The Building of a Homeless Culture by Steven McCabe
by Steven McCabe
A memory is feeling a curved length of polished wood static in its
placement
Stars distant and alive except the ones that are dead
Memory swims in a dream montage seeing with a child’s eye
Thought seeing thought
Memory falling between stars turning round and round a leaf
Fell into my hands come from another world
First create refugees
Fleeing self
And the comforts of home
Home cannot provide
Take the small things wrapped in carved lines
And harden them to the touch demanding they be held
In the safety of a home
Within self
Self disappears
Defined too loosely
Or explicitly wrapped in curved lines hardening to the touch
A Matisse canary
A Dufy splash
Even Mondrian felt a brushstroke as tactile
Never drying to the eye
Never on a wall screaming ‘Get Out’
It’s not the painters who beckon the homeless
It’s the blank space
Where a mirror belongs
Mirrors floating in a rowboat
All sizes and shapes
Reflecting sky never drying on the wall
Smile man
Slyly slide girl/ woman
Softshoe lovers cleaning crevices
Washing hair
This is the small slope children holding hands
Leaping into cloud
Banks of cloud
Happily knee-deep
Later seeing
Reflection in the safe place
This is not me
This is not you
Yet we stay
The camel blood dormant in our jangle-tasseled heels
Homeless in our fortress
Like the trucks bringing fruit from Afghanistan
The Building of a Homeless Culture from Hierarchy of Loss – Ekstasis Editions
poemimage 
Really these have a beautiful etching like quality. Are you considering publishing any of these?
Thank you. And regarding publishing, perhaps. I”m selecting drawings for a poet’s November chapbook and might use some of these. Over the summer (when I disappeared from this blog) I completed over a hundred small linocuts which are ‘in the pipes’ with a publisher for a wordless graphic novel.
I would love to see that! All my little drawings started out with the idea of writing tall tales and I am finding a way to put them together. But in the meantime I am sending out little prints to folks here and there. If you’d like a few, send me an address at sarahreneevaleri@gmail.com
I would love to see prints of your wonderful drawings.
These are done in a Moleskin ‘accordion’ book. So it’s a long flowing ‘narrative.’ I was influenced by reading about the Druids and even earlier; Neolithic culture…as well as a Ronettes kick I went on for a while listening to their videos and somehow constructing a mythology around them. Maybe I’ll use these ‘all together’ at some point since I ended up selecting different work for the chapbook project with Penn Kemp.
Lovely drawings Steve – good luck with publishing…
Thank you John. Not sure what form these will take but I think publishing them somehow makes sense.
Makes sense to me…