Poem-A-Day #343 : Vermin

Vermin

Maybe there is a cockroach in my skull
just behind the eyes
running legs along the sack encasing the brain

There
a drain
a run in a stocking

Feeling like a constant faucet
houses creaking in the night cools
congestion pooling post-nasal

Would it live forever
die and
create a void of longing and eventual rot

At night
I would see it in negative
a butterfly against a lightbulb

Poem-A-Day #330 : When I Am King You Will Be First Against The Wall

When I Am King You Will Be First Against The Wall

I sleep in linen vestments - break
all bread at a bloodwood table - a chair made of silver
in my mind - it is so gleaming -

The crown has thorns - God - does not allow this image room to expand -

Under these robes - a terrier warms my ankles is
a dust mop of a thing - I want to tell you about the letting go -

At some point you have to unhinge
your mind - make it a door - a chest that opens warily
it will only house curtains - a dead moth but it will house
these things well -

But you have to allow it to be emptied - God - the room that is needed
an economy of space - a sort of draining swamp -

Nothing is my own - everything is my own - my Voice
and my Fear are my own - and those things build themselves a castle
that becomes entrenched immediately in vine -

You will plant the seeds - someone
else will eat that bread and be nourished - or poisoned -

That rule is necessary and necessity is rule - well - everyone
loves a fascist until they are the one getting the rod -

Here - I will show you the interior rooms of my mind - gore - all the way down -

Dust Jacket : When Women Were Birds

When Women Were Birds
Designed by: Abby Kagan
Art by: Adly Elewa

Empty journals are frightening.

All those blank pages.

That silence.

From Terry Tempest Williams book:

"They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.”

A blank journal becomes a sigil of unshared personal histories. And that is where the fear comes in.

What are we if we leave only blankness behind?

You could look at a blank journal another way. As hope. A future untold. And a new journal is that. A soft bed for thoughts, hopes, life.

This cover is both comforting and menacing.

A bed of feathers. A pillow. Nature. Birds in flight.

But these are the feathers of a bird of prey.

A peregrine falcon.

The most widely spread of the raptors. It has been clocked flying up to 200+ mph. It is the fastest animal.

How are blank journals like a peregrine falcon?

Peregrine means 'to wander'. As a mind. As the possibility in a blank page.

The artist, Adley Elewa, designs for Penguin Press. The photo also resembles a flock of birds in flight. Again. The mind let loose.

Sky Chase by  Manuel Presti

Again. That silence is both soft and beautiful. And also deeply troubling.

A quiet mind is a home to infinity. And to nothing.

Finding a room full of journals. That were your dead mother's. Then finding them empty.

Nothing left but that blankness. All that blankness.



Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.

Dust Jacket : Yellow World

Yellow World
Design by: Jon Gray (gray 318)

This is a book about surviving cancer. Albert Espinosa survived and wrote a book about imagination as the means of that survival. His 'yellow world'.

A lone world floating in space.

That imagination is a lone planet drifting in the darkness of space is something to think about. Each of us have within us a world separate and equal to everyone else. We are all a constellation, a solar system.

A lot of modern art is about existing in space alone. About the individual experiencing the object. Mark Rothko's Chapel in Houston, Texas is a fine example of meditative art.

Rothko Chapel

You walk into a stark gray room, you are faced with 14 black color field paintings. There are a few benches to sit on. It is pure mediation. Rothko's work requires this. For his paintings to exist as art, the viewer must bring multitudes into the room with them.

In a design week interview, Gray cited Olafur Eliasson as an inspiration for this cover. I certainly see the connection to Eliasson's piece The Weather Project.

That work was installed at Tate Modern in London for 6 months in 2003. It filled their 5-storey 3,400 sq. meter Turbine Hall. I had the chance to visit it.

At the far end of the room was a giant glowing yellow disk. A sun. It floated oddly in the hazy space. The ceiling was mirrored. The floor of Turbine Hall is slanted so as you walked forward the 'sun' seemed to rise. The effect was like staring into the sun, and being oddly closer to it.

Many people would lay near the disk, staring up into the far away mirrored reflection of themselves.

Danny Boyle's movie Sunshine deals with a crew of people attempting to reignite the sun. The mission is suicide. It is a flawed film, the last third is a mess, but the beginning is beautiful. It is about saving everyone, but no one.

There are scenes in the movie of the characters on an observation deck staring at the disk of the sun. Looking at its boiling surface for something akin to a god.

In the movie, the god never arrives. In meditation, you are not looking for god but for an inner truth. A self god.

Yves Klein, Blue Disk 1957

Yves Klein created a lonely blue planet in 1957. His Blue Disk is both stark and rich. Klein wished to visually represent the 'authenticity of the pure idea'.

Purity of idea.

I am reminded of Koans. These thought experiments are meant to illicit the 'great doubt'. A few examples:

'If you meet the Buddha, kill him.'

'Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born.'

The classic we all know:

'Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?'

What happens to that yellow world when Espinosa is no longer fighting cancer?

Assuming that the world is a meditative safe place to go to while fighting cancer, does that world vanish when it is no longer needed? Imagination is a tricky place. You can disassemble as easily as assemble.

Maybe the yellow world is a koan. A place that does not exist, created as the means to protect and survive. A place that cannot be fully taken apart once put together. It is perhaps also a scar.

Seen from space our planet seems perfect. Quiet. At peace. Imagination allows us to pretend that this is true. Reality is another matter altogether.