Maze

There are tattoos in mind, a wolf and a dead deer 

half submerged in still water reflected like a rorschach blot, 

one on either arm, drawn from a Nat Geo mag in Ben’s Greenpoint apartment, 

then painted on Haskell’s deck, the original drawings lost need to be redrawn. 

The idea is that if those around you act like wolves it means you are behaving like prey, 

if you find yourself standing over a wounded deer you must then realize you are acting the wolf.  

The goal is to live somewhere between, on your left breast a picture of an English maze, 

an ordered knot, the dizzying parallel lines betray intuition, vision blurs, the beginning and the end are clear, 

they stand like a tree or a house or a heart.

My carefully constructed walls of sand are destroyed by a sudden flood of emotion, and now remain small lumps, 

almost indistinguishable from the rolling peaks and valleys of an everyday mood swing, 

the uphill shimmy in fourth gear, the bumper sticker adlib respect local combo.  

I continue down the same paths, following the tides, motions, 

I plant flowers for a future I’ll never enjoy, 

but a new leaf unfurls before my eyes 

and I share in its happiness like a secret, 

I’m crouching inside ready to spring, 

the promise and infinite potential lingers outside 

seductive, dangling

Thirty-Six

An old man (and not so old)
once told me (from first hand
knowledge, I presume)
that your luck runs out
after 30, (or was it 35?)
I was 26 at the time
ten years ago
never had I been so lucky as then
(if luck grows in proportion
to consequence) for I met
the love of my life
two days before the full moon
and a day before a bee sting
that told me (what I had been telling the old man)
was true - that it was going to sting going home
Is it true you can never really go home?
I never met a luckier black cat, blind in fact
cross my path and I always loved
Stevie Wonder - Superstitious -
and the girl that made me that mix...
Is it true you should not fix what's not been broken?
Let sleeping dogs lie?
Home seems to have disappeared
along with my health insurance, though
I never felt healthier since
nor do I miss home much
while I'm making a new one here.
So now that girl with the mix
is married with kids and I still
like to dance at weddings to Superstitious.
I'm 36 and dream of dead people
and disease and wake up to bliss
so what's it in praying to a yogi
and all the social acrobatics?
What about the chinese calendar
and the wisdom of the Andes?
A Space Odyssey has come and gone
as quietly as the vines crawl over
Mayan temples. 
A baby has died, torn from her father's arms,
and another reborn
to be spoiled and beaten
by those who know better
or who claim to know more
because they're older and wise
and so luck never gets credit
except in Hollywood
where everyone's a genius
and lemons cost $3 each.
In the end the old man wasn't really
Canadian, he was from those
storied orchards and strawberry hills
of better times when pride was no sin
and luck was dishonest
next to hard work.
His home was destroyed
and overpassed with pavement
and so life goes on accelerating
towards greener pastures
where the machines haven't yet arrived
there is still peace to find
where bees still make honey
and milk tastes like milk
and tomatoes taste like tomatoes
and people behave like animals,
rabbits are hunted and
bad dogs get kicked
and stay outside where they belong.
There's no begging for the drunk and blind
and there's health coverage for the old, long and winded
if they want to stand in line
where prevention is prescribed and
luck is religion.
Be at one with yourself and your nickname,
there's an undeniable reason behind it.
Love lies inside next to a wood burning stove,
rising bread and wine
and life is as charming as you think so.

Urban Activities Done Outdoors

Urban activities done outdoors
Car camp talk of the Harbaugh Bowl
Thinking of La Suri...
is it the rat or the smile?
So you wanna be a Cowboy
or are you just a Marlboro Man
pasting nature on a screen
calling yourself salvaje
but you're more like Savage
from the Wonder Years
Stepping on mouse holes
with an osprey above
you're off trail today
but let's face it, you're not
Jeremiah Johnson
and neither is Robert Redford
never was
just an actor.

Blindspots 

Im starting to sweat a bit
How in God's name do you explain a feeling?!
Images of peace, contentment, ritual, meditation, timelessness, universality
Longo's Monumental Charcoals
The Siesta, El regaloneo, two figures lying in the grass
one sleeping, the other reading
Pablo Neruda versus Atari video game stills in God Less America
Land of the Fee, Home of the Slave
Dancing 180's to Korean Hip Hop with the Iranian backpack puppet
I want jokes. You want jokes.
What about Woody Allen?
Most of us need the eggs. You gotta have faith in people.
All love affairs end in disappointment.
Do not ask if anyone objects!
The Diamond Sutra, MAZDA and Zarathustra say:
Hands that help are better than lips that pray
The ability to watch a still image age
like a song on repeat, a painting produces a developing nostalgia
A bubble in a stream, a phantom in a dream
The instant you reach what is interesting in terms of meaningfulness, words stop.

Holes in the Earth

There are holes in the Earth, for all intensive purposes, bottomless, for whatever may fall into them burns up before ever hitting solid ground, it liquifies and becomes a part of the molten mass that fills the center core. In taking a distant perspective, trees look like a green fuzz, each smaller than a blade of grass and mountains look like wrinkles and the waves in the sea are indistinguishable in the reflected light of the atmosphere, like a perfectly convex mirror. The bottoms of the oceans and seas are similar in form to the rippling land above sea level, only deeper, with more pronounced peaks and valleys, so that the elastic sphere that is earth looks as if it was stuck with so many pins and its skin in spots bleeds, coagulates and reopens like a wound.

The Moviegoers

Mi Chica linda y yo
spinning along the pacific coast
in search of signs, the magnificent in the everyday
What will we do for the rest of our lives?
I ask complacently
her brown eyes gone to discs
fearing forever, in denial of the unknown,
the unattainable expectations
or just boredom
to search is enough
not to be onto something is to be in despair
giant rocks pass by
with the spray of breaking waves
shattering over them, the sea lions roar
in their endless struggle



Human, All too Human

Electrical lines mapping out the dimensions of a neglected, featureless landscape. An expressionless burro on a garbage hill overlooking the highway, sunflower beds pass by a bus window like fire flies in the daytime, bright and hot even in the shade of a huaso's straw sombrero brim stiff and impeccably straight, a clean shirt and dirty jeans, the dust rising at his feet kicked up by a dog chasing a cat, both mangy strays, ignored completely.
Cults begun from bad luck ships pegged to wooden sculptures, pictures with folklore ribbons and real history, death medals, war, the fruits of conquest and the disillusions of vanishing sands through parted fingers, droughts and flash floods create flowers from dust, near gods to the gods, becoming a part of personal belief, then community, for a generation more influential than the official religious scripture, always reflecting the landscape, the ocean, the elephant and the whale.
Nietzsche says: A hostile disposition and act, we must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.
Printed on animal hides with vegetable dyes or carved into clay, the earliest maps are among humanity's first texts, predating poetry, rendering human experience in relation to physical space and place, they show us where we have been and suggest where we might yet go.
Painting backwards, like painting erosion creates natural abstraction on an architectonic level, like the cross sections of the earth's surface in the side of a canyon, or an underwater crevasse, barnacled and bleeding to the depths of the giant squid and the glowworms, everything else dark and unknown, a mist away from mortal revelation.
I guess its a bit connected to Barnett Newman's Abstract Expressionist claim for painting the basic human emotions, nature in its competition with Man, its silent and persistent challenge to Man is Inspiration. Nature outlives us all, outlives our trends, our scandals and news. Why is it people separate human nature with Mother Nature? the supernatural, the unknown, evil, destruction, chemistry, plastics, ash cans, aerosol, the artificial, art is to explore this human denial of Nature


The PS 6 Spring Fling Block Party

Girls will be Juicy Girls
while boys play running bases
the birth of self image
Marvel Comics are the coolest
the righteous in the face of brutality
without much but always enough for survival
Pony rides and the petting zoo
goats, rabbits, ducks, a turkey
a return to friendly strangers
in the mean streets
makes a man happy
to be a nice guy.
like a miracle on 82nd street
an inexplicable coincidence
I smile at a crying baby
so cute even when its crying
so cute and not mine
so cute as a cowgirl in June
so cute as Batman on Halloween
so cute in the Gap Kids catalog
so cute homeless in Honduras
so cute living in a garbage dump
so cute starving in Africa
so cute covered in flies

Song of the Farm

Sing the buzz and the bleat
and the bark of the dogged and sheepish
the rusty squeak of the guinea fowl in the far corner roost
where the clucks fall in with the gutter's drip
and the hiss of the teet!
Lavendar pastures turn to gold
as the last gasp of the James' morning breath climbs up creek
and evaporates into the blue hole heavens and white eaves of a banner day.

The crickets start their massive chatter
like over-heated traffic negotiating the food chain exits of the interstate
white noise fading in and out of consciousness,
once loud like the backfire of a fat leatherneck's chopper
hogging the highways and byways of your crowded mind
the sudden sound of a tailpipe clunker from last year's tax return pick-up
richochets off the spotless bumper of a soccer mom's minivan
bounces between the hanging limbs of oak trees and pine needles
sycamore saplings and telephone wire covered in vine.

Local vanity speaks of private reverie and civil righteousness
as it was written by the scribe of some forgotten king
in the folklore legends of the "oldest mountains in the world"
Tall tales told by the downtown quack of another old man's uphill fight
the homesteader's plight, family ties, black eyes and coal mines
gossipers follow the line of a lunch time buffet and suit of a holiday parade,
a celebrated soccer game with junebug balloons and a dulcimer tune
flowers adorn the french braids of the milkmaids
sipping tea cups with mint and echinacea
speaking of the Nubian princess
as she plays with Gregory the Toad Prince
in the gardens of the Queen.

The King carries on
merry as the dulcimer's endless go round
telling secrets of long lost brothers in faraway lands
the precious knowledge revealed between years of separation
miles and miles of untold rivers and wood
now so easily distilled in a familiar beer
making material the years
fingered like foreign coins
in a turtle shell change purse
as the shadows stretch over the land
and the tracks of the train shadow the James

Private dreams shared are prayers to a rising cresent moon
Hopeful as half smiles and a list of baby names
Bold as a rain dance and the transister radio's mechanical promise
The Final Truth looming above Pergatory Mountain
back lit by the last rays of a dying summer day's reach
dark and distinguished, whispering capable
flying on the soft winds between the fireflies
and the evening boomers.

Head Fool Ideas
Naughty,naughty written on litter
naughty, naughty, naughty
naughty... and so on.
white on black garbage bags
Fresh Kill
The Thrill
Wanted
Head Fool Ideas

Hesitation has its privileges

Take Part in a
Heated underhanded debate
You all crazy fuckers
why don't ya stop the hate
mind your own
god damned business
singin I ain't got the paint
and I ain't seen nothin yet
sit down
you silly perpetrator

head fool ideas
graffiti of classical architecture
on cheap, ugly buildings
Paolo Uccello 1397-1475
battle scenes in a distant landscape
diagonal lines in from the edges of canvas
Red vertical spears of marching men,
checkered flags and a crest
family coat of arms,
a tree in the foreground
men getting to their feet
horses rearing, unfortuantes fallen
to their sides
the bottom edge of canvas
a bloody deluge
at the feet of the public
aging profile pictures
chipping away at a flat screen
al frescco
reminiscent of 2000
lost series of
ghost story paintings
greek islands, Vesuvio
City of the Ancients

Head Fool
Ideas
of Remembrance
Consolation, Revenge, Regret
Never Forget!
shout the needy and those
for the United way
all of us and them
together makes us feed
like animals the need
to let go, move on
return to faith in the future
the everyday tomorrow
singin'
I've been living out of this suitcase
for waaaay too long
pack and unpack
downsize baggage
Freedom is weightlessness!
Coincidence pinpoints a moment
calls attention to the present
the past and future's collapsibility
the reconstruction of time, remembrance, meaning
Head Fool Ideas
about communication
education
and international exchange
A confluence
please dress accordingly for
a Serious(ly)
Fun Event


The Dog Park

A hot summer day
on the black track
the bright green lights
start to smart
so I seek some shade
in the dog park
panting, sprinting, raising hell
hands and legs to the trees
and the delight of
silhouetted figures
of a social club's
transparent charade
fumbling rubber pocket sports
and the usual phony
cell phone tirade
chew on this you
fine how do you do
trade apologies and some laughs
letting silence fade to mutual fatigue
minding the madness at your feet
chasing tails, toys, games,
on the brink of anonymity
panting and grunting
before sudden collapse
a call to feet
look alive private
you're being excused