Sunday, December 03, 2006
Masque du Shaman
A burqua of white around my head, the snowy landscape. The purity of the whole unbroken light, its whiteness.
Rigid
I don't think so.
Once she was back in her unkempt house, where she was looked after until she regained her strength, the tirades began again. She said she was living out of a dumpster which was of course ludicrous. She lashed out at anyone who was younger, brighter, more beautiful. Which was most of the women in the world since she was old and on the decline.
The black habits continued. Dark and flapping with a cane at the seashore, she looked like a nun. Except for the florid red lipstick, the crimson suede gloves, the cherry red French lace petticoat under the thick layers of black burlap when the wind blew.
Liqueur du Feu
Driving
Friday, December 01, 2006
I - The Lake
In the distance to the East, look, the mist is broiling into a squall and the water froths with whitecaps and it looks as if the turbulent sky has fallen into the water, their boundaries disturbed.
Elsewhere, patches of snake green appear and disappear on the surface of the water according to the whims of the fleeting sky.
The winds blow the mist at velocities I can only imagine. What appears like steam billows past the window at race neck speeds.
Despite the rippling shoulders and back of the lake, the harbours in the islands are still. Like moments of meditation.
II - The View from the Lake
I think of letters and numbers, words and money, invisible, flowing, like the continuous traffic on the highways splayed out before me in all directions, transferring, shaping. Do we corrode the landscape with our civilization?
From the Island View Room with its antiques and Persian carpet high in the corporate bank tower the sky is an opague pale grey; it has stopped raining but is thickly overcast.
In the distance the Scarborough Bluffs are lit by sun and look like the white walls of a white city of vision.
How do we fit into the landscape we have so crudely carved?
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
River of Light
White blood stream of the city.
Fog Lights
The corona of the sun is hidden.
There are no sun spots today; no solar flares, no solar storms.
The world is quiet. Lying under a blanket of mist. The wind is absent. If the birds fly, they fly blindly.
Do you have your fog lights on as you make your way along the snaking highways? Somebody stops or swerves in the flow of cars and there is a pile-up. Buckled metal and torn and broken lives, but not yours. You are caught in the stopped and slowed traffic and are late.
Not to meet me, but the others.
I am behind the fog.
Am I seeing anything other than dim forms and whiteness?
Lies
Today envy wore black hair and a black blazer with a red chiffon blouse and a smiling demeanour in the office tower that could be anywhere in the world.
Disguise
If I disguise you in metaphors, it is only to reveal you. Or myself. Or the interconnections that interweave us.
November 28, 2006
The time went by too quickly.
When I saw the date, I knew.
It was very strange, this feeling.
I could not know what it was all about.
But I knew the day was significant.
It had arrived; such long waiting, and now it was here.
What did it mean?
Tide-Line
Sometimes I feel like the woman in the sea-cottage who holds the tide-line tight in her hands. Then I don't drift in and out like the moon-pulled sea; then I remain, present.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Mist
Wild Man
Yet you are a wild man.
When you strip your clothes, the frenzy begins. How can such passion hide under a veneer smooth as the pin stripes in a suit?
I remember, and am awakening. Erotic energy rises like smoldering bush fire. In your absence.
For you are not here, only there.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Constructions
Do I hallucinate you? Who are you?
My hallucination of nature doesn't agree with your hallucination, that's all. Or to you it's not a hallucination, but reality, and you strengthen your position with references to nature writers and by being in a group who believe similarly.
Except it isn't. Reality, I mean. You're taking a position on reality, writing your own essay of it, complete with a thesis statement. Only it's all your thoughts on it, a master narrative, if you will, that continually runs through your mind shaping what you see according to the story you carry.
Which is fine, is good. We'd go mad without our stories. They cohere us, put us in social and historical context; they organize reality for us.
Reality probably needs organizing! For all I know about it.
Everything we can say about Nature, the original substratum, the wilderness is constructed.
Sure, bring the sun in. We don't know what 'sun' is anyway. It's just a word!
Whatever that is in what we call sky is not sun, light, right, might, sol invictus, or illumina...
___________________
Culture creates the overlay.
The overlay enables us to all live together, but it isn't true.
___________________
Can I burn under the artificial sun
in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Museum in London?
Will the fog
of the weather project
hide me?
light glancing
The waves of the ocean that I watch from the window move like imagination across the dreamscape.
Close your eyes, dream the world.
"...That summer all the world
was soul and water, light glancing off peaks."Michael Sims
Friday, November 24, 2006
Wilderness
"I don't find anything out there. I find my own relation to the spaces. We see nature with our cultivated eyes. Again, there is no true nature, there is only your and my construct."Olufur Eliason
You say the wilderness you walk in every day exists.
But you have named every tree, shrub, bird, insect. You move through a wilderness of labels, of theories of ecosystems, of words and images that describe it. You cohere this experience of wilderness; without you, it wouldn't exist.
How can we see but through our own perceptions? A trained and honed perceptual apparatus with its own caring, ethic and aesthetic.
Could we stumble blindly through the bush --- what would we see?
What of the feral child's experience of the wilderness --- raised by wolves, who move by scent and on all fours, who tear at the beating body of fur and blood with bared teeth?
There is only the subjective, the relational. How can there be an objective universe?
We create the world we live in.
It's emptiness.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Hallucination
Within the film of my life I create the story I am living.
That story also shapes outer events. The world coheres to my version of it.
Do you understand that
the world
is a mass hallucination?
That we have agreed
to hallucinate it this way
and we teach our children.
Weight
Referring to what is just out of reach. Emotion, idea, situation, description, always approximating, never fully expressing what they create and shape. We are not feral. Culture moves through us, syncopates its rhythms in us, punctuates us.
veils of words and images drifting over the world
Fever
Does rage have a temperature, and had it now peaked, and was broken?
Tempest
When the winds subsided they stabilized her with intravenous fluids, medication. They checked her blood, ran a CAT scan, an MRI. In her stupour, she relented.
I could feel the tension of resistance dissipate and she became like a boxing glove gone limp. The stuffing disappeared. She could no longer hit; the psychic force of her anger gone.
Her black dress lay on the floor, salty and ragged. She looked strangely newborn in her hospital green gown. Unlike herself.
Only her fingernails were glaring red.
Would it build again, the tempest?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Capture
If you discard me, or appear to, for you never actually do, I am comfortable; if you don't, I panic, sending dozens of invisible arrows to scare you off, so you will shy away. My mixed messages, subliminal. No, I do not always do this knowingly. I'd like to stop, if only I knew how.
For me to be still, and not flee in every other thought, and be your woman is most difficult, even if I am perhaps your woman.
Capture terrifes me.
Like conventional relationships.
Love that is richly fantasized, and remains. Approaching but never arriving. Hidden in each other's lives. Intimacy, this dance of closeness. Which can't settle.
Can we roam through each other's hearts
like oceanic tides?
Monday, November 20, 2006
Sea-Break
What is to keep her from sweeping out to sea, her black dress like a murder of crows flying about her?
Her eyes are lit with terror as the water rises, foaming.
She shrieks at the turbulent sky; her voice joins the screaming winds.
She is thin and flaps like a scarecrow.
She stands on an outcrop. The water swirls around her feet, but doesn’t wash her away. The rock holds her safe.
Her face a venom of fury
when she sees me.
What is it she desires?
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Molten
In this silence in which I wait.
You cannot know, mon homme chéri.
For I do not wish to burden you.
A relational line, a trajectory, a specific set of connections, patterns, motions into. Fire of desire. The threads extinguish themselves in the smoldering flame. What is moving towards erases itself as it burns, charred, blown away in the wind.
Will you catch me?
Or will you let me pass by?
Money
Money is the mediating transmission of the world we have created for our inhabitation.
Money flows as invisibly as language through the atmosphere, roaming the globe, making our world, enabling us to live, eat, work, support ourselves, our families, each other.
Money transferred to luxury cushions us against the harsh elements.
Money is our mediatrix.
The earth turns on its axis but the world turns on money, capital that sloshes through the global markets with the force of the daily oceanic tides.
Core
Investment is risky; art is risky. Of course there is the rote way, the safe way through the tried and true, but that’s not where the excitement is, nor the gains. Do we invest in our talent?
Intimacy
Phrases, sentences, paragraphs, flowing, flowing, on and on. Picked up and read, retained momentarily. Onward, joining, dispersing, shoals of words, tides of words, flowing through our consciousnesses, into our ears, our eyes, and out of our lips, from our fingertips.
The weave of words that weaves our world, shaping it into familiar patterns, without which it would all fall apart and yet which like a membrane separates us from reality. Mimicry. Artistry. Telling us how to see, how to be. The language that shapes us, shaping. Weave of words sculpting.
Is inseparable from time which structures us, organizes us into communal cohesion.
Who cares if we are carriers of the word, transmitters of culture?
The intimacy of love sighing, your lips
kissing you, I
melt in your mouth
Esoteric
cannot be grasped or apprehended in this language
or any other language
even the language of the heart
even as it structures our desire
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