Ninety-Five

The bridges twist and shiver
Before they snap like straw
Whose ends have been pushed too close
to one another

and I whisper in your ear
"This is how the world ends"

Alert the Sky
The Ground has opened
and has begun to swallow jet planes
and steam mills
and all those things we stood upon

as we shouted
"This is how the world turns"

Our boat is gutted and torn
The sea which at one time
carried this machine upon its back
now stretches fingers into its belly
as the clouds applaud and shout 
This vessel holds us close
as it submits to the earth's desire

and I whisper to you
through the cracks between each finger
"This is how the world ends"

You take my hand
and say
"The world will not end in fire
or water
or earth
but in the space between your heart and chest
that place where kindness lives and dies
lives or dies..."

"What is the sound of redemption?"
I shout
"What stretches forth when it is struck
What resonates through the staircase
of a cracked and rotting lighthouse
Who cannot but lead a sinking ship to shore...."

I opened my hands
from clenched fists
And they were covered in dust.

The Greatest Waste of Time

Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to art.  This "art themed" cloud looming over my head was most likely birthed by my Origins of Modernism class I am currently taking, and loooooving.  Anywho my professor was talking about.......(enter name of 1930's french Marxist who by the 1950's recanted most of his leftist beliefs and whose name completely escapes me) and how in the mid 20th century he deemed modernism as being about one and only one thing: flatness.  He said that what set modernist art apart from every other period of art and kept it from simply being some trendy fad that a bunch of french commies jumped on, was the modernist's recognition that painting was all about two dimensions.  He claimed that all those really smart dead guys who did a bunch of cool stuff in Italy that would later be called The Renaissance, actually had the whole painting thing completely wrong.  Painting, in its essence, is all about recognizing first and foremost that it is, in actuality, simply the placing of paint on a flat surface.  You absolutely should not be trying to make things that have two dimensions look as though they have three...because they do not.  Modernist painting recognized that all they were given was two dimensions, and they worked with that, and did a darn good job if you ask me.  Aaaaanywho, things like this make me think about my own experience with art and what it means.  Let me go ahead and say I am the harshest critic of myself.  I have done maybe two complete works with paint that I am actually happy with.....ever.  That being said I often wonder if I am truly putting myself into what I am doing.  I find myself thinking that my art is simply an expression of my brain's interpretation of visual stimulants I've taken in that are deemed acceptable by a cultural sector known as the art world. I've had a lot of ideas floating around in my head as of late, but simply have not had the time to invest in them. My wish is simply that some day I will look at my art objectively and be able to pick it out of crowd of finger paintings and trash glued to canvas and say that, at the very least, I expressed part of my experience, while still allowing the art to live and breath and grow somewhat on its own (and to hopefully not write run-on sentences anymore). And no that part about the art living wasn't me trying to sound "avant-garde" or "hip" or like thick rimmed glasses, beards, and PBR were the greatest things to ever happen to me.....I genuinely meant and believe it. Nighty Night.

P.S. I loved watching Bryce go bonkers tonight :)     

Well here goes nothing....literally

     Alright well I suppose I have finally gone through with making my own blog.  Perhaps this came about out of some false sense that what I have to say about the things that go on inside my head and in my everyday life are actually intriguing enough for others to take time out of their day to observe.  Perhaps this came about due to some narcissistic feeling of importance born out of a random pretense floating in the back of my mind that tells me people sit around for hours grieving over the fact that they do not know exactly what is happening in my head at any given moment.  It could be the result of my understanding the voyeuristic nature that seems to be born inside of every human being on the face of this planet and forces them to have a clinical obsession with the lives of others (perhaps as a subconscious effort to convince themselves that minds outside of their own do in fact exist).  Any way you look at it maybe this will be more than a simple distraction from everyday monotony, hopefully you (assuming of course YOU are actually reading this. I would not be surprised in the least if this blog ends with me carrying on hour long conversations with myself at 3 a.m. including of course the occasion yelling at the computer screen things like "Yeah that's how I feel! *sips coffee* of course you're siding with her! you're both republicans!!!" *flips off laptop*) will find some amusement in my humor/cynicism/emotionally-abusive-relationship-with-coffee.  Hopefully I will learn a thing or two about myself by ordering my thoughts into grammatically correct sentences placed one after the other in paragraph form. At the very least I hope this will delay the deterioration of my sanity. Anywho enjoy......or at least laugh at me and then convince me that I'm laughing too.