Today you forget again
You stay with forgetting
(again)
Today you forget again
You stay with forgetting
(again)
You taste forgetting
Again
You taste
Forgetting
You taste forgetting
(again)
You stay with forgetting
(again)
You forget forgetting
You taste forgetting
(again)
(again)
You taste forgetting
You forget forgetting
You taste forgetting
(again)
Today
you
forget
(again)
At the nine and one-half week mark
Your foot is still swollen
Your ankle looks like a loaf of rye bread baked
On a winter night and placed inside a blanket
As winds howl through cracks in the walls.
Or something meaty and coarse
Illiterate peasants tear between their teeth
Marching beneath a mercenary banner
Fighting a war for glory and power
Though not their own.
The instructions are:
Elevate, ice, and exercise,
Form the alphabet three times a day with your foot.
Do not dangle your foot for hours above any battle scenes
Celebrated in embroidered tapestries
Warming cold castle walls.
For the last month you have worn an air cast
Made of plastic and plastic fabric
Following six weeks of plaster and then fibreglass
Monstrosities.
You march beneath the banner of a cane. This is next.
The electricity goes out. You push past a blond woman on a horse
Climbing the stairs. She’s dressed like a fish.
Or so it seems with glimmers of moonlight passing through cracks
In the roof.
You rescue two children.
This is not possible you are on crutches.
Oliver Cromwell’s army is marauding through the streets
Looking for Irish to enslave or decapitate.
You tear down a tapestry showing Puritans Arriving in America
And roll up the children.
You put a loaf of fresh bread between them
Dragging the tapestry to the corner of the Great Hall
Behind a counter with pastries, a cash register, and postcards.
You find your crutches.
Your air cast is light and removable
For a month and a half you wore what felt like anvils
And told yourself you weren’t going crazy.
This doesn’t really bother me you said.
You tell yourself you won’t be captured.
At the fracture clinic they said you would walk in
On September 8th with a cane and a limp.
Your foot fits in your unlaced walking shoe.
Oliver Cromwell is trying on wooden shoes.
Where did he get those?
He laughs a high-pitched laugh.
His Puritan followers board a ship for the Caribbean
Leading captives bound neck to neck.
You walk right through them and shudder with cold.
You limp into the sunshine
Stopping at your neighbourhood cafe.
In 1981
The Phantom of Liberation
Paid me a visit
Commanding
A sketch
I obliged
Thinking that was all
That was all
There was to it
Hello and goodbye
To the Phantom of Liberation
But the Phantom
Must have said
Eat my body
I complied
Thinking that was all
That was all
There was to it
Hello and goodbye
To the Phantom of Liberation
They found a foreign body
In my heart
And said it’s spread
To your brain
And your wings
I said I don’t have
Any wings
They said I was covered with wings
Beating ferociously
Refusing to stop
And bothering the neighbours
I asked if I should move
To a cemetery
They wanted to know
If I was trying to escape
Liberation
Or the conditions that require
Liberation
I listened to their question
Thinking that was all
That was all
There was to it.
I realized (too late)
We had left alchemy
Out of the equation
Configuring
Stars, pathways, and
Heartbeats.
I hastened to manipulate
The voluminous footnotes to my
Apology.
Rounding and pulling
Like working with clay.
Evaporating
Like working with love.
My apologies began
To glisten.
It is never too late
To listen.
The lovesick man
although looking inward
is watching modern warplanes roar past.
Perhaps aiming for the cities and civilians
of Gaza,
Guernica,
Wounded Knee,
Nagasaki…
Nobody
can sing the blues
like
Blind Willie McTell
Nobody
can sing the blues
like
Blind Willie McTell
Digital collage: Details from Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ have been superimposed over photographs of rubble in Guernica and Gaza. The face of radical pacifist Martin Luther King Jr. is layered within a painting by antiwar artist George Grosz titled ‘The Lovesick Man’ (1916). Battlefield terrain from World War One frames the George Grosz painting.
“Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell...” from the Bob Dylan song Blind Willie McTell.
The copyright of original images remains with the holders of same. Under fair use provisions I have composed new work for non-commercial purposes and commentary.
First a bit of background: I’ve been wearing a cast on my leg and foot for over 40 days. Xrays tomorrow. I’ll find out how well the 7 screws (and my body’s healing processes) have done their job.
Had surgery on May 31st. Pushed through and had my book launch on June 12th with Never More Together. My friend William Beauvais played classical guitar. Mother Nature cooperated during a week of rain & gave us a glorious evening on the ‘Tango Palace Coffee Company’ patio. I was exhausted yet enjoyed it all.
During the last 44 days regular life has come to a standstill. Getting from point A to B is laborious. Summer plans changed. One notable illusion dissipated, a couple of very hopeful (creative) ideas germinated, names and faces came (via telephone and in person) out of the past, I met many kind people and had interactions I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’ve come to the simple conclusion that (living in) the universe gives us experiences and it’s up to us to make of them what we will.
And yet I’m also puzzled by synchronicity. The why of what, the what of when, the when of why. This seems to exist of its own volition. Unless the self has the power to mysteriously will coincidental events into existence. Paging Dr. Jung…
The first four drawings from my sketchbook are from a planned series showing facial profiles as well as a spiral motif. Again I return to Jung’s quote that in times of crisis humanity returns to primal symbols. The final page is post-accident and shows the symbol but not a profile. It has a different feel to it. The drawings from ‘before’ seem to be describing an immersion, or perception of reality. The most recent drawing seems to be aiming. Has ‘experiencing perception’ been replaced by a direct line of reception? Is this what pain does?
The streetcar stops beneath a railroad overpass
Snow still on the ground.
Melody stirring a pot of homemade soup
In the apartment she shares with her mother
Near the courthouse.
A scratchy sofa
Something forgettable on TV
I pass through her kindness like a boat cut loose.
How can I prevent
What I don’t know will happen?
Her eyelids lower
Contemplating a surreal image,
Her laughter like the northern lights,
Her smile
A Maya Deren film.
Jealous ghosts
Lay in wait on darkened country roads
Rising against immortal young gods
Speed-yearning into the future.
Does one simple gesture reconfigure a timeline?
Take the second bowl. The cauldron of vocation.
Leave town with her though you hardly know her.
Study poetry or dowsing,
Wash the ghosts away,
Listen to the northern lights sing into her,
Singing blacktopped roads into a charcoal labyrinth.
Sandra Dee & Bobby Darin at the Oscars, 1964, with ice cream and a Camus quote.
Sandra Dee & Bobby Darin at the Oscars, 1964.
American warplanes spray the jungles of Vietnam with chemicals, 1960s.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
– Albert Camus
Albert Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our time.” Source: Wikipedia.
Bobby Darin performing his hit song ‘Dream Lover’ in 1959.
Bobby Darin singing his antiwar song ‘Simple Song of Freedom’ in 1969.
Freckled with sparrows
Thrushes for tresses
The hedge-girl turns
The dial of the moon
Marie Noight A’Shunning
Through the rushes running
Call her name
When the night is long
Then she’ll shout
the stars down
John W. Sexton’s mind was poured into his body in 1958; since then his life has been dedicated to poetry.
How Marie Noight A’Shunning came to be is a transatlantic astral event (Canada, dreamtime, Ireland). I heard this name in my sleep and in my half-sleep wrote it down. I posted on Facebook about being puzzled; who she was, what she represented. When John W. saw her name he felt an immediate response. Translating these feelings into poetry. My images create a parallel narrative exploring Marie’s identity.
Replacing 20 framed ink drawings with prints for my upcoming book launch & a small exhibition while simultaneously disintegrating thousands of pages and surfaces & putting out the final clear bags on Thursday & rushing to teach art classes Saturday morning/ my mind a blur flipping between channels like an old TV & slipping on a stair-top landing, immediately knowing (and seeing and feeling) the obvious while wrenching back & ribs/ instinctively the body ‘autocorrecting’ a dangerous backwards fall.
Cell phone/ front pocket dragging my prone body to collect the charger/ beginning this brief journey through paramedics, technicians & doctors, nurses & aides performing occupationally with good cheer & diligence (Merlin serving a favoured mead) & as insistence loudly replaces numbed haze they bring me white pills & your face appears softly like Visions of Johanna, watery tears streaming down my cheekbones/ a young physician equating the emotional to the physical.
Sanka instant coffee the next morning at breakfast, almost Hippocratic, like the reflection of a temple with seven new screws holding my reconfigured ankle together.
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