pooey tree

words drip from fingers
like worlds coalescing from
diffuse primordial whirls around big hot stars

each point you make carves pumpkins
in the antique glass of your ex lover’s
hot wax drip sex candle

she’s watching the iridescent beetles
crawl satisfied from the wedding robes
draped around your antique skeleton

she handles the water pitcher at the maidenhead
splashing ice crystals on the pussy willow
in the honeymoon suite between bedposts

you sleep on a rigid pillow and dream a utopia
not realizing the ripe fleshed dancers 
are young faeries testing their tricks

“can you give me your extra-dimensional autograph?”
she asks, offering a page no scribble can sign
“do you have any… other pens?” she asks

if being worm deep in an apple existence
or three legged in a bird world

if fishing in the river styx
while she watches

and the beetles crawling.

extract of three dreams

Language Key:
ren = man, woman, person, people
ye = you
'e = she, he, ze, etc.
'eir = their, his, her, etc.
'em = them, him, her, etc.
'uy = gender neutral casual for someone whose gender identity you view as similar to your own
'irl = gender neutral casual for someone whose gender identity you view as more distant to your own

...

ye meet someone who is a combination of two 
ren ye’ve dated in the past

one is courteous and prettily dressed, “Cheemex”
you stared at em across a classroom a decade ago
the other a nerdy swagger with a smoking habit - “Jackson G”

are ‘ey one… or are ‘ey two?

‘ey join you, sitting on the ground 
in the audience of a strange play
masquerade henna smears across ‘eir shining eyes

the play is like a hard core porn scene
one ren strapped to a bench 
while another two back their oiled sexes into ‘eir face

and the director, only one with a full rear view of the sexes
like a magic show
is a ren you respect as disciplined and masterful

a phys’ felt game of footsie with one of the doppels 
on second inspection this ‘irl is an ‘uy

a scene of violence
two ‘uys with bloodied noses punching into one another
and the tech ‘uy said “Want me to build you an app for that?”

when the show ands and all rise
folx go separate ways

Cheemex is the one standing by ye
and ‘e wants to go to the formal University Manor
where ye end in a corner of a large ballroom
while ‘e pirhouettes away
not made of this dimension
a spectral helix dancer
there and not
a quantum enigma in motion

…

ye are leading the class, well teaching it
though an elde’ren in the corner
pipes in with well tried techniques
and proposes an even more ambitious project
for the class

“I thought we were going to build Katanas”, ye say.
“I think we’re building a chainsaw.” ‘e points to the prototypes

the technology is an iridescent clay 
that hardens into enamel
tough enough to form hilts on full tang steel blades
and yet, on closer inspection
it has the potential to form carapaces for power tools as well

ye find yerself rolling out a huge sheet of marbled clay
with a large bread pin

it seems every time ye look up
there are less students in the class
and more space in the studio -
garage - warehouse - movie set

a sheltered infant staring at the firmament
of an Amazon distribution center.

…

at the end of the movie where ye somehow ended up
with Ryen Zellwegger,
you ask 

“why’d ye cast ME?”

“We needed someone who can explain the plan and ye’re good at that.”

“well”, ye think, gathering yer muster for a response.

“Thank you!”
“Thank you even if I was a typecast!”
“Thank you even if it was all just a dream.”

…

yer up on the wobbly tops of some living roofs 
with yer Mod and Pom 
when the invasion comes
at first it looks like an omni dimensional stealth craft
assembling itself in the sky

there are two copies, one more solid
and one of a more sublime opacity
intersecting perpendicularly
(ye could have sworn there was a third copy,
one not visible to the eye at all
but distinguished only by the 
trail it carved in the clouds as it
drifted to its origin 
on a z axis to the other two forms)

together, the instrument reveals itself 
to be a kind of sattelite 
and it quickly disappears
over the sea beyond
the San Francisco sky.

what comes next is a battleship
a three pronged purple claw-like craft
whose three claw tips send an arc 
of red electricity 
to a glowing ball
that hovers in the air between

it seems able to simultaneous strike
an unlimited number of targets
instantly impacting wide swaths of the metropolis
with arching energy projectiles

you urge your folks to shield ‘emselves behind
lumps in the hill
but ‘ey were out on the street to watch
and there ye see what 
these missiles do
creating patches of space
where time has ground to a halt

yer mod and pom are both caught in it
but ye see that yer Mod is kind of on the edge
while ye are able to pull ‘em back in
to the undisrupted time zone,
Pom is too far in to save
forever frozen in a wide eyed 
watching position
across an uncrossable wall of time
in space

checking the map reveals that
while yer area was not hit directly
it has been stranded in space time
with no bridges or boats to cross
just a tiny patch
of hills and houses
in a suburban neighborhood

…

A ‘ren watching what they assume must be the first 
alien attack ever on San Francisco
stands on the street
and in an instant
‘e is at the edge of a dark pit
into which disappear ‘eir partner and child

“We weren’t attacking you,
we were saving as many of you as we could,
saving you from your slow slow time.”

Fire Dancer

here you play with fire with me, by the old Ford truck
the oiled cord, coiled in a loose snare, a fuse
my flip-feet drag to catch in the sand-dirt
flick flames dance from each of your finger tips
the sun a red pupil in the jaundiced sky
your invisible lips do all the kissing (none)
your silent eyes blink out three syllables
why did god’s electron fingers zap my spine ridge?
(vertebrae to vertebrae)
'til the fire in the mountain is fire between my hips
and the baby in your belly prays "America"
as crows wheel in smog, charred leaves rain down,
and infernal dusk daunts the Western ridgeline.
a tree can stand like this forever, I
need you to tell me when it’s time to fall.

Oad I

I am 13. My crush is my Valentine.
I buy her a chocolate orange and meet her
at the Berkeley public library off Shattuck.
She has blue hair, wears spaghetti straps,
loves someone else.

I am 12. I sit on a concrete tube in the schoolyard
and tell myself, “I will remember this moment forever.”
Wind rustles the crumbling leaves
of Berkeley’s perpetual autumn.

I am a young man. The Warriors just won the NBA finals.
We go out in downtown Oakland.
She has a nose ring and an avocado tattoo on her
smooth left shoulder.

It’s 2009.
The cheap carpet flooring in our flat in Edinburgh is always sticky.
I show the Scots how to build a gravity bong.
Hands dusted with chalk from the climbing gym,
I make myself red curry rice for the third time that week:
grilled chicken, bell peppers, pre-cooked rice.
We start drinking at 4 in the afternoon
and we’re still up twelve hours later,
sitting around a candle singing along to the
guitar strums of a guy named Monkey,
simmering in the smell of hand rolled cigarettes,
finally going to bed when the last girl goes upstairs.

I tell her "I love you" when she finishes me.
I didn’t mean to! It just came out.
I just graduated. I’ve been getting high on 
my own supply, and some darkweb stuff my friend shipped in,
making art with dirty pastels,
locked on the couch while my roommates watch
No Reservations featuring Anthony Bourdain. 

We’re cuddled in the fresh plastic walls
of our 6’ x 6’ greenhouse, high on acid,
gazing at our prized collection of succulents.
She starts to cry. I feel it too.
It’s the thought of us sitting in front of these same plants
as they grow, and we grow old
maybe sitting next to each other.
maybe nowhere near.

So the story of my life is the story of my love for Luci.
No, the story of my life is the story of my love for women:
Tracy Z.
Emma from RISD,
Jane from 3rd grade, who I later found on Facebook.
No.
The story of my life is the story of my love for M.K.

Michelle is standing in front of her house,
which is a giant snail shell
across the street from my columnar startup palace.
She wants to collaborate with me.
Up close, her eyes are fractal florescences 
beaming quadrophonically in extra dimensions.

I am waking up asleep
the morning after heavy drinking
in my tiny bedroom overlooking the river in Providence,
on my balcony in the aether world
where the coral grows from the flowerpots.
A voice made of light says,
“We are all everything.
You am I or our I we is world.”

She is darkness, the glinting surface
of a polished obsidian blade.
The knife maimed deer
chooses a place to surrender:
a matress of secret moss,
a pillow of forgotten ferns.

Photographer II

is your finger still so naked
because I would never marry you?
are your bird wings still flapping for the air
we guzzled out of the sky?

do you remember when the California Grizzly
still roamed in the old-growth mountains,
before the first photographers came
to snap candids of this rolling golden land?

I see your heart ruled in the book
of the newly elected official.
your eyes wander from the the document.
your pen hovers above the page.

Photographer I

as a photographer I am asked
never to fear the darkness;
to sit in a room full of it
waiting for the crimson shadow’s 
furtive resolution
into an observable scene,
a photon prodding an election.

as a photographer I stand alone
on a dark road in California
aiming my camera where the comet is:
NEOWISE becomes my child
as she reaches the horizon.

from some invisible dark direction
comes a panting
a sound of heavy breathing
a wolf
a death
a reason.

sun now

In the windy sunshine
of a California mountain
trees singing their green anthem
in all directions,
I think of you.
My heart fills with hopeful longing,
smiling secretively into the horizon,
winking at the aether,
hiding nervous belly
ready to unfold in tidy laughter.
The breeze you licks my forearms.
Even the ground you presses back
	against my curling toes.
Who “you” are is another matter
though, for sun now, it doesn’t.

sack of meat can’t die

the backdrop of consciousness
is blaring orchestral
fractophony hung
loosely like a phantom 
in the corner of a Dalí bedroom.

existence is an opinion: an onion
we can only see entirely
by slicing it in half,
sautéing with a splash of salt 
ground black pepper,
a thigh from the meat sack
(won’t be needing that anyway)
cover and let cook on medium for 
two millenia, stirring frequently.

look closer at the darkness.
there’s nothing there
to be scared of.
nothing.
the tiger’s dinner is the dandelion’s breakfast.
the bee has a pouchfull of pollen,
dear pistil,
the trigger you pull on makes seed.

Positive Thought Loops

What is a loop?

A loop is a meme. It is an entity composed of behavior, experience, and knowledge that tends to self perpetuate within one individual and can spread to others. 

The gravitational core of a loop is an experience. Once one has had contact with the felt sense, and knowledge of the behavior created it, they enter the orbit of that loop.

In a world were scale is large, only policy changes and mimetic loops create widespread change.

Three archetypal loops can facilitate the transformation that needs to occur in society:

(1) Letting Go

The “letting go” loop shows the looper that they can live happily without something they previously felt a need to hold on to. In fact, without it they are much happier.

Letting-go-loops challenge the human process of design and creation because they are about letting go. How can a newly created “thing” and its accompanying ask to be acquired help its recipient to let go?

Books that teach people to let go have been some of the most effective propulsion vehicles for the letting-go-loop. E.g. Marie Kondo, Eckhart Tolle. 

What should we let go of?

Stuff. The magic of reducing one’s inventory really is life changing, and starting at a physical level gives new loopers a tangible entry point.

Choice. When one takes what is already there, what is freely given, what is abundant, settling for survival over optimization, this creates a loop of joy and acceptance that defies consumerism. 

Aversion to negative sensations and emotions. The power of negative feelings comes from our strong aversion to them. Accepting what is hurting begins the healing process.

(2) Empathy

Is empathy (especially with those suffering) a loop? It is not, as long as the aversion to negative emotions exists in a mind or culture. One empathizes, feels the pain or fear, and then pushes those unpleasant feelings away, killing the loop. 

The typical cycle of charity plays into this non-loop. Some image of suffering people or animals is presented, a viewer feels compassion, starts to see how painful it would be to empathize, and a donation is made which alleviates the negative, creating a story of “ok, maybe that pain is slightly lesser now.”

This is fine, but it’s not a loop, it’s a dead end. A mimetic loop vehicle for empathy is a critical missing component to Earth-healing, and the letting-go-loop of aversion to negative emotion could be a precondition for it.

(3) Gratitude

Everything is better when one is grateful for it. That which one is grateful for, one attracts more of into their life. 

Gratitude is not complicated, it has no downsides. It just requires a tiny bit of additional effort and creates an immediate reward. Let’s start with gratitude.

Thank you for spending your ten minutes embarking on this intellectual journey with me.

Thank you for caring about healing the Earth and her ensemble of beautiful inhabitants.

Thank you for being an inspiration to those around you.

Thank you for being.

The Climate Letter

On March 20, 2020 I climbed to the roof of my apartment building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It was a clear night and on the horizon I saw the jagged silhouettes of lower Manhattan, the crystalline frames of the Hudson Yards complex, and the Empire State Building, whose decorative lighting system pulsated an eerily pragmatic red, like a giant emergency beacon.

In the context of the pandemic, I empathized more easily with prey animals. Humans preyed upon Earth’s entire living environment. Now, a tiny virus had swiped our role as the apex predator.

As an empty plane flew overhead I considered the fear and alarm raised by this virus, which threatened to kill 3% of our population. I wondered how it would feel to face a threat that might not even spare 3%.

Through a chipped Pixel 2 to the last person I had hugged before quarantine, I said, “If humans could feel so much as a fraction of the fear and suffering we cause each day to life on Earth, flights would be grounded and this city would be shut down until we found a way to live sustainably.”

The next morning, I received an email from my grandfather, Ray Clayton. He wrote:
I want to try out an idea on you, perhaps worth a letter to the Times.  And if you’re interested we might co-author it, which would be fun.

I think it’s useful to compare the near-panic with which the world has reacted to the coronavirus, with the slothful way it has reacted to the far slower-acting but ultimately more deadly “virus” of the climate disaster.  Both phenomena are based on sound scientific evidence, Both have their deniers and “hoaxers.”  The big difference, of course, is that the climate crisis has been downplayed to the tune of billions of dollars by the fossil fuel industry.

My argument is that the coronavirus crisis has shown us that we can survive the wholesale disruption of our social fabric and economy to counter an attack by an agent for which we have no known cure. 

The death and destruction due to the climate crisis are already with us and for this we know the cure: stop burning fossil fuels.

A viral pandemic, even if left uncontrolled, will come and go with its toll on human life and property, within months or a few years.  But the climate disaster even with prompt action now, will disrupt human life for many years.  We should look on the coronavirus pandemic as a model for the climate disaster compressed from many decades into, at most, a few years.

My grandfather had been successfully published for his letters to the Times on several occasions. The idea of co-authoring something with him was exciting, so I took him up on it. 
Granddaddy,

I think that is a wonderful idea. I have been having the similar thoughts, though I never thought of submitting a piece to the Times.

One positive outcome of the pandemic might be this: it will place in recent human memory the disastrous consequences of not taking warning signs seriously, and hitting the brakes too late to stop a total wreck.

On an individual level, the COVID-19 outbreak gives us an opportunity to internalize how our actions affect others. I was talking to a young woman on the phone last night about how the pandemic highlights this principle of Buddhist thinking. Buddhist monks are known to walk with a broom, sweeping the path in front of them to make sure they aren't crushing any insects as they proceed. 

While most U.S.Americans would consider this level of care crazy, we’re now confronted with a situation where an action as seemingly benign as leaving the house without a mask could be endangering the life of a passersby.

After receiving my draft, my grandfather gave me some feedback, and suggested that we might increase our chances of actually being published by framing the piece as a response to Tom Friedman's Op-Ed on “Finding the Common Good in a Pandemic.” In the end, this is the letter that I submitted to the NY Times:
The pandemic teaches us two things. One is that rapid societal behavior change is possible when people and government align on what constitutes "common good." The other are the disastrous consequences of waiting too long to make those changes.

We are willing to shut businesses, stay home, and bear significant economic hardship when we see those around us sick and dying. Yet we aren't willing to make such sacrifices in the name of Earth’s wildlife and ecosystems, or even the lives and livelihoods of future human generations.

It doesn’t matter what experts tell us. Our collective definition of "common good" doesn't change when we are told something, it changes when we feel something. If we could feel even a sliver of the immense suffering caused by climate change, flights would be grounded and metropolises shuttered until humans found a way to run their economy sustainably.

Eventually the climate disaster will be actively destroying human lives with a ferocity and persistence that will make the pandemic of 2020 look like a picnic. If we wait until then to change, our legacy as a species will already be doomed. It would be better if we could update our conception of “common good” today.

The Times never ended up getting back to me. A piece published a day after our submission broadly covered the topic of COVID-19 & Climate, and likely scooped our chance of bringing a novel argument to the table. 

In spite of that, co-authoring the letter with my grandfather was an amazing experience, and if you are still reading, I’m willing to call our collaboration a success.