New Work for Exhibition...

This morning the sun came up as it does every morning. I sat at my kitchen table and drank coffee hot and black. To avoid focusing the noises in my head I read Bukowski and just watched. The cold blue sky was pushing down, bottling up the morning lake fog until it was contained gray smokiness, thick and chewable in the primordial light of early morning.

“You have to work today,” my inner dialogue reprimanded me.

“Five months,” I replied. “I remember when we had eight and could still delay it.”

Delay the ritual, the suicidal fluidity, the blood letting, the plunge inside, like a Zen prayer whispered to ones self one to many times…

inhale… exhale
smile at this pain… now release
present… perfect
rinse... repeat

Good art demands some amount of bleeding and that line we play at crossing can be so thin.

Five months before I have to deliver it up to the gallery. Five months and then I nail it on a wall to be picked and prodded, to exhale its breath. It demands the vivisection. Like some guttural beast I’ve breathed life into, birthed and has become its own self. It grows restless holding its breathe, lungs burning until someone else can force its exhale, its death rattle, because I can not. Such is the dialogue of art, creation and interpretation.

But then I read this Bukowski poem, laughed and poured more coffee. A few more poems… it can wait a little while longer.

laugh literary
listen, man, don’t tell me about the poems you
sent, we didn’t receive them,
we are very careful with manuscripts
we bake them
burn them
laugh at them
vomit on them
pour beer over them
but generally we return
them
they are
so
inane.
ah, we believe in Art,
we need it
surely,
but you know, there are many people
(most people)
playing and fornicating with the
Arts
who only crowd the stage
with their generous unforgiving
vigorous
mediocrity.

our subscription rates are $4 a year.
please read our magazine before
submitting.

-Charles Bukowski

(Maybe I’ll end the day with wine and Neruda. I save Bukowski for black coffee and the safety of mornings. He could scare anyone into sobriety and make any of us fear to hear the truth in dark places.)

Latest Bookbinding Project...

Untitled

How long can we Beat her down.
Our dead Amerika.

Still we chase you long...
into the night.

We transverse the course
of your overgrown tracks
veined across your
heartland.

How genuine your Lost Sons.

"Disclaimer"

Threads twisted on a late night conversation.
Wrecked resemblance.
Fiction.
Past real.
Sipping on this bold, beautiful version.

You'll be whispering I love you.

A mile long coverlet of verbatim, of merely coincidental,
of unending blue veins that say sorry.

You'll invent a golden dialogue used up years ago.
Held up on you're gears under the blades of fluorescent midnights.

A long shallow backdrop of overstuffed secrets,
that bring a blizzard of text book good-byes.

Obiter... In Passing

I was afraid to watch you die. I didn't know how to face you, realizing the person I had known all my life was fading away. I could no longer recognize you, just as you could no longer recognize me. I couldn't face the fact that soon your frail figure would be just an empty reminder of you. Everyone kept saying it was time to say goodbye, but I couldn't. I kept thinking there has to be more to it then this. This can't be it, this can't be how it ends, without any dignity, time robbing us of ourselves. And so I didn't.... I never went to say goodbye, and death would not wait. You went in the night. It was dark and cold and the world celebrated a new year as you left it. In the morning when I knew you were gone I lay in my bed, wrapped in your blanket and wept until I felt emptied.

After you were gone I dreamed of you. Dreamed you had found your way home and found all the rooms empty, stripped already of the life you had built. The floors and walls had already begun to decompose, and it wouldn't be long until they were completely gone, as though this house had never been, as though you had never been. They would deteriorate into the earth just as you are now. I followed you as you walked through the empty rooms, eyes wide with fear and confusion, and I couldn't help thinking you had just realized you were dead and everyone you loved had already let go of you. I watched, as a slow animalistic cry of anguish vibrated up and out of you in waves of pain. You curled up on the soiled floors of your kitchen and wept. They were all so quick to forget, so quick to gut this place. We live forever in memories and they had already begun to sweep them away. It would only be a matter of time until all memory of you would be gone. When children and grandchildren, and great grandchildren would know nothing of you. Just a name, a photograph of a person they didn't know, didn't understand, didn't whisper secrets to. I stood and wept over you, angry. Angry that time would take everything away that had once been you. This house, the life you built, the rose bushes you planted in the garden.... Until I would grow old, until time would begin to rob me of my memory of you, just as time had robbed me of you.

Sometimes I sit, my hands placed palm down on the table where we used to eat together. I rest my face against the smooth wood and think of you, of secret conversations, of hot summers and the smell of the dirt on my hands and knees in your rose gardens and I can still smell you.

-excerpt from Obiter.... In Passing, a unique artist book

Fixating...

Spit or swallow,
Choke it down, or will it stay put.

Your apprehensions leaving it just on the tip of your tongue.

Close your eyes,
just in case their watching.

Take it in, swallow it up.
This is the existence you consume.
Despite the bitterness,
the salt of sweaty hands who have
fondled the idea of it before you.

Saturating
Seeping
Salivating

Tongue convulsing...
tightening,
fixating.