Artist leaving residence

The artist leaves the building.
This time he is
wrapping up
his canvases, colors, and
hairy implements.

He loads and stacks,
lines and lays his tiles, some gently
until tightly packed
for transport.

Some of them,
he jams in just seeming
to fill in
any open spaces he sees.

His neighbor, the lady
living below him,
paints furiously-impressionism,
she is no artist.

She tries to finish
her own piece
before he is gone-
before all falls muted,

from above.
Heaven forbid,
the muse is moving on
to another scene, landscape

perch, set of white walls,
half empty canvases,
or another artistic
aesthetic altogether.

Painting by Thomas Prichard Rossiter, 'A Studio Reception, Paris' c. 1841,[CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

He-line

Like a cat

tame or otherwise-

A man

will attack if touched

where he is most tender.

Artwork by Gwen John [Public domain].

Look (it) up

Anyway, it was a woman

who actually spoke first.

“I smell a rat!”

said no Henry or Hamlet

Hard(l)y a Thomas, nary a Richard but a Jane Doe

made this first lament 

despite the great efforts spent

assigning credit-worthiness, 

sighting the source, casting quoted blame

upon small creatures.

And ultimately, it comes to require

repetition, a mask

of sense-ability, or sorts

of ilk and stank disguised with must.

The woman slips into the cloak,

it spreads across the floor.

The folded entity

has been

erased from the scene. 

A mole scurries out from the hem

leaving a mark of beauty 

above the spoken word.

Painting by Giovanni Segantini [Public domain], c. 1891 via Wikimedia Commons.

Euclid’s Expertise

I’m no expert in subjects like geometry, people or what we call space,
but I am open to learning
about any thing
And I have discovered that even when nobody is looking
the sun will shine somewhere
and no body around will notice
the disarray.
No(round)body wants to believe that rounding up or down
is the same,
or that this terra Nuevo is solid and
stretches flat out
beyond sight.
It is easier to focus on what you know.

It is most difficult to sift dirt for gold nuggets
while wearing white gloves.
I wish I had known we needed phosphorus.

Look at the moon! Soak in the sun. between the two,
the eclipse begins.
From this angle the tone is clear.

Between an apple and an orange,
orchard and grove,
notch and needle, I cannot sew,
so I make more pi.

Good shoes, firmly planted, back then
we did not notice we were stuck.
We bury the dead, cover up our dreams, hide our private parts,
and keep our hands to ourselves without a second thought.
We skim across surfaces,
as if buoyancy was our gift,
it could be.

I am no biologist, but I insist on using my senses
to read lines
left in the sand
that glisten like gold and contain
everything we need to know about measuring up
to the given space
for a square peg on a plane.

We needed to make an
impression
that would resonate further than a single dimension.

Naturally, perfect shapes are quite rare
in nature.
Fractals occur nearly everywhere,
proving patterns are purely
people problems.




Painting by Jusepe de Ribero (1591-1692) in Getty Center [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Thus Spake a Prince of Prussia

Has there ever been a person who lived between

then and now, not now and then?

Dreams do this to us.

Details and physics, waves and sand, 

snow and rainbows, 

the observable highs and the lows,

It was as though fine tuning each note

explains why we dance to the song.

Transportation becomes the Philosophers Steam,

traing thoughts by voice and vapors,

and such as smoking papers

and burnt nerves 

on track. 

There is a picture of Nietzsche,

reclined with his feet on an ottoman,

his hands clutch the lapel of his wool coat

sheepishly his lower lip grazes out in view.

The smile lines say libertine and it is sad,

not needing, for want thereof

last laugh and half mast and full bore.

Mercurial man with his playmates, pretty

little penultimate Plutonians 

falling in and out of love like Spring.

He and she circumvent any obstacles 

and asteroids 

some times in line. 

Delirium, therein they concluded,

the horse, of course, and inherent

potency of white Prague.

What does not kill you did not care 

deeply enough to listen to the voices

and translate gagged passions

into fetters.

With a little apathy,

all complaints have been quelled.

This leaves room to travel.

Ape & essence, Super man, good beyond evil,

the power to will, the tragedy of birth, 

where peacocks, buffaloes and Ecce Homos roam,

these were titles of poems

I believe in ideas and insomnia never sounded

more prophetic.

The past princes would say, we continue to be

pathetic plebes

living now and then, dwelling in then and

now manual means melancholy,

machines write programs in prose

and sign 

every thing, Eternally,

Dionysus. 

Image credit:

en: Friedrich Nietzsche. Photograph from the series „Der kranke Nietzsche“ ("The ill Nietzsche") by Hans Olde, between June and August 1899. Original at Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar, signature GSA 101/37.

Scan of a reprint in Benders/Oettermann (ed.): Friedrich Nietzsche - Chronik in Bildern und Texten, Hanser / dtv 2000, p. 806/7

Nature vs. Nurture

Madness. No.
Happiness is fleeting glints
called Moments
we had it all

going along, the way we rolled
dice, high and wide
and thought throwing our cubic weight
around displaced any

matter our way at all.
Red. I read it in black and white,
No. I saw an orca pass through,
rarely, winter in San Diego

so it was weird, and then I remember
they are more traveled than we
and speak louder
amongst themselves, miles away

intonation carries, not by volume
of course-migration.
This is the name we gave to travel
frequently, and holiday and cetacean

all of our conceptual ponds.

No. This makes sense.
We were just busy with containing
must and should, which we may need
to carry with us atop this

Madness. Spinning out of alignment.
Speed wobbles. Yes or No
should have been enough
for a firefly or bacteria to glow.



Painting by Johan Christian Dahl (1819) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.