noir!
Grain.
Valley of vitals
Let us walk to the meadow where blue oaks bloom.
There we can hold each other like weavings,
and stretch beyond our endless toil
of capturing expression as instance and self as other.
Here we may bestow the deepest praise of living;
Not in observation, but outside of identity.
I burn and entrench as one part of you.
So then may I swim with all of my muster,
through and in between foxtail hatches?
We’ll gather the sorrel and sip on bays,
and all the while continue with the valley way.
For days now the waves have come loud,
and the crowns of daises turn and bow,
as we empty our darlings from their nests,
we unfasten the knot’s last loosened ends,
to sing the song that says it all.
You are the rain that fills me full,
and with the tinder in your eyes you torch my soul.
Colony
The flowers you placed behind your lover’s ear
During the crispness of the golden-light hour
Are merely illusions
You may have watched attentively
The locomotion of mist meeting soil
Humiliating all that breathes
And again you see
Reverberating nothing of great sustenance
To you at least
A threshing gesture - flailing symbolism
Your intention screams like sawdust into oblivion
But no grounds for it do you contain
None in the soil nor in your beloved acid rain.
Your own beating pulse does not constitute worth
For all was not once your legion stone
Remember the throne
Recall the flesh
And that fat once lay in the gene of this here land
The native entrails filled your gullet whilst you pounded
Hammer into nail and then again into sand
This plunder accumulated like counterfeit marbles
Pulverized by man, housed in Christ’s bloody garment
And right under his tongue lay the words called deceit.
Your adolescence dances and dies in smiles
But they have no value here
Kissing the unholy stitch after stitch
The very dais of being appears
Then offsprings return
They feed here, breed here, become dust
Nearer to what is not sheer compulsion
Nor a shrewd notion of honor
There, fear presents itself
By some vague patriarch
He erects Invisible structures for many
But as crumbling may come like the cancer you are
It is us, the other
That brought you sanity.
The thief runs all night in his efforts to veer away
From the prized gluttony in his sight
Like the architect
He ends in spinning himself
Needle and web and thread
From the abdomen of his widows
Presenting the littlest notion of what it is that made him say
I am not dead
I am not mad
I am simply the flower being placed by the hand.
Wanderer
Here is the lake and there is the flood
It is only the land who knows what pores lay closed
Waiting to be drenched in love and anguish by the other
All at once, filling the night’s sky with mournful moans
Shrub, flesh, prey- we turn into landslides
Entrenched within her autonomy
Movement and becoming are rendered mystified
Their raging paths seem to have no particular end in sight
They may not cross
A lens that carries our images magnifies the distance
Of an arrival announcing its departure
Whether figurative or imaginative
My bones recognize these tremors
And shake they do
Away from what is sturdy and sensible
Because this is the nature of me in the machine
Distance, dissect, denounce,
Wean
Any shadow that plays itself on a hopeful wall
Wails about the workings beyond itself in that very cast
This is the instrument we’ve been learning, isn’t it?
A smoke screen between the grievous flesh and abstraction we exist
So please forgive me for I am a wanderer
Still learning to track the weakest prey
Preparing for the covering of sweetness
That comes when innocence dies with the soul.
Coral/Canopy.
relent, release.
enter my lungs without my reason
vacate with your presence pieces still woven
to my inner workings
your lips move nearer
the needle and thread of your eyes
now drawing deeper into me
from the inside out
tangling me in this basket
that I never meant to fashion
your buoyancy is what keeps this basket atop
the river seeking the body
charging through stone and brush
just to feel a colder depth
with quenched senses she returns
to the mountain top where
the feeding always begins and ends.
“Not always blessed are the would-be peacemakers, if they rely too much on exhortation and take no interest in discovering environmental sources of antagonism. If incongruent with the facts of the real world, their hortatory efforts may intensify rather than abate the human frictions they deplore. Naive liberalism (political and religious) tends to deny the existence and neglect the occurrence of any valid basis for antagonistic relations between human beings. By implication, if not always explicitly, it attributes conflict to mere human perversity. It avoids the question of whether what passes for a character defect has deeper cases - whether or not the ability to practice brotherly love, self-restraint, and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind depends on such environmental prerequisites as low population pressure and relative absence of civilization-made extrametabolites. By ignoring these issues, such liberal ideology probably nurtures its opposites: those ideologies that regard conflict as inherent in the nature of society or the nature of man.” -Overshoot by William R. Catton
I shot some b&w last summer in Europe and found a really interesting pattern in some of my shots on this one role. Follow the line.
