"leftovers/where do teeth go?"

"You are not supposed to wonder where your teeth go, only celebrate their departure. This habit of thought is so ingrained that even when I no longer believed [in the tooth fairy], I still didn't wonder where my teeth were going. Researching this point, I recently asked the tooth fairy where she had put my teeth. She sighed and said she threw them in the trash.

This seems like a sad end for something that used to be such an important part of my body. While they are in our mouths we know our teeth with such extraordinary intimacy that even a slight change, such as a chip, can be a constant distraction until the tongue gets used to it. And yet we say goodbye to them without a thought as to where they will end up: whether they are kept indefinitely, hoarded for awhile and then discarded, or immediately disposed of, tooth-fairy teeth, like most other teeth, probably end up in landfills or incinerators. In this respect, they are indeed trash - useless, excess to requirement, and a little bit disgusting, fit only to molder away with the rest of the stuff we no longer wish to think about."


"When we think of our first lost tooth, we remember again what such an absence felt like, how it began, strange and unnerving at first, a dangerous taste of blood on the tongue, and then later the thrill and promise of the gifts that might replace it. If baby teeth show us anything, it is that these gaps of nature and of history, which we make even as we fill them, must be filled in this way with only empty artifice, and hope, and forgetfulness."

- Helen Denise Polson, Cabinet, Issue 36

frantic gesturing.

"The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one's face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one's lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heart-breaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they'd understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I've always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me."

- Excerpt from "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss

view at full size.

pencil, india ink. 2010

let the ramones tear your face off.

Don't you just feel like going out now and getting in a fight?

we take death to reach a star.

"For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train."

- Vincent Van Gogh

fracture theory.

It's bizarre that for as long as I loved you, I have virtually no photographs of you.
Almost as if you were merely a figment of my imagination.

An incredibly amazing dream, so powerful my heart could burst. A dark, stormy nightmare; one that I just couldn't seem to wake up from.

You were no ghost.
Your eyes were like tentacles, reaching into me and spreading me open. Your presence in my life was a cataclysm of proportions you can't imagine.
Wiping ash on my face after the fire subsided. That's no way to say goodbye.
That's not the kind of life I dreamed of for us.

I lied, there is one picture that I clearly remember. You are pretending to sleep on a large rock.
You always hid your face.
There were more. My memory misled me. But they are lost somewhere. In a box? In a fire? In the wind?

Maybe you were a ghost. I could never quite catch you.
I tried so goddamn hard.
Fading in and out. I remember all of the static that surrounded us.

I spoke in short sentences around you. I didn't want to give too much away.
But you took everything, anyway.
Electricity is a fickle child. Jolted awake but burned. An open-heart orgasm is no match for your pavlovian tricks.

The only thing I have to remember you by, still, is the picture I drew of you.
It's fuzzy and grey. You aren't looking at me. You're looking somewhere off in the distance.
It's probably better off like that because it makes you seem further away.
I've got you just where I want you. Just where I need you to be.
Somewhere in the distance, crackling branches in the night, asleep on a bed of bones.
We keep our distance on purpose. We hide our scissors, we fold pages in the right places.

Maybe you are a ghost. I've got no more proof of you. Just my drawing.
Just my fear, and the way I stutter when I talk about you.
And the ashes on my cheek that never seem to wipe clean.

I guess this is the way I say goodbye.

(written in November 2009)

ol' slacksey's got himself a new pair o' slacks!

“While some people in Hoboken remember Frank Sinatra as a lonely child, one who spent many hours on the porch gazing into space, Sinatra was never a slum kid, never in jail, always well-dressed. He had so many pants that some people in Hoboken called him ‘Slacksey O’Brien.’”


I hope to someday own enough pairs of pants that I may be known as Slacksey O'Brien.
Or maybe Pantsy O'Toole, Trousers McSullivan, or Plenty O'Jeans.

What's he thinking about? Probably pants.

golden bruises.

"When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes beautiful."