BIO ME
Upon reflection, we realize most of his accomplishments have been associated with hats. When he lived in a cellar, he existed behind the burrowing beam of a miner’s hat. That was the closest he came to being a poet. Twice in his life, he rebelled against wearing a beanie. He has worn a succinct hat, a bottom hat, and a humble hat, falling down around his eyes. For a long time, he wore a welder’s hat, so when others looked into the dark window that framed his eyes, they would see constellations and other glitterings. So now, after years of living under various hats, he has settled on a hat made of mirrors, so when he walks down the street, it looks as if he is wearing the sky.
BIO ME
Everything is about pronouns. Think of all that fits inside the little “It.” We flow beneath all this binary and nonbinary jumble, and even anti-binary stuff. I’ve tried out a number of pronouns. Frankly, I am so sick of the “I,” skeletal, inadequate, and rigid. I’ve used the “He,” but it seems almost half funny. “They” approaches where “I” come from — a kaleidoscopic identity that is multiple and fluid.
And then there is the almost magical “You.” Mayans, when they greet each other, say, “I am another you.” But then, “you” always disappoints.
Of all the options available, “I” prefer the We. OK, but, then, doesn’t that mean, we are all we? Yes.
NOTE TO EDITOR: Change every He to We.
ME: BIO
He occupies his habitat as a collection of organisms — flora and fauna. He is a distinct biological community shaped by the seven terrestrial biomes. As such, he wobbles between fulfillment and want. The sounds of the savanna are a minuscule musical instrument strapped to his brain. He keeps munching his way through the walls of different worlds until he thinks he has become a rainforest.
Now, he is a desert so small he is ashamed to die of thirst.
ME: BIO
If it weren’t for his biography, he would cease being him. He is making every effort to make a name for himself — that is significantly different from the name others have made for him. Often, there is a humming sound around him. When someone takes attendance, as people are apt to do, and he hears the identifiable words that approximate his being, he merely acts distracted, shifts uncomfortably, and looks away. He never tells anyone he carries a bee in his pocket in case he encounters a hive.
ME: BIO
As he was writing his minimalist classic “Less,” his writings began to live on the minuscule edge of a piece of paper. And in accordance with his ardor, his writings emphasized punctuation. Then, to his surprise and consternation, the writing he’d been working on evolved and became “Bless.” What ambition rattles inside the skull? What dark driven-ness? As they say, “Lessened are the fakers.” Oh, this is the ultimate paradox: a maximalist lurks in the tiniest heart.
ME: BIO
One day, he wants to write something fantastical, inspirational, alchemical. In preparation for that time, he puts his efforts into composing a Bio Note. As he begins, he views his Bio Note as a clever little knot. Sometimes, he thinks of it as a diamond falling down a hole. He tries not to touch the burn marks around his mouth. And then it happens. He imagines writing a complicated tiny story called “BIO.” Shortly afterward, he hears the crystalline little clinkclink of something hitting bottom.
BIOME
He is afraid he doesn’t have a lot to say. At one time, he lived faster than he wrote. It was a comfortable place to be. He thought of himself as a phenomenologist, but everyone thought he said “phrenologist.” Then, unexpectedly and for no apparent reason, his life slowed up, not to a complete standstill, but rather as if it were obeying the speed limit in a school zone where Zeno is ploddingly taught. So now he remains in a rather perplexing situation. Appearing one letter-click at a time, his writing, more bewildered than provoked, longingly waits for his life to catch up. Still, many people lay their heads in his lap and ask him to caress their lumpy skulls.
BIOME
“I can always tell when you are lying,” his father said. He felt his real life was too boring, except for when he lived among the bees, and possibly except for when he was a magician in a strip club. “I can’t believe you have no respect for the truth,” said his father. That’s when he started to hum, and began the slow incremental project of his disappearance. Mmmm-mmmm. Right next to a pole, under the sick-pink lights with bees flying around him, he stood on the stage of the strip club, showing the crowd he had nothing up his sleeves.
BI O ME
Flailing his arms, he never learned to swim properly though he was proud that he wrote elaborately detailed instruction manuals for lifeguards. Winter is the most enigmatic season when the drowned purposefully float up from the bottom — their purple faces pressed against the almost purple ice. He writes: Step one. Step two. And he listens to what could be breathing on the other side of the ice.
BI O ME
When given the opportunity to talk about the past or the present or the future, he generally stumbles around between his mortality and his immortality. He has come to think of Time as being deliciously dangerous. Obviously, he has yet to recover from the Tarot Card Accident of 1997 — an event that involved a clattering of cups and pentacles, eventually concluding in a catastrophic crash.
BIO WE
He doesn’t know why, but he’s been thinking a lot lately. He was an algebra teacher until he was “let go” for having an “unbeautiful mind.” In spite of the accusations, staggeringly optimistic, he began to use language as if it were an equation. Hope = Affliction. The Fallen = The Melting. Then he became crushingly sad as equal began to baffle with its seductive simplicity. Fibonacci and Mandelbrot were waiting in the shadows. “Lies = Thought,” he wrote over and over in a spiraling loop. Nothing = Zero
BIO WE
As one of the originators of the Contributors’ Notes, he is preoccupied with data mining. He discovers patterns in the large relational databases involving desert islands, superstitions, and literary crushes. Still, he gathers, and in his gathering, he begins designing elaborate charts — using alchemical analytics to capture the consciousnesses of those who create.
He becomes lost in the grid lines and astrological signs. After being exposed to allegories, he developed an irritable rash. That’s when he discovers he is allergic to bandages and birds.
ME: BIO
He is an elevator operator. Oh, sure, he’s mostly oblivious to the cables and the counterweights, but he is fully engaged with his interior journey. He is a modern-day Sisyphus of the mechanical age, daily transporting his passengers to the top and then back to the bottom. They say, “Oh, you are a man who knows how to push all the right buttons.” And we smile into the empty space in front of our faces. Do I even have to mention the music — and those accompanying elevator dances — the spinning and the lifts? When he gets stuck between floors, he relaxes a little, and he writes, “Help me. But not right away” on a note he tries to slip through the cracks.
ME: BIO
The Director, Mike Nichols, said, “I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein.”
He used to try to do this with characters — but things got really messy. Then he thought maybe they needed to open up a brain, but everything got confusing with the hippocampus spilling into the cerebrum. It just so happens that the protagonist in his next story is named Mike Nichols. But, of course, he is not that Mike Nichols — even though in the first sentence, he opens a door and says, “Cut. Cut. Cut.”
BIO:ME
No one ever talks about the room in the elephant — a big grey room where we have a number of pharmacologically created identities.
As is always the case, telling the tourists from the attractions is nearly impossible.
Eventually, he wears a bird mask with a large pointy beak to attract what comes out of the sky. Then, a lot of people say he looks like he is dying.
Every day, he takes attendance, and every day, something is missing — it gives him hope that we have the possibility of slipping through the cracks, much like the music that seeps through his head.
He has a tattoo — ”Carpe Die.” He explains it this way: “They ran out of ink.”
BIO:ME
Stagger Grass is the lush grass that rapidly grows in the spring. After cattle graze on such grass, they stagger and wobble. He has been investigating this same effect on those who are particularly susceptible to a rapidly growing lushness. He considers Stagger Loves, Stagger Words, Stagger Worlds.
At one point, he consulted the Either Oracle — Fire or Ice, Cracks or Mirrors, Ruination or Rainbows.
He wanted to be an expert at staggering, so he stumbled between the beginning and the end.
ME: BIO
With an umbrella-ed drink and a bird-yellow raincoat, he waits for the Hurricanes to be downgraded from a category 3 to a tropical depression. He believes there is a reason he has survived — something bigger than a tipped-over truck. In spite of what he says, he feels there are no words, no syllables, no morphemes. He watches pink insulation flying by — the viscera from a distant house that is turned inside out like a pocketbook.
With the right medication, everything is a miracle.
ME: BIO
He believes his eye weighs as much as the world.
He has to say things twice in order to make certain they stick. This is why he developed a stutter — and why he became a ventriloquist — with his flesh mouth and his wooden mouth. He has heard that the weight of all humans on the earth is 287 million tons; he can barely open the lids of his eyes.
Thinking of the heft of it all, he looks directly in the eye of his puppet. That is the day he finds sawdust in his own mouth.
BIO:
A hue of ambivalence. Ultimately, everything is kinda sorta…
He reaches a point, and arrives at a blue place where he doesn’t have enough time to say all he has to say. There’s a good amount of emptiness that he can’t account for.
There is always a before and an after. But now there is only the after that comes just before…
He lives in the middle of an ellipsis…
He looks at his former mask. It is like entering a town where he is a stranger who carries a pail. It is like turning into a mirror in the house that has forgotten him.
NOTE TO EDITOR: Every Me is an upside down We.
BIO:
“I told her I was a mirror salesman. And she said, ‘Don’t put yourself down like that. Even salesmen have value.’”
He had to drive very slowly, so the mirrors wouldn’t break. They were positioned on his back seat, and when he’d look back at them, he’d see himself sitting there.
If he came to an abrupt stop for a school bus or an elderly person in a crosswalk, he’d hear the recognizable shattering at his back.
ME
For a while, he was a member of the Caged Bird Society, and they were required to wear birds for hats as they shared their secret pledges, codes, and handshakes. They believed the wound is an eye that looks both inside and outside — it is an eye that will not close. They k(new) music had to separate itself from the musician if it would enter what resembles the real.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Be aware of common mistakes (apostrophe’s, co-nouns, ect.) and, of course, missing comas.
ME
Here is his mistake: He thought he had a life without her. He said: “I will never stop writing for you. Please, do not stop reading for me.” He hands her a list:
- I’ll give up writing
- I’ll take up life
- I’ll check with my therapist
- Plant wounds
- Book a room in Hotel Magnificence
BIOME
He lives at the intersection of Bose and Einstein. Once, his pant leg caught fire when he was walking along as a child. His father told him that while he was driving, he had been chased by a UFO. At first, he felt his family was special; then, he realized his father was drunk.
Through his family, he experienced the melting of life. Time was an enticement. As he walked by the collapsed house, he tried to listen for something breathing under the rubble. He always looked over his shoulder, expecting a surge of almost magical light.
BIOME
Here are some of the things we cannot understand: 1. How he is survived by his dead parents. 2. Why he is obsessed with exploring the connection between taste and poetry (umami and villanelles). 3. What he needs to do to touch memory.
OK, we know he is the creator of the Contributors’ Notes, hoping to gather all the data associated with those who create. Here is what he does understand: the collision of bodies, word-wreckage, residual meanings. Say this: He admires stickiness.
Still, he gathers, and in his gathering, he has begun designing elaborate charts — using alchemical analytics to capture the consciousnesses of those who create — confident that this information will ultimately permit the emergence of an alternative universe where it would be a terrible thing to question what others claim is your insanity.
BIO: WE
We believe he will be skydiving at the moment of the apocalypse. And he thinks maybe he has survived as he drifts over the burning lakes and the boney woods — the smoking malls. Then, people will come running up to him as they see him descending, holding out their arms, thinking he is an angel who has come to save them.
As he approaches the earth, he will try to figure out what to say — suspended in the moment — floating between silence and profundity, between emptiness and surreality.
NOTE TO EDITORS: See Conversations with Extinct Animals.
BIO: WE
We look up at the sky, and it looks emptier. He feels he has crashed into one of our giant time-telling devices.
Here are the options he considers:
- Time is thick with what is around it.
- Time is the story of our lives that vanishes as it is told.
- Time is one event bumping into another.
He is aware of the virus that is infecting the system. On the table are the silver trays with piles of ash, the strangled clock, the crushed blossoms. Outside, the sky has lost 3 billion birds.
BI O ME
His occupation is waking in the morning between one fake dream and one real dream. This is what he does. We used to think he said he was a warrior. “No,” he corrected. “I said I was a worrier. But I am so good at worrying I am the warrior of worriers.” This is the point where he usually wakes up and has something he needs to talk about. He prefers to sleep on the dark side of the bed.
BI O ME
“On the day I am writing this, a husband has asked for his kidney back from a spouse he claims has ‘cheated on him.’” He has also donated various organs: a lung here. A spleen there. The usual. A brain, a heart, a penis. When he meets someone, he apologizes for his lack of physicality. He is only the nail that once held him together. Only now, after all these years, is he reconsidering his donations. He wishes things were different as he flaps what should have been his wings.
BIO ME
At night, he drives by the car wash — the lit, empty cubicles with their hanging paraphernalia. They glisten in the sparkle of all the day’s water, still clinging to the space. He almost wants to cry. You can see right through to the other side. Such purity. Such immaculateness. And it’s like he needs to be someplace, and here is as good a place as any. It’s like some miraculous synchronicity or quantum entanglement. He can think of spirituality or Zen or theoretical physics, but the main thing is, when all is said and done, he has a clean car.
BIO ME
He was trying to stay only one person — it took so much energy. Eventually, he had to find something to use as a sail — a rag, a flake, a shard. To pass the time, he recorded heartbeats. There will be nudes in abundance but only a very few painters. The carpenters build their bodies into the house — their flesh mitered into the beams.
We feel that perhaps he will die from an overabundance of joy. In anticipation, he builds his house in the trees.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Put quotation marks around everything — including “quotation marks.”
BIO
For the first time in weeks, she appears in his dream. They are in an arcade, and he tells her he is sorry, but he has plans. There is a lot of noise and lights. They see each other, and somehow, this ripened moment bursts around them. Surprisingly, for now, it is enough.
They separate to show they are two people, but really, they are not. He is the half that has hurt the whole.
BIO
He still makes a lot of lists that he keeps misplacing — and then when he finds them, he gets a little confused by what they seem to be saying. But then he makes a new list that seems to set everything right until he loses it and has to start all over. Some of the lists actually seem a little scary. Like surreal poems that appear to be desperately holding onto the almost real. He thinks his charts and graphs and timelines are better at getting things straight. But maybe for now, he just needs to work with his crazy lists — though, of course, this seems silly — at least for five different reasons.
1. Tomorrow will be a very warm day. 2. He needs to pick up some stakes. 3. He needs to bring poems, sunshine, and charts. 4. He is required to add one more item to the list. 5. “See you tomorrow.”
ME: BIO
He spent more time being fog than being sunshine. He could almost reach his hands right through the prayers to reach the scintillating stained-glass saint.
He spent more time being Humphrey Bogart than Katherine Hepburn. His publications include “When I WAS God,” “The Me,” and “Son Nets.” The woman with Borderline Personality Disorder didn’t realize his passport had expired. Currently, he spends more time being a nail than a dowsing rod — though both experiences have served him well.
ME: BIO
He wasn’t exactly sure when things got confusing, but he was convinced it started when he discovered his Diary was being written by someone other than him — and he wasn’t a very good speller. He didn’t know who wrote in his Dairy, “Cows moo in my sleep.” All the complexity and mystification. Morality? Or mortality? Eras? Or errors? Or eros? It became more and more difficult to determine what was meant. Oar? Or Ore?
WE: BIO
THEY
WE: BIO
He has resisted saying this in all his other bio notes, but he fears that, ultimately, he is immortal. Unanchored. A persona, an avatar, an icon. A glyph.
Sometimes, he is densely opaque, and other times, he is as diffuse as smoke. A corporeal cloud. Queasy. Unhinged. Searching through the ontological questions.
Though he hates to admit it for fear the whole theoretical apparatus will collapse, he thinks just maybe life insurance premiums are a joke.
For now, at least, he laughs — and that laughter defines him. When you look at him, you want to ask: Who is that man who wears the sky as a hat?
Patrick Lawler’s newest book is Conversations with Extinct Animals from FC2. He is also author of the novel Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds and a collection of short stories, The Meaning of If. He has published seven poetry collections: A Drowning Man is Never Tall Enough, reading a burning book, Feeding the Fear of the Earth, Underground (Notes Toward an Autobiography), Trade World Center, Child Sings in the Womb, and Breathe a World. He teaches at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and is writer-in-residence at LeMoyne College.
