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oil paint construction machinery

Contents:

Tanka & haiku

Tanka with the glasses Arthur Osver lent me (July 5, 2022, edited October 28, 2022)

Loose-framed east window:

Derelict, dripping color,

Sunned metal landscape.

Scaffold-embraced observing.

Wedding bell AC droning.

Tanka in the world of Gerhard Marcks’ cats (July 6, 2022)

Cats smoking, drinking,

Speakeasy, gamble canned fish.

Creatures of the night,

Metropolis rank with vice.

Rats cower down in sewers.

(October 27, 2022)

Abrade history

Evacuate enamel

Architect-sculpt void

Negative space abuts calm

Anthropology of lack

Haiku on a lightly-misting and briefly raining day (October 30, 2022)

Orange cat’s window. Orange leaves, dry til this mist. Orange-embossed road.

Train (December 17, 2022)

Remnant acrid eddies bathe twin steel limbs grounded fluid rattling
Spanning half a hemisphere a mere one forty two cm apart.

8 1 5 2 7 Danger 400 Volts AC Battery Door AMF Business Class fleeting runic procession.

Pastoral coastline scaffolded behemoth lairs metal friction hymns.

Nocturne blur punctured by each stop each traveller each flare against night.

November 2023 lines

Gasoline air and grey under some clouds. Yellow light on draping wires.

Holding quantities beyond the threshold of tears. Gently cut fog. Red.

Neither on-axis alignment nor off-, and still unspoiled support.

Miscellaneous poems

Little Narragansett Bay (July 30, 2016)

In respite from one hundred,
two hundred, four hundred and fifty! horsepower engines,
I float with ease.

To my right–
remnants of a blistering day descend
on the rocks not yet molded
by lilac-draped waves.

The cavalry returns, sending me back to the abrasive shore.

Processes I am accepting lately (November 24, 2020)

Step out of the stagnant cave,
Bear the turbulent spray of the rapids,
Find communion in the decay and moss.

Villanelle (October 27, 2022)

a concrete mass exhales
entry barred all the way around
oil paint industrial park

pitting corrosion
something used to grow in place of melting mauve rot
oil paint industrial park

dead hours of toil embedded
at a prominent fault, sheared brick whines
a concrete mass exhales

cadmium leaching
zinc imprint on underground canals
oil paint industrial park

an acknowledgement of the moribund intertwining
runoff dumped quietly
a concrete mass exhales

cement-foot interface bracing for the inevitable break
an element in another typology to agonize over
concrete masses exhale
at the oil paint industrial park

(November 25, 2022)

I
Superimposed step function building.
Brick and glass and metal and negative
space.
Punctuated windows and punctuated
fumigating pipes and puntuatedly sunned.
Confined compressed known bounds.
Even between facilities the drop-off
holds the stepped
continuity.
Constituted by elementary
cylinders and rectangles
and disturbed by three
tapered cylinders in an
affronting corner.

II
A road trends down. Concave, sagging concrete.
Under the weight of continually staccato traffic.
Straight shot, allotted turnouts for bus stops.
Static structure and static purpose
and flowed use.



And twinned headlights flaring
a modern and known vocabulary.

(December 29, 2022)

Graphite gray on transitory pale blue
Fingertips as media probes falter
Incoherent, convolute, reflected:
Pale, horizontal punctuations, born;
Gray, process expressed in density, essai;
Gray, delicate film, in/external, faith.

Document to remove a layer of transposition

Sense (April 20, 2023)

Alight ten miles away
Piercing heaven, even atmosphere
Cascade waveforms prodding simply-described "medium"
Scattershot contours available and unavailable regions

(September 3, 2023)

Landline mystique
Roadtrip planned through static
Residuals of adolescence-filtered signals

Scattershot filled-in map connecting
Home to summer excursions and
Winter stimulus overload
And eventually the connections between nodes
Imprint into the map dark enough.

The pitch of barcode recognition
Food courts heard from the gallery
And rain on wood glass and plexi

Pastel-colored oil paint
Oil paint construction site
Museum employees took off a comms box panel
And with enough two-to-two connections
Every exhibit is wired in
And the photo hypotheses are begging
You to leave and test them yourself.

(February 8, 2024)

Thrash
Speckled amid pitch
Thrashing. Frictive
Rubber on embossed tar

Witness as action
Spirit at hazard
The prybar notched,
Ribs give to examination

Light cutting the night
Screaming out
Burning spirit
Burning pathos
Spirit on fire

Signals meant for you
Read
Transparent film
The body exposed
Permeation

The urge at the center
And the received signals
Bound-tight fingertips
Extremity reacting to spirit
Unsustainable thrash
Spirit on fire
Asymmetric burning
Throat in smoke

Prose poems

The Commune (December 3, 2022)

Crossed streets perforated by at a glance ordered enough stone host the commune for its allotted history. The frame lingers. It is perverse. Stones are wrenched from streets not soil. Barricades leveled. The holes in the street would fill with blood level to the street if blood did not coagulate so fast. The street is not an eternal substrate. The project is continuous from far and punctuated at these intervals.

Killer (November 17, 2023)

Stuck on loop on every bad moment in every relationship I've been in, trying to make sense of who I am, but they all end for uniquely mundane reasons, none of it fits together. No coherent picture, except for my self at the center. Ink brush strokes darken the periphery. It all blurs together. It really hurts.