A prayer to

the building that held me

with yellowed envelopes

lining the walls of a mystery

fluttering in verdant fans

A collage above a settee

Virgin print and egg tempera

Feathers dancing around a padded cell

The cold silver slab

where you blessed me

Cut pages + memento mori

The maze laid out below a saint. I know

it was you. 

I know your thimble

full of salt.

All the wayward shrines

that once were graves

Stealing candy

Stealing glances from behind a piano

Sharps and flats

Clocks and metronomes

count the loop back

Back to you

Black bird to you

I will not return

back to you

Back to your

coffin draped in gospels

and wrapped in thread

Music boxes and

tiny cathedrals 

singing broken notes

Like the sound of my fingers

flowing over metal waves

following down

the narrow path

Days Away I Still Feel You

16x16 metal print

Memento Mori Digital collage of altered photographs.

August NYC Trip, 2017:

I probably place too much importance on the meaning behind signs, but whenever I don’t see the memento mori album in the funeral parlor I can’t help but  take it as some kind of omen.

It might never come back. It might be there right now. I don’t know. Regardless, it was dripping onto my brain before my eyes opened last Saturday morning after my Friday double. And the thought of it, and the memories attached to it, clung to me like a jealous spirit the rest of the weekend.

Saturday night, appropriately, was for Ghost Light. One of the ideas in the production is that when you’re putting your writing, your art, your soul out there into the universe it creates a connection and a permanence that only memory can destroy. If someone remembers and cares about something, it is never truly gone.

On Sunday, @nodoubtaholic took me to a cemetery in Harlem. She spotted Mr. Dead Bird on the ground and I thought he was the most glorious creature. I knew instantly that I needed to photograph him and create this piece, so both him, the book, and my fondest memories of Fulton can coexist in something tangible.

It was great to spend time with so many of you last weekend & to those I missed: I will be back in about a month.

Fulton’s Bird soft sculpture. felt.

How he came to be: Annual May trip. These were not my favorite shows. That is always the risk of flying across the country.

But there was a favorite moment: Following Assaf’s Fulton, I was temporarily pulled out of my blahhhs by a scene in the funeral parlor. He sat down with his bird cradled in his hands and began speaking to it in a hushed voice and gesturing as if it was a conversation. His expressions- ranging from concerned to afraid- and the idea of having a chat with the bird and the bird answering back was something I’d never seen another Fulton do, and it was endearing and completely what I needed to see.

Victorian Bird Casket Coffin. c. mid 1800’s  

I made the briefest of secret trips for @nodoubtaholic‘s birthday on Saturday.

There is something both comforting and horrific in the way things move on in that place despite changes and absences and additions. We’re all in a loop of sorts, I guess.