to be serious about art is to maintain an open and playful heart

when (and why) did everyone start saying “my person,” like “i’ve found my person”

i don’t understand the desire to get married and the desire to write a novel. i’m not against commitment or i guess duration. i just dislike these two things as institutions and as normative aspirations. like to be a “real” couple or “real” writer.

everything is romantic and everyone is annoying.

so strange when a straight person tries to tell me of their world……. a world increasingly distant and foreign to me….. like what do you mean….. husband and wife….. like what does that even mean….. a husband and a wife….. the husband and the wife…..

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet. —Alain de Botton

thinking about the musicality of a gay sigh

poetry has been declared dead so many times, but so long as there are still people reading for meaning—and music!—as opposed to mere information, i will continue. and honestly, i would continue to read and write poetry anyway, out of just my own personal hunger.

So…I have a poem out today: sillygoosepress.com/silly-summer... It’s after @chenchenwrites.bsky.social, whose collection “Your Emergency Contact has Experienced an Emergency” resonated so deeply with my lonely queer soul, and companioned me through the times

it is so important in this life to stop and smell the giant candles at costco

gonna debut my straight voice soon

tired of poetry discourse. what if my posts were just all about going to costco. while gay.

the way i started reading contemporary poetry was by finding the poetry section at my local library and just standing there reading a poem or two at random from books. i guarantee that if you do this you will find at least one poem you like within 15-20 minutes. unless you just don't like reading.

anyway, people who read more posts than they do poems are going to react to contemporary poetry (which they always call modern poetry) the way they react.

it's funny when people criticize and blanket dismiss contemporary poetry for sounding... contemporary. there's plenty of contemporary work that doesn't sound conversational, if that's what they mean, but they don't actually read and just want an excuse not to.

so much is against reading for pleasure, writing for play, looking without agenda, wondering, just wondering. too much keeps us from beauty that is freedom, from mystery that is freedom, from the freeing questions, from the free inner life that is (or should be!) always ours

it's annoying when a movie can't just be gay and it has to "teach" the straights about gay people

i love going to costco with my boyfriend

... Without mystery, a ballet dancer can barely lift, a man can barely stand idle in the window —Jennifer Militello, from "There's No Such Thing as a Typical Day"

there’s something about the apocalypse that can be so personal

i love it when gay people are both shallow and deep during pride month. yes, take a million shirtless pics AND organize against the police and prisons. show off AND show up. contain and express your multitudes

amazing how little a very long email can communicate

thinking about this delightfully furious poem by Mary Ruefle again.

Some small poems of mine, published on Twitter. Honored @chenchenwrites.bsky.social and Gudetama chose them 🫶✨️ #smallpoemsundays @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

i would like to express my profound gratitude to ice cream

love a group reading where everyone just reads two poems. looooove it. every group reading should be like that

everything’s the matter

when the baja is not a blast

when white people in the literary world go on their little power trips….. now why would you be doing all that in my presence? you think i’m not gonna talk about it, write about it?

i need a mango smoothie and a new lower back

when i’m at small writing conferences/festivals i love attending other writers’ talks and generative sessions because i get to be a student again, asking questions, testing out an idea, but mostly just listening, basking in the shared act of learning

time held you like water time did not hold me —Jennifer Militello, from "(start)"

love the part of the revision process where you just have to make it worse (to figure out what the piece is) before you can make it better. love that for me. love that for all of us who write.

a cyanotype is one of my favorite types

This is still one of my favourite poems ever written, it’s a tweet by Chen Chen

my favorite piece by Duane Michals, rest in peace—

i love flowers and silence

i think to be a writer you have to be stubborn, defiant, and at least a bit delusional. i mean, you have to believe—and keep believing—that you have something worth putting on the page. even just for yourself.

accidentally typed “hoem” instead of “home” and i mean, poems are a kind of home for me

the hard thing about going from finishing work on a book to starting to write something new is the transition from polishing already developed work to drafting, to square one, to crap. but there's joy in it too. the joy of stumbling around, of not knowing where you're going, but going anyway.

unsurprisingly and annoyingly, i do get more writing done when i leave my phone in another room. and apparently i get the most writing done when i’ve altogether forgetten which room i’ve left it in.

a constant struggle: actually feeling my feelings and fully moving through them, rather than immediately (automatically) intellectualizing and aestheticizing them

Te amo hasta la luna y de vuelta

"What would it mean to stay there, on the moon?" guest host Diannely Antigua asks in episode 1536. "To remain in that space of distance and possibility?" Read "i love you to the moon &" by @chenchenwrites.bsky.social and our full episode transcript: bit.ly/441t14O

love to complain a lot about writing AND write a lot

love to complain AND get shit done

beyond the romanticized desire to write and all the sophisticated ideas for writing lives the next real poem, the one forged (again) from failure and surprise, the one made by actually, painfully, joyfully making

Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. The role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing. —Louise Glück, from an interview

Both now gone Duane Michals David Hockney in Love, c. 1980

Very sad to learn of passing of Duane Michals, one of the great queer visual storytellers of the last half-century. "All Things Mellow in the Mind," 1986 (thread)