muse 9

RoM - Ghosts in Daylight

I grab my Mr. Rodgers sweater, my hall pass and my laundromat access card without loosing the heading that is turning into ascension.

When you are dealing with inward reality, unreality, and non-reality any muse will do to fold into the slipstream of the whatever. In a wide-open field they meet; where do they pass on parallel paths that never touch?

The most exhausting part is becoming clear. The shadowy mounting push did not need me. Delusion of reprieve doesn't. All I needed was to move aside from my tiny existence to make my way up a bit further onto the plateau and walk into the sunset. The great egress. I heaved and will powered the paralysis to lift. I pull to the left, out from under the huge boulder I had created, whisking my hands of loose clay. All of the voices hushed as I scramble toward the ledge and hoist myself up and into the black blinding light.

Having no pen nor paper on hand, I mentally impressed upon a page a note of confidence and reform. The paper folded and nested close to my neck for someone to find. I exhaled and swooned wondering after all if I still had the gold loop through my earlobe for payment.

It had been months watching him wither, hands cramping, and toes slowly curling. The room had transformed into a daily camp, a cafeteria, debate forum, a rumpus room, a vigil. They stood around in now hushed tones and witness his release. His body relaxed and there was an undeniable letting-go of the body as it relaxed, deflated and stilled; then a re-gathering wistfully above, moving willfully and purposefully. They felt the familiar, now fade into the near next with a clip of shine singing from his ear, and conversation remorse on the tip of their tongues.

-30-

muse 8

 RoM - Drop Back and Punt

… redirection is in order. Not exactly a new direction, but a mental turning around. Okay, not so much a mental turning — as a looking past. Past options, those were long ago voided out by other reasons and decisions that were uncontrollable. Control suggests need or want. Good thing everything is not controllable. We’d each have bloody hands and be dragging around Santa bags full of dirty rags all of our lives. Who’d be friends with someone who sounds so familiar?

Why not grab hold of hyakutake? Every once in a while it comes looming by, which means it comes closer every day, even when it is leaving.

It comes by from another goldilocks zone, within spit distance … close enough for communication and trade. Boons.

 I glide toward the meeting place, my feet dragging scooping up sludge into it grows like a snowball in front of me. Dodging and skipping along the street that seemed to have a theme of pot holes. I saw a stranger watching me from a noir shadow.

He gave me a nod, Yes, watch out; plot holes.

I meet up, join and follow others feeling the series of events, twist and blind turns currently eluding me. Noticing the writing on the walls, reading an interior dialogue on a one-way mirror. You know how your mind jumps to this hither and thither thing while you are in deep concentration with the other? Hypnogogic hallucination, involves seeing or hearing things just as you fall asleep. This is that. If this is a severing with reality the break feels natural, though wondering how to decipher. No telling, not knowing.

 It’s not the nightly happy phantoms charmed by a conducting Orpheus. This is an uncontrolled waking dream of comatose, passing the pearly gates of how cliché.

muse 7

RoM - The Past is Practice 

Excitingly new hearkens to the past. Three score and ten and overnight; here we may be. This brings up the cycles of the cosmosium. Confound it; I am aware it is impossible to move petrified legs. I feel the warmth of an intense light, the voices in the rotation of returning and retreat. Sometimes whispering amongst themselves. Sometimes lifting sentences as inquiring. I could not quite make out to answer, and do not need to, as they seem to answer for me in a condoling tone.

I enjoy the silences as it means we are all listening for who will say something next. More voices fill in the pauses until the party became an ambush. Wood paneling and wainscoting everywhere, spit flying. I image another rendezvous. Where did you learn to fly? Well that assumes a lot. Bluesy with a taste of twang, ready to get reckless?

A dear friend is smashed but alive. He rocks back and forth in an invisible cradle, a bottle neck loosely hooked through a ring finger. The bottle always slips first.

Sawdust on the floor soaks up the weather. One hundred year old grime on the walls fuzz up the air at McSworley’s. College buddies, now dressed in business suits, meet at the crowded circular tables. After a few too many pints they throw arms around each shoulder and rise swaggering to their feet singing the alma mater. Once ending, now quiet, they look at each other knowingly and sink back into their seats as one shouts, another round! for the glass littered table. This was the first year men wore Gray Flannel. That fragrance and sweat fills the room.

I instinctively look for hides, and escape routes. But instead of escape…

muse 6

 RoM - Occam's Razor Dulled

Backing away does not work. The disembodied and the hysterical pursue me. They take my hand and turn on the hot water works. I feel used and put upon. 

Shuffling through the entities with complicated causes I am able to pull out one recognizable voice. His spiel is selling train tickets to a spiritual pilgrimage, or, charging for the indulgence of your choice. You had a choice. You actually had a choice. He could sum up the present situation snappier than an Oscar F. O. F. W. Wilde remark. He was from NYC, was anywhere anything important happened, had an old guy ponytail, and his every other word was a bomb. 

I need to get this puss out of my system, as my mind is too foggy to tell truth from fiction, assuming fiction exists. My mind is as dull as a butter knife. Willie’s razor would be chasing down these negligible trivialities with a bulldozer in high demand if the human condition wanted simplicity of reasoning. But alack and alas, it has never been so. Some people simply chose to have live strangers in the trunk of the car for ballast.

Nephew, what means this passionate discourse, This peroration with such circumstance?

At some point the voices from a lifetime cycle back through and seem well known. We search and appreciate the kindred on un-familiar territory even within our grappling to find the excitingly new.

muse 5

RoM - A Chill When the Dead Man Smiles

Out of arguing bar-talk, a voice closes in and twists to demanding. I stand. He is tough. I do not remember volunteering but an involuntary arm muscle stood up and got attention. I get a feeling I’m not suppose to show my weakness, something in past lessons about needing to grow my shorn hair long and lacing up hi-top sneakers to cover my ankles for protection. Yes, that should do it.

As he barked orders I notice the scene is done up in tenebrism, to make the watching a controlled devise of sharp realism revealed from the murk. He lisps off what I needed to do for inspection.

…leave a bit of food offering to the tharg from the thupper before on your footlocker, hang your uniform thirt upside down from the light chain so it is eethy to get into and put the crucifith in front of the mirror so he can thee the back. Lathly, wear your underwear inside out, and then turn it in when he’th left.

Well all of that is okay …  accept the displaying the issued crucifix, it’s just not my thing. I don’t like this show.

“Got a better gore thymbol?”

He goes on downloading the plans of attack at noon. I ask if wont many be injured? He looks impatient, adding that we will hit during lunch break. 

Then he ignores my obvious question, “We will not then, be on lunch break, too?”

His plastered smirk began to feel wicked and hard like a Cheshire grin. The voices fade, as though they were exiting through a tunnel … as if his smile could clear a room.

Hey, you practice Ju-jitsu, don’t you?

Yes, the art of getting an opponent off balance, bringing him down, and killing him.

After you put something in motion, sometimes you have to back away.

muse 4

RoM - Cloaked in a Blinding Flash of the Obvious

…and met a fist not intended for me, along with a speech bubble filled with stars. You know that blinding start that keeps you alive? Your body cant tell if you are breathing and so jerks hard only to find you’ve scared yourself to just this side of death? Why, because comedy sucks hard to write, drama is close to the heart and close to the surface. I looked around to find the batman … but, he was still already dead. Why fight when you can bluff? Who said that? Why not move to action? Practice the art of non-pro-activeness.

Good thing my to-do/ne list is shorter than usual:

1. Nail the colors to the mast, only to find captains of industry wrapped in patience waiting for their next chance to control the weather vane.

 
2. Prove the crowded letters of the round table, if spun fast, it will reveal an ouroboros of ‘adopt-adapt-improve’ with no clue where to begin.

3. Figure if front face affronted forward is frontage or facade and if are we traveling against the light or silhouetted.

The idea of an impossible task carried out for impossible reward. I am feeling taxed by the effort of thinking. Breathing, though, seems to be an involuntary event.

Are you goin' to Scarborough Fair? …  Somber and grave grows merry in time.

I am remembered to the immediate.

I will sleep unaware of the clarion call.

muse 3

RoM - Counterintuitive

I felt the fall, but not the flip-flop: I landed on my feet. No, I reminded myself, you still cannot move your legs.

It doesn’t make the kind of since I am use to. The type that connects to a sequential moment, or is a reaction to the last moment, or working up to the next moment. This moment. This next moment. A storyteller is a dream maker. Unless you are never released.

I am busy, at this moment, plastering exploded drawings onto a wall with watery glue using a large brush. Everything from red wagon building instructions to metal stairways to a toilet to scales to guns to an oscillograph to; trusting you get the linear picture. I keep backing away including more of the wall onto my peripheral vision. I was unsure if I needed the information or if I was leaving it for posterity. Because chalk lines don’t last. This plastering a new layer of instructional material would never end. I needed only to hold the torch for the moment. I was in the golden glow of Vesuvio’s bathroom in North Beach. A familiar place, where hopes dangle from thin string, a slow-spinning redemption, winding in and winding out. There are many voices on the other side of the door. I am captiv/aided into a reverie.

The door opened wide and I bolt with a question, “What will you have?”

“I won’t drink.”

“Obviously you do, what will you have?”

The bar-back was so thin I heard someone out there say she could be used as a weapon. I looked past the tender to the images on the walls. The glass coverings were chipped in the corner and smeared with lipstick and grime. The fingery haze of smoke began to tighten my throat.

“I’ll have sky-pie.”

A slice was handed to me as the heavily anise lased aroma hit between the eyes. I took a bite and mentally backed away from the intensity as my mouth went numb with the condensed flavor.

Arguments ebb and flow in a chaotic human mess. I wanted to yell that the bat was on his way, even through the cacophony was too loud to have been effective. Was I the bat? For sure, he and I had never been seen in the same room … kinda use to make ‘em wonder … but I could no longer play that card since the Batman died. Insults were flung in my direction. If that where true I’d have to say, it’s none of your business, but since it isn’t, I’ll just say you’re on your own. I mentally wrote the abuse down to use later, but I have never been good at the memory game. 

I was then sucker punched by the woman in blue, hit between the eyes by something exposing deep secrets. Remembering that someone can't give, if you are not taking I shot back with, 

“Impossible, I do not know you,” and exited out of back door number two...

muse 2

RoM - From Wounds to Wisdom

Reaching for the lightbulb chain to darken the room, I choked on a blood clot and sneezed spewing a thick spray of blood on my chest and a fine spray everywhere else. The blood was intense carmine, the rest grayed in comparison. 

I felt again, as I always do before going to sleep, to insure my entire super suit is folded and stowed under the pillow in case of an emergency in the middle of the night. The situation didn’t seem important, so gaining a second wind I headed out of the bunk-room into the kitchen. I rubbed my fuzzy head trying to remember why my hair was cut so short, walked into the kitchen as the scene was intensifying into vivid color.

A help crew was tugging at a plastic bag full of stink.

“Hey, you got your happy ass out of bed to help me with garbage!” She always knows what I want to do…. I looked at her with what was probably a sheepish grin; I  knew she was kidding, sort of. I took the bag and set it aside.

I reached for the box of DIY breakfast and squinted at the ingredient panel.

“I need glasses.”

“Here, then add this.” She handed me a piece of chipped glassware. I passed it over the trash bag and set the wine glass down in the small sink thinking it could be used a few more times without anyone noticing.

Upon sitting, a feeling of dread dizziness swept over me, I must have lost more blood than imagined. I surrendered into that Jr. Spaceman type of funk that happens when you stare and create a microcosm within your limited proximity. The intense morning sunshine was braking through the window as ants ran around sill searching for the remains of their last expedition, their chief recognizant worker having gone missing only minutes ago.  The world is not flat when you can walk on walls. I blink over and over, my eye as the manual strobe, deflecting the radiant beam. It all turned into an old-tyme movie with the ants stuttering along their business. With every blink a blinding white room was moving closer. White, clean, disinfectant. Pine-sol will not be the smell of rapture as they nail him on a plus sign.  I was paralyzed in the light, not being able to look away and lot being able to look into. I felt the weight of my head hit my forearm and my eyes pulled closed as if attached to weights. Contemplating on the meaningful will take much longer. I crash, wondering if I’ve done all I can do.

How do we save him?

Take a photo?

muse 1

RoM - An Aggressive Return

Ten days ago,

yesterday,

only this morning,

I heard … What’s your heading?Knock ‘em dead. Remember the Mac, — the means always justifies the end. 

Side by side we’ve been through mistake after mistake, revenge and cowardness.

I recognized this well-known voice, but are we ever really formerly introduced to our conscious/ness?

I had been pushed so violently from behind, like being charged with missing a queue; my head snapped back and blacked out a few moments before I opened on the scenes that were filtering in through murky water. Involuntarily pushing off from the quagmire and heading aloft, toward the light, I detected a silhouette of a lifeboat. I surfaced and dragged myself aboard.

My arms ached with muscling in the fight and my one good leg cramped painfully. Rowing up the current was no small feat, the boat held steady, never gaining watery ground. Heading nowhere. A hemp rope tied-on to the board seat snapped taut with an invisible anchored weight below the dark flow. I scanned the current. A bit off, a scaly head revealed itself running toward me. I fumbled for my 10” gerber. Pulling it from my boot, I raised it high pointing down, bracing myself as the boat slowly eased sideways and tipped into the water, like a dipped cup filling. I squinted my eyes, focused and waiting for the dread creature to be within the blood circle.

A blacker slurry was mixing into the swamp. I was leaking from under the skin. With a confused fear I realized I couldn’t feel below my waist and searched my mind to how I had been…

“CUT!”

I shot open my sight to acknowledge where the familiar command originated from … somewhere on the slough bank.

The prop guy failed.

Jeweler, you failed….

The sheets are wet. The air too dry.

My work hollers at me, i hear it loud + clear.  My work lives as thoughts. i have collected these thoughts over the years, categorizing them, comparing, + taking notes on the notes.

i nail them down w/ colorful glass-head pins, spread open on the cork board parading w/ other though-captives + notice that some of them still twitch.

They question me;

If i shape a work perfect, exactly what i want — if i EVER manifested the artwork perfect — would i be afraid to try again?

 

  

Just one regular breath, that’s all.

i seem to be better at understanding the entire picture + then taking it apart to understand the  pieces + how the big picture fits. Not so good at getting a bit at a time + adding + putting the puzzle together.
A necessary condition of knowing is belief.

The dark ages are one of my favorites. Crusaders + their real life MacGuffins. Finding relics at just the correct time to win over + rally, to spur on the waining troops. Gaslighting a generation, the first motivational speeches for political persuasion! 

Relics were an early form of propaganda. An idea whose time had finally come.

I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion. -Themistocles

All misunderstandings are my own.

Isolation is no longer an option.

Figuring is a compelling thought; the complexity of words when used as a constrictor knot. The slip of the noose never loosens. 

The 12 step/ping on eggs plan. Most of the time i feel like i’m on the twelve-step program + i’m not an addict … is this the human condition? It is insulting to me as an artist to be asked to play such a shallow game.

The great debate.

i am a cross trained artist. That means, out of necessity, i'm trained in the fine arts, theater arts + design arts.

 

Having used the terms artist / image maker on my vitae for the past thirty years, It is impossible for me to separate the doing + the being. i also use the word, designer, just as often. The word artist is not pretentious. It's just a word we turn over + into something in our minds. 

101. Cross-training is important. There is no obvious path, + there isn't an automatically garnered paycheck. It is valuable to know what you are asking to be done. Know the execution of what you are asking of someone else. When others realize you have come up in the ranks, + you have put your time in, there is more allowance of respect.  

We have a saying — whomever touches the project last, wins.

After everyone has taken off their stage makeup, + other, i’m asked to go celebrate the show. i decline. Thinking: let me simply enjoy you professionally up on the stage. i am not interested in what pills you take, what labels you wear, what animals you eat….

You all know how to do this  — we’ll come back, for the hard part.