Wednesday 28 August 2013

For Jhana

Bright birds win

g olden sugar swoon

of witch jout.
 

Naked toe scoops
 

undressed anus fizz

translunar.


Thursday 22 August 2013

Punk Mark Grave/Mother Unknown


What marks the year. This candle. This procession. Dazzling sun clusters. Smoke at the altar. Waves of incense. Incensored. I held her and kissed her, drew the poison from her belly. Up and out and up. To air. One cheek. Then another. Insufficient. How calm she was! How sensitive to the damage! We regard the seasons cheerfully. Cruel fingers mark her mother like a passing.

An idol day. A high day. These things I have to attend to. This office. Let's concentrate on getting through. A female form within me. Her embrace is velvet. She asks me to heal her. I tell her I've tried. Embers at the altar. Voices in the kitchen. An altercation. There are horses in Mongolia that heal with silence. Gentle. Insouciant.



A blend of spiritualities shoots an opening through my veins. An aperture where the horses graze. Rapture. Too young to suffer torments. Too unknowing. I've found a field where we can go and watch the spinning. Our arms are full of offerings to forbidden deities.

Tuesday 20 August 2013

SLAMB! - Review of Crunk Juice Remix by Bobby Parker


Just when I thought I’d gotten used to being smacked on the chops by the poetry and art of Bobby Parker – SLAMB!

Parker is the hip priest of high jinx remixology. Responding to an invitation from Steve Roggenbuck to rework his book, Crunk Juice, and a New York Times article referring to Roggenbuck as a “prophet”, Parker shredded the text and drenched it in lamb’s blood acquired from a local butcher. The result, posted at his blog, is a visual slaughterfest with a nod to Hermann Nitsch and the Old Testament Levitical priests.

Here, the word becomes flesh, ink is mixed with blood, paper is saturated in liquid life force. Are we to surmise that Parker is sacrificing his life for art, or offering his art to life? The poet is sacrificed, then sanctified, words and pictures are ripped up, soaked, made ugly, in order to acquire that whiff of absolute holiness. I thought about the countless sacrifices offered to Jehovah of Hosts, Quetzalcoatl, the mad frenzied processions of the Bacchae.

This is poetry as religion, not theological, philosophical, or wearily evangelical, but visceral; a spirituality of body, blood, flesh, and form belonging to the ancient Hebrews, the Druids, the Roman warrior cults. Or is it something purer? Are we to imagine the poet as Lamb of God, the poem as crucifixion?

Visually, the fragments of text, the torn paper, are smeared, smudged, ruined by blood, and so we witness the simultaneous destruction and salvation of a life in full blown ecstatic art ritual. There is a whiff of flesh, a stink of blood, an aftertaste of carnage, but still a purity, a cleansing, a washing away of sin. There is immense beauty in destruction.

It’s well worth working your way through the whole blood stained text, and remembering Parker’s written work. The elements of his poetry inform this work conceptually because we know what stains are being cleansed, what sins are being purged. I imagine this was an exhausting act of atonement for Parker. I imagine a clean heart and washed hands. I see him now climbing the holy hill to art paradise, with a sacrificial lamb on his shoulders, a poet, a prophet, hip priest for a new world.

“Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”

 

Thursday 1 August 2013

Crystal Minimalism

hair smokes crystal jam





quartz log of Moses





amethyst historian





nope, opal hip hop





jazz jazz jasper jazz





I spy with my lapis lazuli





carnelian choke quiver    





salamander aqueduct         blue lace agate





rosequencequartz