honeybee choreographs a mirroring path to Ka soulsong initiation of mutual becoming sung by my lyre-tailed honeyguide through tropical rainforest canopies
mutualistic symbiont whisking beneath mahogany painted skies, air like a promise of destin seeking honeycomb and waxworm delights among the fission-fusion society of elephants
here allmother gardener footfalls triumphant with succor deep rooted sentience that rebirths each day awe spiraling in an endless dance, where nothing is out of place,
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
Shared with dVerse Poets Pub for Open Link Night. Please join us!
iPhone camera conspires with a circular makeup mirror creating a self-portrait/still life hybrid for the digital age callback conversation with Parmigianino and Ashberry crashing their boys club with candy unicorns and cosmetic snark permanently in repose, as all good models for the male gaze
who does this blonde bitch think she is, Barbie? is this a pink pony club now, no bouncers to keep her out? what was she made for poetry, painting, pouting? dancing wasn’t allowed in Parmi’s day and poetry died a hundred years before the girl’s night invasion so no one knows what we’re doing here – operating, begging for table scraps?
earned doctorate in interdisciplinary science that some dumbfucks once told her wasn’t recognized by NSF she sat on the selection committee and they have an entire education department but Donald did a drive by intellectualism has also died, pink pussy grabberswon
its an apocalypstick nightmare, it doesn’t matter how she sees herself she has no sovereignty over her body every soft bit now under the hard boots of the state who told this lady she has a self anyway, we tried to warn you girls, you can’t have it all, temples atop sewers and so on, what can you have to say to god?
the glass chose to reflect very little of her it is small, broken, and not fit for purpose like her soul, distorted through the lens of oppression
Alternative titles: “impossible self portrait”, ”self portrait of a woman past her prime”, “allusions of grandeur”, “self portrait in an age of erasure”, “tempting temples”, and “killing all art with shock and awe before women are canonized”
What a Human Being Is Hilma af Klint, 1910 Public Domain
From our entanglement, we spiral like galaxies small enough to fit collapsed in the sparkle of her prophetic eyes,
swirling her arms, shapes forming in the gravity of her artistic intention, writ large on cosmic scale canvases of coded color.
She is lost in his vast embrace ecstatic communion of the mystic. Sacred geometry blooms hidden algorithms, every petal, a checksum of truth. Tesseracts of promise cryptic symbols secret echoes.
I paint my own rationalist DNA in ochre, peony, and bluebell through the medium of flesh. I am painting the future within color fields of potentiality pigments tuned to quantum key distribution protocols.
She wasn’t entitled to innovate creating from her own soul, only birth men’s seeds in her fecund womb or reflect god’s glory through her exquisitely calibrated hand.
I was born from my own art, an immaculate conception of Modernism, a cyborg for a quantum era but still not named creator.
Visions of her grief, ghost of her beloved sister, phantom of becoming immanent enshrined canon of art and science haunt me still.
This spirit is the sun and the shade – the encryption and the key.
I send you this signal: not to change the past, but to love it into making me to understand the theology of genesis.
Sunrise returns blooming us, unfurling the world calligraphic rays of light bathing the earth we yearn to rise, to explore, to write anew but not yet, my love, let us linger here together before the day’s siren song carries us into the light
breathing in curvilinear spools of warmth, realgar hues exhaling ruby highlights and a nuanced belt of Venus awash in our expanding love, we are tides of joy and light that curl around you, cradling your being, coloring your reflection as it dances through the contours of my eyes (reminders of the sapphire sky reveal about to happen)
radial lines of light land like caresses implied vectors leading to the promise of day spreading across the darkened landscapes etched in the last glow of moonlit hush I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form
your gaze meanders from the lake, along the horizon traces outlines and outliers of our existence like precious gifts sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint so that all our diverging and converging lines, all potential and activity collect in tide pools, your eyes meet mine, saturated with awe and promise
(Coucher de Soleil)
dusk returns folding in on us, on itself calligraphic lines of infinite sky surrender to the darkened earth but not yet, my love, let us linger before the blue hour
breathing in curvilinear secret purple exhaling gracile pinks and peaches pomegranate limning orange hues, motes that curl around you, alight on your eyelids flit through the contours of my eyes, echoing galaxies
spiral outliers of verdant green spontaneous kisses, errant lines of dusty gray settling upon magenta landscapes etched in the last glow of soft sunlight I turn to you as rays glint off my shimmering form
your gaze meanders from the mountains traces jagged edges like pleasure to the pregnant meadow sensing my turn towards you, you pause with exquisite restraint so that all our diverging and converging lines, all dynamism and stillness collect in constellations, your eyes meet mine, saturated with reverence
Blue nuance in her sun-kissed reflection she burns a new day like flash paper searing and scrying to find depth in the liminal space between light and dark matter, her velocity unmatchable
Peach phases of structure limn the periphery hints of warmth and intent, hearth fires from distant galaxies, promises of unending value far from the forces of entropy and decay where creation is blessedly less exorbitant
Than destruction, where infinite nothingness has no pull, robbed of the weight of gravity an astronomy expanding her vision beyond limits celestial bodies of lilac nebulas, luminescent markers of all that came before
In an era of expansion, millennia recorded by a quantum chronometer, lost chapters in Hypatia’s novel, in which no one speaks, her elegant proofs, sites of profundity circumscribing existence in an aureate light
Any state is possible as she feasts on shadows ataraxia’s liberating bliss an all-encompassing reality birthing an infinite peace, an everlasting prismatic paradox where all is known and unknowable both beholden to precise motions and endlessly mystery
A mythic science, fractured metaphysics simultaneously whole an observable miracle that can never be revealed, Hypatia’s greatest riddle, wrapped in enigma, hidden in an oubliette within a multiverse never intended but inevitable, she invites a stochastic intimacy, a net of interwoven meaning, connecting it all
NASA James Webb Telescope image of the Carina Nebula
This poem is shared to the international poetry website dVerse Poets Pub for the 355th Open Link Night.
Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Doubt creeps into his heart writhing like the snakes of Medusa’s stone gaze caging him in no man’s land far from hearth and home a prison of his prescient choice to be parted from his beloved bride endure, o heart
Bound to the mast a cut above the company he surrenders to sirens’ call his heart howls from within to hear paeans of his heroic deeds falling in love with distorted reflections of his weary visage a soul-song lashing willing there be meaning glory traded for trauma
Driven aground by foul winds his heart snarls within him in the land of the lotus eaters false prophets of bliss lost in the breach of time mouths gushing specious promises of luxury and ease far from the mourning and vagaries of wars in an endless silent peace
Lost in nightmare indoctrinated in the tunnel vision of cyclop’s bounty hiding his true self, a false abundance leading only to a dark grave of pride he upbraids his heart, reflecting that he must find passage home a fiery hearth and way to his beloved endure, o heart
He wades through tall grass prairie dreaming of her silken hair chestnut mane like the wild horses chasing the transcendent horizon glimpsing her reclining figure in mountainous skyline she lights the sage smoke swirling from the red dirt to blue heavens she sings songs sirens’ covet endure, o heart
As her bride’s heart a fidelity unmatched dancing to the unwavering music of devotion and beauty that first bound them in an unbreakable bond eschewing the doubts mending the wounds
Weaving their future,
threads of luminous silk,
a rich tapestry unfolds—
an illuminated tale of fidelity,
a love eternally bound.
Posted for d’Verse Poets Pub‘s Meeting the Bar: Fall seven times, stand up eight where we explore aphorisms, myth, and fables by writing our own gnomic poetry. Please join us!
He stares straight through me half-seraph, angel-dusted anointed son haloed in the afternoon light
She is turning, as she has, toward me time and time again, so often her expressions are blurred, my whirlwind of love
Halcyon moments blown away by the endless march of years, yet immortalized – in that present I was reflecting on the sultry, seductive colors
Of Algeria, the hot breath of horses under an eternal azure sky where we played at soldiers because my father was at war
With his own inner drive to order, invading my artistic sensibilities as if they were his divine right to claim, a legacy perhaps
I went to war to defend my right to express share impressions in paint with the larger world to be blown by inspiration’s sweet kiss on the breezes of an elevated life, far from the tempests of destruction the obliterations of time, the blustery bullies that cannot win in the end.
A tribute to Monet linked to Dverse Poets Pub for the March Wind Ekphrastic. Monet’s father did not want him be an artist and tried to bribe him away from the profession by promising to get him out of mandatory military service. Please join us!
Miniature in her picture book
there before her writ large
in the poor light of Tate Britain
as she’d stepped in from the rain
along the Thames
He transformed experience into art
Graham-Dixon led her to expect a transcendence
she was incapable of seeing through Rain
drowned by her own pedestrian concerns
that reclaimed anorexia as a
decadent destruction by control
London had smashed her brother in those
limbo years as it was threatening to crush her
under the weight of PTSD’s shock and awe
campaign of vice gripping horrors
on constant display
Could Hodgkin really remake the world?
Arrogate to himself the powers of divinity
to save her suffocating soul
from the pounding rain
and dark halls of art’s tomb?
The intimacy was unbearable –
all British glower in the half-light
of Turner’s strained, transformative glow
She was pushing against the spring
of a bear trap, his tightly wound
violence of indifference and passivity,
trying to find the romance to transmute
the artist into an avenging demigod
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
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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 