poemimage

Where text meets image. Where the visual intersects the literary. Often posting 1st drafts and editing in (almost) real time.

Category: Artist GIF

Traveling Backwards in The Field of Time: A Romantic Comedy

In light of ‘the body electric…’

In light of ‘the body electric’ in the poetry of Walt Whitman.

In light of the poetry of Walt Whitman.

In light of the body.

In light of the shadow.

In light of the shadow a question.

In deepest shadow The Leisure Class.

Like a Bird’s Crazy Beak in a Silly Cartoon

Shapes animated like a bird’s crazy beak in a silly cartoon

remind me of a seagull

blabbering at somebody, somebody who? maybe… Daffy Duck!

He comes to mind for a not complicated reason.

For some reason (in whatever year since 2014 it was) I made this GIF using the book cover.

The gold & ochre jungle leaves remind me of a B&W Humphrey Bogart movie.

In real life Humphrey Bogart was gold & ochre though some say more of a pleasing technicolour.

In real life the book is B&W & printed on cream-coloured paper.

I stand in line at the (big box) grocery store behind a guy with trees printed on his sky blue arm.

Something is in progress in the centre of the store

if the centre of the store is even there anymore.

The numbers on my receipt (dancing a Latin dance)

signify symmetry and imbalance

simultaneously, as if an omen, as if

smoke rising from an oil lamp, as if

in flight through my psyche still there

or following a jagged shoreline

to a river, thrashing in the centre of the store

if the centre of the store is even there anymore

if the river, voluminous as thunder & thrashing

hypnotized is even there anymore.

Linocut Print (of an apple) in ‘Nevermore Together’ by Steven McCabe

edge, ledge & hedge

The proportional yet abstract face made of shapes like cactus or flowers,

perhaps a mask in commedia dell’arte,

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or a book describing the famous wonders of the world,

thin as a snowflake, balanced on one edge,

tipping to one side diagonally & dampened by droplets

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sliding down a stained blurry windowpane

pooling on the ledge, osmosis dampening

cream-coloured paper, flecked & rippled like grief or papyrus –

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inscriptions of blue ink (messages of mysterious flavour)

to devour, to decipher (imagine the Hanging Gardens of Babylon)

& heaving your bag of magical tools to your shoulder

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building a a sentient tunnel

disappeared beneath the waterfall of a viridian hedge foaming upon the lawn,

blotted by twilight & in the jasmine-scented shade shadowy moss

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envelops a stone, upright, sunk into fertile soil &

inscribed with symbols of a fertile flavour –

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I’m not being sentimental.

Face: mouth, nose, eye, and (tilted) eyebrow.

page 68

I opened the frozen container of orange juice with a can opener. Tasted the frozen orange juice crystals and pulled the razor-sharp, metal lid slowly out of my mouth. Blood poured over my lips. I remembered it was sharp. The guy who told me Picts painted blue symbols all over their bodies said the mouth healed faster than any other part of the body. We were listening to Pink Floyd’s Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict. I said, ‘What is a Pict?’

from my book Meme-Noir (2019)

Harrison Street (3 GIFs)

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A summer art project: Sculpture, ‘The Cosmos’ created with youth. You are seeing half of the sculpture. Plaster gauze, rope, acrylic paint. Also balloons. I don’t know why exactly I superimposed this image over a photograph of Harrison Street. Perhaps curvilinear shapes address time. Or the shapes are somehow ancestral. Perhaps such ‘continual vegetal designs’ balance the angularity of buildings while adding human dimensions of roundness and multi-dimensionality. I don’t know. It just seemed the thing to do.

The String Tied To Your Finger

I remembered night.

How the night air felt sacred

like a string tied to my finger

reminding me

to breathe night

in the fragrance of crushed black flowers,

in the fragrance of sacred flowers.

We also the same

Blue Night (when all is lost )

Which way to the bread line? The mountain is a machine. The animals are leaving Rome. Tell the Pharaoh nothing (I must have been thinking about the current situation – whatever it is).

I accidentally created a B&W version of this GIF which doesn’t register the text (not enough contrast) so there are blank spaces which is ‘sort of’ interesting in terms of future considerations.