Drunkenness

How I loathe you

How I adore you

You come to me

I should have expected you

How you shape me

How you made and

un-make me

I forget all the prose

You told me

In my defiance

un-wholly alliance

You plague me

And you save me

From my self

Who else?

care to listen?

I’m listening

Thank you,

Goodnight

Goodness Bless

lem and the un-mix

out of my mouth, every sentence is quickly followed by a trail of nonsense:

the moment, the music, the un-descriptiveness of it all - all my attempts to interact in this world, to perceive, to feel, to know - this is my life - my fate:

this moment of light and night, of eternal revelation and illusion:

am i the fool or the alchemist? heightening senses and blurring reflexes until each moment of control and expectation is forsaken and every moment is un-distinguishable from the next:

Am i awake? Am I aware? do i see the world with new eyes? What choices do i make? Why do I make the choices i did?

I am confronted, in one form or another, by these mysteries at every step of my turn. i break them like bread. i drink them like wine:

i expect nothing and everything from them, never and always at the same time:

I must question everyone and everything i know, believe in or perceive to be:

and only then can this perception turn inward:

unite the self with the selves and the light:

until everything is undifferentiated

[excerpt}

---

I see two choices continually. The first and most seductive of these choices, is the choice one makes by stepping into the unknown. Taking risk. Looking foe adventure. Motivation. Hunger. Lust. This path usually leads one nowhere. The lure of promise and threat of loss are both great. The decision to take this turn, or not, is usually based on one of these two incentived factors.

The more familiar yet somehow deceptive choice tends to lead one to the antithesis. We know this as going home. Staying safe. Security. Sorry not tonight I have to... I would love to but...

Each decision shares a unique set of reward and consequence. Usually, there is no other way out, it is one or the other.

There is a rummored middle pat, which in this situation would be almost imperceptible, hidden in light like an oasis, slight of hand, hallucination or hologram. Something that at first doesn't seem real, but as time passes is often mistaken for reality itself.

[excerpt]

you see, i have given birth to a myself,

and this self exist as its own self,

its own father, its own mother,

the thing as the thing itself.

you see, there must be

nothing

i no longer

have to say

it's not that i have said everything,

i must,

or what i have said is meaningless,

yet rather, what i am

saying

is only a distant probibility,

an amalgorithm,

of a past memory,

a memory of the past

and

what was

Christ for the price of television [excerpt]

If you or anyone of us fortunate enough to reside for any length of time within the inner sanctum of the modern cityscape, you, more or less, know what it’s like to be here. The ‘more you try it the more you like it’ approach at first seems like an ideal situation. Years (sometimes months, weeks, most likely even days) latter it takes on more than daily living can afford. It is here we are divided into categories and sub-categories and re-located to respective geographic and moralistic territories, each with its own individualized site-specific economic responsibilities. It’s a battle for the top, if you are a multi-nation conglomerate or if you’re a street-wise punk, it’s a struggle to stay high. Both, poised with the same struggle of dominance or threat of disaster, have their own system and network of fail-safes to assure at all cost the avoidance of any unnecessary remedy. They exist in exactly the same stasis of need and ultimately there is no one who can make a right decision about anything.

Both sides have advantages and disadvantages. The Junky is clumsy and heavy-handed; the multi-national is driven by the power and greed of conquest. The Junky has as his advantage the power of invisibility; he or she can safely disappear for intervals of time, as they never existed. At the junkies back, however, is the never-ending demand of a most elusive and restrained capital. The multi-nation, on the other hand, has as its base the liquidity and dexterity of commerce, yet its restriction is a constant and bothersome accountability, known as the paper trail.

Long Form: [excerpts]

long form
and other post-modern apocalypse

______________

“One no longer sees the blue sky or the green earth, only a consonant grey, brown or black enveloping the soul in a spider like web forming within a sphere like glass.”

I have no memory of anything, anymore. The line between the real and what was once considered unimaginable has long since blurred into a searing white noise rendering my mind blank as a canvas and still as a wintry morning blanketed with wet, heavy freshly fallen snow. There is no room for movement of any kind. If I were to look up, I would only see, staring back down at me, a sad, lonely reflection of an old and withered man I have become. Loneliness is the final mask hiding the pain and joy, which is life.

“I no longer touch the blue Earth or see the green Sky…”

This is not Death or what some have come to believe in as Death, more precisely, a catechism of purgatory, limbo, half-life, the spirit world, Bardo. One recognizes this state in questions poised "who’s listening, who’s speaking?" This is the oldest, most primitive, primordial conception of humankind.



_____________



"What good is truth if the truth is us?"

Of course, this lovely imagination can never hold the truth and why would should it? Gauging from history, the changes the self as an absolute authority brings is what none of us really want. There is no God as there is no Death. Yet the ability to grasp the meaning of such is and has always been beyond the reach of Mankind’s rational mind and its obsessions and struggles of conformity. It is the words you read [or believe you read] now that is the closest you will know of these things. It is you who are Dead. In fact, you do not read these words or hold this book. If I where to answer you, why, at this moment you will dissolve, before your own very eyes, into a pool of undifferentiated matter which comprises and is comprised by the multiple realities of this Bastard Universe.


"I stand at the gate of Hell whilst holding the keys of heaven, yet, I can enter neither. My heart is as pure gold, a wild flaming fire whose love, compassion and kindness fuels all lust, hatred and desire. I am every poet and every mad man. I am every blessing and every lie that has ever been spoken."

White River Junction 2006

When I returned, ten years ago, having already been to California and back, I don’t know exactly what I expected. I left the West Coast nearly ten-years after my Art School days had ended at the San Francisco Art Institute. I was thinking Australia; definitely, somewhere off the continental United States. On that long transit ride east, White River Junction, no more appealing than a-thousand tiny-other little grease spots on the map, like it or not, was in the cards for me. It now seems fittingly apropos that this culturally and economically challenged and cross-mixed outcast boarder-line railroad town happened to be the return destination printed on my bus ticket home. It is nothing other than circumstance, opportunity or chance, as far as I can see, that leads you and I to being here, right here and now. It’s the discovery of a new set of principles that you or no one else around you could see the possibilities in before. It’s become a drive for innovation, creativity, finding pathways that lead towards more sustainable futures. It is being on the wrong side-of-the-tracks until you can see the relativity between the concepts of absolute. It’s about those few and then a few more, who make it worthwhile - to stick around – and get it all done. White River Junction – It’s not so bad! Even the motto of the town’s Rio Blanco social club isn’t so hard adapting to. One can do it seemingly overnight. I’ll be glad to tell the rest of that story too, if you or anyone else who asks cares to listen. And do I still dream of Australia? You bet. Mate.

Can one make visible what is invisible? Or is it even necessary to try? Or is it that, what is visible, most likely, goes unseen?

As an Artist, I look for what I cannot always see.
I am interested in any available insight seen through an internal yet interpersonal individuality.
I seek to understand this influence of intuition; how precepts of integrity, value, and meaning are, in turn, influenced, by emerging experiences in a new and changing bio-political and techno-ecological environment.

As a Painter, I want to challenge my perception.
What can be observed can also be manipulated.
Just as the un-known, sometimes, will become known, what already has been seen, is often forgotten.
This uncertainty is timeless and resolute.
The most puerile action of the painter is an act of seeing and remembering.
My process, as a painter, is deeply dependent on an ability to sublimate the expanding or contracting of uncertainty.

As an American, I hope to refine my critical awareness.
Our Nation State has been set on edge by a war of politics and economics.
The lure of disaster, real or imagined, continually reinforces threats of cultural uncertainty.
Our lives are devalued, night after night, and day after day, through a carefully marketed and managed allegiance to image, product or entertainment, distracting us from seeing what we could see, if we truly wanted to.

inverse parallax of the dream landscape

back from the beyond

on a bridge over-looking
an icy river

flowing through an
abandoned dream landscape

a glistening, rippling water
moves beneath me

on all edges...

i am overcome by a sense of beauty
its presence is everywhere

it strikes me
that the splendor of this fact

is not dampened by my situation

for you see
I am suspended above

a narrow ledge

the bridge is ended in front of me

and behind me it does not
connect

to anything
except empty space

i am lost

stranded atop
this plank

a steel matrix
of girders and beams

tethers me
to a frozen ground

hundreds of feet
below

i peer down

is there anyone
below i wonder?

"Hello..."

"Who's there?"

"I Can't get down..."

and even if
i do...

where is
there to go?

inverse paralax of the dream

dream

back from the beyond:

forward is the same
as behind

to my left is a beauty
i struggle
to find

to my right,
a way down but

but not
a way out.

poem

i can't fix
it

it's
not broke

but i'll
try

moments like these...

paint
already on
my hands
like blood

live blood

first
thought
only thought

revised thought
best
thought

no thought what
thought?