Toy Boat

Azul Fantasma (blue ghost)


acrylic/canvas

36"x28"



inspired by Steve Earl

When the ghosts in your bedroom won't rest.

Somtimes these things ring true.

...and Through the Tornado

Coasting over snowy fields of an imitating world,
I yearn to feel a painful comfort from the earth
as my stripped form can no longer find warmth
buried within this barren space—blue is all I touch.
Cold lungs no longer satisfied with dreamy breezes
transiently blowing over my mouth and wings,
every piece of my body stops pumping as I fall
like a broken spirit into winds biting at my skin.
A sharp bitterness cuts through my chest
as I look down to see the unforgiving clouds
that will not soften my journey with hope
or reveal the divine on a fairytale mountaintop;
I am to be sent alone into the funnel of smoke.

My head is an earthquake, but the sky does not mind;
it torments placidity, equaling my mass and gravity
and the distance I measure to each end—equations
like fog could never support my unknown intentions.
I Inhale these wispy seeds of recycled water and doubt
and slip through the white cushioned apparitions,
as I find myself saturated, a snowflake built on dust.

Through the chaos, balance will bring life—death.

Darkness now engulfs my sight, as the tornado
tears the land like night around my pale figure.
I inherently delve into this ferocious wind
with freezing palms that split and fill with dirt;
I cup both bleeding hands around this earth
and mold the particles as a child packs snow
into a tight round ball—Is this believing?
I place my creation into the spiraling wind,
and it circles up through the storm and is thrown
past the clouds, cast over the wispy blue space
like a saturated dream that I can never keep;
as torn dust eternally swirls around a center,
ashes will beg the wind to burn once again.

Mix me a fixer upper

He's part artist, part alchemist,
but a full-on con, self-professed with post-
graduate degrees in mixology
and the god-given sense to know which
smoldering home remedies will catch fire
(give or take an occasional legal glitch).

His healing pitch is grifted on the easy
comparison of queasily lowered brows to
their indistinctly raised betters. You'll doff
the scoffing face as he pulls back a masking
caparison, and your fever gallops hotly
hoof-in-mouth with an uncontrollable itch.

Tinctures, colloids, salves and potions,
they all have twisty caps, blithe boxes
bubbling over with hypnotic patterns
fashioned to cure your urge to avoid
his futility. First'll come the fondle, then
the crumple followed by purse strings loosening.

Don't consider it capitulation.
His assortment of fluid manipulations
bear a singular branding at 100 proof,
and after the recommended daily dosing
(two jiggers with each meal), you'll feel
you're homo erectus made sapient.

2 poems by John Grochalski

such trivial delights

i watch the young ones
dangle on street corners

girls with tight asses
and black souls
that’ll cause damage
to dumb boys and old men

then i close
the wooden shade
forgetting the world

i pop a blood blister on my toe
the red juice squirting where it will

i can’t think
of what else to do
being home sick from work

so i jack-off to starlets
captured on internet
video freeze frames

nude scenes taken from movies
i’ll never see

because the good parts
just landed on the floor
with a dull splat

and movies are too expensive
these days
for such trivial delights


hypocrite

i wake her up
she tells me that she has
a headache
i offer to get her aspirin
but she doesn’t want them.

her stomach feels empty
she says.

i turn on the light

i tell her
she could be hungover

we went to the bar
last night

i told her that she
drank most of the wine
when we got home.

i just kept filling her glass.

don’t tell me
she says, sitting up
i have a headache
don’t sit there and tell me
what i did wrong.

i was just guessing
i say

then we sit there in silence.

i feel like a prick.
three days ago
i was kneeling on the bathroom floor
vomiting up bile
from a night of binging
on wine and beer.

i vomited until a part
of my chest turned black and blue.
now here i am
the judge and juror.

do you want some aspirin?
i ask again.

no
she says.
i just need to take a shower.

she gets up off the bed
to run the water
while i sit there
in the dim light
trying to remember
if we bought enough cat food
or not.

seven scenes from a vase of jasper, moistened by a salty dew

i. High cheek bones show two ells but here is one

The return of a portrait nude of a graying male slightly torn,

jagged with a careless letter in a distant studio by a raven pupil,

closed an oily circle that began with an initial smudge on a ocher flank

and ended with a volley of correspondence that slowly grew electric.

ii. A cough designed to catch your eye

The now pudgy former gamine bends over trashcans

in a discount housecoat of red velour with sporty stripes

near the place you met the smudged mascara that night

cycling home from school with the tears that made you cry.

iii. The uneasy disappointment of no longer feeling murderous

Spooked with calm tears in the bedroom morning after

committing the unnatural crime of square-toed shoes

near a table with blood red wheels; the smudged curtains

wisp a chiffon of meaning that perfectly freezes alarm.

iv. Chrome is no substitute for a welcome reflection

A vigorous smoke exhausted by the smudged fanning blades

pauses to snatch a callipygous view of hiked yellow hips,

as she bends over a linoleum counter in a short striped robe,

attempting to kiss the tearful lips of a spread white rose.

v. Etching over a careen that has no finish

Hoping for a curious little job by calligraphic hand

that will turn the aqueous face of smudged glass

into the smoky hues of sweet sticky forgetfulness;

the perfumey residue of nicotine on lips and lungs

releases gray memories of other hidden tears.

vi. Taxonomies go up and down

Of the thirty-seven ways of hiding tears,

the best use hallways three through nine,

to feather the short vortex of raven hair:

it was just another kind of smudge of death

and another mark of a prickly birthright.

vii. Again the curtains are revealing a creep

birch thin bones in a leathery box covered

by the tricky cloud that played the moon

in a vein pumping peripheral drama

played on a stage of rocks and scrub:

ever see a yellow finch of smudged green

lashed by raven wings and the sting of salt?

that is the mold that dually breaks the mold

both tearfully true and crazily easy to behold.

The Wages of Sin - Gulf of Mexico 2010

Sketchbook work. 2010

shore

i think i'd like to go far away where no one has gone before over the farthest mountains along an empty shore and walk along forever but never round the bend where the ocean meets the river the river that never ends and stop beneath a shady tree to listen to the rain that plays on the leaves a melody that will never be heard again

early history

The period between ca 1914 until early 21th century is usually referred to as the “authentic” 20th century. It was the era which lifted human race from the shortage and self-absorption of previous centuries. The interpretation of the period derives entirety from archeological testimony which points towards a largely utopian global society. Particularly the northern hemisphere enjoyed a lasting economic boom. Steady advancement in technology coupled with the progress of liberation made way for what is largely seen as human race’s most painless time. Some experts go so far as calling it “the period of pleasures”. The époque would famously become a symbol of hope for later ages, even though recent evidence (Yllu, Rollo, covering 9, 4, 9, 3) points at some strife at the end of the era. This made scientists (esp. McLars, Og, Ell, Quinn, Reh) to question the common view, highlighting the archeological shortage (only 1,432189896789 terabyte). The popular view today, however, is that the trouble-free buggers of the 20th and early 21th century would have been a wee bit surprised if they only knew.

Narration of Home Mire (0, 0, 0, 0), early history

bolometric luminosity between air masses
I’m inside the dome while my emergent coastline rises
dancing humid circles
when I die they will put me in the chilly gravel
cataclysmic variable of fading colors

season of growing hillsides
calibration of oceans behind the palisades
make for a stunning get-together
before the gasses

5. a peculiar type of forced curiosity

abscission...

deciduous thoughts
shed words
leaving my soul bare
till spring
.

Night
42"x34"
acrylic/canvas

The Room is Alive.

past the point of mere inertia to the line from here to soliloquy

The screaming blazing comet of your head from a nice boot of white

streaks the grey brown void to places where there is no other stuff

to curse you with unnatural pink volume and the yellowness of stars,

a empty dark billow where all is right because all has ceased to be at all

except re-entrant crispiness because the burning ground is all burnt up.

There is no consumer taxonomy for streaking on such a gone degree of orbit

while you flail a dead sock at the eel weir moss that takes your breath away-

black and white scotty magnets on macadam cannot patch that glassy trouble,

nor your helmet made from broken street lamps shield your grey from aliens:

your thirty year detour in primer paint with a down-draft wing of six-cylinder spunk

marked with crusty cedar apple rust always washed out under dark umbrellas.

Orange sunrise on the sherbet dormer reflects your gaze so blank and banal

with that scrufty dog window sill white over the winter bales of grassy seed:

a plump berry of hazy fumes in this sweet and churning perfume of icy ecstasy

encourages the theoretical kundalini of monkeys to stream your long jones live

with hard radio static over the squawks of geese that plainly state the granite statutes.

In a world of ubiquitous metaphor when I click on the light I am a god to you,

just another kind of blackbird with extra tears for the withered little tweaker

who's stealing breath for one more sunset in an exoskeletal bag of crispy chips:

and it's all just a mandala in sands of green, maroon, and rust

about to be swept away.

Jonesing for Alternative Currencies

I've been thirsting to burst your bubble since
I heard the low-down we may be over-
supplied with a green-backed bird called Money,
that trollop spread-wide by aliases

A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound
A buck or a pound, a buck or a pound

And to layman's ears unlearned in the fine-
tuned registers of glib-tongued financiers,
it may ring up as reason to cheer with
no tinkling of trouble, but if Money

Is all that makes the world go around
that clinking, clanking sound (they do say)

She sings, clangs a bit hollow when she clings
too heavy in alms of poorly wrung hands,
so a well-heeled sit 'n spin'll turn us about
to the golden gap beams of banker's mouth

For Money makes the world go around
The world go around, the world go around

And will till johns who hold little put less
stock in the tart pitches of slick-macking
daddy Street with his tricky fat pay backs
for the ounce of love he's flouncing to sell.

Nivôse

sea
my body is ten feet under disgrace valley
Gabelle between her labyrinthus
dealer sans-culottes told her
the smoky room may be
travelling by speed of light

the eolian disk awaits
words make for a carnage
before she receives the heliocentric sheet
ejecta

face of the earth

A left and a right and a left-hop-skip
I think I've gone and hopped right off it

I've let myself dive into the persistent cloud-cover,
feeling the gray and gloomy days.
While lush mountains with their woolly green coats
flock the sulking Shepard.
Who sits on her rock and consoles her heart
drawing rivers with a stick in the mud
You see, the earth and the rain are playing a game
coaxing this crab from her shell.
For sit long enough on the most comfortable rock
and your bony ass will get sore
And your numb bum and the soft filtered sun
will cause you to stretch and to eye (unawares)
Whereupon Mother Kesey and her gang of merry pranksters
Swiftly sneeze you into the sky.

Shadow of a Stinkbug

The melancholy analyst
appears in the tablet again,

"If I'd ever seen a superconductive
egophone, maybe I'd know what it is.."

skitchitskitchitskitchitskitchit
skitchitskitchitskitchitskitchit
skitchitskitchitskitchitskitchit

--------------------------HAWMPS))))

Somehow Busby Berkeley gets cross
with Lawrence Livermore.

Air stream Cobra.
Ball peen Hummer.

the river has no leader...

.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~t~~~~~~~~~~~~~~h~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~e~~~~ ~~~m~~~~~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~~~v~~~~~~~~~~~~e~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~m~~~~~~~~e~~~~~~~n~~~~~~~t~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~c~~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~m~~~~~~~~~~~e~~~~~~s~~~~~~~ ~~~~f~~~~~~~~~~~~r~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~~~m~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~e~~~~~~~~~~~~~~a~~~~~~~~~~~~c~~~~~~~~~h~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~d~~~~~~~~~~~~~~r~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~~~~p~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
.

▲

A death of sorts
Two chipped fingernails
beneath the pillow
you gave me
last summer

You know the one,
duck down
And a picture of your
University
boat-race
across its bow

I’ll make a believer of you yet
I’ll leak and tear,
And cast it all out to sea

But by then
who knows?

Perhaps the realisation
that, like every good
garden,
this love needs
to be tended with care,

will have you swollen
and calling
my name.

"The Devil's Lumberjack"
Watercolour/Gouache on Paper

It was sitting there having a rest after it had single-handily destroyed and obliterated a whole area of woodland in a single morning. I painted this on the spot among the devastated trees. You could almost sense the terror of the trees still standing.

spewed from spheres-within-spheres

04, 28, 2010

spewed from spheres-within-spheres

10" x 10"

alkyd paint, found image, handmade canvas panel

(this is my favorite one out of a series of four paintings)