Street Musician — Portrait by kenne
A cowboy with a ukulele—
hell, I’ve seen stranger things.
He’s strumming “Blue Moon”
like it’s the last beer in town.
The mustache curls like smoke—
every note a small mercy
for a world gone rough.
Kids stare,
a dog yawns,
the street sways a little
in the rhythm of don’t care.
— kenne
Front Range Snow On the Catalinas — Image by kenne
— kenne
Boat On a Mountain Lake — Photo-artistry by kenne
Beached Boat On Calm Lake
— kenne
Image by kenne
This morning I read an article by Jorge Guerra Pires on the question of whether the universe requires a supernatural designer often centers on the idea of “fine-tuning.” Proponents of the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP) argue that the delicate balance of cosmological and physical constants provides “irrefutable proof of a creator God”. This argument posits that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than ours, suggesting that our existence — which mathematician Roger Penrose calculated rests on odds of $1$ in $10^{10^{123}}$ possible states — is “wildly improbable” by chance.
Rather than responding directly on the fine-tuning argument, I decided to write a poem:
— kenne
Three One-Mast Boats — Art by Katie Turner Bailey
— kenne
Thanksgiving Image by kenne
— kenne
Climate Change II by kenne
Climate Change by kenne
Photo-artistry by kenne
The Photographer
He lifts the camera
as if confessing—
the lens a small mercy
between himself and beauty.
Each click
is a way of saying I see you,
and also I can’t bear to lose you.
In the mountains,
he photographs what he loves,
and what he knows
will never belong to him.
Rainbow with a Tucson Flare — Image by kenne
Rainbow with a Tucson Flare
It arrived like a verdict—
that rainbow—
arched over Tucson’s broken breath,
a spectrum laid upon a land
too used to drought
and good intentions gone brittle.
People came out with phones,
hungry for wonder,
proof that heaven still had
a marketing department.
The rain had barely quit falling,
and already
the city’s thirst began again—
for color,
for meaning,
for something to share.
Out by the wash,
the saguaros
kept their arms raised,
not in praise,
but interrogation.
Each thorn a question
no sermon could answer.
The rainbow lingered,
a flag without allegiance,
a bruise across the sky.
Then—
light slipped,
the air forgot its promise,
and Tucson returned
to its long work
of surviving beauty.
Image by kenne
Autumn Still Life
Multicolored corn dried on the cob,
gourds huddle like friends in conversation—
their skins rough, their colors honest.
We gather, too,
carrying the years in our faces,
the joy in our hearts.
Outside, the wind shifts—
a hush before winter.
For a moment,
everything feels painted
in the same theme:
the harvest,
the stories,
the tender ache
of being here again.
Self-portrait (07/30/10,11:36:01 PM)
Self-Portrait Titled Intellectual Ignorance
yeah,
that’s what I called it.
sounded clever at the time—
like I knew something
about the world.
I had read Sartre and Camus,
underlined all the wrong lines,
and drank enough cheap bourbon
to mistake despair for wisdom.
I thought too much,
said too little,
wrote like a man digging
with a spoon.
the mirror didn’t care.
it just looked back—
same tired eyes,
of a life pretending
to be deep.
call it what you want,
a portrait,
a confession,
a joke—
hell, maybe I got it right after all:
it is intellectual ignorance
to think I could ever
paint myself true.
Photo-artistry by kenne
Mt. Lemmon’s fall colors become artificial near the fenceline
— kenne
Golden Columbine — Image by kenne
Late September
Sunglasses Reflect the World — Photo-artistry by kenne
Sunglasses
