 In 2014, he launched Nikall, a multimedia poetry project through which he read poems to strangers in bed and online. Please welcome Alex Dimitrov. It's always fun to be in San Francisco, especially living in New York. And I'm going to read some poems about New York, actually, and a little bit about Los Angeles, which the new book is about. This is called American Faith. You wonder if this city will kill you, the way the sad boy doing cocaine dangles his legs over the ledge of another roof, and your favorite summer song ends, or is it beginning? It feels too brief to matter. Someone's life is a red or blue light in the distance. None of this will strip you down the way you'd like. You know you came here for the wrong reasons, so tell me, if New York was a word, would it be money or ambition? If you're lucky, love will let you forget about one of the two. You think about this while you watch someone beautiful put a pill in your mouth and a temporary feeling in your body. And love, love again, like a night siren passes. Why go into detail? America is about finding something to worship. It's funny, huh? Sometimes it is, you know? This is called together and by ourselves. My poems aren't very funny, but I'm so happy that someone's laughing. I usually get the opposite reaction. No one's really cried yet, so that's okay. I opened the window so I could hear people. Last night we were together and by ourselves. You, you look and look at diver for crane by Johns and want to say something. In the water you are a child without eyes. Yesterday there was nothing on the beach and no one knows where it came from. There's a small animal lodge somewhere inside us. There are minutes of peace. Just the feel, just this once. Where does the past, where should the period go? What is under the earth followed them home? The branch broke, it broke by itself. It did break, James. We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command. Slow and black on an orange street sign. Missing everywhere and unwritten. Suddenly, all at once. Him, he misses a person and he is still living. I haven't missed you for long and you are so gone. Then he stepped away from the poem mid sentence. We must have been lonely people to say those things then. But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at. In the perfect field someone has left everything including themselves. You, you should stay here. It's a brutal and beautiful autumn. With his hands in the sand on the earth under time, he touched something else. People are mostly what they can't keep and keeps them. And inside the circular cage of the Ferris wheel, you saw the world. In the steam on the mirror, you wrote so, so, so. So if you're looking for answers, you're looking at what every water tower around here. Why does the sea hold what it loves most below? Fear, hopeless money, all the news and the non-news. How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make? And the leather of your chair, it has me marked. So good luck forgetting. The world was a home. It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic. Make sure you date and sign here then save all the soft things because everyone wants to know when it was, how it happened, say something about it, how the night hail made imprints all over, our things, our charming and singular things. I spent some time in Los Angeles last summer writing poems and I'm doing that again this summer. And strangely, that city, as weird as it is, to me Los Angeles is much, much weirder than San Francisco in this strange, abstract way. Like, you can't really walk anywhere, which is really strange for me. So the poems sort of, well, it sort of found its way in them. Always a very sort of complicated relationship to Los Angeles. They're very alluring because it's very glamorous and, you know, I'm kind of a sucker for that. What you can't remember is why soon they'll stop meeting in the gold lonely rooms through the old streets, the history, the limousine came and inside it you flipped like a page in a cheap paperback. The ride into death glowed past summer and the end took a long time to write, mostly descriptive, peeling away the fruit's meat and the smell still under your nails. Like a scarf, the adjectives barely covered us. Although it was beautiful, the dialogue revealed little about anyone else. We are not just those persons which we were, wrote John Dunn, and it was a question. How love disappeared like money and you ran the asylum inside you alone. I wrote a poem about James Franco in my first book and this was way before Howell came out. Not that that gets me any crud, but there's a poem called Lindsay Lohan in my second book and I've just decided that there's just going to be a poem after a celebrity for every book, hopefully. Maybe I'll run out of inspiration, but I do prefer Lindsay to James, so. Lindsay Lohan. It's a cold rehearsal before we all drive off. The ride out is mindless and short on goodbyes and in the flurry of parties she lost her passport, a slow smoke, a think in the old car, how they moved through their places and phrases and onto the bedroom where mostly we kept it all in. People won't tell you, but if you lose enough things, you do become something. All day the water endlessly filtered so it's not the same pool. In the morning our photos look darker than us and the subject we were was a gamble, I know. The night winds came through and the gin took it well. Voyeur, Soho House, no one told us about us. I don't remember, but you wanted me happy or loose like your change because it's not written here or it's not written well and the boys flitted out of the arrow like men do. From one to two I saw three, no mistake, nothing but bones and some flesh. And then you. They said you sped through those hills and would not stop. They said you had nothing to say in Marina del Rey. Reno, Monroe, 1960. I forget his name, Purse's name. I know all these lines, John. I promise you I do. Yes, baby, we know that. And Cook, presumably speaking to Huston, said kindly on the recorder, we must have 86,000 feet of sound film by now. So tonight we'd like to invite only you to this soft flight. It could be your first time. It could be a waste. Her arm was full of bracelets, one of which she said had been given to her by us. And sometimes I think, I'm at this dinner forever. It's like home. I don't leave without paying something. How they wrote about you, how you showed your tattoos, how everyone had grown tired, but they were tired without you. It was late on some coast where you walked, and for now it was quiet. The gulls couldn't tell what we were, so they stared. They kept watching, pretend otherwise, but we just couldn't stop. When I did the research for that poem, I was completely fascinated with her relationship with Samantha Ronson. I don't know if you guys remember when she dated Samantha Ronson for a while. And one of the articles, I think it was Vanity Fair, she mentioned that she had just like a gazillion bracelets on that had been given to her by Samantha Ronson. And I just thought that was so endearing for some reason, so I put it in the poem. One American Summer. And what next for Kicks on Earth? Ginsburg wrote in one of his journals, the August night opens like a cut. All those stories I wrote with black netting about you, I tell them to cab drivers now and let them tell me the endings. I step onto 15th Street, an Irving Place, and there's no place for sadness on the sidewalk. In the park's illegible language, like a mistake, two boys pass a cigarette between them. What they're trying to forget is summer. What they forget is each other. In a train somewhere, love stalls. The gutter fills with someone's glitter, and it's boring but beautiful how glitter has only one purpose. Why I asked, if I asked to be here, I forgot. This last one is called The Last Luxury JFK Jr. and it's sort of another one of these, like the low hand poem, not really the Franco, where I sort of become enthralled by someone and continue to read mostly tabloid articles about them. I guess Vanity Fair's considered tabloids now. It's not very good. Anything not very good, I'm very interested in, about people that are, you know, somewhat interesting. So this is about JFK Jr. Born of the sun, we traveled a short while toward the sun, where there were seasons in sky, where there were monuments, like a single-engine plane in a July haze, or on nights that pile up like shoes in a guest room. I would talk about the weather when I'm in the right weather, but when. At the Stanhope Hotel, just hours before, they were people. The Navy divers found them lying under 116 feet of waves, or a small body of water, meeting a new, larger body, healthy body, nobody. We just couldn't decide. Spatial disorientation occurs when you don't refer to your instruments and begin to believe the whatever inside you. When I punished the Austrian roses by forgetting about them, I knew that they couldn't keep beauty and they couldn't keep life. The day of his father's funeral, November 25th, 1963, was also his third birthday. Then, sometimes, the urge for new windows. A color other than black for the best days. In 14 seconds, plummeting at a rate beyond the safe maximum. The safe maximum at the office, bedroom, or bar. On the way there, somewhere between floors, no velocity could recover us. And again, sometimes the right music, sometimes lucky to be in good light. Once a week, I go into a room and pretend to have similar interests. Every day, I wake up and brush to the left. We're the good people, the bad people, and the people we aren't. Socialite, journalist, lawyer, American's, these Americans, they always button their coats when they see luck. Dear Johnny Boy, thanks for asking me to be your mother, but I'm afraid I would never do her justice. My eyebrows aren't thick enough for one. But you know, it was like eating the best grapefruit, being here, here, here and then what? Yet, once you start answering those questions, well, where do you stop? The old photograph of a young salute, the one send off to death, family, the beginning of character. Maybe you know it's the last year of the century, so come late and leave early. Others, flying similar routes, reported no visual horizon. It's the last luxury to go early and never come back. Thank you so much. Thank you, Alex, to meet Trump. So now I would like all the readers to come and sit right here. Okay, I'm going to go get the cookies. Hold on.