Open the door
Sit down
Drive me close
Tell me where
Your hands roam
I'm all ears
One eye
Tell me where
Your laugh lives
Ride this road
'Till fall
Our high fears
Step on it
Elevate
Pull the sword
My lantern
My lover
Becoming
Through the wound
Kiss the bell
Forehead chime
Cups full
Round night
Uncovered
Across you
Lay, Lady
Lady, Lay
Strength say
Why wait
Any longer
Open the door
Sit down
Take your place

Labels: “Do I dare?”, appearance, artform, notice the sign, spoken word, titles

Dear Charlie,

The trees are wondering what comes next, standing up against the grey sky, mixed up with changing colours and branches undressed. What can I do? They ask. What can I do? Should they move or wait, they wonder. The wet grass giggles with waves of indifference, shrugging away their comedic tears.

The grass is stopped by a black wire fence, protecting cement bricks from amateur botanical jokes. Plastic trees stand guard, bored to death between the fence and the bay window.

Inside, a cat watches an old French movie, dreaming of his Alice In Wonderland moment. Or perhaps he just wants a chance to stop the loud woman from singing that chorus again. Oh, so long Marianne. It’s time that we began to laugh.

What’s his name? This sad clown, writing in his diary, writing about a bunch of sticks of dynamite wrapped up in a red summer dress. He wants to stop time; she doesn’t know his name. But she counts on his steady sanity to predictably burn when she finally adds up the notes. It’s quite simply amusing to lead the hand of a man who is bored with his rotations. So sensible and safe for work. Such a “disgrace to take it philosophically” and to count down to death, but oh so entertaining!

This is the blindness I see, sitting in a dark kitchen in the middle of the afternoon. You’re better off knowing you’re blind. But one can wonder what made it so.

Remember how it went? How it played out? The cruelty of seeing the past so fresh, so tender and to never again recognize the gestures that lit up your soul. You can only die once. Shall we name it, Charlie? It is ill advised. You never were that type of easy. I can’t define the colour of your eyes or the way you looked at me. I can’t put my finger on the calculator of your resurrections. I never know if one of my voices has reached you until the moment you repeat my words back to me, and even then… I don’t know. How can I be sure?

The risk is time. That’s all we have. That’s all we ever had and ever will, until the rotation stops. Did I steal from you, or you from I?

Labels: Dear Charlie, notice the sign, theory

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
-E. Hemingway

So many truths, so little time. With every one of them: an expiry date, kept out of view.

We try to keep things clean but life has a way of getting dirty. This mess in our heads is but a reflection of the mess in our hearts, no more, no less. You come to me with your names and your titles and all my little fingers tremble with anticipation. All you get is silence. Why? So you can hear the ticking of the clock.

Time will prove everything.

Some readers read to peek a truth or two. Some readers read to find themselves outlined, in chalk or in rainbows. A reader can read everything written and gain not one once of fresh clear certainty.

I could sit here and bleed out another story wrapped around a kingdom wrapped around relationships wrapped around a beehive wrapped around a bee wrapped around a ghost wrapped around you. Without a doubt you would know... I wrote it for you.

Never will such a thing happen. The truth of you can only be crushed to fine dust, to be found by a clean cloth.

Labels: alarming truthness, notice the sign

What would I want to tell myself, if one day, I lost all notion of who I was?

Labels: experiment, notice the sign, one-liner

a triangle summons the sky
A TRIANGLE SUMMONS THE EARTH

between two hands
none above us
none below us

i pick your clover
you roll my die

fill my cup with fresh water
i will empty yours of poison

you protect
i defend

your bridge
like my shelter

Labels: art, cult, echo, experiment, ink, notice the sign

After all the heartache, I promised myself I would never eat another apple. There are other fruits in the garden.

One night, miss Holder tempted me out of the garden and into the jungle. The natives were wild, colourful and shared drinks and dances in a manner of ritual. She showed me the dance floor, it was everywhere around us. From side to side my head turned. My hands as birds and then like fish. To the front my left leg, soon gone to the back. Steps close to the fire, steps far from the shore. From side to side my heart flew and stopped on you, standing still like the trunk of a tree.

Your hair and clothes messed up with the night, your beard barely hiding your smiling lips, you kept breathing. Ignoring what had just fallen from the sky, you kept breathing like you were waiting for me to stop you with a bolt of lightning. My dance got slower, my eyes steady on the mark. I studied your language, I moved into mine.

Andre kept stepping forward. From side to side my head turned, only to return to you. Peter showed me all the tricks he was carrying in his bag. A quick look and you had disappeared. Wanted. Returned a few sparks before I could pronounce you missing. Tell me, who are you? Say anything you want over the noise that is not your voice. What’s your name? James. Sweet James, you are beautiful. From side to side the compliment fell, like my blood pressure. I disappeared.

With the sound of the river flowing to my ears, green grass between my fingers and blue eyes above my nose I found myself smiling. Who are you? Sweet James Grieve had come to save me. From under your coat, you pulled out a white flower. Before I could pronounce my love, you put it under water. From the river, you lifted the gift that would water my mouth back to life. A shiny red apple.

Labels: alarming truthness, beard, discovery, love, musical, notice the sign, secret

I know nothing of art, success or society. I can hardly bring myself to get up in the morning and get dressed, let alone write theories and commentaries that could possibly shed light on anything remotely important. That said, I think art is a joke. The good kind. I think art is more important than the oscars, fashion, guns, politics and coffee.

I have a headache, I’m depressed, I need warmth. I want to curl up in bed and dream of suns.

Art, in all it's forms, starts me up. We all know how art can affect/infect people, but I can't say for sure what it represents. I think the story created by the reader, listener, spectator is separate from the artist’s story. Both are important, personal and reflective. That’s why it's so easy for fans to admire/worship musicians because they are responding to what feels like a voice that is personally speaking to them. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, how many times have you heard that a song saved somebody’s life?

Yet how much can the listener really know of what made that song possible? For all I know, that poem has nothing to do with what I think it is saying. Of course I think art can be the tool/statement that the creator wills it to be but once it is released into the wild, the chances of it returning intact are slim. Its likeness will change in every eye that falls upon it.

I see art on the train floor. At first glance it's just a scribble or stain but after staring at it a few minutes, the abstract morphs into whatever my mind can produce at that moment. A piece of art is like a big fat red dot on a map with an arrow next to it saying "You are here." Let that be translated through you, as you wish. Ingest it and spew it out like you want but don't blame the dot. Don’t blame the messenger for being too loud or too red, just move on to the next dot. So, to define art is ridiculous. Give awards to humanitarians, not artists. The way some societies are so sick with power to instill a sense of rivalry in everything is beyond me.

So there's this woman sitting at a bar and a man walks up to her and says "Be very careful leaving tonight. I just had a vision that you had an accident because of alcohol." and leaves. The woman, finishing her first margarita, rolls her eyes, pays the bartender and exits the bar. As she is crossing the street, she pulls out her car keys out of her purse and gets hit by a truck transporting a load of beer.

Labels: artwork, cult, kids in the hall, notice the sign, opinion, theory, there is no ship like championship, titles