wolf spider clings to a plastic pineapple hunts her crunchy crickets, ebony dots bobbing in an azure sea of chlorinated cool reflecting a cloudless Oklahoma sky
chlorophyll dreams long forsaken, baked in the sun fake fruit crown glistening, simulacrum’s royal laurel while spider-mother waits, regal and patient, unattended, for the insect prayers to arrive on the breeze
ripples reach Anansi’s daughter, echos of joy whispering Nyame’s secrets – infinite expanding “I created death and death killed me – vulturous trickster” unleashed upon Asase Efua’s lush earth
chlorine veil cannot shroud her memory-map the spider’s legs sketch glyphs across mimicked rind summoning ancestors from sidewalk cracks and deities from drainage ditches
even here in suburbia’s blue-mirrored stillness the old stories web and tighten— a huntress spins the present into prophecy during the season’s last swim towards the fall
van Gogh paints starry swirls on the interior of the hadron collider, excitation modes divining the luminous day of a cosmic psyche, ebullience of the creative moment as comets seed the earth
and physicists mistake his brushstrokes for data— they chart the yellow whorls, plot cypress trees against probability distributions, find God particles
hiding in the impasto – somewhere between the canvas and the collision, matter forgets it was supposed to be predictable
kaleidoscopic supersymmetry unveils strange loops, circumscribed by the calm intelligibility of science model agnosticism engulfs with purifying fire
in the ascetic refuge of an enchanted forest, imaginarium of enlightenment, crystalline structures of specificity hide the occlusions of the unconscious, chaotic clouds of information growing exponentially
until the monks in their laboratories can’t tell which came first: the equation or the vision, the fern’s fractal spiral or Mandelbrot’s ghost
they light incense that smells like uncertainty, pray to theorems that pray back in quantum tongues, and van Gogh—still painting in the collider—
laughs because he knew all along: stars swirl the same way neurons fire, and every collision is also a creation
Usha’s bifurcated tongue spreads duality across the canvas of the mind sand shifting at the garden’s gate, encoding cryptic messages, erosive ablutions upon the glittering souls of the dead
across the deep shaded valley starling calls and falcon cries unite imploding singularity awash in Dionysian pleasure amidst an Apollonian atmosphere, contrasting Wittgenstein’s necessary silence
Huysum’s flowers scry an ecstatic love, impulses flashing like jewel inlaid symbols of eternity, cartography of virtuosic ambiguity, as Richter explicates tragic materiality or sublime interiority
within this vale of soul-making, temporal and inescapable, poetry’s fountain, a thousand headed hydra, reanimates and reclaims Renoir’s river runs as the round world spins, days end and the end begins
in this elusive and fragile bubble replete with elaborate honeybee dances Magritte’s surreal apple exists in its listening room immortally intoxicated with the mystic universe
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Denise Levertov
When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.
Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.
Robert Anton Wilson
Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).
Witold Gombrowicz
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Gustav Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Dušan “Charles” Simić
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Monique Wittig
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
W.S. Merwin
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Thomas Aquinas
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Chromapoetica 