Participation Mystique

Still Life Portrait 

Cigarette papers datebook and tobacco pouch
Life
Ought to be like painting
Still
And literature
A hairless head
Eyes straight
Comma
A flat nose a plane
On the forehead
My portrait
My heart beats
It's an alarm clock
In the mirror I'm full length
My head smokes

Spews mad notes everywhere
That emerge I don't know how
To fly toward other ears

Listen I'm not crazy
I laugh at the bottom of the stairs
Before the wide-open door
In the sunlight scattered
On the wall among green vines
And my arms are held out toward you

It's today I love you

Pierre Reverdy's Still Life Portrait is anything but still, images interrupting images, a combustion of realism. It is only today that he loves, arms held out towards no one, for no one has rang the bell, no one stands outside the wide-open door, his arms open up to emptiness, to his own projection of the one that does not exist but he wishes to love. What we don't have, we project, what we want and desire, we project, "listen I am not crazy" merely interrupts his objective, a mad man racing down the stairs, laughter booming down his flight echoing in a large house and he stops before the wide-open door for a ghost that he perceives, insists exists. We leech onto the distant being, turning them into these projections of our desires, we leech and suck dry. Once there is nothing left to drain the hologram fades, stake to the heart, for dust you are, I just gotta find another electrical outlet, maybe this time it will last a tad longer.