Of Skin in War
Trump should have to fight this war if he wants it
When Absence is Presence
(Photo by Sergey Causelove)
Prayer
I used to see prayer as something beneficial for others, but not for me. I was too bad, too wild, too sinful for it. I also did not possess the humility to get down on my knees.
What the work needs is you
Part of being an artist is the drudgery of sitting at the desk repetitively, especially when the well of imagination feels dried up.
For Pussy
Alina monkey climbs up the waterfall
A Glass Home
I construct a house with every wall made of glass. The glass sparkles in delight when the sun hangs his body upon its length, and turns impenetrably dark when night takes residency in the sky. The darkness is egalitarian…
Altered States (Featured in The Museum of Sex)
(Essay featured in The Museum of Sex NYC— Higher Love: The Psychedelic Roots of Modern Sexuality)
The Cost of Expediency
When profit is the primary guiding principle of urban development, what is lost is not only aesthetic refinement but the values that make a city worthy of human life. Beauty, patience, and intention are sacrificed for ex…
The Location of Sadness
The Virgin Suicides split open
Be Somebody Here
In New York you’ve gotta be somebody
Invasive
The white men from empire were the invasive species of the Middle East. They charged into a new habitat and forced the native species into a pantheon of suppression. Winston Churchill referred to the Palestinians as dogs…
The Message
Bodies pass one another a thousand times
For Those Still Remaining Neutral
Our moral architecture is crumbling as Gaza is demolished. We’re watching genocide live-streamed while tucked into bed, riding the subway to work, and drinking green juice on lunch break. The American government is fundi…
Uncertainty
We take a train from the green Austrian Alps into the gray concrete of Berlin. The scenery moves like flipping pages from a picture book. Here’s the bright eyed fluffy cow with a glistening tulip nose. Now here’s the vol…
Old Pains
I’m acting like a fool because
Faithful to Faith
If there is only the northern wind that carries through the heat
Forgetting to Remember
My grandaunt Roshni is wrapped in Alzheimer’s
The Inner Citadel
The inner citadel is a mental fortress one creates against adversity. The inner citadel can be destroyed through external pressures if it is not built into the folds of the mind and discipline of the body. For Marcus Aur…
Free Body Culture
FKK, or Free Body Culture, (Freikörperkultur in German), emerged in the 1800s as a method for health optimization and later became a homage to nature. It’s simple. Allow light to touch the body. Walk the grasses barefoot…
Re-Wilding
That guy needs to live a little
Cut the Short Cuts
Zig zag down back alleys
The Fisherman’s Catch
At the end of the Lycian trail
The Lovely Little
The delicate voice of longing
The Will to Meaning
The human spirit has an innate will. This will is what propels us to move forward in the riddled labyrinth that is existence. Freud believed the greatest will, was the will to pleasure. He felt if sex was oppressed, we w…
There is Fear
A friend and I were talking about the past and how far we’ve come. A few years ago there were months on end where she was on the brink of madness. She compulsively locked doors, and had to have a friend come over and sle…
The Poor Writer
I was staying in a friend’s basement in Brooklyn near a Hasidic neighborhood. There had been torrential flooding the week before and the basement had been made half pool. Though it was end of October and a meager 50 degr…
The Necessity of Humor
Comedians have a way of taking sensitive topics like racism, sexism, and politics and bringing them to light in a way that is non-confrontative because it has the ability to make you laugh. You laugh about it because of …
The Beholder’s Share
It wouldn’t be simplistic to say that everything in life is a relationship; a relationship because there’s always one entity interacting with another, there’s no true solitude. Even when we sit in the forest alone, we ar…
All I Ever Wanted Was Everything
Nestled in the green bosom of the Austrian Alps,
Pay For It
Room 305 in the Bowery Hotel smelled like sex, meaning the juices of desire and the dank odor of sweat. Jack was dripping in heat and Sitara thought her left arm was going to become more muscular than her right. "Gr…
Love Lives a Life of its Own
How badly my pain wants to be unique
Spontaneity
Impulse is thoughtless
Child of the Streets
At midnight in Mumbai the air is heavy
Remember District Six?
Apartheid had ended, but the stench of it refused to leave Cape Town. Everything changed, but somehow nothing had changed. Things were as bad as they were ten years prior. Iminathi and her family had lost their home, and…
Self Obsession vs Self Knowledge
There is more self exhibitionism now than ever. Look how much money I have. Look how hot I’ve become. Look how great my boyfriend is. Social media has made life a stage.
Art is for Everything
The world informs creativity. The world contains everything and each of its pieces can be metastasized into art. This can take the form of sugared violence, power dynamics and rape, existential confusion, etc. Pain taken…
Is Freedom Free?
There are truths taken as embroidered conspiracies
Womanhood and the Role of the Body
People cannot choose their bodies, but they do choose how to conduct themselves in the skin they've been given. The body is animated by the voice that emerges from its depths and the gestures it performs. It's the eyes t…
Labor, Leisure, & Carol Bove
Many artists use their personal lives as an experiment in which everything becomes material to work with and create from. All acts, from how one speaks to the way in which one has sex, become valuable pieces of informati…
The Carcass
It is said that monks meditate upon their deaths. They learn non attachment to the body mind complex because they sit with its impermanence.
An Egyptian Bachelor Party
Neith grew up in a town outside of Cairo, with a conservative Arabic upbringing that revolved around family and the value of education. He quickly became an intellectual and made his way to Paris to create a life of his …
Lessons from de Botton's “The Course of Love”
Alain de Botton is a British author and a philosopher of our contemporary age. His work tackles a few of the most timeless issues of the human experience, one being the art of love in relationship. Too often, literature …
Nietzsche’s Morals and Aestheticism
Nietzsche was one of the primary philosophers to contemplate the symbiotic relationship between aestheticism and morality. People’s perception of aesthetics often emerges from societal definitions of value, which, in tur…
Post War, Post Destruction, Post Life
War is the collective unconscious suffering that manifests in a denial of life. It places people in bestial states and increases tribalism. War fuels the polarization of nations and carries trans-generational trauma. It …
Silencing Freud's Thanatos
In Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," he presents a speculative theory, contested by many psychologists.This theory does not contain much empirical support, but remains a phenomena all humans have felt, b…
Part Idea, Part Man: Idealization & Love
When I first met him, I was lulled by euphoric waves of MDMA but it was better than a pill because I was sober and awake. In the mountains of Northern Thailand, we spent every night together. Our words allowed me to meet…
Departures
We were together in the indigo swept mountains of Thailand before I left him for the Mediterranean sea. When we lived together on a Thai island, I left him for New York. When we stayed together in a village in Turkey, I …
For One Night
I was crashing in a community house of techies and entrepreneurs in San Francisco. I was the only one in this fourteen-person household who was an artist. I didn’t go to any Ivy League School. I didn’t make millions of d…
Optimism Amidst Complexity
There's an inherent negativity bias in the mind and in the culture. It is propagated by the media, our speech, and the feeling that there's many problems to be solved. There's an underlying anxiety in this belief, and it…
Folsom Street Fair
Broad daylight on Folsom Street. Two in the afternoon. Pinkish cocks everywhere. Hairy asses in leather thongs. Men in latex flog each other outside the bodega. Transvestites walk naked in five inch heels. A circle jerk …
In The Female Form
The female body is like a bonsai tree, tended to with precision and pruned to be orderly. The bonsai tree does not grow naturally but with a predetermined direction. There is an ideal size and an archetypal shape it must…
Going Not Gone
It was the third day of Burning Man, and Abbie took 120 micrograms of acid. Within the first hour of her trip, she was a crumpled ball on the floor. She wept; it was not a few hot tears but a full-body convulsion of un-m…
Who Knows
There are no morals, there is just righteousness. There is dust on the Protestants Bible and the Quran is at the bottom of the sea.
No Problems
The biggest thing we can do to change our reality, is change our minds. The mind is a problem solving machine, chewing on what to eat for breakfast, what to say to our boss, deciphering what that stranger’s look means. W…
Reducing Radical Roxy
There was a calling for less. I minimized until my life was reduced to one backpack for three and a half years of travel. It was two countries in this time period instead of twelve. It was primarily solitude instead of v…
Deconstructing Deja Vu
Deja vu is commonly described as a sensation of knowing that what is experienced now has occurred before. For some, it's a positive omen, signaling that they’re on the right path, while for others, it verges on a mystica…
Touched to Touch
The slight brush of a shoulder while walking past a stranger. Fingers, like wanderers, find each other beneath the dinner table. Eye contact lingers a minute too long.
A Burning Man Wedding
We had just finished watching a hobbit-like man dressed as Jesus ordain the couple.
A New Friend
It had been a year since I had seen Ayah. Our last moments together were in Prague, on the frozen mouth of the Charles River, the air still with fallen snow. Now we were in the Bay Area on a road trip to her boyfriend's …
Only Fans Couple
Friendship in the internet age is strange
Crying in Foreign Countries
A night club in Amsterdam / My best friend’s concerned gaze / A filthy man’s touch / A recollection of the past / Midnight strobe lights / Gag over a puddle / “You never talk about what happened to you.” / What would wor…
Broken Shells
For weeks on end, he was suspended in the belly of the ocean, in the watery expanse of light between Earth and sky. He had not touched land in three weeks and lived in complete solitude. At first, being alone was refresh…
PostModern Daydream
God is a recurring dream
The Hood
121st Street is at war with itself. The cement does not yield to the bodies that walk upon its shore, nor the men that fight upon its concrete shell. Here, everyone falls and most bleed. This same street we were born on …
El Sol
I lay on the damp Earth and the grasses tremble above my head, they too are breathing. The grasshoppers click their legs in melodic delight. The sun shines thickly upon my skin and I receive its warmth.
Calling Goodness
I write a poem while there is a war in Ukraine. I grocery shop for organic produce while there's genocide in Myanmar. I dance half naked in a techno club while girls in Iran are being murdered for showing their hair.
Configuring New York
The cement remains cement.
Sometimes it feels like we are fucked
The people with the least interesting things to say are the ones who speak the loudest, and the average mind can easily grasp the content, so they agree. In the information age (and no attention span as a result), those …
How dull am I?
It was June in Berlin. We were living in a friend’s penthouse, making ambient music and barely working. Our weekends consisted of naked parties and eating too much sashimi. Jonah was crashing in Prenzlauer Berg the same …
Seldom Satiated
I have practiced numbness by taking and taking and barely getting half way full.
The Mediterranean
In the margin of summer,
The Novikov Consistency Principle & Quantum Mechanics
The Novikov Consistency Principle does not give space to the dreaminess of possibility, but the concrete nature that what has happened cannot be changed. A time traveler cannot journey back to their parent’s college days…
The Wisdom of Carmen Maria Machado’s Prologue for In The Dream House
Prologues usually irritate me. They read as a clumsy info dump, and can often ruin a book by congesting the reader with too many back story details. Prologues can inflate the material and narrow a perspective down to the…
Old Man Pat
He lives in his off white finca in Southern Ibiza. When he comes home, he drinks three glasses of pinot blanc and plays reggae fusion disco. He drags from the stub of his cigarette and watches the ocean, not really watch…
Reflections on Milan Kundera’s Death
On July 11, 2023, Milan Kundera died in Paris. I was halfway through his novel Immortality, when I received the news of his passing. It felt serendipitous, as if I was meant to be reading his mental gymnastics on the sub…