This is a painted mask.
This is also a painted mask.
This is a complimentary cookie in a wax paper bag stapled to a brown paper bag.
I posted a few days ago about the cow in the time machine
a few minutes later
I sat outside a cafe on a bench waiting for take-out food.
I read about a cow in the book I grabbed on the way out
then again on the previous page
then I looked to see the title of the chapter.
This is…synchronicity.
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.
My father brought home FBI WANTED POSTERS his friend, the agent, gave him. I spread them out on the bed and frightened myself with aliases, previous crimes, and last known locations. What is white slavery? He has a bazooka? The square inked fingerprints looked like Neolithic patterns connected to the criminal’s inner mind. Photographs were specific yet vague. He could be at the music store, in line at the Frozen Dairy stand. If a car slowed down, surely one of the most wanted had followed me – possibly for hours.
from my book Meme-Noir (2019)
I meet an old friend for coffee and cake
we discuss the symmetry of
consequence, the coincidence of
symmetry.
After we stand on the corner
I visit two bookstores
near one another in The Annex,
mostly second-hand
books I will thumb through
a hundred times (knock on wood)
finding inspiration
sifting subconscious & mythological elements
a chapter here, chapter there
traipsing the curvilinear imagination.
Birds fly low magnetized by subterranean quartz
wings whoosh, swooshing
miraculously, above the roar of wind,
I hear their soft instruction.
A young person, in motion a river,
photographs the books
over my shoulder.
Humming a tune
I contemplate pages
on the subway train.
Or so it seems, the way she steadies her phone
visible out the corner of my eye –
my station approaches.
I said this image is four, maybe, or five-thousand years old
she said I saw the books.
She said something, maybe, what
she read or might be reading.
Maybe she mentioned Byzantium.
I understood barely anything almost nothing,
with her speaking through a mask,
the subterranean ambient noise,
additional my normal hearing trouble.
She repeats a word, I tilt my head
like a bird
darting
the door embellished with golden mosaic tiles,
sliding closes in my face.
A vast dimension
composed of light-years
descends upon me.
The sound of her mystery words
accentuates her aura
like a river in motion.
I repeat rhyming words
the consequence of symmetry
the symmetry of coincidence.
Thank you, she said.
I dart for the door again
climbing tiled stairs
beneath vast archways
tasting cake.
Birds swoop above & below a quartz-river
flowing from the sun.
The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology and Fiction by
Jesse M. Gellrich –
Sun, Moon and Standing Stones by John Edwin Wood –
Inside the Neolithic Mind by David Lewis-Williams & David Pearce –
A Search for Cave and Canyon Art: Voices From the Stone Age by Douglas Mazonowicz – (signed by the author)
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