly plausible possibility of being mugged as your knees squeak at the tilt of the topography. It’s not enough to cause any great alarm, and you do nothing other than clench your keys between your knuckles, ready to maul anyone who dare come towards you. As you trod further and further down into the valley, your mind wanders across memories of the past few hours until you’ve unwound all the way back to last Thursday morning. Assessing your current surroundings causes clarity you decide you aren’t particularly sure you’re ready to dissect and feelings of distain and confusion of deepen.

            Eventually you arrive upon the notion that the whole set up is helter skelter, a mismatch of the hicks and the hood rats. Regardless of how terrifying it is you used to still be insatiably curious about the depraved human condition that causes close-mindedness. However a few months taught you looking at someone long enough will lead to inevitable eye contact and that’s when you get shot. You can’t question the vastly different ecosystem, hell even universe, you see to have dropped down into. You’ve tried to but you have no starting block to push off.

 You’re surrounded by tweakers and ancient paranoid wisps and pillars of people, all speaking nonsense. Just the other day you saw a peculiar looking lady downtown who appeared to be snorting and instead fell over off the trolley stop and shriveled up until completely motionless.

You were there the whole time they were carting her off.

You saw her fall.

You saw her shake.

Then you saw nothing.

You saw car after car swipe by, plastic like the credit cards they were loaded on by their calloused owners, complaining at the history of the streets, cobbled and uneven. But then, you aren’t any better. You didn’t do anything either.

You didn’t do anything when that poor boy was going to fall backwards and crush his skull.

You had the phone in your hand. You knew he wasn’t ok. You knew. And you let a distraction cause you embarrassment and you tucked away your care are you turned your head and clambered up three flights of stairs into your comfortable fortress, far away from whatever horrors were plaguing that man down in the parking lot on the corner of fifth.

Subconsciously you know you won’t ever be able to forgive anyone who would encourage ignoring another life in limbo.

You’re becoming a recluse more and more, day after day. 

e.m.

Tacked to the mattress With a heavy heart And a few nails of nostalgia. On Sundays I used to occupy the pew third from the top on the left Now I’m holding my stomach In the eleven o’clock sky- Am I relieved or disappointed No one ever stops by. I’m on uneven spokes That send me careening into curbs and Cadillacs that take corners too tight. I don’t want to be bothered by Anything that will hurt me. Bury me in burgundy sheets And fields of green fire To cleanse my aching stomach And inspire my dreams.

and when my creaking knees 

carry me to the top floor

around the corner to my front door

i’ll fall inside,

clutching my spare keys 

and throw the contents of my arms

in the corner

or the middle

it doesn’t matter to me

it’ll blend in with the rest of my sporadic debris.

Adulthood was a manipulated dream,

a menagerie of promises and pictures

only created in

off-day wishes. 

Living alone,

I want someone else to do the dishes.

I’ve never been one

to clean my own messes.

Running on the sputtering winds from the tailpipes

of long forgotten yesterdays

piled into the landfills of the past in the minds

of those once present

I perpetuate my own sadness

for reasons unapparent

inconsistently incoherent

and 

passively belligerent.

I am a paradox of intent, 

I destroy everything I’m in

and turn to nightmares

every dream I begin. 

I’m displaced and poised to fake grace

I keep imagining the next two weeks

begin better than the past.

They all keep telling me

this smile won’t last.