7/31/21 - MYSTERIES AND WONDERS ABOUND

This is an extra-long post, unlike the previous quickies. In Facebook jail for seven days for suggesting that traditional 18th and 19th punishment for treason (perhaps stated too explicitly for Facebook's gentle souls) should suffice for our current crop of traitor, whether in or out of office.) That left me with lots of time to kill. So here you have it.

Usually completing one of these blog posts doesn't bring a lot of satisfaction to me, nothing at all like completing a good poem. They are, after all, nothing but a yard sale with artistic pretension, a collection of old pieces, mine and other's. 

But this post which I took longer to complete does provide a bit of that satisfaction, a true poetry, art, and photography collection. The only thing missing is music and that I am working on. Just need to find out how to transfer CD's to digital media. Coming soon, maybe.

And I remind you again, comments are easy and I like them.


Beginning with this piece is from my book Always to the Light. It was my last poetry book before two fiction books and a final poetry book.

tiny little girl drinks her juice

​little girl
sits,
waits for mom
to finish her
morning
phone call to
friend?
lover?
spouse?
hairdresser?

who knows
mysteries and stories
abound
in our every day
world

tiny girl
drinks
from her juice box,
straw
never leaving 
her mouth

eyes
above the straw
like small blue
diamonds,
blue
ice
beneath
bright blond curls
surveys 
the room
eyes
like blue flame
flicker,
watchinig every
thing, every
body

mysteries
and stories
abound
in her everyday
​world 
phon

While I'm in Always to the Light, here's another.



pants on fire

I'm always
doing stupid things,
the stupidist being
that I know the things
I'm doing are stupid
even as I do them anyway -

but then
I'm an accomplished liar,
never better at it 
than when lying
to myself,
easily convincing  myself,
for example, 
that I will
absolutely,
certainly,
for sure,
make up for not 
walking my mile yesterday
by walking
two miles tomorrow instead,
or that it is most
definitely
true
that there is a
certain chemical in pecan pie filling
that is highly
beneficial
to diabetics
or that Dee will surely
understand
and believe me
when I tell her that I just
forgot her birthday
and will make it up next year
with a three-week vacation
on the coast of Spain

it is so easy
to be talked into stupid things
when a person as gullible
as I am comes under the influence
of a liar as convincing
as me




And here's another  one



deep thoughts to be thunk in 2009

like many people
I like to think deep thoughts
about things I know
nothing
about,
an explanation, some might say,
as to why
all
the world's problems
I solved last year
are back on the table today

balderdash,
as we
deep thinkers like to say

obviously
the world wasn't paying
adequate attention
last year

meaning
I'm just going to have to
deep think louder
in 2009

Leaving that book behind for a while, here's a board I may not have posted before.



Jellyfish Jamboree

This poem is by Sidney Wade, taken from her book Stroke.



The Vulgate of Experience

In this tatterdemalion sandwich of Life,
it pays to pay attention to the light,

not the oligarchic spread of heavy principles,
or to four-week traditions.

There are multitudes caught in the glare
and just as many stuck in a radiant head-book.

The book says even though we might reflect
the bruised glory of all the suns

that ever shone down on the earth,
mostly everyone's dreaming in a savage room

or searching for the beloved in the desert
I admit I, for one, am clouded by experience,

though I'm feeling my way into a weird pre-waking
from the old parabola of darkness.

Some nights I sleep in wild weather
where the names of God change furiously.

Sometimes I wander in the available light.
the wind is always a perilous distraction.

On rare, sweet days I hear a brown, nut-like sound.
Inside thie sound you can hear the imagination fluttering

Here joy whiskers through the main arteries.
Here is where, if you hold out your hands, they will be filled.

Another practice board.

This Could Be Your Final Warning

I'm going to shamelessly self-indulge by quoting the entire critique of my book Seven Beats a Second from Amazon. The critique is old, written by the publisher/editor of Tryst, an on-line poetry journal, but the book is still available in both new print-on-demand and old, second-hand copies.
​

5.0 out of 5 stars Seven Beats a Second: A Collector's Edition
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2011
There aren't many poetry books out there with big, wild, splashy colorful illustrations and that's too bad. You see, there's just not enough imagination in poetry books these days. Besides the generic titles, boring book covers and pages and pages of self-absorbed ink, it's a rare moment to come across a book that entertains as much as it sustains.

Too many poetry books try to be dead serious and just end up...dead. Some poetry books just want to be published, never mind that the poetry reads like a laundry list of sundry garments that had to be aired. Some poetry books try to be too clever or profound and punish the reader with all kinds of cerebral gymnastics in scholastics. These books are for avid fans of the author, or poets studying other poets of which I am guilty of being both. That's fine and all. There's a poetry book for every kind of taste and every die-hard poetry lover out there. Thank goodness because the shelf life of any poetry book is regrettably short--I think the life expectancy of a fly might be longer. So how do you make a book stand out and more importantly, memorable? You write a poetry book that competes with the best of recipe books: You write, SEVEN BEATS A SECOND and illustrate it with wonderful images that happen to coincide with the words and bingo, you "gotta dance"
______________________

shirt off
chest glistening
sweat-wet hair long
swinging as he dances
atop the amp rack
twenty feet in the air
arms pumping feet pumping ....

it's the music
he says
can't you hear it

gotta dance
man

______________________

That poem lands on page 55 and it's illustrated with a rabbit in blue overalls, (all paintings by Vincent Martinez), and for some reason the poem and illustration tickle me every time I read that poem because I'm envisioning this rabbit thumping madly, gyrating and dancing away because he's so happy. Memory works best with word-imagery associations. But if illustrations were all that there was to making poetry books successful then any poet could hire or befriend an artist in the same manner a poet might solicit another colleague to write up a blurb or an endorsement. The illustrations merely help much in the same way photos of an exotic dish help to associate "delicious" with a recipe. Ultimately, the poems made up of words have to click with the reader and the firmer those words lodge into our collective senses, the fiercer a book imprints itself unto our emotions and paves the way for the reader to become attached to a book for sentimental reasons. SEVEN BEATS A SECOND rewards the reader with down-to-earth, folksy narrative poems that are at once rambling and laconic, reflective and somber, humorous and wise as in the poem, "rethinking the probabilities of god"

______________________

it's not the fox holes
that persuade us

we were all immortal
then and dumb
as the dirt that
grew wet with the
surprise of our blood

it's driving past
the old folk's home
knowing,
they're making
a bed up for you
______________________

But what is most admirable is that the poems are so unapologetic and unpretentious. Allen Itz's poems are skillful negotiations with words that connect the reader to the call of poetry that is life. They make me feel right at home. To balance out this review, I have one complaint about Allen Itz: He's too damn humble about his poetry. He should have had fifteen books or better published by now.

{As to the last part of the review, I followed this first book with five more eBooks of poetry and two fiction. Poets don't read eBooks I learned to my disappointment.)

​star bright

imagine the stars
on cold desert nights,
spread across the wide black sky,
beyond the desert and high mesas,
past prairies where trickster coyote calls,
past the land of mortal men
to the place where no man goes,
the place where spirits hunt
ghosts of buffalo

imagine sleeping 
with this blaze of night around you,
black night bright
with cold unchallenged light

imagine
how you must fear the starless night,
when clouds close the sky around  you
and bind  you prisoner to the dark 
​

Dawn's early light

Who will be the poet then?

say that a poem
is not the word spoken
or the word printed or written
in some orderly form 
designated as poetic
by the fashion of the time;
go instead to the image the words,
however presented, are meant to provoke
and find the poetry direct in the vision,
images in the air of real space and time,
transmitted through your senses
to that part of your mind
that dwells among the visual cues
and clues of the world, the derandomized pieces
that combine to form a picture
that means an emotion, visions
that fire chemical reactions that push
electronic jabs to our frontal cortex
to create context within which
emotions form, think of poety as transending word,
internal vision of the poet going directly
to an external vision to be seen and shared...

(the most beautiful poem I've ever experienced,
a French short film of horses,
a herd of horses running through fields
of high grass, the beauty of their flesh
and their muscled bodies, and the sweat
blown from their nostrils, and the steam
from their mouths and nostrils,
the internal heat of their great bodies
under great exertion blown into cold air,
and the colors of their coats
and the grace of their great running leaps
over high grasses and shallow waterways -
the most beautiful poem I've ever experienced
and not a word was spoken - no words,
written or spoken could match the image direct..

I saw this film nearly 60 years ago and it remains
as fresh in my mind as if I saw it today)

think of poetry as visions
transmitted through some visual media
like the screen in your local cinema, 
or think of a future poetry
transmitted diretly into your dreams...

think of the day when dreams
are the ultimate poetry and poets
the ultimate dream makers -
so who will be the poets then?


...While I'm in New Days New Ways, here are a couple more pieces from it.


a mid-winter poem

I have the feeling
of a string running out,
a slackness in my lifeline,
all that I am reduced 
to loose ends...

I've done many things in my life,
good and worthwhile things,
though none lasted longer than
it took for my shadow
to fade around the corner -
my proudest legacies remembered
only by me, like clouds blown apart
by the wind, so much more fragile
than I had imagined

and now the line that anchoed me
to the future has gone slack
and I feel just another of the world's
forgettable loose ends


the best there is on offer

dark
morning rain

light
but steady

the street
an ebony mirror

streaked red
like a lipstick message

from a disappointed
lover

a no-promises
day...

take it 
as you find it...

it's the best there is
on offer

 

I don't talk much about my first eBook, Pushing Clouds Against the Wind​, because, as a result of my own stupidity, it is unmarkatable. 

It was my first eBook and I didn't know what I was doing. As with all my eBooks but one, the cover photo is one of my own. I had a photo for Pushing Clouds I liked a lot. But, in a real "hold my beer moment" I decided that it coudn't be that hard and I could save a couple hundred dollars and do the cover myself. 

The result of that decision, I published a book with no title on the cover and no author name. 

But. the poems aren't bad. Here are several short ones.



riot

red flowers
over yellow 
flowers
among blue
flowers

rainbow riot


blue

blue eyes
under clear
skies
ice
on cut
crystal


post-it note

i love
you
in little
yellow
flashes of
sticky note
passion


yellow

lemons
overflow
a pewter
bowl
roll across the floor
crying
CAUTION...CAUTION!


tiny bites

sea
roars
at a shell-white
beach
takes tiny
bites
spit them
back
with every wave


sunset

sun lies low
behind scrub branches
yellow jigsaw
puzzles
at end of day


red grill

red grill
on a field
of brown leaves

autumn come
and almost gone
with summer

red
grill
begins 
the long wait
for spring


red

blood
on white paper

bright red
like an apple
on a bed of
snow


winter postcard

white horse
on a white field
enclosed by a
white fence

I am blinded
by the
light

The eBook I haven't mentioned  yet in this post is ​Goes Around Comes Around​. It is the only one of my eBook with a cover from not my own photo. The photographer was a baristra from Borders, an insomniac who took great photos at night and who I would love to credit for his great pic but have completely lost track of his name.

​In addition to this and the rest of my poetry books, I also have the travel book, which is a hybrid poetry/prose experiment (which didn't do nearly as well as I thought it should) and two fiction, Sonyador the Dreamer, critiqued as overly sentimental, and Peace In Our Time, which it seems no one liked. A very harsh SciFi "end of humanity" mystery/war story, not the thing poetry readers are likely to turn to. It also has a strong enviornmental message that tree-huggers would like, but you have to get to the end of the book to discover that message. It's one of my favorite books, whether or not anyone else likes it.

The point of the above is, here are a couple of poems from Goes Around Comes Around.
​

habits of mercy

I was thinking this morning
of what I want to do with the rest of my life
and decided it's the same thing
I want to do with the rest of my day

kiss my wife
at least once or twice

eat
some good food

write
some good poems

sleep a nice nap

communicate
with my better nature

& forgive myself
for all recent sins, known,
as well as secret, even to me

easier for some
than for others, those

with no true love
to kiss -

no food
to eat -

no bed to sleep
in -

no poetry in their soul -

those with no key
to unlock the door to self,
their true self as unknown to them
as a stranger passing on the street
in a dark night -

and most difficult of all
those who can't find within
themselves forgiveness of themselves

poor
miserable ego-obsessed creatures that we are,
sinners almost from our first thoughts,
if we cannot forgive ourselves
how will they ever learn to forgive others

and if we cannot forgive others
how can we ever live in this world
that needs cleansed hearts
as much as it needs clean air and water

habits of mercy
are what will save this world;
human sins
forgiven by human sinners



somewhere out there

this is serious business,
somewhere out there innerstellar star systems
are colliding

somewhere out there
and alien race of whoozidoozits
is going extinct
as their methane atmosphere
is slowly replaced by megaterlagon oxygen farts

somewhere out there
a spaceship full of Baptists
is approaching the water planet Aboxion XII
for full immersion baptism

somewhere out there
Pat Boone is thinking about a comeback tour

somewhere out there
a Republican is suffering from delusions
of competency

somewhere out there
a bunch of foreigners who don't even speak English
are bouncing balls off their heads
and calling it football

I mean this is no damn time
for jokes and silly
​faces

if 

New board, just finished it this morning.



Paddling Upstream in a Downstream World

a nearly 78 year-old fat man

so
I’m a 77 going on 78 year old fat man

…but wait,
poetry is about truth and beauty
and while there is no beauty in an old fat man,
truth is still important and the truth is, though
I am already a fat man, I’m not as fat a man
as I used to be and I just turned nearly 78 a few weeks ago…

so
abiding by the poetic requirement for truth
it should be more correctly said that I am
a nearly 78 year old, not-as-fat-as-he-used-to-be
man and the further truth is like so many in my contingent
I hate change and mostly I hate change
(affirming that being the primary purpose of this rant)
because change means I’m going to have to learn new stuff
and I believe, fervently, even, that at the age of
nearly 78, fat, skinny, or perfectly formed,
such a man should already know what he needs to know
to live a full 77-plus year-old life…

I mean, I like many in my regiment, I always like
to read new stuff about stars and galaxies
and dinosaurs and ancient tribes of ancient peoples,
and various other oddities and monstrosities of life
unknown before my time, but I only like to learn such stuff
as long as I don’t have to learn too much about it,
in fact,
I prefer to know just a little bit, just enough to know enough
to set my imagination churning,
because, it is
a fact,
my imagination churning produces much more interesting stuff
to know than anything I would know by actually knowing
real stuff…

and that works great for me, since I read such
science news and other such stuff just looking for
stuff to fill me up like an over-ripe melon with pseudo-science
and interesting fantasy that I might expound upon here
and at other venues where actually knowing stuff
is not strictly
required…

but other than that kind of stuff,
the stuff I don’t want to learn is the stuff
most sixteen year olds already know and I figure
if a sixteen year old already knows it why in the world should
a nearly 78 year old, not-as- fat-as-before man bother with knowing it
too because it just seems to me that such a man
ought to know
just about everything he actually needs to know to make it
though his day…

as to the rest,
well,
take my computer, so old it’s almost steam-powered,
but old as it is, it is my faithful friend
and like any of the other friends
I’ve buried or except to bury within the next few years,
I dread the time when its time is up
and I have to go looking for a new computer friend,
it is just like I hate the idea of going out and finding new regular
friends when the old ones
bite the dust…

it’s oh so much more complicated…

learning a whole new set of demands and expectations and idiosyncrasies
and all the other stuff that goes with maintaining a healthy and productive
relationship…

like my phone and my wife’s new car - I’ve been talking on a phone and driving
for over on 60 years and none of what I learned now seems irrelevant
to making a phone call or driving over to the corner store
for a Baby Ruth, except that the complications now on both the phone
and the car almost make me hesitant to go out in the world
without a tag-along second grader to keep me legal and in the technical
loop…

and, ah, Baby Ruth, now there’s a constant in my life but I’m finding them
harder to find in the candy aisle

is that the next indignity, Baby Ruths becoming another historical oddity
confined to glass display cases in museums of the latest antiquities,
leaving me to learn all the particular rules
and wherefores and whereupon
of a Snickers or Mars Bar?

wouldn’t surprise me…

but then with nearly 78 years upon this twirleybird
planet,
not much does…

Interstate 10
San Antonio - West

The next piece is from about two thirds of the way through my second fiction book, Peace in Our Time. The war for humanity has been lost. There is no long any opposition to the mysterious and murderous enemy, just solitary survivors like our protaganist, endlessly walking, going nowhere, not even sure where they are. Life just a daily struggle to stay out of sight of the enemy. 

Our unnamed hero at this time is not traveling alone. Along the way he came across a young teenage who like himself, has also beaten the odds and survived so far...

​Peace is truly at hand for there are too few humans left to fight

Chapter 34

....We are climbing the steep rock face of a bald dome mountain, rising alone, some kind of geologic aberration, in the middle of very thick, snake infested brush for miles around, cactus and thorn trees, making assage difficult and bloody.

It is my decision to go over the dome, rather than through the brush.

Boy doesn't like it and I have come to agree with him.

The climb is harder than I thought it would be and the two of us on this bare rocky face are like flies waiting to be swatted. After years of hiding in deep forest, beneath trees and anything else that could shield us from patrolling Floaters overhead, it is gut-twisting to be so exposed. But once started, I don't want to go back, no matter how bad the idea to begin.

It was the snakes over-running the brush what I most didn't want to face.

But halfway up the dome, we have seen no evdence of Floaters on the horizon - it could be they consider the clearing of rhis region complete and no longer think there is a need to patrol

We are beginning to feel safe.

Chapter 35

We are on he last downward leg of the granire dome, when we hear the familiar keening as a Floater begins to edge over the dome's crest. Boy and I jump into a nearby crevice in the rock.

With our heads down, we stand on a narrow ledge beneath the surface, barely wide enough for our feet to catch hold.

Boy's grip is secure, but the ledge I am on crumbles and I slip the rest of the way down the crevice into a cave, a winter den for snakes of all kinds, draped around the cave on small outcroppings, snakes tangled l ike twisted rope in piles on the floor. The edge of my foot touches one, and I hear the quiet button whisper of a simnolent rattlesnake...

ith

​

I believe Walt Whitman is the father of American poetry. He and other great minds of his time like Thoreau and Emerson pushed aside pale colonial versons of British canon and created a true American idiom.

My only problem with Whitman is, once I start reading him it is very hard to stop. Usually start reading from the first version of Leaves of Grass with the magnificant, mighty and beautiful Song of Myself and, after reading and reading, have not gotten very far into the greatness of it all.

This time, reading from Leaves of Grass, First and Death Bed editions, I turn randomly to a page from the death bed section of the book to poems I have never read before.


-42-

A call in the midst of the crowd. 
My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.

Come my children,
Come my boys and girls, my women, houehold and intimates,
Now the performer launches his nerve, he has passed his prelude
     on the reeds within.

Easily written loose finger'd chords - I feel the strum of your
     climax and close.

My head slues around on my neck,
Music rolls, but not from the organ,
Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.

Ever the hard unsunk ground,
Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun,
     ever thee air and the ceasless tides,
Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,
Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn'd thumb, that
     breath of itches and thirsts.
Ever the vexer's hoot! hoot! till we find where the fly one hides     and bring him forth,
Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
To feed the greed of the belly the brains literally swooning,
Tickets buying, taking, selling, but into the feast never once
     going,,
Many sweating, ploughing,thrashing, and then the chaff for
     paynment received,
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets,
     newspapers, schools,
The mayor and the councils, banks tariffs, steamships, factories,
​     stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate. 

The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collas and tail'd
     coats,
I am aware who they are, (they are postively not worms or
     fleas,)
I acknowledge  the duplicates of myself, the weakest and
     shallowest is deathless with me,
What I do and say the same waits for adthem,
Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.

I know perfectly well my own egotism,
Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
​And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

No words of routine this song of mine,Th black
But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearing bring;
This printed and bound book - but the printer and the printing-
     office boy?
The well-taken photographs - but your wife or firend closd and
     solid in youSersr arms?
The black ship mail'd with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets -
     but the pluck of the captain and engineers?
In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture - but the host and
the hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
The sky up there - yet here or next door, or across the way?
The saints and sages in history - but you yourself?
Sermons, creeds, theology - but the fathomless human
     brain,
And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?


-43-

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient
     and modern,
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand
     years,
Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the
     sun,
Making a fetich of the least rock or stump, powowing with sticks
​     in the circle of obis,
Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
Dancing through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and
     austere in the woods of the gymnosophist,
Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas
     admirant, minding the Koran,
Waiting the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife,     
     beating the serpent-skinned drum,
Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing
     assuredly that he is divine,
To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting
     patiently in the pew,
Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till
     my spirit arouses me,
Looking forth on pavement andland, or outside of pavementr and
     land,
Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.
One of that centipetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a
     man leaving charges before a journey.

Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affeced, dishearten'd,
     atheistical,
I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt,
     despair and unbelief.

How the flukes splash!
How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms land spouts of
     blood!

Be  at peace bloody flukes of doubtres and sullen mopers,
I take my place among you as much as among any,
The past is the push of you, me, all precisely the same,
And what is yet untried and afterwards is for you, me, all, precisely
     the same.

I do not know what is untried and aferward,
But I know it will in its time prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

Each who passes is considere'd, each who stops is consider'd, not a single one can it fail.

It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried,
Nor the young woman you died and was put by his side,
Nor the little child that peep'd in at the door, and then drew back
     and was never seen again,
Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with
     bitterness worse than gall.
Nor him in the poorhouse tubercled by rum and bad disorder,
Nor the numberless slaughter'd and wreck'd , nor the brutish
     koboo call'd the ordure of humanity,
Nor the sacs merely floating witih open mouths for food to slip in,
Nor anything in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of
     myriads that inhabit them, 
Nor the present, nor the last wisp that is known.


​-44-


It is time to explain myself - let us stand up.
​

What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

The clock indicates the moment - what does eternity
     indicate?

We have thus far ehausted millons of winters and summers,
There are millions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety.

I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my
     sister?
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
(What have I to do with lamentation?)

I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an enclouser of things
     to be.

My fee strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between
     the steps,
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, 
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

Long I was hugg'd close - long and long.

Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing, like cheerful
     boatmen.

For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings.
They sent influence to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother's generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strate piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in themouths and deposited it
     with care.

All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me,
​Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

​

The Whitman transcription above took me a day and a half  because my template declared war on me and was deleting text almost as fast as I typed it, leaving me now at the end in an evil mood, the exact opposite of the way Whitman usually leaves me.

This leading me to consider how does a wannabe abstract artist depict evil. My attempt at such show below, a piece suggested by stories of the the children's birthday party clown and serial killer, John Wayne Gacy.



​Clown For Hire
​