String
I’m drawn away from writing—I’m drawn away by form. I want to draw on that mark made by the scanner.
I always remember that blue blanket, and how from it I constructed these imaginary castles on my cot. It was starchy and like felt it could hold its shape. I couldn’t sleep. I could never sleep, and so, forced to lay quietly, how else was I to amuse myself but to create a castle from the blanket and explore it with my hand in my sock as a puppet?
The forms of that castle still haunt the margins of my notebooks. Following the lines, curves thin and delicate trellises that decorate dark deep caverns of space connected to nothingness. Loopholes in the form, passageways, creating ever more interesting adventures for my pen, and entrancing my mind. That is how I get to the place without words, where I can stop thinking and just wander.
I’m falling asleep and the image I have is of a brain in two halves. It’s composed of strings. Coils of yarn wound, twisted; smaller than the folds on the outside, not relating back to the overall form, just filling it like a container. The form comes more into focus and I see that the stem is actually central. So it’s not a brain. It’s a tree. Then I inhale and I loose the image because my face is pressed up close to my baby’s ear, and the smell which collects in the folds of skin at his baby neck is a flat and perfect ocean—its silver undulations so seamlessly pitched against an infinite horizon.
His hands are on my skin, one on my breast. The other, turned up, rests on my navel. Leaves on a rock. The weight of the one on my belly is water collecting in a small pool, carving into the stone, slowly, slowly, carving the stone away. This is not metaphor. This is the experience of falling asleep. This body knows where it has been. I can know too, if I listen closely.
I’m at the table now, head resting on my wrist and I close my eyes, trying to listen, to break free from my physicality. But all that’s there are the buzzing shapes—like an infared picture of what’s around my head: flat fingers jutting out onto soft square. Am I cheating at going deep? I cheat. Sure. Start to draw on a napkin and just like that: inner dialog shuts off. I’m a cat, eyes closely following motion. Pen darting about outside of my control, just following contours.
I went to an art therapist once, and I painted for her something like this that I am drawing. I was so excited for a diagnosis or something like a horoscope. What does it mean? She looked at it and said, “ It means nothing. It has no meaning!” She was right, of course, but her answer really threw me. I thought she meant my life has no meaning. I’ve been trying to have meaning for so long it was like a slap in the face. The drawing has no meaning. It is like a leaf on a rock. My life has no meaning either, in that context. My life has meaning in the context of human history, but not in nature. They are separate. The brain. The tree. Filled with string.
Eye
I stare at it for a moment. I’ve walked over it time and time again, never noticing.
It does not stare back. The lid is closed, but I can see the tiny cracks, its creepy seams. It remains motionless, but I now know that any minute those rings coalesced around the knot might unfurl in either direction, most likely skyward. Like a telescope it might uncoil, and then the delicate triangles will unhinge, or perhaps gather on a tiny track around the rim and something spherical will emerge.
An Eye. A single Eye on a breakfast tray next to yellow egg yolks-I’ve seen it.
It wasn’t round, it was a convex ellipse with painted iris. The coral was round, behind it, attached to muscle which allowed it to shift almost like a real human eye. But to what brain, what receptor, is this Eye connected?
Perhaps here, underfoot, a whole intricate system of circuitry, more complex than a city with all it’s structural layers. Pumps pushing waste away, bringing in what it needs to sustain life, to sustain perception. To sustain the Eye- the single feature most often thought of as a window, a portal. This it is not. Even with the splintering sheath over its monstrous orb, I can tell.
I can tell it is over for us. This quaint time. We’ve been warned, but in disbelief we carry on our merry way. Unprepared— for what I can not exactly say, but to relax and enjoy this precipice is too much to ask.
When it opens, and I am certain that it will, the illusions will fall away. I’ve imagined the outcome many ways. A continuation of the present being the most likely, but looking back at what has changed already and how it felt, I think it will hardly be the same at all. I’d be lucky to remember this—to remember anything at all.
Perhaps when I see it 1,000 times some dim reflection in its glaring surface will kick my sense of knowing—that deep sense that still exists no matter how far off the ledge I’ve jumped in my mind, when I’ve left it all, all but the faintest trace of knowing. And in that glimpse, I might know that we were once the keepers of the earth.
Curious Patterns
Pointed swirls at each tip, tiny mounds for balancing coins. They tuck in. Resting crescent moons on their backs. Their shadows striate the life line. Shifting with the dream, like an underwater plant dances in an invisible current.
Amazing how 30 years from now they will be the same, or recognizable at least. Bigger, more defined. But the form will remain. The four pools of creased skin will evaporate and then bones will push up, like buffered horns, stopping before they break the surface. Oh, they may be used to break other surfaces… faces… walls.
The smooth puffs between these pools will sink by then and reveal a lattice when the webbing is spread out taunt. Lines all over, more articulated with age.
But for now they remain soft. Folded like sand colored crabs that scurry sideways between waves. Legs jointed at intervals recalling perfect mathematical relationships. The undersides are carved, inscribed. They come out that way. With inerasable patterns, augmented by repetitious motion, by tenuous stillness, never the less a testimony to heredity, individuality. Inked and pressed to paper, they could provide traceability.
All things change with time. The most curious things are those patterns that remain recognizable, if not static. I am more interested in the territories the lines carve out. What will emerge from those spaces, and why?
Siren’s Song
That space, the very shape of it, and all it’s colors like a scrap of magazine
something which was left after the object was cut out.
The object of the sentence, it’s been omitted.
Where are the boundaries on the work of art?
Where ever you draw them, maybe.
If you choose only to see what’s there, framed by light and shadow which expertly direct your eye to the contours of the object, then you wander through the alleys of your memory to retrieve the closest object or box of objects that you’ve seen before.
You spend a millisecond playing with it all like a jigsaw puzzle.
A few years ago you would’ve lingered there, scraping the void against all possible aberrances.
Now your attention is made fickle by the jolts of electric impulses,
sparks flying everywhere nonstop nonstop nonstop
and when they stop it’s a relief so sensual, you are as aware of your precious numbered days as you will ever be.
Yet in that quiet stillness you forget to focus, and that means all is lost.
When I come up from the water I forget to breath. Or maybe I do breath unintentionally. I must or else I’d die, but I forget to enunciate to punctuate. My exhales are blaring sirens, staining the dark with fluorescent glow. Ineffable sound, and in it’s echo I hear nothing. It scares me worse than the thought of annihilation at the hands of this wicked shore break.
But where are the lines? Are they as imaginary as they seem, shifting with the balance of chemicals, of hormones and toxins, inhibitors and exstinguishers, the personalities in the room, their energy. It’s not a field like a bubble. It’s a diffuse particulate that weaves into all other present objects. Sometimes it is yet indistinguishable from the object itself, but more and more I can see them in the objects that surround them.
Take my picture, and if we are lucky something of the field will be perceptible down the line. Luck. Luck has nothing to do with it. We are blinded by the idea of luck. Blinded by the object. The very object intended to show us something, we see it in shadow, but with the light on the shape becomes ordinary. The boundaries reconform and it’s not time that constrains them in it’s sticky grid of arrows, they are weightless through time, like mirrors reflecting thousands of falling feathers where in reality there is only one.
Through the Glass
Like a fool I obscured them
The fragments I found
The intricacy was mesmerizing
So with each discovery I got lost
I sunk into the portrayal, each a serious role.
Now I wade in the debris while the geodesic domes go up like bubbles in a bath
The froth feeds them
Hardly a tree to climb, but when I find one I am a clambering vine
So vicious is the spread, of what I forecasted but neglected.
I have no remorse, just astonishment
I have nothing to add.
I’m the audience, the surveyor of what is said.
Scorn and guile dissolve into callous
I will scrape it to no avail,
transformation is irrevocable.
The sound of claws on glass,
when I overlook that they are enclosed
Amalgamated memories stung on thin imaginary tracks
Forcing their way through the words of songs
Mop pushing dirt around, feet leave puckered prints behind.
This image added like a bead to the string of this song for me.
My mind a karaoke machine
With a slot for each coin, in a row of moments
It disturbs me that the wide beam of light grows narrower with each passing day
Until one day it is just a pinprick
Which laser cuts my name into stone.
My name? What is this obsession?
I was invisible to all but one kid on the play ground, and I didn’t know his name.
I called him climbing bear. When did names start to matter?
Matter- dirt. Pushed across the floor.
Rhythm- it’s the push and the pull. I use music to bring back what used to matter look at it again,
it’s more romantic in this dimmer light.
I can’t really go there, to where it was more than a story,
Insects clamber up the walls to escape the mop.
Escape death.
Cheat. I love to cheat.
Cheating death is the true lie we all live
Knowledge of its imminence escapes our grasp unless we focus on it,
And then how it looms.
Do you like gay sex?
I met a man at a party last weekend, you know the kind: opinionated, gregarious. And he was going on about his feelings toward people who oppose the legalization of gay marriage. He wanted to tell them (you know, those right wing religious discriminators) that when he meets a gay person he doesn’t picture them having sex, you know? And there is something wrong with people who think it is O.K. to categorize people based on their sexual preferences, which of course is a very personal matter.
Indeed, I agreed, of course, you know? But I got hung up on something: don’t picture them having sex?! Okay, that’s fine, it’s not always pleasant to go there, but what if you did? Does gay sex gross you out? Because that is kind of um, repressed, you know??
I have to admit—I might be on the other end of the spectrum, but I like gay sex! You know? I like gay sex so much that I actually pretend I’m having it! If you’ve never pretended to be a man while fucking, you are missing out!
Sometimes I pretend I’m a man fucking a woman. Men love to watch, you know? So I imagine I am looking down, and it’s fucking awesome! I see the base of my penis going in and out of her… Sometimes the illusion is interrupted by my partner—you know—here, my real partner, and he’s a man… He decides to flip me over, you know, and get behind, and this is where it becomes gay sex for me because unbeknownst to him, I’m still pretending to be a man! Lucky for me he likes to slip a finger in the back door— You know?!
Anyway, everyone knows that those right wing religious fuckers are repressed. It’s the ones like the guy at the party I feel sorry for, you know? With limited voyeuristic abilities he can only rely on a sort of metaphor: “if it were me, I’d want equal rights.”
But that can’t stand up against the argument that gay sex is disgusting, and those who practice it are disgusting, or at best very different, you know?
What is actually disgusting is that we live in a society so obsessed with identity and status that the true issues—such as dwindling resources and the devastating effects of development on the environment are pushed aside for this type of shit that should really be a non-issue, you know??
So whether or not you have a penis, or you like to pretend you do, and whether or not you even like penises, you should be allowed to be married, you know? I have a feeling marriage isn’t what it’s cracked up to be any way, but since gay people aren’t fighting segregation or unequal pay, I guess that’s the battle ground, you know?
I always remember that blue blanket, and how from it I constructed these imaginary castles on my cot. It was starchy and like felt it could hold its shape. I couldn’t sleep. I could never sleep, and so, forced to lay quietly, how else was I to amuse myself but to create a castle from the blanket and explore it with my hand in my sock as a puppet?
The forms of that castle still haunt the margins of my notebooks. Following the lines, curves thin and delicate trellises that decorate dark deep caverns of space connected to nothingness. Loopholes in the form, passageways, creating ever more interesting adventures for my pen, and entrancing my mind. That is how I get to the place without words, where I can stop thinking and just wander.
I’m falling asleep and the image I have is of a brain in two halves. It’s composed of strings. Coils of yarn wound, twisted; smaller than the folds on the outside, not relating back to the overall form, just filling it like a container. The form comes more into focus and I see that the stem is actually central. So it’s not a brain. It’s a tree. Then I inhale and I loose the image because my face is pressed up close to my baby’s ear, and the smell which collects in the folds of skin at his baby neck is a flat and perfect ocean—its silver undulations so seamlessly pitched against an infinite horizon.
His hands are on my skin, one on my breast. The other, turned up, rests on my navel. Leaves on a rock. The weight of the one on my belly is water collecting in a small pool, carving into the stone, slowly, slowly, carving the stone away. This is not metaphor. This is the experience of falling asleep. This body knows where it has been. I can know too, if I listen closely.
I’m at the table now, head resting on my wrist and I close my eyes, trying to listen, to break free from my physicality. But all that’s there are the buzzing shapes—like an infared picture of what’s around my head: flat fingers jutting out onto soft square. Am I cheating at going deep? I cheat. Sure. Start to draw on a napkin and just like that: inner dialog shuts off. I’m a cat, eyes closely following motion. Pen darting about outside of my control, just following contours.
I went to an art therapist once, and I painted for her something like this that I am drawing. I was so excited for a diagnosis or something like a horoscope. What does it mean? She looked at it and said, “ It means nothing. It has no meaning!” She was right, of course, but her answer really threw me. I thought she meant my life has no meaning. I’ve been trying to have meaning for so long it was like a slap in the face. The drawing has no meaning. It is like a leaf on a rock. My life has no meaning either, in that context. My life has meaning in the context of human history, but not in nature. They are separate. The brain. The tree. Filled with string.
Eye
I stare at it for a moment. I’ve walked over it time and time again, never noticing.
It does not stare back. The lid is closed, but I can see the tiny cracks, its creepy seams. It remains motionless, but I now know that any minute those rings coalesced around the knot might unfurl in either direction, most likely skyward. Like a telescope it might uncoil, and then the delicate triangles will unhinge, or perhaps gather on a tiny track around the rim and something spherical will emerge.
An Eye. A single Eye on a breakfast tray next to yellow egg yolks-I’ve seen it.
It wasn’t round, it was a convex ellipse with painted iris. The coral was round, behind it, attached to muscle which allowed it to shift almost like a real human eye. But to what brain, what receptor, is this Eye connected?
Perhaps here, underfoot, a whole intricate system of circuitry, more complex than a city with all it’s structural layers. Pumps pushing waste away, bringing in what it needs to sustain life, to sustain perception. To sustain the Eye- the single feature most often thought of as a window, a portal. This it is not. Even with the splintering sheath over its monstrous orb, I can tell.
I can tell it is over for us. This quaint time. We’ve been warned, but in disbelief we carry on our merry way. Unprepared— for what I can not exactly say, but to relax and enjoy this precipice is too much to ask.
When it opens, and I am certain that it will, the illusions will fall away. I’ve imagined the outcome many ways. A continuation of the present being the most likely, but looking back at what has changed already and how it felt, I think it will hardly be the same at all. I’d be lucky to remember this—to remember anything at all.
Perhaps when I see it 1,000 times some dim reflection in its glaring surface will kick my sense of knowing—that deep sense that still exists no matter how far off the ledge I’ve jumped in my mind, when I’ve left it all, all but the faintest trace of knowing. And in that glimpse, I might know that we were once the keepers of the earth.
Curious Patterns
Pointed swirls at each tip, tiny mounds for balancing coins. They tuck in. Resting crescent moons on their backs. Their shadows striate the life line. Shifting with the dream, like an underwater plant dances in an invisible current.
Amazing how 30 years from now they will be the same, or recognizable at least. Bigger, more defined. But the form will remain. The four pools of creased skin will evaporate and then bones will push up, like buffered horns, stopping before they break the surface. Oh, they may be used to break other surfaces… faces… walls.
The smooth puffs between these pools will sink by then and reveal a lattice when the webbing is spread out taunt. Lines all over, more articulated with age.
But for now they remain soft. Folded like sand colored crabs that scurry sideways between waves. Legs jointed at intervals recalling perfect mathematical relationships. The undersides are carved, inscribed. They come out that way. With inerasable patterns, augmented by repetitious motion, by tenuous stillness, never the less a testimony to heredity, individuality. Inked and pressed to paper, they could provide traceability.
All things change with time. The most curious things are those patterns that remain recognizable, if not static. I am more interested in the territories the lines carve out. What will emerge from those spaces, and why?
Siren’s Song
That space, the very shape of it, and all it’s colors like a scrap of magazine
something which was left after the object was cut out.
The object of the sentence, it’s been omitted.
Where are the boundaries on the work of art?
Where ever you draw them, maybe.
If you choose only to see what’s there, framed by light and shadow which expertly direct your eye to the contours of the object, then you wander through the alleys of your memory to retrieve the closest object or box of objects that you’ve seen before.
You spend a millisecond playing with it all like a jigsaw puzzle.
A few years ago you would’ve lingered there, scraping the void against all possible aberrances.
Now your attention is made fickle by the jolts of electric impulses,
sparks flying everywhere nonstop nonstop nonstop
and when they stop it’s a relief so sensual, you are as aware of your precious numbered days as you will ever be.
Yet in that quiet stillness you forget to focus, and that means all is lost.
When I come up from the water I forget to breath. Or maybe I do breath unintentionally. I must or else I’d die, but I forget to enunciate to punctuate. My exhales are blaring sirens, staining the dark with fluorescent glow. Ineffable sound, and in it’s echo I hear nothing. It scares me worse than the thought of annihilation at the hands of this wicked shore break.
But where are the lines? Are they as imaginary as they seem, shifting with the balance of chemicals, of hormones and toxins, inhibitors and exstinguishers, the personalities in the room, their energy. It’s not a field like a bubble. It’s a diffuse particulate that weaves into all other present objects. Sometimes it is yet indistinguishable from the object itself, but more and more I can see them in the objects that surround them.
Take my picture, and if we are lucky something of the field will be perceptible down the line. Luck. Luck has nothing to do with it. We are blinded by the idea of luck. Blinded by the object. The very object intended to show us something, we see it in shadow, but with the light on the shape becomes ordinary. The boundaries reconform and it’s not time that constrains them in it’s sticky grid of arrows, they are weightless through time, like mirrors reflecting thousands of falling feathers where in reality there is only one.
Through the Glass
Like a fool I obscured them
The fragments I found
The intricacy was mesmerizing
So with each discovery I got lost
I sunk into the portrayal, each a serious role.
Now I wade in the debris while the geodesic domes go up like bubbles in a bath
The froth feeds them
Hardly a tree to climb, but when I find one I am a clambering vine
So vicious is the spread, of what I forecasted but neglected.
I have no remorse, just astonishment
I have nothing to add.
I’m the audience, the surveyor of what is said.
Scorn and guile dissolve into callous
I will scrape it to no avail,
transformation is irrevocable.
The sound of claws on glass,
when I overlook that they are enclosed
Amalgamated memories stung on thin imaginary tracks
Forcing their way through the words of songs
Mop pushing dirt around, feet leave puckered prints behind.
This image added like a bead to the string of this song for me.
My mind a karaoke machine
With a slot for each coin, in a row of moments
It disturbs me that the wide beam of light grows narrower with each passing day
Until one day it is just a pinprick
Which laser cuts my name into stone.
My name? What is this obsession?
I was invisible to all but one kid on the play ground, and I didn’t know his name.
I called him climbing bear. When did names start to matter?
Matter- dirt. Pushed across the floor.
Rhythm- it’s the push and the pull. I use music to bring back what used to matter look at it again,
it’s more romantic in this dimmer light.
I can’t really go there, to where it was more than a story,
Insects clamber up the walls to escape the mop.
Escape death.
Cheat. I love to cheat.
Cheating death is the true lie we all live
Knowledge of its imminence escapes our grasp unless we focus on it,
And then how it looms.
Do you like gay sex?
I met a man at a party last weekend, you know the kind: opinionated, gregarious. And he was going on about his feelings toward people who oppose the legalization of gay marriage. He wanted to tell them (you know, those right wing religious discriminators) that when he meets a gay person he doesn’t picture them having sex, you know? And there is something wrong with people who think it is O.K. to categorize people based on their sexual preferences, which of course is a very personal matter.
Indeed, I agreed, of course, you know? But I got hung up on something: don’t picture them having sex?! Okay, that’s fine, it’s not always pleasant to go there, but what if you did? Does gay sex gross you out? Because that is kind of um, repressed, you know??
I have to admit—I might be on the other end of the spectrum, but I like gay sex! You know? I like gay sex so much that I actually pretend I’m having it! If you’ve never pretended to be a man while fucking, you are missing out!
Sometimes I pretend I’m a man fucking a woman. Men love to watch, you know? So I imagine I am looking down, and it’s fucking awesome! I see the base of my penis going in and out of her… Sometimes the illusion is interrupted by my partner—you know—here, my real partner, and he’s a man… He decides to flip me over, you know, and get behind, and this is where it becomes gay sex for me because unbeknownst to him, I’m still pretending to be a man! Lucky for me he likes to slip a finger in the back door— You know?!
Anyway, everyone knows that those right wing religious fuckers are repressed. It’s the ones like the guy at the party I feel sorry for, you know? With limited voyeuristic abilities he can only rely on a sort of metaphor: “if it were me, I’d want equal rights.”
But that can’t stand up against the argument that gay sex is disgusting, and those who practice it are disgusting, or at best very different, you know?
What is actually disgusting is that we live in a society so obsessed with identity and status that the true issues—such as dwindling resources and the devastating effects of development on the environment are pushed aside for this type of shit that should really be a non-issue, you know??
So whether or not you have a penis, or you like to pretend you do, and whether or not you even like penises, you should be allowed to be married, you know? I have a feeling marriage isn’t what it’s cracked up to be any way, but since gay people aren’t fighting segregation or unequal pay, I guess that’s the battle ground, you know?
