I’m not sure the words ocean and sea mean the same to you and me. Ninety-five percent universal confusion, dark matter was born with the legitimacy of an onion, the roar of a lion. I sit in the rumble seat of judgment, I damn myself for entertainment, for wasting time on hopeless entertainment. I am guilty of snarling lines, Gordian knots in my “Shakespeare” fishing reels. I must untangle this because eels have hearts like us. The enemy is symmetry. In the spring of content, I trust glorious chaos. I smell in disorder the outhouse of order.
Pipevine Swallowtail Abstract — Photo-Artistry by kenne
“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.”
Mirror, Mirror On The Wall — Photo-Artistry by kenne
I saw her coming. The version of myself I wanted to see, I saw her in the corners of my eyes, I felt her shouting at me from the future, So loud I heard it through another dimension, I felt her overwhelming confidence and Clear sense of direction shaking the ground as I pass by her image So much so that I forget about the past; It melts away with her words, at her resurrection As I make her come alive time after time, My Alter Ego. She lies within me and sometimes, if you look closely You can see her within the cracks of my skin, Beneath the fragments of my broken heart when, Against all odds, I must find strength.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see’st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,Desert As the death-bed, whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
“Flight” (Sandhill Cranes at Whitewater Draw) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Flying Inside Your Own Body
Your lungs fill & spread themselves, wings of pink blood, and your bones empty themselves and become hollow. When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon and your heart is light too & huge, beating with pure joy, pure helium. The sun’s white winds blow through you, there’s nothing above you, you see the earth now as an oval jewel, radiant & seablue with love. It’s only in dreams you can do this. Waking, your heart is a shaken fist, a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in; the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight down on the think pink rind of your skull. It’s always the moment just before gunshot. You try & try to rise but you cannot.
The hour-glass whispers to the lion’s paw, The clock-towers tell the gardens day and night, How many errors Time has patience for, How wrong they are in being always right.
Yet Time, however loud its chimes or deep, However fast its falling torrent flows, Has never put the lion off his leap Nor shaken the assurance of the rose.
For they, it seems, care only for success: While we choose words according to their sound And judge a problem by its awkwardness;
And Time with us was always popular. When have we not preferred some going round To going straight to where we are?
black and gray drowns out the blue oceans full of plastic poison in our water virus in the air deserts are dryer water in the streets glasers are melting forests are burning times are changing
I don’t fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.
Rio de Janeiro Favela (2001) — Abstract Art by kenne
In the Favelas
‘Slum tourism’ sneered a moralising friend.
I thought of this as our small group trekked through alleys, deep in the favelas, climbed interminable steep small stairs, gazed curiously at faces that stared back indifferently.
Their world, ruled by drug lords, Crime bosses, poverty and need … How do these people of Rocinha, see us, the dilettante tourists, stepping carefully on broken ground? Don’t wear your rings or watches! Leave your wallets back at the hotel! Cautiously, we pick our way, cameras snapping at the sight of tangled wires for stolen power, of deep canals that take the sewerage to the sea, of grinding cycles of a poverty that no one can escape.
And we who walk among them, do we have the right to drive away, return to luxury hotels, download our photos for display to friends back home, while shaking heads in wonder that anyone can live like this?
My friend was right, for we have been, to our eternal shame, ‘Slum tourists!’
