For Kathy, Upon Reading The Village Voice [ February 23, 1976 ]

Performance. The performative.
I need more performance art in my life.

Reading this clipping sped my pulse, made me feel
both as if I were a spectator and a participant in the event.
[ Each is the other, ultimately. ]

A nod to your ghost, Kathy Acker…

I never told you that several lifetimes ago, back when I lived
in a dry county in Nowheresville, Arkansas —
so eager to claw out of that place
the tips of my fingers ached

I stole a San Francisco telephone book from the local library
[ planning, as it were, my ’ great escape ’ ] and
was so stunned to see your name / number listed, I
had to call and confirm you were you.

Sorry I hung up, but not-so-sorry
Caller I.D. didn’t exist yet in that
ancient history

What…I don’t know what else
I could or would’ve said

My favorite writers, artists :
I guess I view them the way most people do “rock stars.”

Even the term ‘rock and roll’ induces eye-rolling on this end, but
I’d stomp my feet and raise a lighter
for an encore

of your life, for
your life cut short —

This world is a cancer : it eats everything
precious, everything
every thing

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The Visual/The Verbal: Speaking In Hieroglyphics (Grabbing Language By The Throat)

Though your MySpace page tells us “all we need to know,” Mia—your photography exposes a vulnerable intensity. The beauty inherent is that which remains unspoken: those subtle nuances, the vocabulary of the heart that extends beyond logic & its parameters. It’s none of what a viewer “need[s] to know,” yet it’s everything.

The ability to send the blood rushing—to thaw hearts as impenetrable and cold as marble—through a glacial striptease?

This is what it is to cast spells: not of the premeditated chanting from a back-room magick book, none of the hackneyed “add this herb; follow these directions; do it THIS WAY, no THIS WAY, no THIS WAY.” There is no guide book for psyche-penetration, no recipe by which one can be taught how to affect the human condition effectively.

It just it what it is: a medium that for some, is a camera lens; for others, a paint brush & a canvas stretched to its limits; others still, a pen hungry for pages on which it can conduct, gather all the energy from the soil on which we stand to mustering up the truth tucked deep inside us, an honesty of whom we really are versus how we present ourselves or what others perceive us to be—and it’s in the marrowbones, the core of our beings.

And what it is?

Something raw and real and imperfect.  Something greater than I can assign nomenclature—let alone fully comprehend. It’s a force that travels through us yet belongs not to us; it’s those “accidents” that happen when we don’t set out To Create but seem to create themselves for us all the same…those inexplicable pieces of perfection for which we somehow feel we weren’t responsible, or perhaps can’t pinpoint with specificity. Can’t name a technique or place in this space, a state of being I won’t pretend to understand though have heard referred to as La Duende, the spirit of evocation, a state of possession : vox popula. Vox populi—a sense of I can’t tell you ‘How I Did It’ when it feels as if I wasn’t even at the wheel

yet

what we see, what we discover is credited as ‘ours,’ what we feel equal parts distant from as well as intimately involved—it’s when our limbs jangle and that four-chambered metronome pounds against our sternum, and the eyes and voices and fingertips of others respond, pounding sentences out in a quicksilver frenzy.  It’s when an image you took has the power to peel back the ribs of a stranger, or near-stranger, or incite the syllables and consonants that come rushing out at 1:31 a.m. to be ‘strange’ enough, strange enough;

It’s when all the odds are stacked against your viewer, yet he throws every ounce of his being down along with his better judgment. All bets are off in moments like these, in a moment like this, when your brow is furrowed & mouth hangs open in disbelief and the little voice nestled in your skull asserts “This is insane!” in a whisper, the words scalpels…

And yeah: insane it is. Would you opt for the blandular instead, the khaki-clad with lips pursed for air kisses and ass kissing? Would you rather have the safe-yet-soggy response that’s the verbal equivalent of a microwave pizza box lining?  Because in three minutes I may splash faucet water on my face, feel the shock as I regain physicality and shrug off this rant of a reaction.  In three minutes I may very well glance back with a deep-throated laugh and ask myself “Seriously, What. The. Fuck?”

But three minutes is a long time. Don’t believe me?  Set your alarm; then hold your breath.

What the fuck?  Seriously: because I live for this madness, I live for the spine-snap urgency to bound down the staircase and haunt my neighborhood streets—Micheltorena, Sunset Blvd., Alvarado—to dig my fingernails into the raw evening, to tear down the sky and polish the stars. I live. I live for.

I live for these unforeseen moments of inspiration in which I feel alive alive alive…

They’re how I know I exist: the flames lapping at the backside of my corneas like the backlash of a furnace blast.  The sensory overload.  The feral fervor. I live for this severity that destroys any sense of severity, no matter if when or how much I feel it siphoning the life force out of me.

While you may not be poisoned with the same ‘unnamed ‘which wears me down to an angry frazzle, I’m drawn to some irrational spirit of artistry  I intuit is chambertombed to you, to your need to search and to see and to leave something lasting, some body of work that no longer has to be searched for, as it’s already found; as it’s already found you; it’s found you,

found it’s you.

Speaking in the Sentence Fragments of the Seratonin-Depleted

So here I am, testing out this new blog. The Webmistress has introduced me to WordPress, so of course I wanna see what it’s all about.

However, Full Disclaimer:

(visual art by Glenn Arthur)

*Thing is: I have to “own it”—sure, it’s lachrymose. It’s of the Things Are Very Serious school, the stacks-of-bipolar-poems strewn about. But here’s the deal: it’s not like me to hide what I fear might be mocked. I mean, I view it differently after 7 hours of zzzzs—though that doesn’t change the moment, the cheeks-burning-crimson over what developed, the cadence that’s captured in this emotional Polaroid.

Said another way? I meant it. Not really, but really meant it at the time.