rain collected by me and many friend 11/14/19
...the first home i built i named “the handshake room” because of the fly always clapping their hands over the strawberries beginning to cover themselves in snow and i was always jealous of all the thinning spaces they were able to move through. i built the home they swarmed slowly and regretted doing so when i came to find its door locked away with no warning. it had been declared dead without me knowing and i wonder how long something i conceived of could be declared dead without me knowing. at the same time i have to say i was partially relieved from the realization i would no longer everyday look into a home i was building for no one to live in. i decided the next home I built I would build fast. i would build it in a day. i went to a corner of a place with what was left of that home I could carry in my hands. i spent the day walking on gravel and as the gravel was lunging into the soles of my feet i started to remember my mom telling me about a year when i was four when she was very angry with me because i thought we shouldn’t be walking on grass. i obviously had not considered all the things i was stepping on by stepping on anything. how in order to never hurt anything i would have to weigh zero pounds. so i continued to step on the grass and the gravel and the sand and the ants and the weeds and the earth’s crust and all the people underneath pretending i wasn’t aware.but what was also accompanied in this thought process that day was the use of lettuce as a notepad and the beauty of peaches stuck in couch cushions
at one point it rained and i watched the house get drenched. then it stopped and i watched the house get dried by the sun. i would say this was their official welcome to the earth despite the brief time which they were actually there. of course this corner where i made a house where markers could get stuck in half eaten apples and purple onions could be sewn to make a purple blanket and everything made sense together was discarded from being as soon as I lefti’m positive I will never be able to make anything solid and i’m pretty sure my words are becoming more disparate with age but I also think if there is anything impenetrable it is probably the weaker structure. as i was writing on clothes i started to see that a lot of the time i just like the sound of certain words together and hope i can learn to justify my reasoning for them before someone asks me for an explanationbehind the brick wall on franklin st. richmond, va on 11/14/18 (draft #1)
my living room on broad st. richmond, va on 12/10/18 (draft #2)
in front of Andrea’s table on broad st richmond, va on 11/28/18 (draft #3)
backyard of a friend at floyd avenue richmond, va on 02/16/19 (draft #6)
beside the wall covering up the dumpster on franklin st richmond, va on 03/12/19 (draft #5)
