
2025 February 9




Rest in Peace, Roddy Popovich (1932-2024)

I needed to put this someplace and it wasn’t going to be the other place


Didn’t stop painting but did stop thinking about posting them, as in it wasn’t a conscious decision, I just stopped posting them, that’s new, excellently encouraging, excellently frightening. Should I post a shadow of what I made?
One of the three people who’ve seen one of these in real life said more people in real life are not going to see them unless I put them out there and you should put them out there, more people should see them. I don’t want to, praise me for these all you people who’ve never seen one of these and never will. I keep posting shadows of what I make. Finest fucking metaphor for me forever me

23rd draft before I fuck it up


Dead already by five minutes, deader by the second, clear elmer’s glue and acrylic ink sustain but I insist gouache mirror my joints hike-wrung to death, dyingwet. Self-portrait for my 65th on the 28th

Left eye up, right eye down


This getting old shit
inexorably expands
into whatever
fun is left first. Knees
Look at the word knees ten
minutes, you wonder
why we’re phucked? Knever
ktrust kanyone kook kenough
kto kignore kankles




No kid is named Dusk
No kid named Apostasy
or Disgrace or Doomed
Noun, yes, aspire
to adjective and adverb:
jeffish and jeffly
Apostasy, Jeff’s
kid, ditto Dusk and Disgrace
and Doomed, wrote haiku

I don’t know it rates as the third greatest Jeff metaphor my favorite newest Jeff metaphor: gouache not only begins fading the moment it starts drying, the way I layer it on itself the faster it crumbles when dries, I can’t glue them back to back and save without ruining both, I emergency laminate the back-to-back, less desiccated side down
All circles, I now acknowledge my circles *are* placemats to everyone but me and you and not most of you and I agree wholeheartely, there are six notes I can hit singing and *not* have the worse voice in human history, I love George inordinately cause they’re his six too: E Flat, our key, our voice, our range, our placemats
I never once in fifty years of writing jeffspeakspastic poetry thought as much about poetry when hiking like I think about my just done, in process, and future playmats when hiking now. L always remarks how much I love bells, she lets me listen to Swans in the car now. I pretend this a discovery not my onset mother’s and mother’s mother’s dementia, they both loved bells, wrote nothing

Painters tape canvases starting now:





My right eye above
left below Not blind enough
yet to stop screaming




Second full-body self-portrait glued to the back of and upside-down from the first. Three 6×6 hot-press watercolor paper, gouache, watercolor ink, ballpoint pen ink, sharpie.


A vomit is an extreme burp
I once consoled Billy Wayne
busy extreme burping on my shoe
I need to start a new elephant
note page for March but was
afraid I’d forget this poem’s first
sentence formatting another
month in a platform I’d rather
paint bricks than use. No
abacuses were used in the how
old are you Jeff the gimmick
rictus of this poem. I’m growing



To stop myself thinking about it I bought an Arches 12 x 12 hot-press watercolor block which, if I’d thought about it instead of thinking I needed to buy it, is too big for the bed of the scanner I use so I can post the squares here and there and too big for the laminator I use so that the squares can be handled without fountain pen ink staining fingers, the above is the 12 x 12 cropped to 11 x 11, fine metajeffphors abound

| * | * | * | * | |||
| * | * | |||||
| * | What | could | possibly | * | ||
| possess | seven | syllables | ||||
| * | to | stomach | haikus? | * | ||
| * | * | * | ||||
| * | When | head | grimaces | * | ||
| seven | syllables | baptize | ||||
| * | Feet | demand | credit | * | ||
| * | * | |||||
| * | * | * | * |




*
I’m you too humorless to me too humorful
we disagree agreeing
(not the double I viscerally hate knew
my grandmother Shultz
told me I’d meet, what infuriates me about him
what I hate about about me and
true) yes, the joke in my head before you opened your mouth
What’s the score?
*

Tomorrow night last night before tele
port least griefly vacation re: job
Summarily fired in absentia Friday next week
scrivener notepad
taptaptap tap taptap tap
taptap tap tap tap
(I bleive point scriveNe r tworobust
simple me tapping, tr
oo.)













