Locusts

Don’t be afraid of the locusts

But know they’re coming

Don’t be afraid

We’ll steer you in the right direction

In time

We’ll protect you from them coming

The corn is bursting in fields

And we will wait for summer harvest

They’re coming

Don’t be alarmed until we let you know

And than we’ll make you go

Away from that safe place

The corn rising in the fields

We’ll tell you how to see

And how to feel

When it’s time

But know they’re coming

We will facilitate

Evacuate

Mandate everything you’ll need to know

We have channels where you’ll listen to our words

We’ll comfort you

We’ll keep you warned

We’ll keep you updated daily

On their progress

Though you’ll never see a wing

We’ll protect your children

From everything

We’ll show you who is the enemy

We’ll create the image

We’ll advertise

And fill your dreams with dread

We’ll make you question

Starvation and the impending death

They’re coming

Most of the corn is already ready for harvest

We’ll keep them safe

We’ll spread them around

We’ll keep you feed

We’ll clear the clouds above your head

Buildings in the city coming down

Empty storefronts crumble to the ground

But don’t move

And don’t make a sound

We’ll tell you when it’s time to be alarmed

You won’t be harmed

We promise

We’ll herd you to where it’s safe

We’ll keep you feed

We’ll save face

The dying cattle

We’ve hauled them away

Nothing to worry about today

Until we tell you it’s time

The corn burned in the evening

You never smelled a thing

They’ve come and devoured

Everything

We kept you safe

We’ll spread what’s left

To who deserves the most

We will keep you bound

To that post

So we’ll rebuild

And we will conquer all of this fear

All the hunger

Rest assured

We’ve reached the deepest hole

We will need from you

All that’s left

We will keep control

We will keep you calm

We will keep you never feeling the pain

Of convulsing

Starving

As all of you do

We will spread what’s left

It’s what we do

When all the harvest disappears and next years’

Seems to be half as much

We will warn you of the locusts

The beasts you feared so much

And we will feed upon your corpses

And lay you all in the ground

In a small box

In that tiny dusty town

Where storefronts fall to the ground

No food, no belongings

Only the starving, with hands held out

And we on evil wings

Will persevere

On to the next small town

Or small city

Where we’ll devour

All the summer harvest

Before it comes to be true

And when you try to warn them

They won’t believe you…..

We are locusts

It’s what we’ve done

It’s what we do……..

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: Funeral for a Celebrity

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: Funeral for a Celebrity: The body in the standard layout, the same state, the same ritual,  a line of cars, the press were pallbearers taking pieces of t...

Funeral for a Celebrity

The body in the standard layout,

the same state, the same ritual, 

a line of cars,

the press were pallbearers

taking pieces of the corpse like ants

bits of anything left

scraps of dirty remnants of their lives

nothing sacred

nothing safe

all of those human moments exposed

sadness was the standard costume

crying eyes of those who took posesssion of the corpse

but no one knew her

sterile bits of words

from voices of strangers

tomorrow the front page

all the wars their demons rage

all the things they shouldn't have said

no respect, no emotion

for the dead

the possession

a celebrity becomes

the possession

all decorum lost to the story at hand

speak the words like vultures at a feast

without choking on a single word

cast out across the news

every dirty, filthy thought they ever had

and how they once did drugs

and how they beat their kids

facts like seasoning

that add or detract

to fill the space and compensate

for all the dignity we lack......

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: Blame....

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: Blame....: A child’s suicide Because he was being bullied What do we do in this world That gets more violent ignore or Punish the violence ...

Blame....

A child’s suicide

Because he was being bullied

What do we do in this world

That gets more violent

ignore or Punish the violence

Raise the child in a warm wonderful place

That hides societies' cruel uncomfortable face

Ashamed of our darkness

Ignore the disgraceful

Tear down idles of sports

And movies

And wonder why

Our children are mean

Attack fast food for hurting our children

And wonder why our children

won’t take responsibility

cockroaches in expensive suits

sell lottery tickets

for damages rendered

everyone is a potential victim

everyone is a potential donor

and let’s sell the kindness of disasters

join together with tears

and ignore all the corruption

and the fingers reaching

imprison the Christian

dismantle the church

disgard God from every corner

of our lives

and question who’s responsible

for a child suicide.

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: A Winter Sky

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: A Winter Sky: You don’t know what road to take Your eyes are cold and gray like winter How do you fit in your skin When your not like them...

Another Landscape

Indifferent blackbirds in pastel fields

Demons entangled

In last years broken stems

Broken rays of light

Find tired eyes

How quick and quietly

Compromised

That  I can not see

The sun

Or wake without the light

Without noticing

Gray

A shadow across the lens

Keeping blackbirds from getting in

When all around me clouds

The silence of  words

streaming out

A Winter Sky

You don’t know what road to take

Your eyes are cold and gray like winter

How do you fit in your skin

When your not like them

And the winter drags like the flu

As all the trees that grab the sky

Seem closer and darker to you

And the orange sky you remember as a child

Was the beginning of the snow

How quietly the sound of emptiness

In harmony with being lonely

You grow in size and weight

The forest dark and foreign

How many days did you walk by the stream

Searching for a reflection that never came

But it was you in that dark place

So close and dark like the dying trees

How sad that no one knew your face

Even you- a stranger on your own set

Where all the vines pulled at sinews bleeding

Did anyone notice you had forgotten your lines

Did anyone think to mercilessly leave

You behind

But you in that dark place

Remembering December like a life that passed you by

All the gray sky

The sadness of trees indifferent in the cold steel breezes

And that orange sky that hung for you like a beacon

As if there was a safe warm place

Not too far away

And if you found the road you sought

You could simply walk away…..

Art by Gordon: Community-it's where we began and where we're goin...

Art by Gordon: Community-it's where we began and where we're goin...: Community is something that is innate in our culture. With the rise of the web and the increasing state of anonymity the web offers, we have...

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: What's so great about poetry? What's so bad about ...

The Unspoken Page-Nature, art, life, death, politics, religion: What's so great about poetry? What's so bad about ...: I almost hate the word poem or poetry because of the stigma it has taken on. People who don't get it seem to think it's some foreign, incohe...

What's so great about poetry? What's so bad about poetry?

I almost hate the word poem or poetry because of the stigma it has taken on. People who don't get it seem to think it's some foreign, incoherent rambling of words for the sake of being artsy and creative. I think we are force fed poetry in high school and choke on words we don't only not understand but at that stage don't particularly want to understand. I have written all of my life-since I was ten and when you tell someone about poetry you can almost see their eyes glaze over. It's some foreign overly artsy intense thing that makes most people who don't care about it think your some kind of babbling foul.

I would prefer to call poetry-a verbal snapshot of life. It captures a description of intangible elements of some ones life and creates a tapestry of colors only through words. It would not make sense to speak in poetic terms in prose because there are too many elements that blur together and support each others processes. Another aspect of poetry for me is that it touches parts of the brain that aren't normally accessed. You will be speaking about a feeling and describe it with words that people can relate to-for example-depression; the great steel vice that crushes us or the black chasm that always looms above us, a language is created that isn't so much the sum of simply words but the sum of multiple feelings that people address with words. This way the poem starts out from the writer as their experience but when it is read, the reader injects their own feelings from the experiences they equate with the words chosen.

In a more self motivated process, I learn about myself and others every time I write because it is not the standard way of relating. From the subconscious, decisions and opinions are formed and reworked in every poem which grows the breadth of understanding of people, nature and that all encompassing theme of death. I see the world and people from various different perspectives from a subconscious bent and every time I write I learn more.

I believe if it was not for writing my coping mechanisms would definitely have been tested as poetry is a release valve that contains all of the fears, hopes, happiness and sadness. It filters the feelings and allows them to be processed first in subconscious and than to the conscious. I am working on a book on dealing with depression and living through the process and writing has helped a lot in getting through it. It tends to be the vehicle for writing as well as an illness that is alleviated through writing.

So when they glaze over when you mention poetry, lose the word-it is not poetry it is a word snapshot.
A language that transcends feeling, words and life, a way the inside speaks to the outside-okay I'm getting artsy now.

Painting an Effect Instead of a Scene


Saturday was the first class of a new painting. It is a totally different process from the previous painting as this painting is very simple and low on details. This makes it hard to lose focus on the overall painting because you are in the process of working the whole painting at once and all the processes support the overall effect. The previous waterfall painting was all about detail and technique and it was easy to get lost in the details-teach a technique and an idea of how to quickly render an area and let the student take over the process.

This painting, because of its lack of detail and the subtlety of its effect demands light overlays of color, not a whole lot of paint piling up and an intricate weaving of light and hue to capture the focus of light, movement and hue. The main point of painting water is that you are not painting water-you are painting the sky, the landscape or anything that interacts with the water but the water because of its colorless characteristics can not be captured only by the movement and color of objects reacting with it.

Another problem with painting water and a simple image of a leaf on water is how do you explain the fact that their is water and that the leaf is not just plastered on a wall flat like it is envisioned. The  image needs visual cues to explain to the viewer what they are seeing, visual cues that are assumed and felt because of the fact that we know by watching water that the leaf is on water and we hear the water and know that the leaf is on water. In a painting there are no sensual cues to explain there is water so unless you can explain to the viewer how the leaf rests on water and that there is depth before and behind the leaf the image is a flat leaf on a two dimensional plain.

We have to notice changes in detail, contrast and color, without the changes the eye has no concept of what it is seeing and the photograph from which the rendering came from has successfully captured a three dimensional image and rendered it as a flat, evenly contrasting image. As artists we need to exaggerate certain aspects of the image and clarify what the viewer is seeing.

So how hard is this to teach? For me it is even more like trying to explain the color you see on a regular basis to someone who has never seen color but even harder than that is without certain words like warm or cold. I would move paint around as I was constructing the original painting and as it worked or didn't work I would adjust and refine my rendering of the painting depending on the process. In teaching you have to reach and move paint without being able to rely on the idea that this is an experiment, there needs to be clarity with a student and you need to show the way when your way at times seems somewhat cryptic.

We moved paint around the leaf and continued to refine the image-If I say refine to her one more time she's going to shoot me, but just as in the other more detailed painting the process begins with refining where light is, where the leaf falls in your plane of vision and how the contrast and color changes throughout the painting. As the textures and the colors form and push each other into the position on the plane the image will create itself almost like a puzzle that becomes only with the relation to its parts and how each appear. So just like not painting water, we are painting the way the sky looks and how the leaf looks and in the end we will have how the water was affected by the leaf and the sky.

I will continue to comment on the steps to getting there and have a final video of the class in the end when the final puzzle creates itself. Thanks for reading and stay tuned.

Places to Paint and the Places Painted from


I try not to be too abstract about art and the intricacies of inspiration and creativity but there are many intangibles that are hard to explain. I am a landscape painter-I paint places but the place from which I paint tends to be varied depending on mood and circumstance. The word place could better be described as tense as in writing or maybe even atmosphere. I  paint from states of being either extremely happy and feeling content or being somewhat dark and pensive. There definitely seems to be a need for extreme of mood when I paint because I rarely intend on painting a pretty landscape I more want the viewer to feel
cold or lonely, or the excitement of light and vibrancy of color so the landscape becomes a secondary backdrop to a state of being.

The most uncanny of this is in the past having painted a landscape which for all purposes was a simple landscape but having music in the background while painting caused the painting to have a somewhat dark uncomfortable  feeling-the music in the background was Hunters and Collectors-Scream and it touched on a darker more uncomfortable place in my mind and that's what came out through the painting.

I am impressed with mystery and darkness. I think depression probably has also lent itself to the darkness in my paintings-I just sometimes don't feel comfortable in my own skin and I often think that comes out in the painting. I want the viewer to walk down a road in the evening and feel that tension of fear but the enjoyment at the same time of that fear and uneasiness and that is probably why people like haunted houses-the fear takes them safely out of their comfort zone.

My writing is actually more dark and tends to be more of an open door for the uneasiness because it is unattached to a specific image which at times might be completely contradictory to the scope and ideas I convey. I like a landscape that you can enjoy the beauty and natural feeling while at the same time feeling that there was  a bit of tension and you don't feel completely comfortable being there. I think one painter that has captured the idea that I express is Edward Hopper-his paintings are about dark places in city streets or in bars and there is a tension I just love.

I've included a pastel that is probably a bit more over the top than intended as far as the mood but the name is Halloween. It's a perfect example-a wonderful family time out with the community and yet the underlying idea that there are goblins in the trees and ghosts abound. I've always loved that feeling and that's what I tend to paint.

The second pastel is of blackbirds which is a recurring theme in my writing. The last image is of sunflowers-I thought it was a bit alarming of that one light in the evening on a silent house-begs the question who is staring out the window?

At the Cremation

At the Cremation

Smoke filled the air

Joy and sadness mingled with dust

Twisting writhing spirits in the sky

Dreaming of the day we touched the ground

All the love and time that streamed across the plane

And wound down

The pyre floating in the sea

We watched for remnants

Of what used to be

All of our memories

Written across the sky

How could we be happy

But we needed to be

As this is what was meant to be

Time is just a measure

It’s the words that create the page

The chapter ends

Another begins

Eyes staring out across a horizon

Of light

All clouds unobscurred the path

A smile and a conversation had

As tomorrow might not be so sad

The journey begins today

Discarding the weight of the body

That reaches the sky

That touches us with rings of smoke

And all the loved ones wave goodbye

The portrait measures its final stroke

And we remember all the words,

Written or spoke

How will they see us tomorrow

When we’re on our way

What will they say another day

When the wound is somewhat healed

Only a glimpse of the pain

For the soul that’s gone away

We wait here on the shores

And will follow

One day soon

To rise among the embers

Of our lives

and forever shine anew.

9-26-11

At the Burial

At the burial

The long drive and the street is dark

The sky is a backdrop

Of rain

But you won’t feel a drop

Not the moisture

In the grass

Not the salt on your cheek

Only the chore

Of preparation

Only the position

And the box and the place and time

Wills to attest

And papers to sign

Down the long green mile

Of grass so green

Its sickening

I watched blackbirds

Filling in the blanks of the sky

Forming forests and trees

In peripheral eyes

The cold grey day

The green felt gives way

To a hole that no one can ever fill

Only with earth that will cover our cries

Forever stain our frightened minds

Fill the depression

That nothing will……

At the Wedding

At the Wedding

All of the moments before

Were a preparation for this promise

And I promise

The weight we carry together

Will always be more barable

You take my words

As they bind us

You listen as Gods breath instills

A key between us

That keeps our wills

Restrained

I have no desire to capture

Nor cage

Though will it be my detriment

That you are yourself

Separate from me

And the two of us

Will always be

Two

We will have rules that neither will ever voice

But we will know them

We will have boundaries

Neither will test

They will mean everything

And trust is the block we’ll forge

A structure

With all its cracks and remnants of the past

That will stand as a testament

To a promise

For as long as we last.

At the Birth

At the birth-

The light broke through clouds

A crack in the gray and pale white

She in

Her final bout

All her weight carried

Her voice loud

The steam erupting to the cool autumn air

The silence is deafening

The pause

And the moments becoming

Memories crawling off of walls

And into albums

I remember the hospital white

The bed

The room

The simplicity of timing

The impatient nurse

And the tv fading into the silence

As the room spun around

The doctor in all his formality

And every moment before and after

Pointless

The one great divine moment

Of creation

And God shows his window

One small glimpse of this perfect soul

Captured just before

The world robs its eyes

And slowly steals

What was only for a moment

Hers and mine……

The Media Teacher

The Media Teacher

I’m so glad to have the media

To teach us about the world

To teach us how to talk with our children

To show me that most things can be unsafe

To show me how to use common sense

To instruct me how to eat

And what to eat

And how to feed my child

And what my favorite celebrity eats

And what insignificant thing they said

That I need to hear

And what product will kill me

And what I should be afraid of

And what I shouldn’t fear

How I should feel

What’s fake, what’s real

To distract me from the government

With their fingers in my life

Teaching me what’s wrong and right

Showing me how to decide

Keeping everything bright for the side they choose

Teaching me which politician needs to win

And lose

Showing me what the weather is like

Every moment, every day, every night

but don’t look at the electorate

they’ll decide

keep my eyes

on kims new dress

or her marriage failed

tell me rumors about celebrities

show me how to watch sports

and who’s guilty and who’s not

the story, the most important aspect

trumping true or false

courtrooms on tv

mesmorize me

so I don’t notice the real

I don’t know what’s false, or what to feel

They keep me tuned to tv

On the radio

On the web

Show me how to analyze sports

And how to understand celebrity

And how all my heroes fall

And most people are bad

And most things that happened aren’t good

What is sensationalism

What is a theatrical event

Rats in a maize we are

Listening to them feeding us

Spoons of words that mislead

As we follow

The news

But no one teaches propaganda

versus truth…….