truthfront

truthfront

  • down rodeo

    I wrapped the shotgun in a blanket and put it in the trunk before driving through West Hollywood into Beverly Hills with the spring sun blazing. I had to see some guys but instead maneuvered through gridlock traffic to a coffee shop off Santa Monica Boulevard where hipsters brunched and rich folk avoided the homeless. She sat at a table near the front window. I kissed her on the cheek and sat, regretting I didn’t have time for coffee. 

    I just came to say hi, I said. 

    She smiled and time stopped for a few minutes. I forgot about everything else, only absorbing half of what she said, spellbound, entranced. 

    I have to go, I said.

    She stood to hug me and I kissed her neck, inhaling her. 

    Back in the devastating noontime light I steered the rented sedan toward West LA and contemplated how the room full of thieves would react when out come that shotgun.

  • Transfiguration

    He wrote himself into the story as a marginal character, someone who watches and listens intensely, someone who, beneath his ordinary appearance, conceals a deadly weapon. Knowing he possesses the weapon provides him with a sense of power and he scans the room of people dressed formally beneath twinkling chandeliers. None of them share his clandestine power. He is handed a bubbly drink in a flute glass and sips it, then drains it whole. Who are these people made of gold? It isn’t enough to own the world; one also has to celebrate their ownership. He pats the weapon in his pocket, feeling its cylindrical body, the antenna-like electric coils. Soon this will all be over, he thinks. I’ll be on my way home to the blue bungalow on 23rd with the giant rhododendron in front that nearly conceals the building. In an hour the bleached teeth, overpriced garments, and ornamental minerals will drop suddenly from these people to the ballroom floor, the flesh and bone of their previous owners evaporated, transfigured, only to return in part to a different place, as a different being. 

  • Cărtărescu’s anti-literature

    After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.

    Cărtărescu, Mircea. SOLENOID, trans. by Seán Cotter, Deep Vellum Publishing, Dallas, 2022: 42. 

  • Swirling dark, two questions

    Cold wind rocks me wake 

    camp flames whip

    black desert

    storms approach

    horse and dog spooked

    White veins skyward

    light the world in grayscale

    creatures, cactuses

    stunned

    beneath the flash

    lashing dust gales

    stubborn fire keeps itself alive

    small victories

    What could be the approaching thunder 

    that is not thunder?

    If trains existed yet

    I’d bet a locomotive

    bearing down

    massive

    in the darkness

    my saddle raised from the ground

    gone

    next, the dog

    swallowed by churning black

    roaring wind

    I wasn’t lifted

    so much as exploded

    backward by an uprooted

    saguaro

    If there were a god

    it might have plucked me

    from death

    but if there were a god

    what be that swirling dark?

  • forgetfulness

    The items you sent

    priority

    are cast out 

    used DVDs

    aged plastic waste

    musicals in black and white

    the logic of you

    hateful literature

    twisted philosophies

    philosophies twisted

    classical CDs

    used decorations

    everything fake

    used

    unuseful

    your smell in the box

    familiar

    despair

    isolation

    paranoia

    you forgot who I am

    or you wouldn’t have sent 

    a holy bible

  • How to Dream Well, by Fernando Pessoa (1913)

    Postpone everything. Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything today or tomorrow. 

    Never think about what you’re going to do. Simply don’t do it. 

    Live your life. Do not be lived by it. In truth and in error, in sickness and in health, be your own self. You can only achieve this by dreaming, because your real life, your human life, does not belong to you, but to others. Therefore, replace life with dreaming and take care to dream perfectly. In all your real-life actions, from the day you are born until the day you die, it is not you performing those actions; you do not live, you are merely lived.

    Become an absurd sphinx in the eyes of others. Shut yourself up in your ivory tower, but without slamming the door, for your ivory tower is you. 

    And if anyone tells you this is false and absurd, don’t believe him. But don’t believe what I’m telling you either, because you shouldn’t believe anything. 

    Despise everything, but in such a way that despising feels quite normal. Do not think you’re superior when you despise others. Therein lies the noble art of despising.

    Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet, New Directions, New York, 2017: 46.

  • Melville, spring 1851

    While those around him savored the renewed warmth and light of spring, Melville, unused to the sun and habituated to daytime reclusiveness, wrote to a friend that “like an owl I steal about my twilight.” During the days, he sat alone, as Hawthorne wrote of him, “shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while the gigantic shape of Mount Greylock looms upon him from his study window.” The second-floor study of his house was Melville’s sanctuary, a bright corner room filled with morning light streaming through its eastern window and affording a view of Mount Greylock framed in a second window that looked north over an expanse of fields. Despite her best efforts, Melville’s wife later recalled, he sometimes worked on the book “at his desk all day not eating anything until four or five o’clock,” and then, according to his own account, retired for the evening “in a sort of mesmeric state.”

    Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work, Vintage, New York, 2005: 140.

  • letters to friends

    Night is a ghost on wings. I write letters to myself and to friends who no longer exist, friends who are dead or friends with dead parents like me. I write letters from those friends to their dead parents and sometimes from the dead parents to their living children but I never send them, I keep the letters in a safe place to reread as I age. Aging is hard but not in ways my young self imagined. Aging is hard like remembering is hard, it is uncomfortable and strange, even as being in one’s body grows more familiar with time. Aging is the accrual of experience. I write letters to my future self about experience and accrual and pain. Perhaps one day I’ll read them. I write letters to my living friends and almost always send them. The letters contain recent anecdotes of irony, whimsy, severity. Perhaps someone should write me a letter, someone other than me. Write me in a language other than English. Write me a letter from my dead father, tell me about his recent bets, his meals, his whores.