Category: Art


Sense impressions intermingled
With a coruscant intellect
Create vivid imaginings – connectedness

A thousand flashes of memory
Rest stops, fragments of homes
The smell of mountains
I cede these visages
Imagery sung by loquacious tongues

In the shadowed corners
All the fears, debts, atrocities are piled up
There’s no escape from responsibility
We’re all complicit, culpable

Our wellspring of shame
Familial bonds and human failings
Mythologies reveal the hidden dangers
Of archetypal activism as we lose ourselves in
Over-identification, righteousness, or doubt

Each moment of conjunction
Reciprocity – when my embodied self
Ameliorated the suffering of another
Or my own is a gift
This rare moment of communion

Intertwining insights
Deeply held convictions
Passions of the mind
Emotive effusions of art
Papered meanings
Visual striving, resolution
Melodic companions
I weep, overwhelmed by sheer beauty

These offerings, sacrifices pointing toward
Divine grace and awe
Genuflections and contrition
All lead to promises of an immortal soul

Liminal Spaces

Crossing the threshold
Between dream and reality
A hypnopompic state
Orienting to a more stable country
Yet still present to resonant images
Of the internal space

The artist is a liminal being
Caught between the muse and a self
Venturing out even in daylight
An avatar in a virtual world
Disoriented by its double life

Artists require apotropaic magic
To make it back intact
Whole and capable of translation
Dangers faced by mystics,
Long lost in ecstasies –
A logorrheic tongue
The dreamer never wakes

Protostellar Phase

We were standing in the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Here are painters who want to communicate
They show up on their canvases
Emotive, sensual, engaging,
Pouring over the edges with ideas

They are Hydrogen, capable
Of the complex chain of reactions
Required to fuel a galaxy
Rauschenberg, Mitchell, de Kooning
All Hydrogen molecules
Dancing, spinning, arguing
Contrasting the inert gasses across the hall
Nonreactive as Krypton,
From kryptos, “the hidden one”

It is actually a skill,
This art of invitation
Creating works capable of fusion
Viewer, artist, and painting,
Conspiring toward explosions
A dangerous, naked,
And frightening proposition
Can you blame the countless artists,
Hiding behind flat surfaces,
Incapable of combustion,
Unable to make the invitation?