My ode to life
Is painted in sweat,
Over the years
Is enhanced by rot.
Ode to Life
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Breathing shadow
Your shadow
casts my presence
on the wall,
breathing gently.
Hope
The itch to be out of what one is in at the moment with the idea that there is something better, is Hope. Human Life is a condition of irritation arising from the feed from the outer world through our orifices and thence to that engine of discontent, the brain. Aggravated and scratching, we are thus propelled forward by Hope.
Faith
I have a deep down, abiding faith in nothing. My unassailable, immovable lack of belief is especially profound with regards to the inherent goodness of man.
Eating lead paint
I have been eating lead paint my entire life. As a toddler I would gnaw on the stairwell baluster of our WWI era home. The successive layers of black, white and red were smoothly worn through and had a sweetish taste characteristic of lead paint. When I began to paint with oils, lead white was my preferred white pigment, smooth and malleable to the brush. Most days, while at work painting my hands are generally spotted with many of the colors I am using. White, being admixed to a large percentage of the pigments on my palette, I am rarely free from at least some traces of lead carbonate.
I have never had any ill effects from lead paint, using the minimum of caution, I probably ingest a soupcon of extra lead daily; my inadvertent nutritional supplement. Lead white was the primary white pigment used by painters for centuries, until a prying and controlling government decided to save us from ourselves, adding another terror to fuel our paranoia.
Junkfood for thought
Our senses are our masters. The Great Tempters; make us cry out, “I want. I want.”
Orifices agape for stimuli, vibrate to suggestion.
This is the day of the sugar, salt and grease aesthetic.
Saturated synapses.
Deep-fried.
Waiting
My late counterpart is Catherine Sloper or Madame LaFarge. Ladies waiting, one for a knock at the door, the other for the sound of metal cleaving bone, then, the satisfying “thump”. Both ply their particular needles as they wait for the change from what is to what could be.
Scrim boundaries
Something happens inside the emerging picture. The plotted image refuses to stay constant. As if it has a will of its own, it defies being pinpointed by my assiduous needle. At the boundaries a skirmish thrusts this way and that in a no man’s land just outside the line of sight.
Knotting threads
I am knotting threads on the underside of my redundant fancywork. This will ensure its durability on its flight into a vast wasteland of trivialities. The colors of this piece are mutable and mutating. I can hardly see them for their unwillingness to be described. Their common names escape me. They are like the colors of decorator paints; shadow yellow, unwhite, even more unwhite, red like green, sunlit black, and so on.
My pointless needle
Poking away at the computer I am like a genteel lady of yore sitting at my tambour frame, plying my needle on useless fancywork.