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.

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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.)