nother time, a couple pressed me to / forgive my family, they said all the best art draws from love, not anger / but I barely heard them over the Frank Ocean song

Let me tell you, Lil—I’m here to be borne down on.

A bag of snakes, the hole inside / me.

What’s beyond the two lights at the edge / of the bay bridge tunnel blinking / out of turn, one a bit more butch / than the other

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

But we arrive to find it’s been co-opted by a cocktail bar. / The Moss wants to bounce but we’re already here.

I was born March 24th, the same day as Harry Houdini, so my family used to take annual trips to the Harry Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The last time I was here I was really in here. I have been here. I know that I have been here. These people are in my home and they are watching my TV.

But for me, Earl’s short poems (sometimes, I’m willing to concede, laid over monotonous beats) are speculative and visionary. They map a modern mind, short in attention, fighting to be audible above our cyber industrial reality—its alienating information storm of iPhone notifications. They take us beyond the day’s meaning-emptied habitual speech.