My parents became born again Christians when I was four. I was introduced to movies about the second coming and therefore spent much of my growing up years awaiting the trumpet call which I often mistook for the train whistle by our house. My father built the swing set in our back yard and my mother would push us high into the air while singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”. The trumpet was the train and I guess there was never really a trumpet at all. I believe there will be a trumpet someday. My front teeth look like front teeth but they are actually fake teeth that replace the real teeth I knocked out of my head in a bike accident when I was nine on the Saturday before Easter. I suffered from severe acne throughout my teenage years and was cured of it by taking a medication that had a listed side effect of suicide. I discovered a large artery in a piece of sausage I was eating when I was fifteen at a New Years Eve party my parents threw. From that point on I have lived a strictly vegetarian lifestyle. I have pride fully attributed my never having menstrual cramps to the absence of meat in my diet.

Exhausted from work, a misshapen edge is the best I can do. Too much piling, not enough give. Stretch marks signify an accelerated change in shape, a scar beneath the surface. Firm walls stop me in my tracks, knock my teeth out, and send me flying while occasionally hiding under a distant glisten. Perfectly angled frames create a rigidity upon which the chaos can appear presentable. The frames act like well-tailored suits. Tired drawings are stretched taught and pierced from behind in three places. The drawings maintain a vertical posture that allows them to LOOK ALIVE while politely hiding their braces. A bad drawing can be turned over. Sometimes the backside is better. The back distantly resembles the front. However the back removes the direct gesture. As a grave rubbing documents a surface, the back of a drawing documents an action. Paper is skin and can be penetrated, pierced, ravaged, and folded. As a fold makes a line, so does a cut, a scratch, or a tear. Aggressive actions become coupled with quiet pressing. Hold up your thumb, place it to your thigh, now begin to rub in a slow circular motion increasing the pressure in each rotation. Graphite is rubbed into paper until a velvety surface results. Toxic colors are clouded with powdery grays. Flowers are flowers but bleed like a squashed bug or a heavy period.