FOUND ART

COMING SOON TO THIS BLOG:

MATERIAL FROM MY FOUND ARCHIVES

THIS IS NOW AN IMAGE BLOG

No more words for awhile.
All photographs and artwork by J. Roivas (unless stated)

CLAUDE

By blowing gently over the tops, Claude could produce a strange array of notes from the ten bottles of varying sizes that were lined up on a small Flemish bond wall. Through the hedge could be seen the half built housing development project. Started no doubt by those who take advantage of the temporary nature that is the marketplace of speculation. This familiar Pompeii has now become an adventure playground for the local children. Huge vacant sewage pipes now rang with the echoes of pirate smugglers and Robin Hood outlaw style bands.

ELIZABETH'S VISION


There are 24 different types of violin shoulder rest 'on the market'
The propane stove sputtered then went out. Every time you fill up
a new bottle, you know that someday it'’s going to die. So you can
either sit there mourning it'’s loss, or clear the fire pit of leaves.
Brophy had decided to visit Elizabeth in hospital.

She blinks white in her private room
She is lighter than before

The corridors are dim and musty, his feet as he walks churn up the dry
flower petals. The dust is like a thick smoke. It becomes harder for him to
breathe, his eyes are stinging at the edges.
Pain begins to stab up her wrist. She lifts her arm and its like lifting an
empty mug that you thought was full. Why did her arm feel lighter?
Why did it bend like a feather when she waved it through the air?
(He wanted power on his knees)

The sackcloth and ashes that carried his sin
When God exploded a little piece lodged under our flesh
Sin/skin

“I read about you in the paper, I brought these

He rests the garden picked flowers on the bedside table next to
a jug of stagnant water.

" Thank you that'’s very kind, but I don'’t understand why you came here"

" I care about you that'’s why"
.
"I never met you before did I ?"

The dust had left its aridness at the back of his throat. He gave a sharp
cough, curling whips of dusty smoke floated from his open mouth.

"Factories have been built in the name of music, it could be so much more,
it all could be so much more".

She doesn't weep at the sight of her bandaged stump, but seems to drain
the reserves from her fractured being. And at that moment she becomes a
symbol of strength. Brophy breaks the skin on the water pouring himself
a drink.





A vibration starts somewhere at the center of him, it resonates to a louder pitch.
It grows higher and louder until the whole hospital is shaking.
It's coming alive, she thought.
The jug of stagnant water shudders off the table.
He instinctively stuck out his arm to save it and for a split second had been
unable to see his hand, misjudged his reach, shattering the jug with his knuckles.
The lights flickered then flashed brightly on. The air fans whirred into motion,
from on top of the roof clouds of dust were sent drifting across the orchard.
Like a toxic spray it lingered in the tree tops.

His hand is bleeding, a spatter drops on a pile of bandages at the Elisabeth's
bed. They coil themselves around him, first one leg then the other. He is being tightly
bound, wrapping his arms and waist.

"“Elizabeth, please help me"

"I can only feel the pain,"” she said

He pleaded with her again, before his mouth was covered by the strips of bandage.

"“You took my hand, what right did you have to maim me"”?

He can not speak so has to think and listen.
The bandages become another skin, sealing his face in an identical mask.
To all outward appearances he looks like himself, but the real one is now
underneath. This new layer knows how to function in the present framework.

A small hammer hits some where at the heart of things. An obese fist squeezes juice from the gristle lump. The quivering trumpet muffler announces the catastrophe, as the still-life fruit gallery opens it'’s contrite doors; a cameras eye follows my side step. I can'’t breath. I can‚'t move. I'm buried like a beach toy. Stewing in my own broth. Trapped in my own narrative. We will scrape the waxy fuzz from your shiny apple world.


Dear Elizabeth,


I feel you have unhooked the silence between us,
have demanded what might be a miracle. That day at the hospital I could
detect in your voice, at the end of your prolonged sentences; that you were
fighting your own irritating goliaths. The ammunition was prised out of the
pleats of memory. I can't tell you who to take aim at, it's hard to know what's
right and wrong anymore.
I tried to listen to your pain. Across the hall I could hear the spasms of congealed
sound, a commotion of stereos, a reception of cluttered fragments. I dwelt on just a
few of your words, the signals of your body and eyes. You spoke some more of your
pain. I was left behind, always trying to catch up. I heard the library paper rustle. I
heard the sigh of a snow boot. In your kitchen I heard the oil that lubricates the potatoes
creaking, hiss and spit in the saucepan. But I couldn't hear your pain.

FINLAY


She unplugged the phone to sever another level of communication, to further isolate herself from any situation that might increase the likelihood of a conflict. Ever since Elizabeth's accident the tension between their families and eachother had grow nearly to breaking point. The realization that now things were different, Elizabeth had lost a physical part of herself. For Miss Finlay this became like a force field that she could not go beyond. An emotional barrier that would not permit her to feel the other woman's pain. This had been the hallmark of their relationship.
Two years ago Miss Finlay had told her parents that she and Elizabeth were lovers.
"Look darling you're very young you've got your whole life ahead of you".
Her mother turned away sobbing into her hands.
He enclosed his wife in the crook of his arm, her face looked as if it was burrowing into his chest or else it was somehow being sucked in, absorbed by a greater power and authority.
"You're trying to destroy us"

She stands in the garden a green hose pipe lays stretched and uncoiled across the lawn. The colours soothe her, the yellows and greens of the tomatoes. Some resting red and swollen on the loamy earth drawing in the last rays of the evening. The leaves of the corn seem to visibly relax themselves and hang like tired arms.
The fanned out leaves of dusty purple cabbages, on which slugs have chewed intricate lace-work, are frozen in the scattered light. They resemble huge marzipan roses. The stillness here is comforting, it is not like the eerie calm of a factory that has ceased to function where the machines stand idle with a silence that is sinister and demanding.
It is the tranquility of things growing. Here there is a connectedness, a harmony that effects her self purpose. When she works in the garden the rhythm of the day changes. The forced acceleration of the city becomes intolerable. She knows her father has probably tried to call her by now. She resists the urge to plug-in the phone.

ELIZABETH


Betty is going to be fine Mr and Mrs Walters, all she needs is a good nights sleep

She is underneath the house playing with her dolls. Her mother's voice flys away
off the back step. It has been this way for a long time, the close distance.

Near yet so far so good god in heaven name that tune

That's a funny way of saying grace she thought looking first at her father, then her mother.
Her father nodded in approval and they all began their meal. Betty's father stabbed out his words.

The cockrels ill again

Why don't you take it to the vet suggested her mother


The rusted gate bends it's iron bones and creaks in sympathy
as if it knows of the images sent to haunt a childhood sleep.
The fevered heat of bronchial nights, a infant sickness that thickens
the air. Sweat wetted pillow and sheets.
The human dogs pace outside her windows.


Betty is 26, her mother says she is addicted to self sabotage.
Since the age of nineteen she has not kept a job more than six months.
Welfare classified her unemployable.
She can't handle responsibility her father says

THE HOSPITAL



A state of inertia has been reached, where the living appear to be dead. That'’s why there is
a fence around the hospital, to keep them out. A woman (on the inside) is walking in the orchard she is agitated as if she has misplaced something of importance. She picks up pieces of paper
examines them then lets them drop. You are glad there is a fence there, because you have an
unquenchable desire to be nursed. You turn and walk away aware that a feeling of uneasiness has crept in on the wind. It stops you from moving, compels your body to turn, to resist would mean tearing yourself in two. With fixed eyes you stare at the hospital, scrutinizing the rows of windows. As your eyes adjust to the mass of shadow at the back of one of the rooms, you can make out thin strips of light, brilliant white rods that spiral into the air like charmed snakes attaching themselves to some invisible framework. As more of them curl upwards the outline of a body is revealed.


A skin that preserves and mummify's, must this skin always be fused with linen with resins of blood and sawdust. We shall have to reclaim our bodies and minds from the canopic jars of modern medicine, for it has robbed us of the skill of self healing. In hospitals you are born in isolation "“I don'’t know these reanimated corpses, they are not real people they are getting paid to do a job, they are in a theatre"”
More women are choosing to have home births, turning to mid-wives and learning plant medicine.

The zombie hands can never break the glass, no matter how hard they try they are trapped because they came here of their own free will Pounding on the windows only causes the stitches to burst open and leak with clear
liquid They plead, cry for help, swear that they are no longer sick, a cure has been found and they are better now Then they smile their cock-eyed smiles and their brains come sliding down their noses their guts tumble out
slipping away from their grasps like lithe jerking eels They laugh and sing and dance with each other, swirling round holding on so tight that their fingers rupture one another‚’s flesh Occasionally one of them will slip and fall amongst the pools of slime that have accumulated on the floor. The others laugh and dance faster and wilder causing more wounds to reopen and weep with frustration. The hospital in the diffused light of evening takes on the shape of a brooding monument
'‘LEST WE FORGET THOSE WHO WERE DISSECTED'’
The woman in the orchard picks up a piece of paper and the sleeping weight
of a great emptiness folds itself around her.

It's thinly spread across the day, a shower and a coffee or a conversation on the phone.
Poison infiltrates the simplicity of a home, where understanding takes it's toll. Dissatisfaction
creeps across the floor sprinkles powder before the foot-steps, on books and VCR's.
Denies the events of past years, undermines friendships. A weak passion that can't be maintained,
it comes in the middle of the night and leaves a cold space.

BROPHY

Often as he walked about the city, the rhythm of his steps would draw thoughts to the surface.
The time when his brother had shot a Collared-dove. They were standing in the front garden
to the left of the smaller of the two weeping willows. The roots of which were always dislodging
the sewage pipes. His brother aiming up at an Elm tree in the field across the road. The soft
flat puff of the air-gun and a light grey triangle tumbles out of the branches.
They stand silent for a moment, before his brother's friend who was older than them and had supplied
the new rifle with the telescopic sights - elects to "finish it off". When they reach the dove it is still alive
this is some what of a shock to them. Maybe they had expected the addition of the telescopic sight to have
performed the deed with such accuracy that one pellet would have been enough to bring instant or even
painless death. The older boy bends its flapping wings together, this pushes the birds chest out in an
exaggerated fashion. He holds the wings down with his boot. Then loads and fires five pellets, there is a
horrific muffled slap as they puncture the flesh stretched taut. A few purple-nibbed feathers are mixed
amongst the cow's-shit churned up by their boots. He felt in the pit of his stomach that it wasn't a fun
game anymore, and was sure his brother felt the same way, although they never talked about it.

THE PROFESSOR



With a hiss of rain the Professor entered the old brick library through the dirty glass
doors, made his way over to the computers opened his bag took out his glasses case
removed the glasses and placed them in their suited position. He typed with a brisk
sharpness, watching the screen intently, a delicate hand looped a stray hair behind
his ear, Jade light tinted his face.

THE PROFESSOR AS A YOUNG MAN

Every month while attending university his family sent him a healthy sum of money.
The Professor as he was then couldn't stomach the campus social life. He had maybe
at most three friends, if you were to stretch the term friends to its broadest edges.
As a result most of the allowance went unspent.

The day of 'The Project' had arrived. A lot of people sleep rough in the city, his friends
didn't seem to notice. He had been waiting for the double Christmas cheque, now he
gathered up the big wad of money in his fist and hurriedly left his apartment.
For the next two hours he scanned the cavities of the city and by chance he eventually
found her at a small cafe on the westside. He heard behind him those unmistakable
heels, four inches of black patent leather that rattled inside. Her legs were long, bony,
mottled with patches of bruises, recent scabs and past scars. She began working the
tables at the far end, gradually moving towards him, asking first for money then cigarettes
or coffee. Most people didn't give to her it seemed a waste of money she looked to far gone
beyond help. He lowered his eyes pretending to read a book, she moved in his direction
smoking the only cigarette she'd been given. She stood beside his table and began to tell
her story. He raised his head than threw up his arms in recognition, smiling widely holding
out his hand and saying "Joyce this is a surprise won't you join me for coffee"
The woman tentatively shook his hand a thin smile creased her lips. She constantly
tapped the cigarette with her finger. She sat down drank the coffee and smoked the
cigarettes that were offered. Said- "Fine" "Ok" "Yes" "No" and "Alright"
It went that way for the rest of the night, except at one point they were at a
bar, by now the Professor was drunk, Joyce was very drunk and she started talking
as if they really had known eachother.
"You remember when we were kids, skinny dipping, the prairie sky like an unblinking eye
you said watching down on us?"
He replied that of coarse he remembered, would never forget it, even went as far as to
say that it was one of the most beautiful moments of his life. After saying this he excused
himself, shakily dismounted the barstool side winded his way through the dancers and
vomited in the toilet.
He continued to spend his family's money in this way for the next three years. In that time
not one of the people he chose ever let on that they knew he wasn't really their friend.
The Professor passed with honors, he no longer performs random acts of charity.

THE HOSPITAL

Two hours of non-stop rain, a solace from the heat and closeness of the night. City rain is greasy,it varnishes the roads and pavements with an oily film. He took off his jacket, put it in a black canvas shoulder bag. Water soaked though the shirt, ran off his hair and down his back. Bad moods flowed out into the sea, always hungry, always reclaiming. This man will slip as he's walking because his shoes are worn. He may swear out loud in the street, curse the synthetic culture, the life stylists and art careerists. He may regain his balance momentarily, then go crashing to the ground. The business people huddled under the dripping awnings of jewelry shops and estate agents are furtively anxious and openly hostile. Are they concerned that he is drunk, mad, is going a place a cold knife to their throats and whisper "could you spare a little change for something to eat today"? Their fear will make them generous! Contamination by touch is their greatest fear. There is no sun-light in the financial district, there are shadows from tall glass buildings. The gigantic architecture of an exclusive world blots out the sun, prevents us from feeling warmth and sensation. On the main streets the pace is hot and nasty, the feeling is different, peoples faces gleam like wax. There are grey patches between the thick and stunted buildings, between the wholesale stationeries and the chartered accountants. When a country's population is outnumbered by rats, then perhaps a small victory is won. The path-way that cuts across a segment of 'waste' ground drops steeply, you could easily loose your footing muddy up the elbow of your one decent coat. The path ends, he stings his hands on the nettles, stands and stares at the beautiful unkempt lawns of the old hospital. The windows are silent and watchful. (Just think about those business people men and women in spacious restaurant's, working out in fully equipped health clubs, in airplanes over the pacific, sipping Hennessey, warming the ink in gold Parker pens signing cheques at the poolside discotheque casino revolving golf coarse) The hospital is his church. Boarded windows are bandaged eyes, this is where he comes for guidance, while scrumping apples and visualizing the interior wing by wing, window by window. Images projected behind the shutters. In the children's ward the nurses are flustered, a child has managed to get her hands on a pair of scissors giving half the ward haircuts that are as fierce as they are strange. Visiting hour is in 45 minutes. It is decided that the children will be told to wear cotton night-caps. The doctors for their part will convince the parents that " this is part of the most up to date development in modern medicine" As resident patriarchs they loath the idea of this base deception and hint with cold humour that the nurses will be asked to "fulfill certain needs" If they should refuse they run the risk of loosing their jobs which would lead to a life on the streets, starvation, madness, drugs and prostitution,because that's all freedom has to offer. Doctors are good manipulators of fear and fear is more precise that a surgeons scalpel. Hospitals smell of constant sanitation, a lot of time is spent scrubbing and soaping until it smells clean. Dirt is not our problem, dirt is what makes us flesh and blood, dirt is what heals our sight, dirt is what cleans us, unites us. WE ARE DIRT! A dirty man and a dirty woman enter the hospital, the doors slam behind them like prison bars. Their daughter (who is not older enough to be in the advanced stages of dirtiness) is dying. They want her to get well, they pray at night kneeling at her bedside holding eachother and crying. Life is sometimes a slow turning on the rack. Six days from now the child will die. After death all is imagination, fantasy, and faith. To grieve in isolation is painful. Sunday will never be bath night again.

A star of many colours over fields of unlimited concrete
hangs like a drag queens dress claiming its own space
in the window.
I'm growing horns. I wear the lost crucifix to ward off the pains
of illness. Everything is cold and still
the quivering lips of the clay head are cracking to life.
And suddenly its all a bunch of horse-shit, this not being afraid.


The sounds we hear in our daily lives
are unstructured and come to us as random intakes
There is a music of solitude
and a music of intimacy

Touching warm ash
between the fingers
kissing every stray hair
fragrance and gesture

snuff out the candles together
your hand fits with mine
jigsaw fingers link
pulsing warm like a mother

It was the winter of strikes, couldn't pass the sweet shop without staring.
The fist brought down hard on the table, sympathetic hands laid on his shoulders
and one realizes "to be a man" is quite another matter.

Underneath the court yard in a dungeon,in a palace ruled by a tortured emperor,
lay a Tiger cub whose mother was killed by the Archbishop's hunting party
yesterday morning. I thought then that it was wrong but I was only the cooks
son, so for three quarters of my life I was invisible. The curse of this being
I was privy to the most debased and loathsome of human affairs, which weaved
the cradle in which our young ones now suckle.
My mother was a whore, I say this with no shame or as a blemish upon her.
My father was a ghost, brave and violent ghost. I promised through my tears
that I would chase down his dreams and tell them what they missed.
But I never once cried out his name when my dreams were being butchered.

There is no movement to join, there is however the frequent and occasional basis, the engagement
of 'the heart', the becoming. Tear the patches off your hoodies, abort textural strategies. Clean out
your living space, objects of association- these are no good in the underground. The success of
direct action relies on the appropriate configuration of components at any given time. Evil as it is
most often committed comes of the given life, it takes not only its motivation, but its form from
the existing circumstances. The logic of dominant ideas presents evil as terror that occurs without a historical
condition, but we who have struggled to maintain our sanity know this to be wrong.
The pain relieving messiahs are here to administer to the stricken, rotten and fallen, who will fill my ears with
whiskey, pouring in tales of untruthful friends, stolen property and unintelligible important messages.
They are here to put a kind bullet through the bone plated skulls of distressed Buffalo spirits.

As we grow older we discover that what at the time seemed to us the absorbing interests and preoccupations which we had taken up and thrown over, were in reality appetites or passions that had swept over us and passed on, until at last we come to see that our life has no more continuity than a pool in the rocks which the tide fills with foam and flotsam and then empties. Nothing remains in the end but the sediment which this flux deposits; ambergris valuable only to those who know how to use it.
The Unquite Grave- Palinurus

I'm sure we will simply have to redouble our efforts to forgive, understand, to rebuild the bridges between us; we must attempt to comprehend fully just how these bridges came to be destroyed. There is no other recourse. We must, of ourselves, by ourselves, recognize the roots of our illness, and do all that we can to extricate ourselves from this mess.
- George L. Jackson

D. Boon dies in Arizona car crash

I have endured your hatred.
I have expressed my gratitude.
I have tried to penetrate your secretive motives.
You won't be happy until there is nothing left unused.
Every stratum of coal.
Every tree chopped down.
Every fanatical missile.
Every unjust decree.
Every animal killed.
Is all this for my benefit?
If so I never asked for it.

Are we improving morally
with every high pitched battle cry?
Does it elevate our clumsiness?

Arbitrated disputes breakdown
too easily to the pervading
moods of the armed forces.

Parody of capture

You may think I'm crazy, but the founder of the Smithsonian Institute told me last night that I should quit writing. He said he'd "go over" what I had, help knock it into shape..."but it's not really going anywhere" Sure I said, "it's all acorns and beechnuts to me"
Against good sense and nature he set to work. I sat on the porch biting my nails. His criticisms would amount to nothing I was sure, no more than quibbles. It would all rest on his understanding
of the fragment. Maybe I should except the fact he will educate and enlighten me about myself, then I will take what he's given me and use it against him. I will be like the father who walks in the bride's path stepping softly on the train. I will be the reckoner who settles the accounts, who strips
away the military pose, who is neither left or right. I will whiten the pages of literature with my theft, my violent de-signs.

Soul work

The aim of soul work, therefore is not adjustment to accepted norms or to an image of the statistically healthy individual. Rather the goal is a richly elaborated life connected to society and nature, woven into the culture of family, nation and globe. The idea is not to be superficially adjusted, but to be profoundly connected in the heart to ancestors and to living brothers and sisters in all the many communities that claim our hearts.

The track down

Sitting here with a tea-ball full of anti-toxins and a skater punk from Barcelona, who is as thin as a hair; stirring the congealed milk into my cup, watching the grey mole on his ear move up and down as he chews. The java hugging geniuses in the corner chain smoking their way to fame. My lack of style is stylish. I look out the window, it makes me sad, the skater shows me his pierced leg joint, it's infected, he pokes at it with his finger. When the sky gets heavy like this, when you are without language or a fantasy, without any hope of expression, you do things that you know will hurt you.
I get ready to leave, refuse more tea, the skater punk is going to a friends house to watch a Polanski film, asks me if I want to come along, I say no.
A car pulls up as I walk out into the street.

THE STRUGGLE

Struggling to squeeze out a shit in the morning without bursting a hemorrhoid. Struggling to remember how many favors I owe, how many couches I've slept on. Struggling to make the words "THANK YOU" sound bigger than they are. Struggling to recognize love in familiar faces. Struggling to match a child's energy....one more push on the swing.....one more horsey ride....one more glass of water....one more withered flower in my pocket. "Yes, yes it is beautiful"... No really look at it this time. Oh christ when did I stop noticing the simple beauty?
Struggling to remember the facts. How many people were massacred in Colombia, Mexico, Zimbabwe, and what was that guys name who was killed by the cops? Struggling to reach out to a grieving family... I have a knotted fist inside my chest that wants to open up and take you by the hand. Struggling with the white trash, soup kitchen, free food white pastry coffee bagel dumpster diet. For every 20lb of food you consume you get an 1 ounce of nutrition. Struggling with self diagnosed depression and self administered narcotic drug therapies. Struggling with the knowledge that my father lost his eye because of Thatchrism. Struggling not to laugh at inappropriate moments. Struggling to tolerate another middle-class activist talking shit......

Alone in the snow

Our movement has been crushed, a defeat so emphatic it hurts to write of it. Yet we still live on, we still lift our faces to the sun, birth and raise children. The last 15 years I look back on with the calculated interest of an antiquarian scholar. Shifting indentities come in and out of focus, sometimes appearing as separate lives (If you are not at odds with yourself then you are in denial)
We have been out maneuvered on every front so many lost, co-opted, sold out, drifted away, victimized by their own narcotic therapies, taken by disease and time; others have become the antithesis of all they once stood for. What of those who are left, clinging to fossilized ideologies to stop themselves from going under.-We shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheep-
Singing hymns at the anti-christs funeral. Spasmodically fanning the dying embers of revolution, running out from shadows cloaked in ambiguity, finding human dignity in the hand thrown missile.
Tracing the fault lines in the hope they will lead to some center, some pulsing brain in a huge fish tank, a flashing computer matrix, seething nest of masons plotting day and night at giant mahogany tables. One withered and senile old white man sitting alone waiting for his potty to be emptied, just someone or something to hold accountable, some physical presence to articulate our hatred at. If such a center does exist, might we find ourselves in a hall of mirrors much the same as Bruce Lee in 'Enter the Dragon' but with no adversary except our own reflection. Smashing them one by one with impotent rage and sense of our own powerlessness, standing waiting for our pseudo mystical enlightenment.

Europe will return to it's senses only when the word 'revolution' evokes shame and not pride. A country that boasts of it's glorious revolution is as vain and absurd as a man boasting of his glorious appendicitis. - Salvador de Madariaga

A scrap of paper

I prefer committed men to literatures of commitment. It seems that to write a poem about spring today would be to serve capitalism. I am not a poet, but I should delight in such a work without mental reservation, if it were beautiful. One serves mankind all together or not at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if we must do the necessary to satisfy that need, he also needs pure beauty, which is the bread of his heart. The rest is not serious. Yes, I should like to see them less committed in their work and a little more so in their daily life. - Camus

The candidate has an inert populace

There are no angels with castanets who are going to fly out of the tea-chest and save us from coming into contact with ourselves.

There is a hole in this wall
dents that match my fist
I put this poem on the wall
because I'm proud of my creation
and if poetry can teach me to feel
then I'll have no need for this wall

I see fresh cement drying
at the place where I thought I'd broken through
We have covered this wall with expression
ways of channeling emotion

Pete's choice of organic art
the carved roots of storm flattened trees
and the skillfully shaped dome of the yert
The pictures of Jon's bus: a fusion
between the mechanical and the organic

The bad egg has hatched out and is killing it's parents

Alice swang in the hammock
Trotter ran across the lawn
carrying a dead partridge
Everybody laughed

I put aside my Heine
to ask if you would
help pick Dog- Violets
down in Cable Woods

From inside your hankichef
you brought out a Nectarine

Alice broke the fruit in two fleshy halves
and offered one to Christopher
(can I arrange this so she is an instinctive nihilist and he has hair that smells of wild thyme?)

Bent on being straight

He pushed her to the floor
the cutlery fell beside them.
Identity is a vicious trap
to be caught in.
Lives are lived
as if they were screenings
of a movie.
The planetary chaos
rejects your sex.
Your idea of a man is a robot.

He calls her "an inane bitch"
because she wants to be a playwright.
He is the tamed Tiger
who swipes his paw
at the memories
of a freer time.

She is blood and birth
the giver of more death.
She mirrors his loss.
Her saffron dress has long sleeves,
his hands leave bruises.

My constant temptation, the one against which I have never ceased fighting to the point of exhaustion: cynicism. - Camus

The fall

The splinter in my hand, which I got from gripping the chair at the onset of my dizzy spell, was painful and annoying. It kept catching on things, my clothes, the towel mainly. I felt marginally better this morning, when I'd pulled the curtains back to let in the brightest sun that had been seen in a couple of weeks. I told people that I preferred bleaker, more overcast weather, because it matched my predominant mood. This wasn't completely true, for today I was aware of an ancient significance, the pulse of a new emotion. The sun was out and I had 5 grand in a shoe box under my bed; if there was ever a time to break my own mythic creations, it had to be this day.
The sweet smell of pine wafted into my room. Anneth would collect the semi-crystallized sap from the trees in the park at the back of the house, she spent a lot of time there. I had seen her once with her small wooden altar decorated with stones, feathers, shells, jewelry and other tokens. I'd gone the long way round. "Don't want to make her feel embarrassed" I'd thought to myself. Now as I stood in my room, my mind somewhere in the pure beauty of the forest, I wondered if it hadn't been my own embarrassment that I'd wanted to avoid; the fact that I didn't have a spiritual aspect in my life, hadn't even investigated the possibilities.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from it's neat Morocco case. With long white nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston and sank back into the velvet lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

True saints of the mystic band

Poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility begotten of the poet's brain; it seeks to be the exact opposite, an unvarnished expression of truth, and for this reason must cast away the trumpery garments worn by the supposed reality of civilized society.

The process of distillation becomes one of expansion

A long piece of writing I had been living with for almost two years had recently reached the stage where a books essential significance is at stake- Hesse

Another of Wilk's sayings was "The cut worm forgives the plough" it was usually accompanied by a melting enigmatic half-smile, those chariots would flash and you knew he really believed in the truth of the words. It was sometime later that I discovered they were Blake's. He saw angels in Peckham Rye; so of coarse he believed in them.

Quotidian Songs

The city and it's fabric have me painted into a corner. A summer cast in iron holds me down. On the pavement cracks a cocktail glass; I rip and tear a paper napkin, say "Merci" to the waiter, excuse myself and try to disappear. Going back to the stuffy atmosphere of my room doesn't feel a very satisfactory option, alternatively the river seems to fill me with light, dappled light which only occurs on long lazy afternoons. Watching a rowboat gently drift away, I take an elegant black bottle from my pocket, uncork it and drink down a few drops. I left Charles back at the cafe with his refillable museum of dead words. Another headless poet grows in the perfumed garden, not attracted by the mellow warmth of the compost heap.

Manet Paintings

Boy with cherries: The young boy slumps against the wall, luxurious mauve red cherries tumble out of a make shift basket of leaves. The red cap he wears at a rakish angle brands him as a rascal, a raider of orchards, an artful dodger of the market stalls. His smile, which Manet uses as a confirmation that a child is guiltless in a world of chaos.

Notes on old Wilks

Old Wilks places his bony hand on my shoulder and a cascade of fiery chariots flash across his eyes. It's times like this I tell him I believe that nature will prevail without an intermediary. Wilks to me has always had the appearance of someone who has come out of a dream, absentmindedly wandered to a closed door, opened it, stepped into a different world and decided to stay. Why he would choose to stay is what I can't fathom.
The first time I met the old man, I noticed he seemed to give off the faint odor of hickory, a smell that after awhile warmed my heart.

Imagine how the ecstatic sounds of the Dionysiac rites penetrated ever more enticingly into that artificially restrained and discreet world of illusion, how this clamor expressed the whole outrageous gamut of nature- delight, grief, knowledge, even to the most piercing cry; and then let us imagine how the Apollonian artist with his thin monotonous harp music must have sounded beside the demoniac chant of the multitude!

Van Gogh

Oh nightingale
yes nightingale
that cutting throat
where loneliness
knows no bounds
sing a song that weeps
for my spirit
for today
love has chosen to die
chosen to end the silence
of the heart
with a gun shot

To fall a sleep

It passes through me, a mist that leaves me with a vague sensation of weightlessness; an impression with no out lines, a silhouette that is interchangeable, an illusion, a dream.
Between the falling and the landing is the dream, the distance from one reality to another. The bed is the haven of the depressed. Nightmares are better than this waking daylight, that floods with sanity. Walking the walls of a tornadoes flawless twist.

The winter blew in cold and unexpected, as I softly walked out the door. I could smell food sizzling on a backyard grill. I grabbed the last cold beers in the fridge, a blimp of mild tasting hash and two baking potatoes; Iris had said that I should come on over regardless of her husbands behavior. I squeezed through the privet hedge, holding the beer and spuds. Iris and Harold live in a small cottage, the type you'd expect Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle to be ironing clothes outside of, black and white and thatched, country style. Harold is a retired Major, fox hunting man. Iris is his wife.
"I see chicken's your favorite Harold" I remark as I deposit my offerings on a plastic lawn table.
" It's on special this week"
I resist the urge to make a comment about salmonella.
"Where's the fabulous face lift"
"I wish you wouldn't call her that"
"It's not as if I don't call Iris that to her face, she thinks it's funny"
"Well some people have an odd sense of the comedic tradition"

There's probably only one place Iris would be on a Sunday afternoon, The Lady Lake Health and Beauty Spar; where they enable aging ladies to maintain a youthful aesthetic that little bit longer.

An advertisment in a newspaper can become a revelation; the most exhilarating, the most affirmative thoughts can spring from a completely irrelevant word if one turns it about, playing with the letters as if it were a puzzle.

*

I'm going to goose growing university
gonna get a golden egg that's just for me.

Old mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
and a pipe bomb went off in her face.
*

....the great optimist rationalist utilitarian victory, together with democracy, it's political contemporary, was at the bottom nothing other than a symptom of a declining strength.

Strange dreams

I should devote the day to writing them down, as Herman Hesse points out a simple dream can burst forth with thousands of memories and feelings, the best we can do is scribble down some shorthand. S is leaving to go back to work today, she dropped off a bunch of veggies this morning, cabbage, carrots, broccoli, spring onions, she couldn't get them in her traveling pack, I think she was just being kind. I picked some peas from the garden...must steam the swiss chard aswell. Dreams and eating...my day is planned.

Notes on chaos

.....that no idea, no law, no character or order exists that is true and right except as seen from one pole- and for every pole there is an opposite pole. Settling upon a pole, adopting a position from which the world is viewed and arranged, this is the first principle of every order, every culture, every society and morality. Whoever feels, if only for an instant, that spirit and nature, good and evil are interchangeable is the most dangerous enemy of all forms of order. For that is where the opposite of order is, and there chaos begins.

Who pulled your chain

Break from the body and transport!
(I would show you how but it's rather cloudy today)

*

For writing poetry, especially when one is young, does not have just one social function, that of bring pretty works of art into the world and through them delighting or exhorting; rather writing poetry can have, completely independent of worth and possible success of the poems produced, an irreplaceable value for the poet themselves.

Piano Moon

Stones on the body
in electrified cool
clear water
their bellies touched
tiny scars held within
the days of blood
the thin needles of night

They explored each other
in order to find their way

*

For only in the intensive self examination of analysis can a portion of the individual's developmental history be actually experienced and transfused with the blood of feeling