For a flash of a moment, he could plainly see that every single thing was composed of the same light - one vast, seamless veneer of light - a grand palace of images pressed thin like a beautiful, shimmering cast molded over an infinite, form-granting void - infinitely deep, infinitely silent - just barely beneath that gossamer, spellbinding surface...
Inner Dancer
They were all dancing - transcendent, graceful - giving, taking - beautiful, effortless, reciprocal Love - but only in their imagination, only on the inside, only for themselves. They stood silent and still, arms crossed, nary a smile, for the crushing embarrassment, shame, and fear of being misunderstood, being the odd one out, outweighed the will to live a life ideal - Earthly Paradise lost once again...
Roman Soldier
A Roman soldier. He enjoyed the free-wheeling asymmetry of his violence, it's one-sided bent. A swift, ragged cut with a war-dulled blade, the arc of it's forceful gravity flung through neck and cheek and sinus - useless enamel, pitiful cartilage, a great splintering of bone - explosive spray of mucus and blood from a nose split in two. The terrible divorce of spirit and flesh. The angels averted their gaze while God watched on…
Impossible Wings
The child paced up and down the city blocks, exploring every back alley and nook & cranny, often trespassing in doing so. He searched intensely, tirelessly for that magnificent, mythical bird, the same one that dazzled in his imagination that he knew he’d seen a real-life glimpse of the day before. Without a shred of doubt, he knew the bird would truly exist if he fervently, wholeheartedly believed in its existence. From there, it would be a simple matter of tracking it down!
His periphery winked - a flash. A quicksilver river of red and blue shadow cast wide on the adjacent wall of a dead-end alley. He slowly, quietly turned the corner and there it was: unbelievable - impossibly beautiful - awesome, in the most fearsome sense of the word. Literally taken aback, the child missteps loudly and their eyes lock, each terrified by the sudden discovery. The bird, cornered, panicked. Screeching horribly and frantically leaping back & forth, the child didn't know what to do, immediately regretting willing it into existence. He shut his eyes, clasped his face tightly, and began to cry, hoping that if he cried loudly enough and for long enough, the bird, and the whole world for that matter, would just disappear. He opened his eyes, vision wet and blurry, blinking away tears - the bird he so desired to find was gone, nowhere to be seen.
He cautiously approached the end of the alley where the bird was thrashing about just moments ago and, on the ground, he noticed a peculiar shape. A feather: large, intricately, subtly patterned, almost holographic - light as air - impossibly shaped yet in a state of change, unlike anything he'd ever seen or could possibly imagine. The longer he looked the more he saw it as it really was, and this frightened him so completely that he dropped it as if snakebit. As it gently floated down - so soft, so light - the boy turned and ran and never thought of such things again.
The Dove
Using his paintbrush, the Artist painted a dove; creating not an image of a dove but an actual dove - fully alive - three-dimensional, becoming. The Artist painted the iridescence of each keratinous fiber of its feathers, the bacteria and minerals in the cracks of its feet, the endless miles of DNA in its genetic makeup (saturated with millennia of instinct, awareness, and feeling), the crystallized matrix of every atom floating in space, the infinite reflected world in its eyes - omnia memoria - the entire totality of existence in a quick succession of brushstrokes - until its wings, actualized and transcendent, spread wide and effortlessly carried it into the sky, through the clouds, until the Artist's work was out of sight. God Smiled.
Functional Schizophrenic
The mechanism in his brain that filtered awe and wonder from the everyday was broken. Every little thing was utterly mind-blowing, often to the point of completely forgetting what it was he was supposed to be looking at. The Functional Schizophrenic - universal output received incomprehensible & wondrous, the world of appearances leaving him wide-eyed, slack-jawed and dumb. A double-edged sword, retraining & rewiring his mind to accept all things as ineffably beautiful, innately holy - a beatific sometimes terrifying whole - irreversibly on a road of lifelong unlearning; a mental retreat back toward childhood, back when the world was young and new and dangerously free - the infinite arc of history unspooling before us…
Pressure
At a point of unbearable pressure, the intellect overheated and shattered - much like a sculpture not hollowed before firing, its prior shape lost forever. After a long, painful interlude sifting through the fragments and a sort of functional braindeath, the largest shards were salvaged, scored, slipped, and reassembled. A new form emerged, one largely unrecognizable from its original state, full of a nebulous emptiness where a fixed density formerly reigned. Somewhere between a two- & three-dimensional collage of past & present, no longer the white-hot ball of nickel it once was, now uncertain, fragile - an empty, imperfect sphere hastily glued back together out of fear and primal necessity. Yet underneath that cracked and broken facade, something profoundly new began to grow - every edge, kissed with light, penumbra brimming, yearning, illumined deep within...
Dream as Short Story
In a dream, a Vodou Magician gives you a stone to keep in your pocket, unknowingly linked to a stone in his hand, an enchanted stone through which dark designs are writ. Suddenly, you awaken - in a mythical Land of High Mountains - map calls it "Underdadd." In a high-end hotel bustling with wealthy travelers & new arrivals. Peaks surround the city - some snowy, some rocky, some green - mountain-chill & warm sunlight, clouds gather low in the early morning valleys. It is beautiful. Through an open window, you can make out a distant tour group in colorful cold-weather gear led to the top of a nearby mountain, a snow-capped peak called Nuk. After settling in, we go walking on the outskirts of the city. We pass a stately, sprawling university campus on top of a hill overlooking vast moors and dark forest dotted with little cottages and smoking chimneys, well-to-do collegiates strolling the adjoining promenade. There is a small town nearby with a river running through it, homes and places of business built into the hills that spiral and rise above it. On a pedestrian bridge overlooking the river, an excited visitor turns and says, "You're in for a treat - this only happens this time of year!" You smile, curious, and after a beat, the clouds begin to part - sunlight comes beaming in and, like magic, the water turns a deep, rich, blood-red hue. Apparently, this is a natural, localized phenomenon - something to do with the conjunction of light, specific atmospheric conditions, the biochemical makeup of the water, and perhaps something altogether more mysterious. The crowd gasps, then bursts with excitement. Music plays - the roots in pagan celebrations here from time immemorial. You watch on high as a woman at the edge of a growing crowd along the river breaks into dance, quickly steps into the shallows of the newly red river - fast, agile, graceful choreography but with a pinch of chaos, full of a dark & lively passion. She sashays deeper into the crimson recurrently sending cupped handfuls of ruby-lit water shimmering through the air, further intensifying her movements (much to the audience's delight). At times, she slips and sinks down into the black mud of the riverbed and is fully submerged in the deep-red water only to spring back up as if engaged in some kind of self-baptismal ritual, working each dip into her dance with ease, exuberant and fully undeterred in ecstatic revelry. The otherworldly, ancient music that accompanies her intensifies into a thumping, rhythmic beat and two more dancers move in to join her - sun shining, blood-red water splashing & sparkling. Shortly after, everyone on the bank follows suit and soon the river is thronged with muddied, wide-eyed revellers. The celebration on the hillside grows wilder too, glasses clinking, heels stomping, excited hoots & hollers raise in pitch and frequency. We remain here for a while - entranced, jollified, bearing witness - then move on, down through town on the other side of the hill, a town that now appears to be a shantytown, but teeming with perfumed visitors in diamonds & expensive clothing, dipping in & out of designer outlets, bistros, clubs, galleries, all set up inside of tin-roofed shacks, no-longer-abandoned buildings, the ruins of old churches. There was sewage flowing down the streets, mosquitoes & flies biting - strange - a midpoint between worlds, some kind of alloyed magic waning, your eyes narrowing. You turn around with an odd, sickly feeling. The man from the dream is behind you - The Magician, a Bokor, stone in hand manifesting, in control of the Vision like a leash to a dog. None of it is real - a consuming illusion unsteadily cast over an altogether different and destitute place; a Pauper with a King's mantle and the All-Power vested in it. Seeing the look of horror, he says, "Don't make me crack you" - and he vanishes. The spell is back, full force. Dog wandered too far off the trail - leash tightened - he won't make that mistake again. And so, I am content with walking, lifelong, unknowing, blind to reality, led through the alterplace - the Underdadd - a tourist's place where nothing is real, all is but a Show - for preening, selfish travellers cursed to live preening, selfish lives - a spell of wanton luxury unbroken - mindless, soulbound, cyclic, inescapable - led like a Shepherd leads lambs to the slaughter...
Fit Check
Egomaniacal megalomania
What doesn’t fit in that head?
Sight reduced to pinholes
We’re barely shining through
The Supreme, Unknowable Genius
“And don’t I just know it!”
Welcome to Your Heart
Love without Reason
No Carrot on the Stick
No Rabbit in the Hat
Welcome to Your Heart
Boundless and Racing
Tracing Every Single Curve
More than Enough for You and Me
All that the Eye can See…
All Hallows’ Hallelujah
Brainstem Severed, Taproot Headless
A Sleepy Hollow Harvest – Ready or Not!
Here Cerebrum, Come Cerebellum
Shorn like Pumpkin from Leathery Stalk
Pink-Grey-White – Transmogrified
Matter Carved like Jack-O-Lantern
Eyes Alight, Mouthful of Flame
Braindeath’s Head in Orange & Black
How it Glows! Grins, Portends!
The Inevitable Dimming of the Light
Visage Wanes, Spent Wax Pools
The Pyromancer’s Wick goes Dark
Now the Night Forever Sings
All Hallows’ Hallelujah!
To You
You – Tucked in Periphery
In Corners, Folds, Recessions
Winking Majesty Twinkling
Topological Miracle – You
Fill in the Gap – Smiles Crack
Magnetars, Cosmos in Your Eyes
As we Hum and Play (and Eat our Cake too!)
When Silence rules and Love runs deeper
Where does Language take us?
To You – Heartbeat in Stillness
Relaxed in Eternity
All within – You
A Life in Arrears, Forgiven
Beloved, Unconditional
Palimpsest Infinities
Life Under Spokes
Life Under Spokes or Life at the Limit?
Is it Worth it? Where do we Go from Here?
Spires casting Shadows, glint in Receding Light
Eldritch Pantomimes and Clubs up the Ladder
Jesus Wept – Tears blooming on your Tongue
Manna from Heaven (and Salt to Taste)
The Whole World Upside-down & Outside-in
Inverted Communion in the Back of Your Skull
A Wretched Musical, Tap-dancing Falsehoods in Chorus Line
Flagrant and Flaming and Grinning and Singing
Satan in Drag on a Tightrope – Feather Boa Twirls!
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s – Status Woe…
Hungry Ghosts, Insurers & Usurers, Egregores, Firedrakes, Pearl-clutchers, Coffers to Coffins
A Life of Just-Desserts and Sugar-Rot, Self-Immolators Marching in Unison
Synchonized Sinners weeping Arpeggios, chasing the Pain with Mirthless Laughter
Blindfold Tightening – Eyes once Sparkling
Swelling – Ballooning – Wet with Tears – Burst
Wick alight no more…
Green
In some flowery grave
Packed a lifetime of dirt
Wept over like the sky
Consummates the Earth
Memory blooming – trapped
Absorbed in the loam
Electrical matrix tilling
Death to Life anew
May fresh air and salt raise you up
Back to life as you know it
Green
Birdsong, ridgelines
A mossy mouth
Honeyed with rejoicing
Eden in your heart
The Lion
Your Love pounces like a Lion
Tears the soft white throat of shame
Rips, bloody, doubt and worry
The pool surrounds you
No longer inside you
Only righteous gnashing and the licking of wounds
Hands caressing its coarse, bloodied flank
Clouds part
The Dove descends
Crown to root
A Serpent rises to meet it
My Arrow
My arrow flies not straight and narrow
But rollicking, fearsome, and wild
Wide-arced, sinuous – its path, unstoppable
Painted with sunlight, flecked with blood
And All Good Things
And the Muy Mal – rises catastrophic
From depths like ancient oarfish
Falls like gentle newborn snow
Kissing the rosy cheeks of children
Sweeps the fields like harvesting scythes
Cools the sweat of labor beading on your brow
My arrow is Love – do not mistake it
Perilous and holy and free…
The Long Haul
Illumination
Of the Godflesh of your heart
Beat wings transcend
The woes of the Earth
And the sins we weave together
A lifetime forgiven
In the brilliant light of Being
Adorned, resplendent
Sundogs centrifuge
Play in your hair
Commandeer the journey
In it for the long haul
O, the glorious song of Life Everlasting!
Echoes through me
Takes my breath away
Reign, Agoraphobic!
Reign, Agoraphobic!
I kneel to Thee
Deluded “I”
Bereft of Grace
Or Freedom
Or Connection
Earthbound
Crestfallen
Dumb and alone
Condemned to walk
Barren wastelands
Overpopulous
Unkind, solipsistic
Motherless, Fatherless
Wells of virtue
Emptied & abandoned
New Gods at Home in our Hearts
Avarice and Envy and O, Deluded “I!”
Digital Lord Almighty
At Such Great Heights
Awareness shivers in the dark
Paler by the moonlight
Will the sun warm your sight again?
Your treatise, one-sided
Hands with a mind of their own
Blue light holograph, facehugger nightmares
PSI crushing
Your mind – mind of a Serpent
Past and present, thoughtform skeletons
Bowing and breaking
Mid-air, feathered and tarred
At such great heights
The air is thinner than you think
Breathe deep and fold
Thirteen times forever
Upcoming Figurative Art Show at the Rusty Lotus Dojo
Happy to be included in a new group show coming up in May (my first since moving to Asheville, NC in September!). The exhibit will feature artwork focused on the human form from artists who have attended the live modeling sessions at the Rusty Lotus Dojo in downtown Asheville. Many of the pieces on display were created directly from live models at these sessions. I will be contributing three pieces to the show (two of which were created on site) which you can see below. Details about the specific dates and times will be coming soon!
“Sunrise” Tripoli, 2019, oil on canvas
“Ren Sakuraba - Rusty Lotus Dojo” Tripoli, 2021, charcoal on paper
“Shauna - Rusty Lotus Dojo” Tripoli, 2021, charcoal on paper