There is a copy of Band of Outsiders that I checked out from a local record store and lost having been imbued with the memory of falling in love with the world that I had projected upon her awake at 4 A.M. and watching a video that someone had created for The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “The Devil May Care (Mom and Dad Don’t)” for the seventh time and discovering the emerald green glow on the horizon in the cool tranquility before dawn I had once thought that the sun cast bright golden carmine across the snow covered plains in the waking hours of a day gone by in an old house that I’ve never been to where you were cast in a film about snipers and I had forgotten to make the coffee for the crew and scout the next location They say that it is quite common for people to remember events that never took place. As if even memory was mediated by images within what Guy Debord called “The Spectacle”. Jean Luc Godard, whom the Situationist International neither disavowed or claimed as one of their own, is famous for having allegedly stated that “Cinema is truth twenty-four frames per second”. As it appears in The Little Soldier, his meditation upon The Algerian War of Independence, the quote actually reads “Photography is truth and cinema is truth 24 times a second.” A photograph is a historical record that serves as a synecdoche for an event that occurs as a totality. Their existence emphatically proves, once and for all, that subjectivity can only be transcended through the cultivation of collective memory. I had once imagined that I had been told a story about a newspaper article on the riots against the Serbian population that occurred following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He told me that, in spite of that the image of the destroyed carriage was a painful reminder of the intransigent ethnic strife that had incited the war, he left article up, nailed to his wall, for years later. He said that he had done so because he identified with one the people who had been captured by the photographer. He, then, moved his finger across the scene so as to accentuate the damage, and said, “I guess that I left that article up for all of these years because I thought that that was what had become of this world...” He, then, pointed to a man in the background of the image and said, “…and that’s me running away.” Regardless as to what is actually written in that article, my relationship to that event is mediated by an encounter that I only imagined during an odd repose from a fit of mania that I had experienced while compulsively accumulating information from Wikipedia. History is not a scientific record. It is also comprised of the evanescent respite from the analysis of information that inspires the creation of works of art. There is, perhaps, something all too Vitalist, even solipsistic, or, dare I say, “Fascist”, to that sentiment, though. It’s not that I think that Jean Luc Godard was mistaken, photography is truth and cinema, at its most basic level, is a succession of photographs; it’s just that I think that he, perhaps, had not considered the implications of that truth can be created as a mediator for a person’s subjective relationship to collective memory. Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet is “truth”, Ivan’s Childhood is “truth”, Maya Deren’s At Land is “truth”, the archival footage utilized in documentaries on the Holocaust is “truth”, and The Triumph of the Will is “truth”. Jean Baudrillad is famous for having cited Ecclesiastes as stating that, “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” Cinema is as much of a simulation of an event as it is a record of an event in its own right. When people create a film, they actually attempt to participate in the creation of memory, and fail, I might add, as, like any work of art, what there is left upon the reel never quite appears as its author had imagined and what a person feels when they see the film projected always somehow differs from every other person in the theater. I bring all of this up because I now wonder what it will be like for a person to discover an unreturned copy of Band of Outsiders perhaps, for the first time there as a record of the love I’ve never known or the life they’ve just begun

Lucky Strikes feeling like I did when I was stoned out of my mind lying on the floor of my apartment in the attic and listening to Galaxie 500’s “Fourth of July” as I, with all of the brilliance of a world-renowned actor delivered my thesis upon the Intelligence community, Neo-Fascism, reckless abandon, political power, and suicide to someone who had just come to see the band and was either too captivated by the sincerity, eloquence, and acuity of my speech or astonished by the rate at which I had delivered it to do anything other than stand there and smoke as I had somehow connected the disparate threads so as to leave them with a coherent theory Feeling like I should know better than to revel in what I have always wanted for the American Tobacco Company to have sold to me as if a pack of Luckies somehow signified an odd kind of clandestine solidarity as if they were really for anyone who just wanted to drop out of the gambit with all of the vaunt and charm of its famed socialites Like smoking them was a veritable revolt against anyone who couldn’t cope with such an expression of freedom when I know that I have merely developed an addictive compulsion that may kill me someday should no one else do so before then I still smoke them when I celebrate out of spite so as not to let what has become of my life be encapsulated by an advertising slogan Get it? “It’s toasted!”

discovering foreign matchbooks in an abandoned house I thought about running numbers and method actors who identify so directly with the roles that they have been given that they can no longer differentiate between themselves and the roles that they play

Savage, bright and dried leaves wake in the armisonance of your step These shores of dead still follow me make all kinds of glory vain hollows ring circular rites and Savage, bright dried leaves wake in the armisonance of your step

The I: internal combustion machine totem shape of the letter all vectors curved (in) and still exploding, youth set weather into Pyrénées skies All beauty exists between the(infinite)span of here and there collapsing –electric- collapsing organ made manifest by your beating drum mallet shutter- catch - my pumping blood parading circadian rhythms

all salt sea stick sweet breathing lashes on my tongue steel-screeching mud drenched motorcycle ridden proto-beats and the Edge of Heaven turn Chandala wheels over the bones of our dead. Hannah said, that we should gather-up all of the tobacco patch it in episcopate lines drawn on red-winged blackbirds drunk on whiskey wine and bright red crashing golden - High Life in 40 ounces The Millionth Shrine - Tehran

Civilian 18th century born December-ing Cossack traitor turned bayonets on Nikolai black clad Russian skull & bones Anna had stolen all of her mother’s jewelry wore it in a tzigane shack close to the Canadian border Family ties drug-gun running terminal speed all blood run down the kitchen sink The Aokigahara commune rustic, efflorescent new life breeding from the burial ground Vajrayāna cut cycle Sleeping re-born fey sprite burning violet angelic hosts revolve around the golden pyre Now absent glory -gone shadow sleeping gone. Pale King

…and then I just tried to abandon the world.

You and I went to see Coup de Grâce together and played a game of chess in the city park I lost, of course, though, must admit that I could’ve played better had I not lost myself in your opening eyes or the swirl of cream that I almost never take in a cup of coffee

Still quitting the bitter air makes breathing cold and clear timber only in halfcovered snow rapidly accumulating nervous tics the tug of hair and wince, for want of smile your halfgone northern Aurorae and my unsung choral paintings nevermade - the enclaves of your bay.

The waves come in in black and white I’m looking over a cliff and the ocean keeps coming in and out of focus Slowly as if on fine grain film the sunsoaked blues become more and more vivid

each ocean unto its solitary depths and broken tonal wasted hours silent frames the shutter revolving one day the light dies down over a town in the Northeast and the world just rips apart dreams and isolated visions in black and white the line that prolongs the horizon a horse that dies and is made anew with each image the gaze from behind that gattling gun always catching up with the notional gallop the eidetic phrases and mechanical movements headlong into culminate black and soft glow of aluminum the somber grain so like the flooding shores and disintegrating charcoal Self Portrait in Watercolor the calligraphic lines occidental ink blotting wells in his pupils as deep as rock sediment Death is a language that is ephemeral the light always shines through shoring the soundless knoll of its fervid procession the venerated halls and incense burning from the thurible Sunlight cast down on the dial outside the ever divisive incisions that mark the passage of time and the body bled black as it hurls itself into the ever retreating oblivion I live here now, alone in this world. I live here now, alone.