A drawing and a poem! Yeah!

This drawing has no real title, but for association's and contemplation's sake, I am nicknaming it "Temporal Evolution". Make of it what you will...

Mediums: Pen and more pen.

And this poem is another dream poem, though this poem has been more worked out when am awake and full of writerly concerns. Still a rough draft though, so judge as harshly as you like, I shall take no offense! I hope you enjoy it, or derive some spiritual value out of it...

                                                                                                                                                                       

Sky-sent Eyes

It was in your hands where I began.

But the crown of oaths is too heavy for your heart now,

As it was for my shaking hands.

How long do you hold someone to

A promise?

As long as they can stand?

The birds of sorrow have come to me

In dreams and in waking

Black feathers rustling and

Oak branches whispering

Under their sudden weight.

They would look me in the eye,

I would look in yours.

But I looked away for so long

No longer can you hold my gaze straight on.

The cup we shared dropped

Red wedding wine upon the unkempt floor.

Their raven claws would snap my lies in two,

Their sky-sent eyes would comfort me.

For they have come from a place of honored promises

The sky has held their wings aloft

And I will fly to you

They will teach me how

There are no words in naked flight.

Meet me with your eyes

And landing I will shake your heart

Free

To hold me again.

Dragon Arrogance, Demon Dreams

A drawing/painting and a poem. They seem for the most part to be quite connected in many ways, but they were created independently, both in terms of how I felt when I made them, but also in terms of when I made them. I have decided to call the style of art I am pursuing Creationalism, rather than the more lengthy term, Dream Consciousness Art. The goal, if there is one, is to create genuine emotive and intellectual realities on the material I am interacting with at the time, whether it be paper, cardboard, wood, brick, etc. As I noted before, the psycho-spiritual goal is to come into fuller and fuller contact with our dream and subconscious realities and to allow those energies, concerns, thoughts and perceptions to dominate and guide the creation of images, colors, rhythms, patters, etc. The intuitive, rather than the analytical and rational, is to dominate in the creative act; the interpretive procedures, such as meaning-making and searching for known patterns, comes after the creation stage.

Note: the title is merely a suggestive afterthought, meant to highlight some of the possible themes in the work. There is much else that is going on here, I feel, so please do not limit your experience to simply 'finding' the dragon. If possible, feel the energy, emotions, realities, and concerns in the art as it presents itself to your own raw basal consciousness.

Dragon Arrogance

Mediums: Charcoal, Pen, Acrylic, Pastel, and Marker on Paper 

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I wrote the following poem directly after waking up from an intense series of dreams that I will not elaborate upon too much here, but suffice it to say that the poem is strongly but not directly influenced by the narrative content of my dreams; it is, rather, expressive of the emotions and symbols I experienced when dreaming. I have only edited the grammar of the poem since I first wrote it, and have not subjected it yet to a fully conscious and rational revision.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Demon Dreams

Demon realities
demon dreams.

Break the egg I’ve been sleeping in.
Oxygen I need.

Let me slip wet across the floor

to fall a thousand times
and when you hold me awoken
I will be yours for good.

Until then it is ok to cry
But I will not see or notice.

Flailing and angry 
in cocoon rags I will break realities.

I will offer you death kisses
poison eyes
my love will be

An asphyxiation.

Upon my weeping and mutilated body
beauty will flow
treacherous
the stuff of unbidden dragons
sharp claws
poisonous wings
and terrifying flight.

Fear my embrace.
Fear my laugh.
They will mean nothing to me.

You will mean nothing.

But I won't mean it.

My legs will be covered in
slime,
millions of eggs in my writhing womb, the pain
tremendous.

I just want to be free....

Let my walls crack,
let my yoke flow.

Blue eyes to blue eyes
awakened
we will be denizens of love
together once more.

New Poem: Burial Rites for the Riteless

Burial Rites for the Riteless

When weeping

but still vain

we crawled out from the Garden of Eden on weakened knees,

our eyes were surely on the skies,

our hearts convinced our hands a grander

more productive garden would grow.

Our gardens grand at last

And even majestic grown

When seen without memory

Or known without knowledge of the world’s whole.

But seen complete

Our gardens are

Chaotic

And tangled grown,

When all the world’s edges are gathered under glaring magnitude

And collisions are pronounced by the unlistened mages

Of yester and today.

In our gardens we have buried all our bones

And watered some,

Forgotten others.

The blood of the trampled

Underfoot and forgotten

Is filling up the barrows

And leaking into fountains

And burial rites that apple trees and roses

Once knew best

We have buried with unburied bones.

The bone-piles rise:

Ancient and holy scavengers ejected,

Scents of death severed from the rounds of the living.

I too took a turn

At garden-growing,

Found my books, my seeds, and my time,

But left off at weeding.

I always felt digging in my heels

The cracked ribs of Able:

my blood gushed,

my garden wilted.

My eye for eyes,

Heel for heels,

My limbs for all the rest…

I have held a cup of blood

In my tired

Raging hands

And been urged by sinister others

To “drink, drink,

Drink to success,

Let not the weeping of the maimed

And hungry

maim your thirst!”

“Oh” they say,

“Oh,

The pain,

The crashing

The thunder is not divine,

It is but a passing fury –

There are no more hurtling Furies

To be unleashed upon the grievous world!”

And they run around dancing somersaults

Upon the graves of the just

And blameworthy alike,

Perfuming rocks with rose water

And taking trees to task for

Littering their yards with leaves.

Our gardener’s gloves are stained with blood.

We have lost repentance to the overgrowth

And the plain white wind waits to make our home

A perfect circle once more.

We can no Eden dig up,

Rediscover,

Or grow for our own narrow time.

The long shadows of writhing Furies

Have long been cast

Upon our bickering backs –

And it is but a wondrous spell

That holds us from the brink.

The beginning of a New Sanity

I am going to kick off this blog with a drawing and two poems. I only began making visual art as a conscious activity about four months; I will explain the overall nature of my artistic endeavors shortly. The first poem I wrote some 3 months ago and another I wrote a few days ago. All three works of art speak for themselves, but I would also like to speak for them, thereby providing multiple lenses through which a reader/viewer may assess the value and import of my work. These secondary descriptive lenses are by no means conceptually obligatory or semantically prior to the original creative acts they append. Indeed, you can completely ignore the commentary - or just enjoy the commentary as art and ignore the originals!

This drawing belongs to what I consider my early phase of drawing and painting: I had just begun to branch out from pure gestural scribbling and to explore more articulated conceptual themes and color patterns, textures, abstract movements and rhythms. I think it is appropriate to explain that while I do regard my work as "Art" in the sense that it has aesthetic values and spiritual values I seek to impart to an unknown audience, I do not limit the quality or quantity of those aesthetic values to those I experienced during the creation stage. See and discover what you like. There are and there are not "things" to see in this drawing and many others to come. I would also like to note that I view my visual art-making as an important psycho-spiritual activity that helps me to open myself up to the more intuitive, purely visio-spatial side of total being, which I have through most of my life largely ignored in favor of the literary, philosophical, and analytical aspects of total being. Hopefully my work can be a similar gateway for other like-minded souls. One last note: this work of art, and many others I have made, fall into a distinct branch of art that may or may not exist for other people: it is Dream Consciousness Art - that is, art that seeks to express what the pure dreaming/subconscious part of my being/our being is in contact with at all times. I typically allow only a minimal amount of planning and rational/analytical and self-critical thought to enter into the creative process. There is no correcting, no erasing, except to contact and extend a Dream Consciousness movement or energy pattern. Words and known images may enter into the fray, but not by conceptual plan or schema - more by impulse and listening to the silence, and allowing my hands and eyes in the creative act to reign sovereign over the whole process.
                                                                                                                                                                  

 The first poem is about personal transformation: my own transformation. I have come to recognize that the self is a construction - it is a narrative. And we get to play with that narrative and change it as we can over time. In my life I seek now to forge a distinct but malleable 'mask' I can 'wear' as an artist, intellectual, poet, translator, and philosopher. This mask is that of Manbeard. The poem is an introduction to the ways of Manbeard (but don't take it too literally. There is a "real' person lurking underneath - isn't there?). By forging and donning such a mask I simultaneously seek to call into question the socio-economic statuses the aforementioned roles play in our society, to re-explore those statuses for our New Age - and to call attention to both the simultaneity and distance between the 'I' behind my chosen mask and the roles this mask is to play.
                                                                                                                                                                  

Manbeard

Manbeard,

Conviction is your mother.

Desperation is your father.

Terror and dreamsmoke combine

To make truth built on lies.

Manbeard, god of truth and lies,

Of secret imagined violence and public peace.

Mortal, the god who enables,

Who bears witness

And brings forth the possible into life.

The god who sends forth unity and love communion with the front hand

With the back hand he summons lust and lies,

Who looks unafraid on death,

On life,

In the hidden depths of souls and bids them come forth with their deepest urgings

By hook and by crook,

By swindle and by swag.

Manbeard waits for understanding in mesh,

In mush,

And knows that escape is

Standing at the grave of sanity.

Collecting consciousness,

Wearing identity’s contorting mask,

He says goodbye.

He says hello. 

                                                                                                                                                                  

This next poem is a poem I actually wrote for someone, someone I may or may not love, depending on the season and the light, but always someone I care about - and someone I always find physically and spiritually attractive, but also unattainable.

                                                                                                                                                                  

For Sarah

You are the bird who cannot be held,

Floating on savage wings of unspeakable

Beauty.

Perhaps I am the one who will hold you next.

You will not look me in the eye, but your feathers rain down on me

And your flight makes shadows over my shoulders.

Do you long for home with your wings outstretched and your heart stumbling

From this long peregrination through the bleeding sky?

I know,

I know,

Don’t tell me anything,

You must keep it all inside that pure chest of yours.

My hands are here should you wish to land,

My head raised, ears waiting for your piercing call

Should you wish to scream of defeat

Or whisper of your dreams.

I seek a home as well as you,

No cages or owners,

nothing but the wide and playful sky

Full of memories and victory.

And across the broad sweep of crumbling loves,

We can spy one another searching for home.

No answers to offer have I, no directions,

But open arms

And eyes waiting to meet your stare.