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.
I told them I was no expert but they signed the contract anyway.
The flight to the cave in the mountains was so long it included five meals.
When it came time to adjust the settings they told me I would be the operator.
They asked me over the intercom what I saw.
I said, ‘A cow.’
They said, A bull belonging to Genghis Khan?
A bull breathing fire?
A bull pulling a chariot across the sky?
I said, ‘A cow in a barn
watching Sonny and Cher sing The Beat Goes On.’
They said, ‘Adjust the settings.’
I did. They said, ‘Where are you?’
I said, ‘I see Rasputin.’
They said, ‘What is he doing?’
I said, ‘Building a time machine.’
Last night I walked home at eleven. Dark and cool. The streets and cafes were busy – lots of children.
Turning left, then right, I skirted the park. On my street I was startled by a sudden voice behind a large bush. A woman was photographing earwigs (feeding?) in the centres of daisies.
I’m taking care of two cats and one decided to make noise at 4:45 am to let me know she expected to be fed. I lay there trying to sleep and heard the phrase ‘in singularity the flowers explode.’ I thought it needed something so added ‘in neon mystery.’
I was a dishwasher at the Executive Motor Hotel on King Street. The waitress with early 1960s-style hair, who was, maybe, 28, said, ‘If you want to come over after your shift I live nearby.’ Maggie May by Rod Stewart was playing on the radio. Seriously it was. At the time I was reading the writings of Antonin Artaud – founder of the Theatre of Cruelty. He claimed to own a walking stick stained with drops of the blood of Jesus Christ. I was trying to connect dots on a map that didn’t exist. I partook of the green, brown, and black herb. I partook of the artificial chariots. She was, maybe, 28.
from my book Meme-Noir (2019)
*
the key to here
pulled on a string slowly away
*
I didn’t even notice
*
The quiet sailor watches the Beatles play in the Kaiserkeller bar in 1960.
He listens to a song in time out of sync
composed for the Abbey Road album
in 1969.
A song born for the future –
silently asleep
in the silence of crystal stars.
He listens above the open sea
climbing a ladder made of coal
rising from the depths –
dreaming itself
into a structure
aimed into the obsidian sky.
Nearer the end than the beginning in my ‘wordless poem’ book Nevermore Together, the protagonist (who is nameless, well because…) escapes from a prison. The floor cracks – opening to a tunnel. A tunnel that whooshes him a very long and winding distance, sort of a ‘birth canal’ or portal. But he doesn’t reappear as a newborn. Perhaps, though, he engages the world in a ‘newly born’ fashion.
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,
*
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
*
sliding down a stained blurry windowpane
pooling on the ledge, osmosis dampening
cream-coloured paper, flecked & rippled like grief or papyrus –
*
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
*
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
*
envelops a stone, upright, sunk into fertile soil &
inscribed with symbols of a fertile flavour –
*
I’m not being sentimental.
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)
poemimage 