My craft has a name for me.
Its holy ink
painting the first stroke on the cave wall
now. At this very moment
it is lifting the curtain and watching me sleep.
It is stirring egg and ash
over a flame.
Category: Creativity
Let the World Spin
The enemy does not live in you.
Your life is not your foe. Not your wounds or mistakes, not even the hurt you caused.
Not your temper. Not your failures. Not the paths you taken or those you’ve passed on, not your reckless love or your absent god.
The enemy does not occupy your mind. The enemy does not govern your chemical imbalance. The enemy never existed inside you. You didn’t let it infiltrate, storm the gates. You are innocent of that, if not of everything.
Hearing Voices
![[no title: p. 304] 1970 by Tom Phillips born 1937](https://smirkpretty.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/phillips_tom.jpg?w=578&h=896)
Surely it is not art. She pulls her phone from her pocket and steps to the stage. Her first time. Tapping the screen, she balances it on the ancient music stand. Grips the mic with both hands. Through ums and mumbles, she describes a man who called it love before the girl learned the proper name for abuse.
Surely this is not poetry, nowhere close to art.
Art you know. You saw Gipsy Kings at the Barns and walked Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors at the Hirshhorn. You can recite Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” by heart.
You know art.
Surely this falls short. Yet…
Kill the Babysitter
Here comes the babysitter. You’re pumped. His appearance promises a night of board games, TV, living room dance parties. He’ll make mac & cheese for dinner and skip the broccoli entirely. Turn up the volume on bands you’ve never heard of. Dress up like a Sith Lord and let you annihilate him after a protracted battle that covers every floor of the house.
You may pass several hours draped in sequins and spiked on sugar. Playing, yes. But for show, not for keeps. Playing for this night only. Playing with the door closed.
The babysitter has one job: keeping you safe until your parents get home.
This Holy Round
Until her dying day, Georgia O’Keefe fought against the notion
that her flowers resemble sexy ladyparts. Too silly. Titillating.
Low art.
Diminishing that lovely stroke to the hungry scratchings of a beast in heat.
Vulgar. Raw.
It’s a Game of Give and Take
The instructions said
to lay it deep
six weeks at least
before last frost.
You followed the steps
more or less.
In Defiance of Morning
You catalogue the early shames,
a tattoo on the lining of your lungs.
The mural leaves its stain despite the stretch
and growth you chart first on door frames
then belt notches
then monthly statements,
each unit of measure distorting the fresco
as much as the measurement taken.
Recognizable no matter the eons intervening,
the arcs of those stories.
Petroglyphs,
kaleidoscopes,
crime scenes,
autopsies.
All tales have tongues.
They scour the natal down
from your heart. They leave a taste
like pennies and char.
Like Riding
How to write a poem
is one thing you thought you’d never forget
but after a while even the wobble escapes you.
Wheels warp, refuse to align.
Months of days passing the place you stashed it
before you notice it’s gone.
Stolen? At first it seems so, a ragged hole
the size of your fist
in the door just below the lock.
Sometimes The Owls Are Exactly What They Seem: The Banality of David Lynch
I loved it. Identified with it. Bought the soundtrack and made copies for all my friends.
Even so, something about it turned me off.
Every few weeks, my fellow freaks and I gathered in a friend’s living room to marathon-watch taped episodes of Twin Peaks on Betamax. We buzzed over Laura Palmer’s diary and even tossed around the idea of dressing up as the show’s characters for Halloween.
When they tapped me to wrap myself in a plastic drop-cloth, I balked.
Because something about it turned me off.
Continue reading “Sometimes The Owls Are Exactly What They Seem: The Banality of David Lynch”
Dear Blank Page
My Dear One,
It’s possible to ignore something for so long, it slips from awareness. This happens even with the things we need to live. By accident or luck, one of these lost things might tumble across our path. We trip over it and pause to pick it up. Oh, you! I remember you! We’re stunned that we’ve managed without it, yet skimming back over the time apart, we see, with absolute clarity, how its absence has hobbled us.
