Michael Indemaio

Never the genocidal insistence of nondifference and unbeauty, infinite stutters in a vacuum. Only up and up, feeling more than thinking, proceeding not succeeding, endlessly ephemeral, forever etcetera — a nocturne of the stars. Only the always of a penstroke, tie the art around my heart, digging deeper, unafraid, revel-child, beauty-made, and I’m sorry if I forgot to say I’m sorry.

I plant roses in the rubble. 

Biographical Information For Immediate Release:

I was born on a hot day 115 years after Wild Bill Hickok shot Dave Tutt dead in Missouri. At a very young age I began conversing with trees and calling them by name, as we all will one day in Heaven. The earliest audio recording of myself displays a toddling voice eagerly repeating the simple question "do you want to know why?" It appears I knew innately that no matter how much you wish to explain something it may be that no one will want to listen. Between the ages of 5 and 8 I decided not to speak outside the confines of my home.

I played imaginative games and kept detailed records. At 9 I wrote my first love poem displaying early interest in the relation of symmetry to beauty and the manner in which physical forces work against each other. (It was terrible, even for a 9 year old). The following year I was writing elaborate plays using classmates as characters inspired by our lunchtime games of cops and drug dealers. At 12 I saw my first knife fight and began reading Twain and Poe, at 13 Emerson. Self-Reliance worked in me as it had America -- inspiring, uplifting, defining, and quickly leading to a Whitmanian fever. I began again at poetry, this time using trees as metaphors for death (I was psychologically unaware of my toddling literary voice). Then at 15 I met Quentin and attacked him with a crowbar.

I read Cummings and Pound, Plath and Keats, and it was Quentin himself who turned my eyes to the Beats. I remember he said that time was cutting through us like a machete through shrubs and that nothing not even art could be eternal. I said that I wanted to see like The Beatles did and he said it was impossible, that they were graced by angels and that angels didn't exist. We climbed trees in the night.

Quentin would write, oh would he write... long impossible sentences in short violent verse, and he would dye all his paper to make himself feel ancient and wise, like his prophet beard and bunkhouse jeans. We would steal each other's words then and never care. It's a peculiar thing, the creativity of youth comes so easily, like childhood games, we never thought to guard its product as something precious or rare. What is bohemia after all, if not a kind of Marxism of the soul?

In college I fell in love with spoken word and snowstorms, chocolate chip cookies and rain. Afterwards I took a job on a boat where I learnt about self-tightening knots, currents, and tides. I began to understand that some people hang themselves for safety and that most people expend too much energy striving against their fate. The gravity of the situation was consuming and I began to grow mad. (There is nothing so insane as to embrace the world around you as reality). I wrote a few books under the assumption that faith floats, and dedicated to the insistence of the individual's existence.

After that I had my first angelic vision and went blind for nearly 5 years. I decided to write another book and burnt the first draft hoping it would light my way. Once a woman I didn't know told me that God said He heard my prayer and would answer it. I asked her if she knew which prayer but she said she did not and that she also didn't know how He would answer it or in what time. I wanted to ask her what time was, and what it meant to the eternal, and I wanted to ask her if God spoke to her often and what that was like, but instead I said thank you. I collected my poetic ashes and began again at the book. I wrote poems about honesty and edited them with lies and would write feverishly in the middle of the night waking myself to record my dreams. I started dyeing my own paper, scribbling on napkins and walls, and filling endlessly the margins of paperback novels. All of this of course while I was blind and unaware of what I was writing. Plus on the streets of San Francisco a dog told me that time meant nothing to him and that he didn't know he was a dog.

As a matter of point, here observe that exoterics and esoterics alike find themselves at home in the eternal, abstract or anthropomorphized it doesn't matter, so long as pervasive divine and affirmative in being, just as they unwittingly know that beauty must be immeasurable and everything. Just as Dionysius the Areogate speaks of the mysteries of heavenly truth "outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty," so too did I know that light is all the more exemplified at night.

When the angel finally returned so did my eyesight and with it the tenacity of spring -- everywhere everything vibrant alive and sudden, blooming and growing and singing its gleeful songs. Nothing was dull or unpolished halved or unsure but rather vibrating with the joyous luminous extravagance of fact. There in that moment I spent 200 years reading through my mad screaming pages of blindman poetry. I delighted in each shocking page releasing them like balloons in the night. They floated off to distant dreamlands like the wishes of strangers as the angel cheered their passing. For 200 years I continued until the last page said this:

The greatest gifts are selfless
Therefore nothing,
Gifts you have no way to give.
We all have nothing
But ourselves
Which we also deeply seek ---
Give them them
Provide a light,
Take their hand and lead the way.
There is nothing in time
That is yours or is mine;
Be stubborn
In love
Today.

With that I awoke slowly running through rain and it was a year ago. In sudden recognition of what had just happened, (the story I've passed along here), I dropped to my knees and began clawing deeper and deeper at the rich moist dirt. When I arrived at the place where the tree roots end, I clipped off a bit for safe-keeping.

Last week I shot Quentin dead in the middle of Times Square at rush hour. There in his honor I left the root bit with the sincere belief that it may grow.

Publications interested in interviews may freely flesh out the above biographical information with the following stock answers:

For questions about my poetry:

"The poems are not mine."

For questions about poetic ownership:

"Like everything they belong to all of us and none of us

     because they belong to God."

For questions about spirituality:

"I believe in ghosts because I've been one,

     I believe in angels because I've kissed one,

          and I believe in God because he told me to."

For questions about future plans:

"I'd like to live this life again or else converse with trees in heaven

where there will be Quentin smiling and all desires pure and fulfilled

and entire sections just for animals and things we don't notice."

For questions about my private life or hobbies:

"I plant roses in the rubble."

For questions about style:

"Every word is a weapon, every poem a rose."

For advice on writing:

"Shine a light."

For advice on poetry:

"Be stubborn in love."