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I am

I am ugly, I would be American, a hummingbird, black-eyed and sentimental

Disconnecting

How long can you go without checking your phone? 

Your texts? 

Your Facebook? 

Email? 

Voicemail? 

Twitter? 

How long can you comfortably go…alone? 

Disconnected from the hive mind, without the cacophony of a million voices that the internet provides us?

Today's western developed world has a seemingly inescapable connection to the online world, Heidegger defined this present state of being as the technological era of being, the age of systems thinking.

We are no longer using machines as much as we are used by machines or more accurately used by systems. Systems thinking is the name of the game when it comes to the technological era of being. Efficiency at all costs, if you can maximize efficency find the formula that produces the best results then you capitalize on that and reproduce it, again and again.

But what is systems thinking doing to us, is it turning us into documenting machines instead of experiecneing machines, have we given up the moment for the ability to create a future narrative that we can then return to the tribe with?

Computers, tablets, cellphones and smart watches all allow us to be continuously and uninterruptedly connected to millions of other people all the time, but is that what we really need?

Are we losing our ability to experience and to just be without the constant feedback of the crowd?

"Pictures or it didn't happen!"

My enemy. My friend.

only through memory
in the mind–in the eye
Mark the passage
dawn to dusk
day to month

My enemy. My friend.

You take and give
pain in reflections

You gnaw—
at who I am
and dissolve my love
steal the moment
that which is most precious

Without you I am nothing,
With you I will be nothing.

And if I halved the span to the moment a thousand times –
A million times—a billion times—never will I catch you.

I cannot see, smell, taste or touch you,
but I know that you exist –

Only I can see that you are always with me –
My enemy. My friend.
You give and take from me everything,
You hector me no quiet respite day or night

Rob me of vitality—
Draw lines across my face–
dry up my mind
turn my bones to dust –

its so beautiful--
sadness,
they don't really know

Above and below--
sameness,
its so beautiful.
and they don't really know

Session 1

Find my uncle

He teases Mrs. Kings guards

I explain I am allowed

They let me go

I return home with a kitten

Am punished by my step-mom

Looked down on for fraternizing with the blacks

My room is given to my older sister

Friends come along

One is rich and has a new car

We ride into town he doesn’t say where we are going

We reach the boardwalk

Go into a ghetto

Up some abandoned building

Inside is a room with a rack of jackets

A nicely dressed black man with dark glasses on tells us to pick a suit jacket

We do and my friend pays him

Then he slides back a false wall and we descend into a smokey night club

Sex and gambling

Suburbs at Night

The suburbs at night bath in orange incandescent light, insect shooting stars streak above, "New Homes for Sale" the banner flaps, early morning sprinklers shower bikes piled by the shed, a humming power box sings electric with the choir of crickets, and in each silent window flickering shadow shows of static bounce across the curtains.

Are You Drinking?

washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook
out again
I write from the bed
as I did last
year.
will see the doctor,
Monday.
"yes, doctor, weak legs, vertigo, head-
aches and my back
hurts."
"are you drinking?" he will ask.
"are you getting your
exercise, your
vitamins?"
I think that I am just ill
with life, the same stale yet
fluctuating
factors.
even at the track
I watch the horses run by
and it seems
meaningless.
I leave early after buying tickets on the
remaining races.
"taking off?" asks the motel
clerk.
"yes, it's boring,"
I tell him.
"If you think it's boring
out there," he tells me, "you oughta be
back here."
so here I am
propped up against my pillows
again
just an old guy
just an old writer
with a yellow
notebook.
something is
walking across the
floor
toward
me.
oh, it's just
my cat
this
time.

Charles Bukowski

"Ego sum te peto et uidere queo!"