there was a crew called "FOI"

it stood for "FULL OF INSANITY"
I like that name

I never met any of them, but they used to write things on my street

these pictures are unrelated

sophia

The dull light, green
and yellow, flares
around your
neck and shoulders
and your face blurs out
in a picture
in my mind
and foreign charms
rattle on your chest --
keep smiling, like
you do, like you've got
the darkness to disprove,
like you know the
path and can show me to
the source of life
and light, that narrow
path, and winding, and
binding, and treacherous,
but it's alright,
the horror of hell
does not overwhelm
when we glimpse the last enemy
and rattle the gates of hades
and hear the gnashing and
weeping that sounds
like a song of profound
truth and I'll start
weeping too if my eyes
and heart fail and if I
look down or even
at you and fear
like the grip of a python
is waiting for me,
so smile like you do,
because you've got the darkness
to disprove.

first oils doodle

arrow

beelzebub

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47OhgRF_Fl8

I’m thrown like a stone

and I skip six times

over still waters

and sink on the seventh.

I’m wasting away

like river rocks

washed out into the sea,

gone, lost,

don’t look for me.

I’m gone and free

as a man buried

eight feet.

Mr. Linux on left, Jank on right.  featured at the TOW Art Space.

the end

mike

the drains

            JANKINS

"When we get there, we’ll make a circuit around the block to see which houses have lights on, who’s awake and asleep.  Then we’ll park, and once the car stops, no talking, no noises, just get out and get the paint and go.  Once we’re away from the car and into the wash on our way down into the drains, don’t stop for anything.  If someone sees you or someone says something to you, don’t stop.  We’re vulnerable until we get inside the drains.  Once we’re in the drains, no-one will follow us.  There was a guy who shot at a cop and went down into the drains, and it took the cops three hours to even go in there.  So if it’s a cop who sees you outside the drains, run.  Drop everything and run.  Once you get through the mouth of the drains you’re safe.  You can pop out a manhole or keep going down for miles.  But it’s illegal to be holding spray paint inside a wash so don’t stop and chat with anyone."

I stop the car.  The four doors pop open, and then close, I unload the bags from the trunk, Anctious takes the battery pack and we hop the fence, slide down the bank into the wash, and walk north toward the drains.  Now, walking, there’s time to notice the coolness of the air and the clouds in the sky that diffuse the light of the moon. It’s silent except for the treading of our shoes.  On either side of the wash are houses, some with lights that come on automatically as we pass, and now at 10 PM people will still be awake, and if they look out their back doors they’ll see our parade, and if not, they’ll hear the dogs and know we’re here.

One dog yelps at us a few times and then quiets.  Another barks from the other side, and more dogs hear us or catch our smell and join in, but we can see the mouth of the drains, dimly, down there where the sides of the wash rise up into a ceiling and go down under a parking lot and under a shopping mall and on underneath the rest of the city.  At the last house three dogs bark and growl with fierceness that betrays their sixth sense about who is good and who is bad, if you heard these dogs bark you’d say they are convinced we are bad, we are demons and spirits like Mephisto who prowls disguised as a cat, and we, trying to be as quiet as the cat do not escape the notice of the dogs, they know.

old one

I wrote this a while ago and I don’t feel this way anymore.

*

I can’t help but wonder if this spot of earth is groaning a little louder than the rest. I know that it’s not, but I still wonder.



The horizon is gone
because the night has nullified it,
and with no real reason to stay out
I’ll walk inside
and close the door.
If you pretend it doesn’t matter
long enough
eventually
it doesn’t.

evening

It has been a while, quite some while,
since the evening
(with impeccable style,
and without asking,
and with its usual way of coaxing out
our unpleasant extremes)
has come upon us like the wilting of a flower,
where you don't notice the way it changes,
only, suddenly, that something has changed.
(is it dark out already?)

bookstore

I close my eyes while I walk across the parking lot. I wonder how long I can keep them closed without tripping. I open them before I get to the curb and step up onto the sidewalk. The book store has big glass windows and a sliding glass door that squeaks. I walk in and see the books set up on racks in a room where they seem out of place, wrong. Escalators go down to an underground level, except they don’t go down, they just stay still, blocked off by boards, and the underground level is empty and abandoned.
Two men sit at the cash register.
I ask them, “Do you use the bottom floor for anything?”
“What’s that?”
“Do you use the bottom level for anything?”
“Oh no, that hadn’t been used for years.”
“Fell behind code,” the other adds.
“You’dve been 10 or 11 since it was used for anything. The owner won’t spend the money to bring it up to code. Used to be a fair, for kids.”
Banners for the fair still hang overhead.
The kids are gone and I’m the only one in the store besides the two at the cash register. We’re surrounded by racks of books on all sides. The light is poor and it’s hard to read the titles. I wander around until one of the men calls out that the store is closing, and I haven't found anything, and I walk out.

JANKINS
Where am I going?

MR. LINUX
You don’t know where The Scene is?

JANKINS
No, I’ve never been there.

MR. LINUX
Left on Saticoy.

I nod, then it’s silent. As the summer light dies down, gray, we turn into a small parking lot, where a shin-high brick wall is falling apart at the corners, the asphalt is old and cracked, and in the front there’s a group of people, they all stand next to an old van with a flat tire and they look worried. We get out.

JANKINS
You guys need help?

MAN
No, we’re okay.

You wouldn’t expect a bar here, it’s a dirty side street in Pacoima or maybe Sun Valley. Mr. Linux and I grew up here. If someone asked de donde eres or where you from I’d say nowhere. We walk through the heavy wooden door into The Scene.

It’s small and mostly empty. Two people at the bar, another one at a table. Mr. Linux gets a pitcher and we sit down at a small round table.

MR. LINUX
You don’t care what your school says?

JANKINS
You mean about contract?

MR. LINUX
Yeah. What’s it say, you just can’t drink?

JANKINS
You can’t drink, you can’t smoke. You can’t dance. You can’t – what else? There’s more. I can’t remember all of it.

MR. LINUX
What happens if they find out?

JANKINS
You get a talking-to. Maybe you get kicked out. I depends if you’re repentant or not. As long as you act repentant, you’ll be okay. My problem is I don’t know if I can act repentant, or if I’ll just say, to hell with all your bullshit rules, you brood of vipers.

Mr. Linux grins,

MR. LINUX
So you can’t have fun, in the name of Christ. You have to be boring for Christ.

I raise my glass.

JANKINS
To boring Christians.

MR. LINUX
I don’t know. I won’t drink to that.

We drink.

I'll be okay if I can walk quietly enough

We paint our mess, and a man and his two young sons walk through, they're taking a shortcut through the closed road. They see us, and don’t say anything, and keep walking. They don’t even acknowledge us or seem to notice. I love them for that, they know. They know what it's like here.

When I see them, I’m sorry I’ve said that this place is mine. I’m sorry, it’s not mine. It’s not anyone’s. You can be here too. The other gangs and crews who have come through and marked it up, they can be here too. SOD, Newhall X3, they’re all welcome. We don’t have beef with anyone. We just want to paint, and destroy, and build. We want to love the dirt and the cracks and the walls, and the trash and the sky and the mountains and hills that surround us, and the weeds. It’s not just ours, it’s yours too, enjoy it with us.

They pass and we’re alone again. We keep going. We pull out more cans until we’re out of black, out of white, and out of colors, and every time we shake the last sputters out of a can we hurl it into the distance and let it sit among the weeds, and every time we finish a beer bottle we hurl it and let it shatter and let the glass settle into the dirt.

There’s paint on our hands and on our clothes. There’s paint everywhere. I can smell the paint. It smells like life, I won’t forget it. Every time I smell it from now on I’ll think of this fucking worthless action we’re doing right now.

ABK.

I hear a train. I can feel it in my apartment. I can hear it through the window and feel it through the floor. Its horn blows and I hear the alarms clanging and the wheels squealing, and the heavy rumbling carries through the floor, and I'd feel it stronger if I was on it, that heavy rumble, that bone-shaking rumble that you feel through your skin so thoroughly that it goes into your soul. That train-hopper's massage, like that beautiful kind of wine-wince you get, it takes over. It makes everything alright.

wall paint continued

“I don’t like that one,” he says about the painting on the city's concrete of a blue man with the caption written out,
JANK?
-ABK-
I know, I say to him, I need to get better. I’m trying to get better. Why am I trying to get better? I don’t know. That’s it, chasing the wind.

bottle paint continued

“Finish your beer.” “What do you care if I finish my beer?” “Come on, douche, just do it. I want the bottle.” And I give it to him – he takes the bottle, fills it with paint, all colors, takes a few running steps and throws it at the wall, and what a satisfying smash, that smash is better than a gunshot, or a hand grenade, or a bomb.

sinaloa continued

There’s a roach-coach taco stand on foothill where Yasmin has been going since she was a little girl. Two women are inside, and they cook the meat and flatten the dough, and Jas talks to them like old friends. On the sidewalk there’s a few tables and some chairs, we sit down and eat and drink and I kick the beer into the bushes when the cops come for their tacos too. This is the kind of spot most people miss out on.

trees, continued

There’s a tree above me. It has thick branches and the sun is hitting it and I’m lying on my back looking up at it, the sky is bright blue behind it. Silence, only wind. Nothing touches me except the breeze. Everything that has ever happened in the world or to me is not here, it’s not anywhere. The only thing that is here is the breeze.

all is vanity
and chasing the wind,
come on, let's go and chase the wind.

trees sinaloa bottle paint wall paint

a day

the moon, and a little later

the sun.

days keep coming and going, and in any given day there is happiness, sadness, confusion, elation, and hope, and in the night we stay awake as long as possible until we don't even know where we are, but we're not lost. The morning is the time for being lost. The night is the time for lying down.

a new something, and a better capture of an old something

jank-ear

something

lowlight

I can’t sit, wait,
watch, and do nothing,
just watch and listen -
I can’t stand it –
It’s like a cage – the
theater is a cage,
I can’t sit here and
wait – for what? for –
the end –
this is a cage – the theater
is a cage.
Now the theater is
a cage that holds us
all by its three
dark walls and its
bullshit fourth wall.
I’m stuck here until it’s over.
there’s no way out
for me or for anyone else.

I mean,
the movie is fun.
I can’t speak, because every time I do I expose my own bullshit.
I point the finger at myself.
But I watch movies like this and I’m convinced
nothing is worth anything.

bullshit.

later

laodicea

there is something missing from the words of Christ:
confusion.
but there is constant confusion in the disciples,
up until His resurrection.
And even after, that unfortunate rift between Paul and Barnabas.
Christ has shared all our burdens.
Does He know what it's like to be confused?
I don't know,
but I know I don't want confusion
and the words of Christ dispel it
and then all the Christian bullshit doesn't matter.

found these from turkey/greece '08

I should go to bed. I got four hours of sleep and before that I was awake for 24. Now it's three fifty three in the morning and I'm sitting on the porch listening to crickets. They're loud tonight. They have a good tone. They're just like us, making a lot of noise and commotion to try and find another who hears, who will hear. who likes their sound.

but not me,
I'm silent
and all the noise
in all the world
all of it
will never wake me
up again,
it will take a
miraculous
resurrection.

Ha! someone tell me to stop being a bitch when I write like that.

Once I read a poem where coleridge compared something to a sieve. If I knew what a sieve was, I'd use words like that in my poetry too.
At the end of the day,
life is like a sieve;
you can only wonder
what the fuck it is.

night

the heart is a fantastic muscle

it never stops

(until it stops)

I’m sitting dozing on and off

with the zsound of a relentless line of boxcars.

now it sojunds like thunder.

go to this

the woman of the drain

5:11 AM

5:11 AM mostly finished cleaning the gobs of flesh out of the back of my car, any I missed will probably cook when the light on the horizon turns into the day's heat. whoever he was, the anonymous man with the 10-inch wrist laceration to the bone, I hope he does alright. His friend who told the cops they were fucking pigs for asking too many questions when he was only trying to get to the hospital was a good friend. When he said that, the cops threw open their batons, cuffed him, bullied him.
"give him a break he's just trying to help his friend."
"No, step back. Why is your car parked in the middle of the road. Get it out of here. Why are you still here?"
"because my back seat is covered in blood and I'll need to take this gentleman to meet his friend at the hospital."
"well he's going to jail."
Cops threaten jail a lot even when they know they won't deliver. They had nothing to keep him on.

amen

thou shalt place thy tasty treats into thine microwave, and shalt nuke thereby the treats on high for two minutes and forty-five seconds.

comic bus.card

somewhat wip, probably change completely before I print them

terra bella street

(Look, they don’t belong here - a couple gringos in a Saturn. Pull up next to them. All with open beers in the car): Hey foo where you from? And his homies laugh. I answer nowhere. I tell my brother to turn. He does. That’s worked out all right for me so far but I saw a guy with a sheet thrown over him who got gunned down that way. That was a couple blocks away. The kid on this beautiful ground didn't have a sheet yet,


There is ugliness mixed in with the beauty, and beauty is somewhere in the ugliness.

I don’t know why. But the meaning of everything is in there somewhere if you can find it.

silence

silence
will overcome, finally—
it has followed at my heels
because I always keep a treat for it with me
in my front pocket on the other side of my wallet—
it’s waiting, maybe,
for that day when it will finally
overtake me.
then I’ll be ready.
I’ll be more ready than anyone else,
cause I got practice, see.

to byron

On the way up, I met a girl with a streak of pink in her hair and a Siren Studios Hollywood shirt – we were introduced by a man I later found out she didn’t really know, who she called a weirdo, I said “he seemed nice enough,” and then a pervert – and we only spoke briefly, while boarding a north-bound train, she to Modesto and me to Byron, CA., about the breeze and the bad shit she’d been into before in Modesto. “Real bad shit,” she said. I wanted to talk to her more, and look at her more closely, study the way her eyes were. But then she put on sunglasses and I sat far away from her; I can’t forget, I’m the outsider, I’ve got to perpetuate that. Because I have to. We rode for hours, and suddenly I realized we were twenty minutes past Modesto, and, well, she’d be gone.

la sidewalks

Children of the sidewalks
and the gutters
of LA,
old children -
a woman a year too old for this
blotto on the sidewalk, seductively:
"only fifteen minutes till they stop serving alcohol,"
she moans. "the liquor store closes in fifteen minutes."
She pouts and then laughs and puts her cheek on the sidewalk,
holds up a cigarette,
in glitters and high heels,
"you want to go?"
"it's up to Allen."
she stands up, stumbles, sits against a wall,
meanwhile
the music from inside is like a lake
that everyone swims in

soft silent sight - some slow slightly sightly sprite

not brand echh

The opportunity never presented itself.
(I mix up some energy drink and scotch.)
It kind of slipped by, I guess,
it went away.
(I swirl it around in a dirty stained coffee mug.)
I don’t think it was ever
meant to be.
(it’s gone.)

unifro

downcast

someone told me i ripped off sam flores...sorry sam, it was an accident

ballerina brute

debris

something

"The Grapevine looms before us
like a grape vine"

- a great poet

when death has wrapped his fingers
around my simple soul
and taken me away
into the great unknown
and like a whisper spoken on the wind
I’ve been lost,
then I’ll never say
it doesn’t make sense
again.

coconut crumbs mingle with car oil on the asphalt

there's a woman who is homeless who stands outside the K INN doughnut shop at Van Nuys and Woodman, she was there tonight at 8, when I went in the store she was just coming out of it and when I left she was standing there outside with her elbows on her shopping cart and one foot up on the undercarriage by the rear wheels. I saw her four or five years ago and was worried for her, but I guess she does okay.

megan

sacrifice is a great honor. the abandoned buddha eats only the choicest maidens to appease his great anger toward the santa claritians.





special limited edition post

virus

i gave up on this painting several times

the turk speeks

"Plastic munchies? Plastic munchies! Time to eet the plastic monchees? Plastic monchees? Plastic monchees! Time to eet the plastic monchees!" -Turk

the sleepy ones

mini comic

a line of dialogue that will be cut

JANKINS
I know what it feels like to lie. I know what the heart does. I know what it’s like to hide in the dark when authorities are looking for you with flashlights. I know what fear is like on a dark street at one AM. I know what it’s like to watch a man fire a gun, all nine rounds, and the smile that can be on his face when he kills another man. I know what it’s like to see a man bleed to death on the sidewalk and to be too scared to help him or call for the paramedics. I know the splitting wail that comes from the patrol cars and the blinding red and blue lights, and when I see them, I know to hide. I’ll show you what fear can do to a man. I’ll show you what money can do to the mind of a man. I’ll show you what pride can do when blood is easily spilled. I’ll show you the darkness of the jail cell and the madness that overtakes the mind of a man, slowly, a little more every time he goes into the camp. It affects you. It gets to your head. You’re a worm who goes into a cocoon and comes out not as a butterfly but as a mosquito, and you’ll never lose the taste for blood.

the royal sun

The day, if you’d call it that,
is mostly done
Nice people have become ugly
Smoke chokes my throat and
starts to sting my eyes –
it’s alright,
smoke in the eyes is alright…
Let’s talk about forsaking
everything and everyone
over smokes at the Royal Sun…

X

until the abandoned buildings are finally forsaken even by the homeless and the vagrants and the downtrodden and the disenfranchised,

until all the spray cans are empty and the last black sputters have dripped down my fingers,

until the hot sun above has scorched my skin and the dark underground has chilled my bones,

until the heavens are opened up for me, or hell has wrapped its fingers around my soul,

until everything makes sense, or everything is finally rendered meaningless:

Blessed be the walls in this city, the beautiful ones and ugly ones, the walls that give warmth, the walls that receive markings and spray from the artists and gangsters; blessed be the walls, until the day that they fall.

headhands?

no apologies

she was almost as black as the night
and her eyes were clear;
her eyes judged all things.
her hair caught highlights here and there
from the street-light behind her,
and clouds came from her mouth when she spoke.
“oh no,” she said when I told her my name,
“that’s his name,” she said.
(the guy who was the asshole
had the same name as me)
Otherwise she was nice to me
and her smile was bright,
except sometimes it went away
and then there was pain in her eyes –
the pain of memory
as she explained things that
I felt like I shouldn’t hear.
I think she told me because she knew
tomorrow I’d be gone.
Where am I now, _______?
Where are you?
(I forget your name...)
have you decided whether or not to smile?

i hope i walk

I didn't hear it because it happened while I was banging on the drums, but there was more blood in arleta today
on terra bella st. (beautiful ground)
-que sucedio aqui?
-no se
but we knew, they don't block off the whole street like that unless there has been blood

the junkyard

steal from the richest

throat is warm, chest is warm, mouth is sour, eyes are closed, tears still don't come, can't come, but they should - will you cry for me? I can't do it.

anctious

I often talk about mourning
and weeping
And beauty to make you weep,
and disaster to make you mourn,
and the mess of the world
that creeps up close next to you
while you sleep
or wake
or eat
or dink,
or whatever you do,
and every tear will be wiped away.
but I don’t weep:
I’m not moved enough to weep,
I’m not angry:
I’m too complacent for it.

Anctious says:

at the protest

some years ago. this guy asked me to take his picture. he gave me a business card so I could send the picture to him. I never sent the picture to him.

Αθήνα

why

I flew across the world;
your eyes were like stars,
then like rivers,
then like mountains
topped with ice an chilled with frost,
and I left, lost in
foreign lands and loud, echoing chants,
(but somehow someone or something
always brings me back again.
until then I'll wander
with your eyes following
me like guilty flying
sprites to brush the
dirt off my shoulders
and then fly to new heights of beauty.
but the dirt is mine

who stepped in the water at 4 am?

the upside-down man