The Ivory Tower

my knowledge--best thriving on card-board
livers and gray-veal pages--
is the Ivory Tower.
I am the gloating resentment of everyday.
I am silence, its disconcerting
narcissism. In a corner, watch me swell
and redden, explode in finite,
twinkling
ideas.

I am the Ivory Tower,
its quiet intellectuals, grateful liberals who
only see torture in novels and
historical
accounts. Our language is slow and painful.
we have white skin, like the sick, imposing
Aryans.

we live and breathe and communicate within
walls
inside, stifled, deliberately choking on
knowledge. we know war through
Hemingway, violence through Palahniuk,
drugs through Hunter S.
but none of these we know through
ourselves

these walls--
white ivory, pure and untainted--have, like curtains
drawn themselves
and closed.

we venture out only
when it is safe

The Death of Finality

ideas,
bubbles in the universe
swinging
on bus stops
in paperbacks, on
desks carved in heart-strings.

foucault had them,
as did aristotle and atwood. beauvoir blew
voice into the swift, catapulting
balloons of shifty
ones.

platonic ideas--floating above us?
like air-circuitry; a network
of flying
knowledge?
kantian dreams; morrison bleeding
with heroin
and bukowski sewing
stories out of
dismissal slips and empty, shivering
wine bottles.

in understanding we are lost,
in finality,
stranded in doubt.
in the unconnected, vibrant waiting, in the
not-yet and the not-to-be
in the never-was and
never-will
we are the always-here.
always waiting, catching circles of thought--idly and
ideally--in our palms like
unfinished, string-thin dreams.

New Layout

In an effort to procrastinate, I have created a new layout for my dear blog. Please comment.. what do you like better? Personally, I miss the old one.

Art as Redeemer

many will say that art is a way to let out anger; to rearrange subjective trauma in an effort to make it coherent and valuable. writing is therapy. its even a form of meditation (according to over-priced self-help books). it is self-help.

but i've always had trouble with this. is art only a form of therapy? if so, it fails to play any larger, cosmic role in mankind's history. art becomes a free therapist you can scribble on while he sits quietly and listens. I've been troubled by the idea. it seems to diminish art.

what's more, it seems to posit that all we do is spill our feelings and watch them flourish, without any real intellectual work. this is far from the case, as we know. take writing, for example: there's editing, submitting to publishers, grovelling over plot and character errors. there is--in essence--an entire life to it. painting is similar: there is the picking of right colors, symmetry, symbolism, metaphor. its a network of communication. rather than being a simple release, art is simultaneously a giving-up and a taking-in. we give up our experiences in order for them to be taken in by someone else, creating a slow, deliberate dialogue--a telepathic communication between two souls. is art a Redeemer for the human race? definitely not. one can argue that clay pots and bone fragments have as much archeological significance--if not more--than literature. but what's in clay pots and bone fragments? they neither reveal to us aspects of the human condition nor their makers' subjective toils. they are voiceless.

get out your pencils, paint-brushes, notebooks, canvases..
and redeem the world :)

The Shaman

the shaman perched on
building-steps, black glass between his
nail-bitten fingers; lapping
quietly at
dreams.

"I'm always out of body,"
he says when asked.
what is he? I think. A traveling
salesmen bundled in ghost-thin
spirit? a
moving apparition, eating auras and
spitting demons?

grand, drugged-up
mess--living in a liminal
mind state.

between classes. wandering,
diving, swimming, falling
off edges and climbing
down
upward.

through misunderstanding, i had
deemed it
noise--bombast and unnecessary.
for what is misunderstood is
a growing, sour
hatred of
ourselves.

Pogs

seven Pogs and a wooden
fence, brown and
dangling in the
past.

Lion King with Disney on the
back in purple, dusty
letters. One-fifty at the
dollar store.

Out back, a lake swelters in the
mid-day sun, waiting
for small, muddy feet.

these Pogs: treasures lifted from
the sea-bed, quick fingers
luring them with
allowance money.

somewhere it was so sunny
one could hardly
breathe.