New York in The Age of the Great Unknowing - Written on the Occasion of the Visit

The gated and the negated.

The more I look at color the more I see gray.

How they created dimension on the flat paper.

A canvas of paper.

A room of canvas.

Canvas the room.

Lost audience.

Rule bound.

Spatially impoverished.

He taps his wrist as though it were possible to decoupage the sound.

He asks if is possible to see the painting in both color (purple) and gray.

An expression of abstraction as if it could contravene the possibility of probability.

The sex was sensational.

Are you being cute James?   Or crazy James?

Because she was a sufficiency and/an efficiency of opportunity.

A real good time knocker.   Rapity Rap Rap – It’s a wrap.

Clap clap it’s the Flapper!   Dancing the lights on and off.

Milquetoast – the quality of a Milky Maid performing the act of making ready surface for the milk paints used in the  composition in question.

Watch the sap between the limbs.

The materiality of the construction – the fabrication of the material,  the coloration, imprinting of, all shapes the emptiness of infinite space – the limits of possibility – permeability.

The outer limits of the abstract refract against the mirror of expression – an audience absent itself as the composition fails to compel, repel, engage at all.

The viewer looks and looks and looks until there is no more seeing, co completion, no unification of object and gaze.

Don’t worry it’s just a phase.

This is the train to New Haven, West Haven a new haven for Wes Craven.

Digital Dilemas

Too much stimulation and the temptation to create even more.   Which event is the most interesting?   Who will be where and when?   So many to dos,  I do nothing.

I am again thinking of what this space might become and how it might be an easy way to share work. And then I wonder if I should create a new space, something fresh and clean or purge or archive this one and have it be just poems and stories.  And so again I fret and do nothing or only a little of this writing about my preparing to plan to decide to do.

Old Audels - Some Saturday Some Time Ago

A lovely SF weekend remembering why I love San Francisco.

Saturday-

Breakfast with Jan Johnson one of my early SF friends from SF State and publisher of Red Wheel Weiser books at the Fountain on 24th.   Even better than expected on all fronts.  The neighborhood in daylight as delightful as in the evening when I'd been before for readings at Alley Cat Books.   Turns out Jan almost bought a house out here when she first moved to SF but ended up in the Richmond which give the number of decades was likely a better real estate bet.  Even now the gentrification out there seems to be slower and less intense than the changes in my Alamo Square/NOPA neighborhood in the last couple of years (Falleti's, NOPA, Parish Trust, and now BiRite and the Mill competing for most hip).  Then shopping at Alley Cat in search for book props for the son in laws play in LA (lots of light spined literary books please) which thanks to the bargain bin in front was a success followed by even more success at Community Thrift on Valencia where I collaterally scored a 1977 Rolling Stone Goodbye SF edition for $3- that was the best ever Emily Wilson surprise gift I could imagine.

Mid-Day slightly manic browse at Bolerium Boooks which a great Bruce Boone score, Karate Poem, and the temptation to come back for more later.

And then late after noon....Then Alvin's Noe Valley reading which was a weird church bake sale meets bookfair event but his reading was good and that Karl (KM Sonelheim) was there so some to chat with while they waited forever to start.

Then Yoga and now Blowdryers on the CD.

The Plane is my Passenger

 The plane is a my passenger from here to there with small flutters of possibility.   I write as if it were to tell a story but the story is stuck behind the noise of anxiety.  The fear of failures, real and imagined, pressing against my mind.   An impossible place of so many thoughts in so many directions.  Job stress.  Home stress.  Travel stress.  All the stress of too much to consider and too much to do.

The poetry magazine article on color slowly settling in.   So many ideas of expression and so many poems/poets cited/quoted.   A theory of color and a coloring of the theory to give such brightness to language.  Dorothy Lasky.  Didn’t Dodie in part use this article or at least the idea of the article for an exercise.  The red one or the green one or any of the colored ones?   Colored ones…a colorful term out of fashion for a distinction of race in a time of overt racial tensions.   A world without color.  A world of black and white.  A world where shade and shadow are enough to answer the questions of polite politics.

This writing on the plane is uncomfortable.  The laptop too high.   My wrists all twisted into a knotty tunnel of discomfort.  I persist fearing an injury and enjoying the thinking and writing and being present with these two activities.  I wonder how Dodie’s will be?  I am sorry to have missed so much and even sorrier to miss more.

Careful what you wish for.

This was the year of getting it done.   It has become the year of turmoil and upheaval. 

Dead Friends Dinner Party

Arrange the table in a circle.
No one heads the table of the departed.
Be sure to use place cards.
Not all of the departed will remember their place.
Be unconcerned about balance of gender.
Allow for the discomfort of dislike.
Friendships fail the test of timelessness.

A lock of hair, nestled in the centerpiece, commemorates the correspondence of the past with the present.
The letters exchanged describe the indescribable you.
In their narration your story is found.