citywired

I am
damp with the
wet wonder of the November city and I am looking up,
peering over the cloudy soft pillow-white edge
of BC Place on a Saturday night
(Leafs fans in jerseys pass by, howling at the Vancouver skyline)
I peer at the glow of incandescent orange and gloaming blue
I walk, my inside is a dull aching place
due to the replacement
of
bodily fluids with caffeine
a daily occurrence for the past four weeks--
and I walk at a dullard's pace,
breathing in the mist and the orange glow of street lights, city lights
on my way to Pat's to
listen to Stevie Wonder records and to
make him a lampshade out of copper wire and acrylic medium and paper
from the recycling bin
(it's a birthday gift, he needed a lampshade)
and
things are shifting... Stevie Wonder sings maybe your baby
it's makin' him worried
it's makin' me queer
things are beginning, but the ending
is near

salacious / salubrious

the sentiments you sent to me are disturbing
though inadvertently, I am sure

you make a wish in your foreign mind and in the english language:
to see me again, all “sexy panty and golden hair”

I haven’t got the slightest inclination to
share these things with you

I want to keep it clean and distant,
a postcard unsold
free from the misfortune
of words

when you meant to convey
romance and the scent of autumn
you instead recognize my superior strength
and voluminous size
and pillowy softness

unintentionally tasteless twisted compliments

I received sleazy covetous intentions and was bound by
your hazy tethers of garbled muddy desire

translation
how unfair are the brutalities of language transformation

ten

one finger crooked to beckon or push on the button of the chin

two fingers to wear rings of falsity, and one to wear a ring of hope

one thumb drawn smearingly through charcoal and ash, then across faces, making warriors
or committing others to Wednesday’s penance and grief

one thumb held in the palm for safekeeping

one finger long and lean, speaking of bone and ceremony

two fingers
catching up a thread
between them

one finger stuck in the mouth of the past
feeling the wet jagged spaces within

friction

heat can be produced
simply from the act of rubbing two things
against each other

anemone

whatever he said, it stuck
a blob of blackberry jam, just like that.
it’s always like that, in the beginning
in the beginning of everything
my brain is flat and wide open, begging
to be etched and stained,
and then
after a period, it folds up small and tight
like a note waiting to be passed. no more room
for words, however clever they may be. but
like I said—at first, he left vermillion splatters and
magenta smears, a cocktail of fantasy distorted
like a red tide of dangerous passion
all across my bleary (but appreciative) senses. and
now although I have passed, like an anemone, into the
epoch of closed tendrils
the interior lights up with a glow of warmth
like a love note
written on the palm of a closed fist

p's and q's

face creased
lips small like a cat’s ass
all for the sake of concentration
all for the art of beatification

send your words up
ask for
love/money/luck/patience to rain down
or don’t ask for anything at all

prayer is the same all over the world
the personal twist is
whether you commonly call up to ask
or to say “thank you”

what is it

whatever have we here
unreliable fullness of smile
i want to rest my head on the heart of
the heart of the world
i want the biggest reality to be
the fullness
of me

finished

August goes blowing by, so much cotton candy in the wind
warm air and hot sweet breath mixing to syrup
leaves drying and adding orange music to black branches reaching up
to the gypsy skies, indigo and ochre

my mind is turning to the tune of the sweeping
of the dust on the sundeck, the past days all glory and no substance
leaving nothing but dry granules and a cocked ear

I’m ready for September to launch

crystal garden

drifts of sweetness

condensed on the window of the garden

wicked to remember what we took from one-another

more wicked to forget

away

we like the big sky
out here

moved
away
to be closer

to

nothing

nasty bedtime story

dirty sticky feets and hands
worms and turds and foreign lands
want to be in mad bazaars
with swinging kings and twisted czars

burning face and peeling knee
Elle and Em and Oh and Pee
childhood red the adult scarred
with bloody grin the mirror marred

Rayon crayon swirling fiend
Veal to meal as soon as weaned
battle thick with foaming yells
swords and mallets striking bells

bursting squeezing needing meaning
tight-shut eyes still see the gleaming
wanting bigger better best
and fell to ruin like the rest

kitsune

junk and jewels in the god’s house
a canopy of light beyond it
green freedom

the fox cannot reach the offerings
placed too far beyond the broken bicycles and the statues of herself

Advice for Art Students

I was thinking about my post secondary education in ‘Fine Art’, and it struck me that there were so many expectations that came with enrollment that the students knew little or nothing about. So often, a student would make something that they were reeeeally happy with, only to have it bashed to pieces in a critique by a professor who found it to be cliché. It turns out that although a first-year student might be having his or her first blissful encounters with duct-tape, the professors have seen enough duct-tape. ENOUGH. Seriously.

I wanted to put some of the common ‘clichés’ here, so that any pending Fine Arts students can be forewarned.

Clichéd Materials
Duct Tape
Masking Tape
Green Painter’s Tape
Oil Pastels / Oil Sticks
Anything ‘Free’ at your campus (ie. wooden coffee stirrers, brown kraft paper… trust me, they know where you’re getting this stuff from)
Glitter
Splattered Paint

Clichéd Themes
Fruit
Your Pet(s)
Your Kid(s)
Cars
Naked Women Posing Moodily
Sunsets
Angsty Self-Portraits
Birds / Bird Nests

Please note—I don’t think you should take my lists as definitive; there are bound to be instructors out there who haven’t gotten their fill, or who have a particular vendetta against watercolour or what-have-you.

If you feel confident that you can do something really great with the clichéd materials and themes, go for it! I know plenty of artists who make their livings dealing in glitter and baby portraits and what-have you (but remember, Art School is nothing like real life…)

Just don’t under-do it… go full out! I think that the sin that art students most commonly commit is sloth. They get lazy, and think, “Oh, it’s done enough.” Trust me; it shouldn’t be ‘done’ until you’re out of time. If you are going to make a glitter and green painter’s tape sculpture of your cat, it had better be the biggest, best, glitteriest ever—or there should be forty little ones, all done in minute detail, each with a tiny glittering fish in its mouth. Let your piece live up to its full potential—don’t half-ass it!

Just don’t use duct tape. Ever.

desert ride

slowly
turn the radio dial
in the old
blue
car
and hear only
dry air and bones

greasy

eating sundried tomatoes in oil, straight out of the jar
while watching Oprah on the downstairs couch, the couch upon which last month I spilled
hot lemon-chicken soup (still smells zesty and greasy)
I am thinking about Chad, whose baby is a boy—congratulations, I think—and
the time I was working as a Christmas-time perfume pusher for Givenchy
and the East Indian ladies would come by every day
to spray the armpits of their dresses with Obsession by Calvin Klein

cracked

I took the time
to blog and rhyme
the feelings I'd misplaced

I went looking for
an open door
and found an open safe

Postmarked 1998

I ventured beyond the little walls
that we put up around that wonderland we built
when we were still letter-writing dreamers,
I saw you, make-upped and ageing on myspacedotcom
and
I don't know-- was I shocked? I felt a little
voyeuristic, a little
disheartened

I took your advice, I looked up
p-r-o-s-e-l-y-t-i-z-e
and I suppose I’ve done that to you, tried to convert you to
my ‘happy’ – I just…
I wanted to keep you the way you were
in the picture, the one where you
weren’t posing, Timmy just surprised you—

I’m not driving
I can’t drive you, can’t ‘fix’ this, there isn’t anything to be fixed,
there isn’t anything to repair, to keep, to save

I whispered my wishes into the wind…

we shifted stance so quietly
stepped apart so gently
wings winnowing out our names—this fairytale doesn’t work out, didn’t work out the way I—I’m not driving—you’re not Griffin, and I’m not Sabine—I wish—I want--

goodnight, goodnight, my dear

the real Laughter of Buddha-me

I was having this conversation with myself, with these
aspects of myself
in the car, on the way home yesterday.

The Buddha-me was talking to an old distant ghost of sad-me--
a former incarnation (and one who was very real, before
Core-Belief Engineering and Wellbutrin—she is just a shadow now;
thankfully she doesn’t live Here anymore, but
I remember her) and

Buddha-me was teaching her about Happiness
Buddha-me said that happiness is just a matter of practicing happiness
that to be happy, one must just
Be Happy

and the sad ghost was so bitter
and sarcastic, and laughed a brittle laugh, thinking Buddha me
must be stupid, must be simple
to be So Happy
but Buddha me just laughed more, laughed bigger, laughed real Laughter—and said—

poor little ghost
you ache with anger because you think I have it so easy
that it must be so very Easy for me to be this Stupidly Happy

Bullshit, sad little ghost!
to Be Happy is Work!
Hard Work!

a discipline takes Discipline, and you, weak and bitter
are weak and bitter because That is the Easiest Way to Be!
Do not laugh with your cutting sneering laugh at me
and believe that I am the foolish one
if you laugh
do not put poison in your laughter
do not laugh until your laughter
is Real

glow

thin white bright long
hum tighten narrow hum
vibrate vibrate expand expand
change white pink green
glow glow yellow pink white green
blink turn reach reach expand
warm moist deep hum
dew green sigh slow
touch light turn reach
reach pull shock vibrate
revibrate vibrate expand push
push pull yellow green pink bright
shock gasp breathe breathe
breathe breathe
breathe

Anderson, South Carolina

the first cotton gin in the world
the first cotton gin in the world
run electrically
was built in
Anderson, the electric city, the
friendliest city in South Carolina, the
first city in the United States to have a
continuous supply of electric power

the boy
the boy born there, raised there
darted about in the blue dusk
with his sister, to milk from the fireflies
the electric face-paint
the boy named for his father, who

flung him away, when the boy ran in to be enfolded
in his daddy’s arms, the father
who did not deserve the son
the son who
needed more than the name of his father, the

first cotton gin in the world
to run
electrically

dust to

the reams of silent expectations
dust
the weight of anticipation
dust
the battered dreams, the reeling wings
the open arms, the broken rings
dust

dust is light

wear it, carry it, layers of it, heavy and dead
or

shake it off

butterflymoth renewal

The dark(ened) and har(er)-scrabble
pocket-linty / crumpled-(up)
portion of your life is
falling away
like so much abandoned chrysalis-tic swaddling

pretty
is just a feeling

self-reflecting
is a way of life

the way to the edge of the water

thin enduring song
wavering distant note

a clear peg in a sound hole
(that’s just how it is, make it good, make it good for now)

bright tongues of light rub up against
everything green

trip breezy
past small rocks smiling
small leaves twirling
small creeks laughing

shimmering long strand of secret feeling
strong like the wind is strong

red warm trees flash
when eyes are closed

down to the line between blue and blue
s& between toes

sarcasm is based in truth
beware

gleamings

nimbly
furrowed
under
-
squirreled
away
-
the
squeezing
believing
-
that
keeps
her
at
bay

the
light
understandings
-
too
narrow
to
touch
-
gleamings
and
gleanings
-
and
meaning
too
much

a
look
that
sets
boundaries
-
chalk
smiles
on
the
path
-
small
holes
in
the
dreamings
-
small
frowns
in
the
laugh

jubulant
self-expressive freak
dance or write the word dance
write the word dance and say it too

or just dance

What happened after the dot-com crash? The dot-com rush? What was it like, you pixilated being, did your diodes divide, did you sell your virginity on e-bay, did you surf the unseen strands of electric love and find e-harmony?