Aren’t we the ones here to make everything right? Aren’t artists revolutionaries? Art is useless, isn’t that what makes it truly valuable?
Creativity is a temporary visa to a less-than-ordinary dimension that lacks existential burdens— an alternate universe where we ride the waves and breakers of pure perceptual pleasure.
There is a place for, a need for, a necessity for the impractical, the incredible, the absurd. (If that were not true, we would not be led by a clown surrounded by yes-men and cowards.)
Can I hear an Amen?
Can I hear an A-MEN!
I honor those of you who understand the cravings and ravings of myself and others like me; those who firmly grasp pretzel logic and twist it a little bit tighter.
An artistic paradox exists.
In a setting composed only of essentials, the environment rapidly becomes subhuman, fit only for machines. Therefore, in this pragmatic world, the non-essential has become essential.
So, to all of you weirdos who not only listen but actually hear the writing on the wall-- and dare to cover it with spray paint, I worship you.
For whether you realize it or not, to understand, to appreciate the aesthetics of this weird, crazed side branch of normality called ART is to be an outlaw, an outcast, anarchist, guerrilla.
I raise my glass in tribute to the twisted rebels!
Switch off technology. Wear fewer clothes. Take fewer showers and enjoy more late-night swims.
Listen to the quail and crickets. Hear the owls and coyotes. Notice seasonal illumination: the slant of amber autumn light, the warmth of winter sun, the cool of summer shade. Smell the wind; hear its wisdom.
Observe equinox and solstice Leap headlong into spring planting. Celebrate the fall harvest. Dine alfresco, savor sweet, succulent peaches, revel in fragrant dill, rosemary, and thyme.
Tune in to lunar cycles. Witness night-blooming lilies lifting pale faces toward glowing moonlight. Notice shifting shadow patterns swaying in midnight breezes. Stargaze on clear, moonless nights and dance beneath the full.
Dim the lights. Let thoughts fall like gentle rain. Open your golden heart; reveal your night-blooming soul.
In a place so beautiful it’s painful Distant thunder rumbles, felt more than heard— like bowel gas after cabbage, percussive shivers deep in the bones.
Gaia’s unrelenting energy unleashed upon arrogant primates. Abandonment the only option: families with suitcases, many leaving their homes for the first time ever, running from atmospheric warming and rising seas, the two mouths of hell.
Structures dismembered, falling like bones of an overcooked stewing chicken. Shape-shifting phenomena, silent screams of terror echoed off brown-tinted glass, shaken by nature to the foundation.
Slender and vaguely professorial, a de facto general shouting orders to noncompliant buffoons amid growing chaos, failed leader overseeing remnants of the lost battle— a battle over before it had begun.
A battle begun without sufficient warnings, or, more accurately, ignored portents. Scientists' signals heard by captains who did not listen or simply misunderstood, returned grumpily to rudely interrupted slumber. Some pious fools, sensing unknown danger, lifted hands to the gods, perhaps invoking their own demise.
Waves lap at rooftops. Wind blows unimpeded across leveled ground. Holy mountains now undone— not by gods, but by human nature.
The four of us dangle and swing in canoes: Romulus, Remus, Li’l Abner, and The Wizard, floating by green hawthorn, deciduous holly, surrounded by dragonflies known as snake doctors, Anopheles mosquitoes, owl butterflies, woodpecker. The capture is inevitable.
A sanguine septuagenarian, who once entered prizefights, now stoop-shouldered, with quick dark eyes, voice like coarse gravel. In a glass-sided see-in coffin, he holds court.
Looking almost alive, sometimes it is impossible to differentiate works of human beings from acts of gods.
The youngest of seven, a middle-aged high jumper, tall and loosely structured, hair with a curl in the back like a breaking wave, dons mirrored sunglasses, red baseball cap, adorns himself with intimidating habiliments: trinkets, stars, stratified ribbons— inappropriate around civilians and children— betoken his vulnerability, dealing off the top in a state of apprehension, beaten on the head and shoulders. The delta waves wax and wane, artifice required to survive, a work of creation incomplete.
Filtered sunlight and shadows of clouds, torrential rains fall upon this large lump of mountain butter. A breeze puts waves upon the water, coastland sinking out of sight, pressing down on the muck beneath it.
Income and elevation exist on a sliding scale. Unprivileged people hover in the lowlands, privileged abodes rest on higher ground.
Humans, self-conscripted to fight nature, breaking down brush like an elephant, taking what is not given, expecting the gods to surrender, spreading like nuclear winter, closing down life forms. Vegetation cannot decay unless it grows first.
Suspicion, a force to be controlled, a robust poet, attired in alienation, with fervent voice, asserts there’s not a market anymore for poetry, especially romantic— it’s a thing of the past.
What separates body from spirit? where is the distinction between living and dying?
Seas are both waves and water, waves and water, distinct yet inseparable. What differentiates waves from water? Rolling rising waves are water, when broken on shore, they are still water.
Humans are both body and spirit body and soul, distinct yet inseparable. When the body is broken, doesn’t it also injure the spirit? At birth, with infinite possibility, we are human. When broken on the wheel of life, we are still human.
Is there a land where neither sorrow nor doubt prevail? A land that error cannot enter, where conflict, life and death no longer exist?
Standing firm, the heart melts, runs into streams, which become rivers that run into seas, oceans where waves break upon the shore.
Swirling in eddies unaware of location, weathering rough waters and calm, adrift on a river without a shore in a boat without an oar, floating through life toward unknown destinations, for unknowable reasons, I may have lost my way but I trust that the river knows where it goes.
Desert Dweller 