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You can't fake it. You know when I fail to achieve the expected: palm the becoming- comatose bullfrog, legs collapsing as they may, and chuck it (we used to say) high as you can. Let it fly stone-like to the skylight in the low dome of fog—another requirement of the game: a foggy day and a bullfrog and you, Vincent. The old code goes back and forth between us as we take our turns, childhood pals, engaged by the game we once called Kamikaze—now, a nameless ceremony. Nameless not because a boy's play calcifies in a man's conviction; not because, despite our promise, you've become a mid-rank fighter pilot, and I a minor poet; and not because it's too unpleasant to name what brings to hand that astonished muscle only to leave it, later, sprawled on the current. The perfect toss sends the critter shattering for an instant, beyond fog, into the invisible. Disappearance is success. Once you said, "My insides tickle whenever it happens," and so I know you've been tickled five times, and I three. That's the score; the score matters little. The name is gone because we're from here, and, being native, cannot visit how it is that an urge to which we tend tends to us— how we are cruel, inscrutable, indefensible, yet holy. How we send up bodies of praise from our right hand, only to gather eventual elegies— flesh stunned still as words—in our left. Once again the center of the heavens is earth. We've thrown as high as we can for as long as we can remember, only to await some return: a revelation, plummet, explosive splash. So it is that two grown men may stand again in stillness, awaiting word, friends who glimpse for seconds at a time earth as it is in heaven, ankle-deep in Rowan Creek with eyes uplifted, reflecting the fog to the fog itself.

Lord is not a word. Song is not a salve. Suffer the child, who lived on sunlight and solitude. Savor the man, craving earth like an aftertaste. To discover in one's hand two local stones the size of a dead man's eyes saves no one, but to fling them with a grace you did not know you knew, to bring them skimming homing over blue, is to discover the river from which they came. Mild merciful amnesia through which I've moved as through a blue atmosphere of almost and was, how is it now, like ruins unearthed by ruin, my childhood should rise? Lord, suffer me to sing these wounds by which I am made and marred, savor this creature whose aloneness you ease and are.

Like any subscription member of the Metropolitan Opera fashion bloggers believe they're at the center of perception. I want to go where men go. Is a high school crush on an alien surf girl the same as the need to fatally possess the other and the self? My friends were in a band called Second Life ® . Let's get high talk about '90s nostalgia Scientology drink Diet Coke. The Real is a teenager drunk in a turn. A blue dot pulsing down Santa Monica Blvd. Hackers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. For something to be timeless it must be outside mortality and if humans exist outside of death they're no longer subject to the violence of sexual reproduction or the fragility of life itself. In these conditions music will have no cultural efficacy. Hope life now won't need. A forever sadness, though possible, now obsolete, What did I do this weekend? Listened to this song "Tropical Winter" on repeat while POV jogging through Runyon Canyon. Totally desperate boys following cute boys making out under Tumblr skies reblogged as gossip sent from my iPhone. Kenneth Anger fatigued and decadent in silk post-fantasy. Negation is part of the positive identity of an object. There is no snow in Hollywood. Celebrities constitutive of a scene that draw the populations restaurant owners want as their clientele. In a single day three stars photographed in the same gray hoodie. I want to create a product too unstable to be marketed. Not to say lacking maybe messy discursive and sort of pushing oscillating among the various dimensions of influence. I could write here randy details of my consumer choices banal and otherwise it would not amount to much. Mallarmé on fashion, Benjamin on fashion. A monograph retrospective of Guess's photo editorials next to the bed. So maybe alien visitations directly influenced human history over the millennia. What does it take to start a new life? You take lonely trips to the city you are interested in moving to. Saturate the market with your resume. During interviews order both coffee and juice. Masterfully handle the acceptance of your ontological incompleteness by affecting the persona of the applicant they want to hire a winning assurance that you never intend to realize obvious to all parties six months into the job as if persona or voice was something laid stable over the truth of a tectonic subjectivity Jean Paul Gaultier staged his Chic Rabbi collection at Paris Fashion Week FW '93 Very beautiful, very elegant, the orthodox religious clothing and the gender bending fits with his interest in tradition and iconic imagery as well as the fact that he's treating somewhat impertinently something that most people wouldn't dare play with in couture design. When Gaultier talks about himself though he sounds so dumb.

Two of them with chests like blond silk cornsilk hair stalled in traffic in the awful heat they smiled were they messengers delivering through the open window promises or lies or invitations? Boys are everywhere at noon they glide between parched cars bare broad shoulders color of chestnut colts

Some of us are chum. Some of us are the come-hither honeycomb gleamy in the middle of the trap’s busted smile. Though I let myself a little off this hook, petard by which I flail, and fancy myself more flattered — no ugly worm! Humor me as hapless nymph, straight outta Bullfinch, minding my own beeswax, gamboling, or picking flowers (say daffodils), doing that unspecified stuff nymphs do with their hours, until spied by a layabout youth, or rapey God who leaps unerring, staglike, quicker than smoke, to the wrong idea. Or maybe the right? For didn’t I supply the tippy box, too? Notch the stick on which to prop it? Didn’t I fumble the clove hitch for the rope? Leave the trip lying obvious in the tall, buggy grass? Ever it was. Duh. Be the mat, and the left foot finds you welcome. Though there’s always a subject, a him or herself. But to name it calls it down, like Betelgeuse, or the IRS. It must be swell to have both deed and the entitlement, for leaners who hold our lien, consumers who consume like red tide ripping through a coastal lake? Who find themselves so very well when gazing in that kiddie pool, or any skinny inch of water. That guy, remember? How tell this tale without him? A story so hoary, his name’s Pre-Greek. What brought Narcissus down? A spotty case of the disdains, I think, a one-man performance where the actor hates his audience.

It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itself? Or is God more like us, made in His image—shaking His head because He can’t be expected to keep track of which voice goes with what name and address, He being just one God. Either way, we seem to be left here to discover our losses, everything from car keys to larger items we can’t search our pockets for, destined to face them on our own. Even though the dentist gives us music to listen to and the assistant looks down with her lovely smile, it’s still our tooth he yanks out, leaving a soft spot we ponder with our tongue for days. Left to ourselves, we always go over and over what’s missing— tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop reaching for on the other side of his bed a year later. Then one odd afternoon, watching something as common as the way light from the window lingers over a vase on the table, or how the leaves on his backyard tree change colors all at once in a quick wind, he begins to feel a lightness, as if all his loss has led to finding just this. Only God knows where the feeling came from, or maybe God’s not some knower off on a cloud, but there in the eye, which tears up now at the strangest moments, over the smallest things.

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops in Iraq was close to 3,800 , said ‘The truth is you never do get used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes, and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’— leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol, tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball, but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking, all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said, correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

Desolate and lone All night long on the lake Where fog trails and mist creeps, The whistle of a boat Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears and trouble Hunting the harbor's breast And the harbor's eyes.

I am looking for the photo that would make all the difference in my life. It’s very small and subject to fits of amnesia, turning up in poker hands, grocery carts, under the unturned stone. The photo shows me at the lost and found looking for an earlier photo, the one that would have made all the difference then. My past evades me like a politician. Wielding a fly-swatter, it destroys my collection of cereal boxes, my childhood lived close to the breakfast table. Only that photo can help me locate my fourteen lost children, who look just like me. When I call the Bureau of Missing Persons, they say, “Try the Bureau of Missing Photos.” They have a fine collection. Here’s one of Calvin Coolidge’s seventh wedding. Here’s one of a man going over a cliff on a dogsled. Here’s my Uncle Arthur the night he bought the prize peacock. O photo! End your tour of the world in a hot air balloon. Resign your job at the mirror-testing laboratory. Come home to me, you little fool, before I find I can live without you.

the time i dropped your almost body down down to meet the waters under the city and run one with the sewage to the sea what did i know about waters rushing back what did i know about drowning or being drowned you would have been born into winter in the year of the disconnected gas and no car       we would have made the thin walk over genesee hill into the canada wind to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands you would have fallen naked as snow into winter if you were here i could tell you these and some other things if i am ever less than a mountain for your definite brothers and sisters let the rivers pour over my head let the sea take me for a spiller of seas        let black men call me stranger always        for your never named sake