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