A Short Film I Made Earlier this Year in Response to Chris Marker's La Jetée

A meditation on time.

I did the music, soi-disant, too. I think of it more as "bodily organic ambience" than music. bio-soundtrack.

I love how Chris Marker's later super-short films fit in so beautifully with YouTube's and other social media's re-shaping of consciousness and attention span. Let's call it neo-span.

Stopping an Argument Going Nowhere

As a boy, I stood in drowned sneakers

and held up to the sun a crayfish

between my thumb and forefinger,

just plucked from the creek,

its pincers gyrating and pinching air,

trying to reach back far enough

to scissor skin and win release

from pain by pain. Win release

from pain by pain. Even in the dark places

under stones in creeks, whatever stones,

whatever other kingdoms, this immutable

is known. The dark imbricated plates

of her body were soft bronze. She knew me

enough. She’d treat any animal the same

and be blameless, not dwell as we do

after we use our natural defenses

to return to where we can breathe.

I’d call a friend over to see tiny dark eggs

she strummed under her body’s shields,

then drop her for the pleasure of seeing

that tiny splash, the dark zing backwards

into her watermind. She’d flex her entire body

and her big scoop tail would shoot water

through water as she flew to the safe

underplace. Each language, its dark, protective stones.

I am not a boy. I no longer lift

the roofs of stones from creatures.

Let dwell, let dwell.

Time is water and we must breathe under it.

Each in the darkness it calls home.

I Have a Poem in the Current Visual Voice

I love seeing what people come up with each month.

The whole ekphrasis thing. No ideas but in translation.

It

It is never finished.
I wake and walk barefoot
to the backyard,
past the spider universe
of the abandoned nook garden,
branches of everything-all-at-once
strangling or loving, who knows;
should I have said roses
in a poem, pedigree, pedigree
I have no use for.
Something wilder than roses
grows there and through me,
the birds getting excited
at my approach, summer
through us, they flee
in terror but will circle back
as soon as I’m gone,

as soon as I’m gone.

FDA Approves Ebola Vaccine with 100% Success Rate

Merck has developed an Ebola vaccine with a 100% success rate which has been approved by the FDA.

This is really wonderful news for the planet, especially when you look at the 2014-15 outbreak in West Africa where the death toll exceeded 28,000 people. Viruses with an ability to spread through casual contact in an age of global air travel are nothing to shrug off.

Technically, Ebola is not spread though "casual contact." If we use a CDC definition of the term. But if we use a civilian definition of the term, one might want to argue the point.  It's spread through bodily fluids. But then: "If a person sick with Ebola coughs or sneezes, and saliva or mucus touches another person's eyes, nose, mouth, or an open cut or wound, these fluids may spread Ebola." That's pretty darn casual. And it can acquired by touching such fluids on door knobs or other surfaces if one then transfers that inoculant to a mucus membrane such as one's mouth, nose, eyes, etc. That's a pretty common occurrence. Again, sounds pretty casual. Few people on the street or in their office in Kinshasa or anywhere else are going to be wearing gloves and goggles the way scientists going into Ebola zones wisely do. A co-worker's sneeze might mean Ebola transmission. So the word “casual” in “casual contact” when used in relation to Ebola might just be a misleading term used in a sedative phrase intended to quell public panic.

The different strains of Ebola have varied wildly in terms of mortality, with some variants having a mortality rate as high as 90% .

So a vaccine is really great news. It’s a cause for celebration. At least until the next plague says “Surprise!” It’s a never-ending war. Probably long after humans finally stop going to war with other humans, there will still be that microbial war and its many active fronts. The enemy is within. It has been a vital part of our evolution and the evolution of everything else alive.

I've recommended a book on this topic before and I will again today. If you want to read a well-written account of the first time scientists went to war against Ebola, check out Laurie Garrett's nonpareil The Coming Plague (1994). The long chapter "Yambuku" in the book gives a harrowing account of the first Ebola outbreaks, which occurred virtually simultaneously in Zaire and South Sudan (1976) and the international scientific response to them. This book was eerily prescient and forecast much of what was to come with the new millennium. And it's some of the best nonfiction writing you will ever encounter. 

Time Leaks

"Mysterious blocks of flotsam, about the size of a chopping-board, bearing the name 'Tjipetir' (a plantation in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—operating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), have been washing up on the beaches of northern Europe for some time through 2013 and 2014. They are believed to be blocks of gutta-percha from the Japanese liner Miyazaki Maru, which was sunk 150 miles (240 km) west of the Isles of Scilly in 1917."

"No, Wittgenstein did not invent the emoji"

Did you realize this was almost a thing?

A Grim and Funny Whitmanian Experiment

I thought this article trying to suss out the cause of Walt Whitman's death was darkly funny, especially when the guys started mixing up the bacteria-orgy which Whitman considered a beverage to try it for themselves.

Sort of a new genre there and potential for a new show, poetry Jackass. 

Up next week: the guys try to out-drink Dylan Thomas and avoid acute hepatitis on an historically accurate reading tour.

And I would have guessed long-entrenched syphilis had something to do with Walt's death. Pneumonia and tuberculosis can be associated with syphilis.

Here's another interesting article about poets and suicide which should surprise absolutely no one. Poets who use the first person pronouns more in their poems (narcissistic poets?) are more likely to kill themselves. So too much self-absorption can lead to the ultimate self-absorption?

I'm Still Wondering about the Indiana Dunes Mystery

Well, it's not the only mystery centered in the Indiana Dunes, but the disappearance of three young women from the beach when thousands of people were present remains one of the most enduring and perplexing cases.

What happened to Patrica Blough, Renee Bruhl and Ann Miller on July 2, 1966?

Unless I'm mistaken, there's never been a book dedicated solely to this case (a few compendia have included brief rundowns of the case). I'm discounting one book predicated on what I consider a completely outlandish theory not based in any real evidence.

I'm still wondering what happened. Silas Jayne? Certainly evil enough to have been behind it. Richard Speck? Ditto and nearby that day. An innocent accident in a park known for dangerous waters and dangerous terrain as well? Something else?

This isn't the only disappearance of three women in one fell swoop. Those other cases of multiple disappearances are equally disturbing. For example, the Springfield Three or the Fort Worth Missing Trio.

I'm surprised no one has made a movie about the Indian Dunes mystery. It would require a director with subtlety, someone attuned to the unanswerable side of things. Probably someone like Sofia Coppola. 

Here is a Short Story

I wrote about phrogging.

8 Poems (Air Poems)

      BEHIND CVS

I wake and my little cat gives me my spirit.
No cat, no spirit.

The sun is tender
with looking at the earth.

It is hard to look at earth

Truly to see
the people's hope

Oh, look at
The things that end in a dirty creek



        CHILD

The child touches lightning bugs
on the summer air

So many lovers
she will have

So many doorways

None nailed shut




           CURSE IN A CVS

The pot you gave me is no good

I will float on lightning

and return later




                 TWO BOYS

Two punks
walking over a bridge
stone bridge
snickering
throw stones
into a world below
anger
zings and zips
through the Underworld
their faces
wood in the snow
crack like a rifle
shot
into a world below
their living





               NIGHT

What the roses dream at night
let me dream

The spiderwebs all through me

let me dream

The stars sending light
without postage

Yes

An old woman the color of night
breaking up

In the river now

More of my excuses die



      EXPLANATION

the cat
sits in
winter's window
slant rain
turns snow
means more
means less
than naming
to me

I am a cat



     SEDUCTION

I hear
this neighbor's
coyote voice
a woman
is a blue bird
rousing coyote
into the open
where he releases
his voice
in spring
the blue berries
release her
birds know
poison from food
fly away
into fire
of more sky





      LOVERS

the rain
comes down
bending their necks
the lovers
who run now
into shelter
of a garden
inside the mall
rain on the glass ceiling
of the shopping mall
continues
they look up
where birds flee
we are
seeming
to be many pieces
of one person

My Copy of the U.S. Constitution

Something calls oblivion

Where milk glass is heading

It won’t return

like icicles every year

White cherubs for stems

You notice people buy it

not because they want it

but to preserve it

Fruit that aspires to be alabaster

What words give

What words take away

Not beauty but what it’s cut out of

So jaggedy

as you out of me

You note more circles every year

Less rectangles

It must be a national diet of shapes

Men lose their beards and women find them

Food can be a sexual proxy adventure

The bears in the backyard

Seem more like your dead parents

every year

You lock the door earlier

You start to swoon into the curtains

And watch the bears that way

Dear

Raindrops on the window

please stop impersonating me

with your stillness and your going

you are too much like modern punctuation

trying to evaporate so quietly

nobody notices you have died

because of cell phones

and escaped into that reservoir

of nostalgia around which I pretend to jog

but mostly mosey,  the way

mushrooms do and other spongy

things that prefer spongy dreams

on moist lawns faking wine

each morning home

to the disconcerting rest

Thank You For Talking to Me

I say to the rain.
I say to the ingredients of a person
which just erupted in a random conversation
they insisted I taste.

I say to the past,
then lock the door behind it.
I say to the crows
in the cemetery

that act like cashiers,
pretending to make conversation,
but not really.
I say to sleep's

white noise pretending
to be a person pretending
to be me.
Then I nap

and dream of the world
before conversations existed.
How like a glass paperweight
everything was!

22nd Century Art

16 Speculations

I Missed that the Web Urbanist Site Used One of My Photographs

for a feature on strange garage doors.

That's from 2016. I never even noticed they shared that until tonight.

The garage door in question was painted over about the time they were publishing that. I think it might have been related to the sale of the house.

I assume it was a family solidarity thing, or maybe a magic symbol to protect the house.

Penny Woolcock's Gritty Documentary The Wet House (2000)

Oddly enough, I had never even heard of a wet house before today.

I wasn't even reading about alcohol. It just appeared in an article I was glossing over and I was mystified by the term.

Apparently, it's quite common for people to drink themselves to death in these establishments. Such habitations are justified based on the money (allegedly) saved by taxpayers and the notion that recovery help is available through the facilities.

But studies have demonstrated that residents in such facilities often drink significantly less. That probably makes sense, since the stressors associated with homelessness are removed. That's not an inconsequential psychological burden, I'm sure. Homeless alcoholics probably drink more precisely because they are homeless.

In doing a search for the term, I found this documentary by Penny Woolcock. Talk about difficult viewing.




I also watched this depressing documentary which gives you the truth about the American occupation of Afghanistan and its challenges. Sisyphus all the way around. No need to ask about the Bechdel test with this one. I think the only female you see in the entire documentary is a four-year-old girl who gets pushed out of the way by the soldiers passing through. You get the feeling that country might be half a century away from any sort of modern liberation and respect of human rights. I realize the documentary focuses on one of the worst problem areas in the country, but still.

1976: The Pandemic That Wasn't

Someone should make a longer documentary about the swine flu (H1N1) scare of 1976.

It's clear the government acted from the best motives, but it was a non-starter.

The best writing on this I've encountered is the chapter dedicated to it in Laurie Garrett's stellar nonfiction book The Coming Plague (1994).

A brief synopsis.

Guillain-Barré is scary as hell. It can be caused by the flu vaccine (on the order today of one in a million) but it can also be caused by the flu itself (much more frequently). I've seen accounts of it occurring in a variety of viral syndromes. And yet it still seems to remain a medical mystery when it comes to the mechanics of what is actually occurring in the human body.

Some speculate that the government's initial response to AIDs was so lackluster because the epidemiological cognoscenti had only recently sounded the panic alarm for an epidemic which never materialized. Perhaps they were afraid of crying wolf again a mere five years later.

A Little Closer Look at Wreaths Across America is Warranted

It doesn't take much digging to realize there are many unanswered questions.

I'm Happy to Have Some Fiction

in the new issue of Visual Verse.

I love the writing challenges each  month.

I like seeing how wide the interpretation of a visual image ranges, in poetry and fiction.

Ekphrasis now and forever.

Why Guernica Would Be Impossible Today

Because aerial bombardment was somewhat new. Because humans cannot show themselves to be surprised too much or too often. This could be arrogance of pride but more likely it is a cognitive phenomenon. But perhaps graphic representation of tragedy is passe. Please don't mediate it through a human body that intimately. Painting ceded to photography which ceded to don't even show us. Because an armed culture is a luxury and a screen. Guernica becomes, instead, closer to today, something Boltanski would do. Respectful, less ego. The clothing being lifted over and over by the claw of the machine and dropped from a height onto the ground. The way the simulacra of bodies, the empty clothes, dance as they plummet. This instead of drawing. The self pretending to be removed, pretending not to draw, from what is still drawing on the air, somehow. But it is the otherness drawing. It is the emptiness celebrating itself. A new innocence that is not us. We become leaves of the molting tree. A new innocence that is not human being. The moment preceding and the moment following a human thought. 

Poor Species

I feel increasingly distant from you. Your weak attempts at birdsong. Your dominion, which was enjoyable, warm and cozy, while I was young. But more and more the frayed sweater of the DNA. We pick at it on the television news. The sound of gunfire in the streets. But still: Poor Species. I wonder if the search for expression will end. The search for expression will not end. It is the search for expression which is Guernica and that which Guernica depicts. And how long ago was Guernica painted? Do you feel that slippage? Today, nobody would attempt to paint it. Irony is lifeblood. But the secret is encoded in the art itself. That there is pleasure in the forms which quote pain. If they are imaginatively conceived, they are a distraction, an invitation to play. Guernica was such an invitation presented as a raw scream. Infantile and dark. Shelter of speaking or drawing. The people come out of the bombed theater speaking. The film still plays.The lovers are on the screen in black and white as the rafters fall. They are toying with each other. Their faces the size of the entire screen. It is only the childhood of the work of art. The work of art is eternally at play in a form of childhood. We feel like shadows, like shades, when faced. 

Pete Buttigieg

is being ridiculously pilloried by fake ass people.

George Mayerle’s Eye Test charts, Schmidt Litho Co., San Francisco , ca. 1907

I want to order it as a shower curtain. 

Below Central Park

was this.

I recently learned our own State Capitol Building's park and surrounding capitol complex in Harrisburg was also constructed where an African American and immigrant community was thriving. It was razed for that purpose and erased, largely lost to history. This was Harrisburg's wild and woolly Eighth Ward.

I'm glad there is a monument being placed there in 2020.

Looking back.

Horrific: New York's History of Slavery

Wabi-Sabi and Zen in Photography

Nice Ta-ta's, Shakespeare!

I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries.

— Charles Darwin, 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

In 1861, historical linguist Max Müller published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language:

Bow-wow. The bow-wow or cuckoo theory, which Müller attributed to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, saw early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds.

Pooh-pooh. The pooh-pooh theory saw the first words as emotional interjections and exclamations triggered by pain, pleasure, surprise, etc.

Ding-dong. Müller suggested what he called the ding-dong theory, which states that all things have a vibrating natural resonance, echoed somehow by man in his earliest words.

Yo-he-ho. The yo-he-ho theory claims language emerged from collective rhythmic labor, the attempt to synchronize muscular effort resulting in sounds such as heave alternating with sounds such as ho.

Ta-ta. This did not feature in Max Müller's list, having been proposed in 1930 by Sir Richard Paget. According to the ta-ta theory, humans made the earliest words by tongue movements that mimicked manual gestures, rendering them audible.

Interesting Graphic

One could still argue about the subjective interpretation of raw data, but overall isn't there a smack of truth to this assessment and ranking? Alcohol is definitely in the right place on this list.

Two Favorite Recent Finds (Category Sculpture)

I spend a lot of time looking at folk art, outsider art, lowbrow art, ephemera, etc.

Sometimes I can't resist because I get the screaming mimis at how great something is and how I want to stare at it much, much longer. An object stamps its feet inside of me. I vibrate.

Love for the phenomenal world speaking through objects fashioned by humans or not.

This set of the usual suspects are solid wood and about a foot tall each and were found in Russia.

I believe they escaped from some debut de siecle paintings. So refugees. Like most beings in art.

 And this therianthropic beauty was found in a deep attic in deepest Connecticut. It bewitches me entirely. I think they were looking in the wrong state for the witches back at the end of the seventeenth century in America.

Could that be...sycamore wood...with that odd biomorphic relief to the grain? Also known as plane tree. And it has a third name, which I forget. It's about a foot tall.

It almost feels like Colonial period to me. I feel so lucky to have this weird, almost Druidic being watching over me while I sleep. I think I will have interesting dreams under that tutelage.

There is a larger monochrome watercolor landscape I have hanging on my third floor landing and I got tired of looking at it but didn't want to jettison it. So I bought this lovely bit of a tomesode in (online) Japan and covered just about half of the glass frame with this. So: a form of collage without glue and I love the way the landscape came alive again.

Avi Weider & Dave Chartier's Adaptation of Some Entries from Brainard's I Remember

Forest Meeting

The face in its carving

           turns to you.

Supernatural owl-turning,

       the moment of falling

            through a face

       to what it means to say

           without knowing.



Without knowing,

    only then can it be

                saying  a face.

  The moment of falling

        through the mask fitted at birth,

             into the welcome fire

               (you are burning)

             of what the owl will notice

                     in you.

Ocean

The word dying is dying

       it has no more resonance

          no appeals


      something pure life

       is battering pier legs to take its place

                 liquid turquoise streamers

           
          over sea rocks slimy
               our anticipation


           the person

                with no address

       
             the address

                    with no person


          they are falling in love

Someone

You are lying on a bed

                                   in a nursing home

your body is a bed of roses

   in your mind which is music

    full of love and waves

                                            of energy

     as large as the decaying children
              who tend the body

                    the idea

                  of being un-present

              in the window clouds

                     (large, piled up)

               in the breath of sheets and pillows

                            there is no patience

                                in a body

              full of love and waves

                                                of energy

                          dying

                                       under a sheet




       

The Genuineness of Bernie Sanders

I'm sure hundreds of millions of people are pulling for Bernie Sanders to come out of his medical procedure better and stronger than ever. (It's not only Americans who admire the man.)

One fact never to forget: Bernie Sanders declared only about two hundred thousands dollars of income from the years 2009 to 2015. It was only in 2016 and 2017 that he and his wife Jill surpassed (a mere) one million dollars in earnings. And that was largely due to book royalties and a few other incidentals.

The point is that those numbers show that Bernie Sanders has always lived his ideals. They demonstrate that he was not feeding at the trough, as he could so easily have done. They are the closest thing to a shining proof of his absolute integrity and honesty, and demonstrate his firmly-held core belief that a public servant should not be beholden to lobbyists or interests at cross-purposes to the people and their well-being. This is in contrast with virtually every other money-grabber in Washington. 

If we lose Bernie, Diogenes might as well skip Washington on his peregrinations with that lamp. 

Sanders is that rare, real deal who believed in you. He believed your struggle was real.

dark watery things

she said something to him
and then she watched
headlights cross the ceiling
like spirits disconnected from bodies
they only pretend to inhabit
most days, most nights

not seeing headlights
he said
many more things
so could not see
the souls on the ceiling
as they lay in bed
looking up
still he did not see
he had not guessed
she had said
a final thing

and so when he thought
she slept
she had congress with spirits
on their bedroom ceiling
from the street
who told her how lovely
it would be to live
without a soul
in her body
for just one year

mark the calendar
lest you forget

the things whisked

she found this religion
of just walking
just what she needed
thank you, ceiling
she told the light
and was soon gone

taking a knife and a pillow

da club

some flowers were being mean
earlier today
I watched them writhe in the breeze
listened to their petals rage
such colors
even marigolds can look like tigers, ya know
on such a small stem
and thought
about their meanness
but didn't say anything

I didn't belong to their flowerbed

plus

I figure it was just autumn

and maybe the things they say in autumn

with death listening
just outside the door

don't really count

Moth

attention is nice
but maybe the quietest days
were the best
being slower
watching endless rain
through old windows
it empties my soul
hunting for my glasses
for an hour
gently cursing
these softest distractions
up and down the stairs
over and over
a moth in the night
invisible to myself
and everyone else

Twenty Bucks and a Stone Haiku

the cemetery
a bag blowing past
says THANK YOU

*

visiting Van Gogh
feeling all the people
we didn't

*

as many cracks
as days
a doll’s face

*
autumn morning
somewhere you change color
without me

*

chipped glasses
plates with hairline cracks
not a bad marriage

*

something in you the way
autumn trees
pretend to shiver

*

cool autumn morning
awakened by small feet
racing away

*

children share secrets
clear sap
from an unseen center

*

old porcelain dolls
in the nursing home
every crack speaks

*

autumn leaves
the colors a warning
a celebration

*

autumn leaves
fall on the railroad tracks…
is this a joke?

*
autumn market
different gourds
with the same problems

*

autumn morning
something running fast over
my head wakes me


*

hometown years later
even the creek’s
changed beds

*

groundhog hibernates
our clocks slow down
then reverse

*

the vacant house's
welcome mat
snowflake by snowflake

*

autumn morning
cold finds
a tooth’s crack

*
ANTIQUES store window
autumn leaves reflect
over old metal

*

winter morning
a tree that killed its children
waves at me

*
October schoolbus
autumn leaves board
in a hurry

*

asking what number
snowstorm this is
no one knows

*
autumn morning
the carp turn
slower circles

*

under canal leaves
disgust a century old
wedding ring smolders

*

waking in cold
to write of coldness
warms me

*

autumn crickets
a tempo
tells a story

*

autumn crickets:
imagine dying
without loneliness

*

funeral champagne
tiny bubbles stroke
forgotten places

*
reading obits
an unseen jet rumbles
towards no one’s home

*
in time

the pleasures of time
replace the pleasures
of place

*
my old school
my stomach rumbles
on its stone

*

the kid eating stones
on the playground
is a bird

*
the only thing
weirder than words
what they replace

*

a leaf falls
in the cemetery
a sort of Thank You

*

Van Gogh
freezes the cornfield
before winter

*

Van Gogh's cornfields
just before winter
forever

*

Van Gogh's paintings
lose color every year…
the snakeskins no one finds


*

missing each other
by mere eons
you and God

*

museum room
full of paintings the feeling
we just missed God

*
weather report
from behind icy fingers
on her nipples

*
snowstorm
all the infidelities
need rescheduling

*
Indian summer
an affair that promised to end
shops for skis

*

we visit you
in a cemetery
to talk about debt

*

dead winter
on my dad’s grave a twenty
under a rock

*

winter morning
you wake and your lover
is years away

*

winter morning
all the lovers on this bus
look like boxers

*

winter morning
lost coffees left on buses
tell us their names

*
winter to spring
a bus kiosk’s plexiglas
scratched like home

*
a real home
even the diamond
has scratches

*

autumn light
the clock turns backwards
when we do

*
autumn leaves
I can’t decide
on a collage

*
winter night ocean
still growing colors
in abalone

*
buried love
the night ocean
colors abalone

*

buried love
the night ocean
mothers pearl

*

visiting Van Gogh
feeling all the purple
we aren't

Tuesday

The rain was out in the street
making collages. 

People indoors make collages,
and I don't want to think
first world problems
of time like Proust. Look at their
hands ripping the ages
out of books which stood
for no one has the permission
to steal my pages
when we were kids
and every library had
at least one gorgon.

Let us paste time down
over other time and see.
The mind likes to see things
just ripped out like that,
the strange contours

of a body discovering
how it is a body,

if never quite why.

The collage at night
replaces the dog-eared
lover, a book we were currently
reading, which seems to wonder now
if we would sacrifice it
in this way. For art or some other
abstraction. Just how much
should I trust you, the book
seems to be saying under
its borrowed breath, as we hold it
close, whisper promises
to protect and preserve
what will slowly die
and only be brought back
to partial life by willful destruction.

What we will not tell it:
it is only certain pieces of you
that I will want and those
for the way they will brush
new-torn strangeness.

Monday

You said yesterday was the first day
of autumn everything. It was not. Today is.
Am I a breeze in your mind
as you are in mine? This window glass
through which I watch you is ancient,
possibly as old as Lincoln's forehead,
making wavy gravy of the landscape.
I wanted to send you some old art
along with its resident silverfish. Autumn
prepares to mount its exhibitions. You know
that usually means sex. Art workers
are usually oversexed and on ghosts.
Ghosts cannot harm us. (I would that
they could.) Today, I asked autumn what
she thinks of you, and it was all under her breath,
like a Ouija board. Just push the planchette
so we can get this over, get into bed.

Sunday

Each person is a cup of ghosts.
Each person like a spoon in a warmth
you can stir and drink close to sleep.
A white square in the museum is useful.
A black square in the museum is useful.
You mostly stir the way birds do
around the museum. You listen to the grass
move through walls, without seeing.
You say the word Sunday to hear
the shape it takes. Someone blows glass
far away, thinking as of a child
who will be your first reflection?

Wow! I'm Always Happy When I Find Something Like This...

Sue me, Ironman bro-fans, but Robert Downey Jr. was just fresher back when he was a Democrat.

Dream cast. Wonder if I'll love the movie as much if I watch it again. It's been so many years. Loved it back then. Hope it holds up.

Gum

I wake up in the night, worried about how to get rid of gum. I fear nothing will vaporize gum but a white hot star. I worry about our ignorance. If you put it in a mere earthly incinerator, the wet gum of a mouth will just scream and writhe and turn and pop and then crawl away. Just as Daniel came with a spring in his step out of that Biblical oven. It will lie on the street, charred, and wait for a really low mouth, for little hands to pick it up and pop it in. It might be a child. Or an art dwarf like Lautrec. And if you bury it deep in the earth, it will hold all our cells and spit in those brain-like grooves, and with the weight of all the trash above, pockets will seal over that DNA like amber over 99 million year old ants caught in the act of inter-species fornication. There is no solution. We should have never started with gum. You might swallow it, but then it's going to follow the great Excremental Highway to the sea. Think of all the people who throw their gum into the ocean. Right off cruise ships and PVC rafts made to look like a box of Crayola Crayons.You just know sea cucumbers are mating with our gum at the bottom of the sea. How do you sleep at night?  You probably don't even believe gum has genes, but at the beginning of creation a bunch of water bubbles "got" genes. They had nothing at the beginning. Just a dark dream and a fiction about themselves they told themselves constantly until it became true. The way you can hear gum talking, even when you stop chewing it. So it begins.

Van Gogh's Long Drive Home Haiku

cops in darkness
drive and smile
at other cops

*

if a tree falls
in the forest…
fireflies

*

sunflowers…
all the faces
born to travel

*

night cops in cars
wait for darkness
to well up

*

complaining about
carbon footprints he swats
a bee with newspaper

*

slow down your walk
until it’s lovemaking
air your partner

*

watching waves
on the beach
in a cup

*

morning fog
the old zinc bucket
behind everything

*

spring rain
the graffiti of dead boys
looks new again

*

the funeral
only the dead man
knows everyone

*

night beach
ancient female
thunder

*

all night
dark waves crash saying
she  she  she

*

leaving the gym
still dark
inside my body

*

even your eyelids
taste her
crashing morning waves

*

3 a.m. gym
a few satyrs
frown at each other

*

August street
children and flies
bug a dead cat

*

Christmas snow
cats glower
at carolers

*

naked cop
without his gun
feels naked

*

making the best
of a bad century
Mae West

*

everyone sees
the rain fall but no one
sees it rise

*

no longer calling
the last crickets
listen

*

all the past days–
are they tight sardines
or gone clouds

*

sardine tin–
death makes
strange bedfellows

*

old man
staring at a tin of sardines
remembers an orgy

*

long drive home
headlights narrow
his feeling

*

an apple
so perfect
my hunger fades

*

dark river
chuckles on stone steps
all night long

*

old men piss
slow at racetrack urinals
dreaming of speed

*

night horsetrack
the odds of everything
hide in a fog

*

young soldiers dead…
on a battlefield crows jingle
their good luck charms

*

rehab clinic
at dawn the erections
dream of home

*

too tired to explain
he gets another tattoo
instead

*

in the bar
he lets his tattoos
do all the work

*

bar’s alpha
even his arm cast
collects phone numbers

*

breeze in night’s screen door:
he watches dark willows
change clothes like women

*

after the crash
his shoes stayed on the back porch
all winter

*

small wings
in the candle wax
summer night

*

summer night
the kitchen’s cricket
getting closer

*

kitchen-trapped cricket
pretends not to care
he’s dateless

*

some dates
just end badly   a cricket
in a kitchen

*

be gentle
with our kitchen’s cricket
the dateless wonder

*

summer crickets
under the stars
dateless wonders

*

night fishing
a cigarette glows
twice

*

the best part
of being a cricket
you’re never lost

*

horny crickets
all night tell
absolutely anyone

*

Sunday dawn
crickets who struck out
finally shut up

*

he sprays his mom’s
favorite perfume on her ashes
before guests

*

my dead mother
atomizing
in my memory

*

summer hookup
she makes love to his tattoos
not him

*

watching sparrows
not knowing
what i am

*

a tugboat
far below this hill
slowly pulls my mind

*

freezing night
a far dog barks
at lowness

*

a loon’s cry…
dead friends
listen through me

*

deep ocean
dreamless sharks
made of time

*

no one left
she talks
to the house

*

morning fog
freshens the graveyard
behind town

*

deer in the yard
a ninety-year-old
raps on the glass

*

a psych textbook
titled YOUR PROJECTIONS
ABOUT THE MOON

*

she comes home
from the library
younger with grass stains

*

a man jumps
from a bridge some birds
briefly join him

*

we talk
behind its back
the childless apple

*

dawn branches
a bunch of birds call bullshit
on night

*

night auction
more chairs
than his funeral

*

flea market
checking each link
in a stranger’s necklace

*

balloons trapped
in a hospital room
barely breathing

*

husband to husband–
all the picture frames
she gives away

*

rain on the roof
a story fainter
every year

*

polite smiles
people give milk glass
as they pass

*

deep under
the alphabet
the animals

*

the only one
children love in a graveyard
the snowman

*

we pass the cemetery
and think
no porch light

*

August cicadas
our ice cream
shedding its skin

*

after feeding pigeons
she feeds the coworkers
on Ambien

*
separate beds
separate checkbooks
same young lover

*

swimming in
the dead neighbor’s pool
her moonlight’s nicer

*

breaking up
still, they smile that their bed
has a limp

*

autumn sunlight
even the leaves know
they’re toast

*

in your sleep
you talk to years
without their skin

*

not a total loss:
Gettysburg
National Park

*

your death too
is the leaves
changing color

*

hating the world so
while he’s held in warm arms,
her lover the chihuahua

*

such angelic carving
a big bed goes traveling
divorce by divorce

*

ginkgo leaves
things won’t say
how old they are

*

after a week
of constant snow
expect mice

*

some words can squeeze
through holes much smaller
than themselves

*

the things
mice must think about holes
squeezing through!

*

two floors down
a murder
sounds like a dance

*

boy’s first time
and she’s pregnant…
deer taste moonlight

*

a touch
on the shoulder a leaf
in the graveyard

*

it’s raining outside
leaking inside
we’re making love

*

sniffing his shirt
left here years ago
a Golden Fleece is born

*

a swampy new love
she doesn’t check her mailbox
for days

*

animal eyes
in the zoo thinking man
this is a long visit

*

a breakup:
don’t click, call or visit
beloved emptiness

*

her mother’s hand
on the old man’s hand
that painted a rice grain

*

on his grave
we leave a geranium
armpit stank he loved

*

quiet house
cicadas louder
than the t.v. news

*

waking up
worried about bussing
my dream’s plates

*

abandoned orchard
deer thank no one
for cool moonlight

*

the sunflowers
nothing here
is old

*

Arles tour bus
sunflowers on the side
lost faces in windows

*
a small girl
is in love with sunflowers
half her age

*

brushing it off
an aroused firefly
lighting her breast

*

Arles
blue sky
begins to hiss

*

night sky
stars heat up
the sky boils

*

jar of fireflies
on a windowsill Vincent paints
Starry Night

*

U.S. puzzle toy
some wooden states
keep falling out

*

waking to no name
the cream rises
over the milk

*

fireflies
in a paper cup
still warm

*

after a late walk
your foliage
next to mine

*

frog’s splash
then endless commentary
of toads

*

how young they seem–
dust motes turning
in sunbeams

*

streetlight in fog
a bat passes by
dreaming hello

(so that's what's up)

I love folk art.

Why does this remind me of Raymond Pettibon?

If it's under ten bucks and this weird, I can't resist. Father is a what....C.H.U.D.?

I Couldn't Resist This Little Trio of Sculptures by a Folk Artist Named Gaines

Gaines? I did like a two second Google search and didn't see anything. But I didn't really care, because the pieces were so charming.

They're miniatures and they remind me of traveling in the family a la Russell Edson. Mom has a bird in the center of her skull; so does junior. Dad is always leveling his head to make sure his mind is okay.

I wish they were larger, but you can't have everything. The boy is missing one of his wings, but I suppose you just make up a story to explain that. They'll be good muses in my writing station upstairs.

They're totally the sort of carvings I'd expect to see in the Visionary Arts Museum. I felt a little twirl in my heart the moment I saw them.

Dorian Hurricane Relief

The Bahamas really took a hit from Dorian. I bet that single digit death toll being given out right now is low. Would be wonderful and miraculous were it not far off the actual number, but unless evacuation efforts were nonpareil, it's most likely way off. And, regardless, entire communities and their resources have vanished. So huge relief is needed.

An article at VOX giving out a few caveats.

And the Times offers this advice.

The Distance from Shep Shapiro to Medardo Rosso

I've been enjoying learning about folk artists lately.

I purchased a little Shep Shapiro sculpture today, largely because it's so creepy as well as sumptuous of surface.

Folk artists are particularly interesting to me when they do weird, sui generis things. Shapiro and his apple carvings would fall into that category. Granted, others have carved faces in apples since time immemorial, and there are those dried apple dolls and little kitchen witches, which I think were originally a Scandinavian tradition. But Shapiro's apple people end up reminding me of Medardo Rosso's sculpture (one of my last visits to New England coincided with a great Rosso show). I suppose it's that epoxy resin technique he brought to the table.

Shep is gone now, since 1993.

If you're looking for an interesting folk artist to collect, Shep Shapiro is a good bet. His pieces go for relatively very little right now on Ebay and similar sites. Yet you can see the prices incrementally edging up and you can see the interest remains strong. Probably because his is an outre art, and the wabi-sabi element in his creations is strong.

I think I wanted this one because the figure looks so evil and will suggest ideas for dark fiction.

Here's another weird Shapiro, face submerged in wax.

And one of Shapiro's girls.

The People Who Transform Culture "Too Quickly" Are a Breed Often Hunted to Extinction

Page from a School "Autograph Book," Public School #164, Brooklyn, NY (1944)

I Had Fiction Published at Visual Verse

a little while back and somehow missed it.

The mag tells you that you have to check back (they don't send notifications of acceptance).

Challenge journals like this one are fun.

The journal serves up an image and you can write poetry or fiction based on that.

Mine was a few images back. 

I'll have to check in and catch up with the journal.

Many thanks to the editor.

A Long and Varied Dream

Mostly early Goghiana.