Traveling Backwards in The Field of Time: A Romantic Comedy







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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.