In a strange mood - see/write art



in a strange way, disorganized but straight on,
light tinted magenta, issuing, in frothy large pours, from my mouth,
knowing what to say, and the meaning too,
I can more than walk, can write, on water,
where all can read weeping, Mary-miracles of seeing, living words,
themselves, on light waves lapping in a
shifting rotunda vision, color reorienting spatial senses.^

in a strange, strange stitch, seasonal spirits and witches,
Chagall, Baez, Dylan Thomas, Donovan, Richie Havens
doing their knitting in my brain, from Montmartre to the Midwest to Monterey,
painters and poets in lockstep head-messing with me,
imperfect clarity but still one voice,
see/write art,
so went and caught the wind, going gently into night
to banish the hodgepodge of uncertainty from inside out.

knowing well you don't understand fully, but jumbling tumbling
verses are sliding off my rusted tongue as fiddlers fly above,
roughened words, hewn from a paper cup, spilling diamonds uncut, imported from Sarajevo, Montparnasse, the Lower East Side.
wretched me, in the hour I first believed, this amalgamated conception conceded,
seceded from my mind into your palate for a tasting,
tho neither drugged, nor deaf and dumb, just slammed poetical-like, this write is
all I have to portend is your affections, your attentions, to yours, am beholden.

a *****, well respected man in daylight,
the hidden references accuse,
woke up to see Wednes-day Caesarian born,
askance glanced at the prior passages of the night before,
when my palate clefted,
when eyes chose not to distinguish
between right and lefted,
in the nightlight,
a ***** man disrespects language convection/convention,
and lays before you activating stanzas and his mind, prone,
but always the truth, speaking,
the visions, leaking, mind to eye,
recombinant, into our minds eye.




^ http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/james-turrell


Rather than write extensive notes on the many references, inspirations in this poem, if there is a line that intrigues, ask me

I have mistaken you, for the great wielder of language, that in the times of Caesar my father, my hero, the castle builder in mid-century medieval Spain, he was not. Painting mustard seeds and his mistake, bulbs of garlic for warding off the blood-suckers, I don't think it was his intention, but he could paint potatoes the flavor of want my sister and I so craved when she and I and him, revering in our trident throng forged language before a fading Tuesday night.

A painter is great rarely, but occurs in small, adequate attic-like spaces, empty squares upon squares, readied for the taking of language. Art might be the purveyor of its own bright useless entity, bright ripened similes squeezed out of the Dutch into the Latin vernacular our father failed to remember while poking him at midnight to rile him up to bed.

It was a mistake, the one my Godfather made when he started studying French with himself. No ranking professor can rank himself into his own pedagogy. Language might have lost its roots, maybe it even lost its qualities of being official.

"This is the office of the president."
"The President of the United States?"
"No, the president of the DISH Network."

This is for me, not any president I serve. You could have learnedly observed the words my father would spell to me, each individual vowel and consonant given their own power. However, not my mother or sister could undertake with adequate prowess the tenant of speaking as such, and their tongues suffered as their palates poorly undertook their flustered attempts to enter our philocalist resolve for Caesarian language.

Sadly now, as I think of reading. I think of your fingers and what you must certainly claim to be such grandiose proficiency, your digits and dactyls bring a melancholy hoop of unpleasantries to my eyes. Your mistake has been writing as you speak, and speaking as the free-style spoken-word "artists" attempt to do, in a horrifically insufficient and inarticulate way. I know your mistake when I open myself to read the Associated Press, listen to what Capitol Hill has to say, even coming down from the end of the bar it is a sick knot of undoing that I so wish any children we have will never be privy to.

Except on this Monday night where we can still commit our lives to one another without becoming the indigestible alphabet that has evolved into a toxin around us. What chance does poetry have if sentences collapse in short-dialogues? What will become of our hands? Will they forget the feeling of a pen or pencil in their grip? Certainly, those short notes and scribbles of cursive my mother left for my father, sister, and I will take themselves into antiquity with cuneiform and chalk, whether in Spain, The States, or another place, they have stormed out world with writing and grammar mistakes. He who must pretend to be understood by taking up the thesaurus to talk, will never have the qualities necessary to write without totally ******* it up.

Constant worry.

Mothers know best,
and that is why their
unofficial motto is to
be in a state of constant
worry. My mother has
loved me from my very
inception. Through the
Caesarian section birth,
breast feeding, first words,
first steps. First mistakes.
First successes. My mother
has loved me.

My weight is the top concern,
my grades, nay my future,
is second.

But she believes in me.

She believes in me to do
what is right; not just for
me, but for others. She
believes in me and knows
I can do anything with
motivation. She believes in me
because my mother loves me.

She believes in me, and my
mother loves me, because of
constant worry.

Constant.

                                              ­     I am my mother's son.
                                                     My mother loves me,
                                                   and I love my mother.

                        Because I am in a state
                             of constant worry.

stem cell words
from the cellular wall of the
poem birth canal
narrows, twists,
even double helix's,
doc-prof diagnosis
with perfect, absolute uncertainty,
denotes the presence of
stem cell words

"all your writes,
gestating make-believe,
word smythe
premium cocktail concoctions,
gospel soul post-viewed
rocked and roiled
still and always,
unflinchingly personal

singing and simulcast
the unique
internal combustion,
that removes the pollution,
of your
unflinchingly personal..."

mother necessity
delivery of a
Caesarian cut-them-out

says me
cut, excise them,
take them,
them newborn-baby stones
give them
a good home,
my DNA upon them,
my only Jacob blessing,
that they get
goodly tented taken

let them spawn
more and others,
will love them
better just for knowing
even never seeing them again,
still and always,
whatever they
write on,
still and always,
I'm in them,
they will be,
unflinchingly personal,
even if signed by
another's name....

Versed in the art of silence and independence,
he quietly hosts the soul gnawing parasites
which devour him from within
only leaving crumbs of his being.

He is broken.
He is heavy with multitudes of untold tales,
so he seeks Caesarian experts
to deliver him from the burdens.
"Be strong, be a man" they say,
and he goes.

At home,
the hanging clothes flutter in excitement.
They whisper to him,
"Come, join us on the line to paradise."