Dan Bailey

     It's not Dan Bailey's birthday, but it's time for a birthday pizza with candles while he drinks and watches wrestling. His limbs are tired and angular, and his face is the wilted “W” of someone slowly digesting a dark truth. He's burning pieces of paper on the coiled burners of his electric stove, silent smoke alarms hovering above forlornly like angels who've given up. “Have you tried the burning soap? Don't use it; it burns. I thought about it, and I think maybe it's like this... Because I made it like this.” Behind a rainy windshield, wandering through an electronics warehouse, sitting in bleak, dorm-like Midwestern housing, filming a dog having a nightmare, the poet is working. Scrabbling with his long descriptive hands, he is grasping at dead space, gripping ghost tits while his harsh, surreal mutterings present the wounded musings of an artist living and hurting and growing for a few years. Like an old letter from a friend, he projects a deep, quiet nostalgia; a dark cousin updating us on the state of existence from his empty Midwestern plain. College friends, cheap beer, the glow of screens, living rooms, old dogs, used books, bad lights, bored hands, humming fridges, paper on marbled linoleum, unused candles, cheap bathrooms.
     Did you know people still play? Connection is still available to us all, in some strange, unknowable place that hovers. You can be a magician even if you don't have a plan. You can create something just for delight. You can be a performer for an audience of the future. You can leave behind a world of wonder in one lonely night. The internet has room for all of us.
     Keep drinking, keep writing. Dan floats in a clanky tub, intoning dull and nasal, reaching for some aloof vapor of alms. The hollow grinding of floating cans slapping white vinyl, the spray of confusing lights and the pale, drawn face of our fearless narrator, who unreliably brings us by the wet hand into a sad, quiet place of beauty. Bailey's work is earnest and surreal, humor disarmingly surrounding a dark vortex of sleepy augorism. Pursuing his unknowable missions with a smooth sureness, blurry ideas are brought to their cheeky end, and a badly-lit evening a few years back lays partially exhumed from its refuge beneath the babbling tides of the internet.

walking through the artificial light