James Jacques Joseph Tissot

Dance Me Through The Panic Till I'm Gathered Safely In

The collection is here!
 If you get a chance stop by The Fine Art of Design and visit Stacked Bookshop, located inside the shop if you wish for your copy. There is only five, yikes!

 The Un-Included Introduction, If You Will


There always is this yearning, almost dirty desire to be read and to be enjoyed. A sort of exploited desperation that exists within a writer when commissioned to create a collection. It seems almost necessary to title it i seem to have gone blind as well as cover it with headless naked women. Each poem dedicates itself to the idea that "the image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite." Nothing here can be claimed as fact, but nothing can be claimed as fiction.


I was told that this experience is something I will look back on and feel relief. And it really is a beautiful thing, in the way that beauty can be sick and intrusive. As for the recent pieces of poetry, a million thanks, dear Ireland. Finishing this collection brings me the release, the only path of escape. In the process during which I wrote the recent poems, I felt I did not create enough. But now I can remove myself and peer at what I did create, and although it is not much, I created something internally worthy for myself. For what has been created is exactly how I want to remember it.

Grrrrrr.

These Hills Exist

A Cacophony of Silent Redwood Trees




 I woke in Yosemite 
Jamie curled up next to me 
cupping my left breast, platonically
 her body morphs a furnace 
I find myself again 
inside of the tent this time 
with a single sheet tightly wrapped 
like a coroner's bag around my body 
the sun finally stretches its arms 
piercing the microscopic stitching 
and there is warmth 
stuffy warmth 
and the desire to desert the wilderness 




JMI

What Drains Me Most

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.


In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.


So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.




D.H. Lawrence

I Wish To Be Murdered By A Woman

Skin Debris as Microscopic Human Trace

The Suit


I am locked in a very expensive suit
old elegant and enduring
Only my hair has been able to get free
but someone has been leaving
their dandruff in it
Now I will tell you
all there is to know about optimism
Each day in hubcap mirror
in soup reflection
in other people's spectacles
I check my hair
for an army of Alpinists
for Indian rope trick masters
for tangled aviators
for dove and albatross
for insect suicides
for abominable snowmen
I check my hair
for aerialists of every kind
Dedicated as an automatic elevator
I comb my hair possibilities
I stick my neck out
I lean illegally from locomotive windows
and only for the barber
do I wear a hat



Leonard Cohen Selected Poems 1956-1968

Just to See Her

Bad Girl

Shirley Collins & Davy Graham

The Art of Bookbinding

Bookbinding Instructions

Supplies
1. Bookbinding glue
2. Ruler
3. scissors and/or x-acto knife
4. letter opener
5. pencil
6. cardstock or fancy thick paper
7. wet-media heavy weight multi-purpose paper
8. no bookbinding press? use encyclopedias, phone-books, heavy square rectangular objects~

What to do?

First you need to print out what you want to bind. I printed things on one side, folded the page in half and glued the inside hamburger style pages together, to create a thicker feeling page. Use a letter opener or the x-acto knife to score the folding process. Caution, let these pages sit and dry. When in doubt use the ruler for any cutting of the paper! Double Caution, some pages depending on its linear insides may have to be done on the opposite side of the page.

A  :   B

may really need to be

B  :   A

Next, cut out cardstock to cover the pages, as a book cover would do.

- then put one encyclopedia on flat surface,

- put the cardstock down

- put the pages face down on the cardstock

-insert glue, using a cottonball on the folded spines of the pages

- put other encyclopedia over and press for a while

Then, 

- remove top encyclopedia

-put more glue on the spine

-and fold the cardstock to cover the book 

-put encyclopedia back on top

let this sit for a good while

You, can also then add the canvas like paper, cut it out just like the cardstock and glue it on

Paint on this, or do whatever!

The finished product,

Why this bookbinding post? 

Right now I am making a collection of five books all titled,

I Seem to Have Gone Blind

combined with a series of different flower-women on the covers.

I have been asked to do something that I have been desiring to do

for the longest time, and it is to put a collection together

however I wish!!

Please check out StackedBookshop (click here)

for the series is going on sale over there!!!

Support independent bookshops!!

(this one is super rad because it carries "books, print: vintage, rare unusual" ! )

Stay tuned for the rest of the series!!

Sexy Slacks and Self Orchestrated Purgatories

A good film to watch, Timothy 'Speed' Levitch The Cruise

Here is Not Rescued

Surrounded by chaotic circular streets

the screech of homeless

city raccoons vs. home-broken cats

shredding decaying

TJ pre-package meals

the only thing that heaves

is the dance of the sea

I look no longer

into the eyes of the beast

but I cover myself with

the skins of redwood trees

outlining the horizon

west-cliff, east-cliff

edge of the world cliff

out of logic

out of visibility

divided by two years ago

one year ago

and as I

substantiate flight

I dissolve

with each step

on this earth

Fantastic Flicks

Buffalo '66

A transient lives by transition
swept up in cogent roots

Text Testimonials

Today's Text Testimonial is..."Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart. Yes, I believe that today is the  appropriate day to share this novel. 

This book is a great way to diffuse those proud nationalistic emotions you may be feeling from over eating beef, soaking up those harsh rays, and inhaling debris from fireworks.

Read anything good lately??? Please Share!

External Inspirators

 "If all you young men were fish in the water,
How many young girls would undress and dive after?"
Shirley Collins








Take a listen...

Folk Roots, New Routes
http://www.mediafire.com/?6806xc9dd1rj28x






What's your favorite folk song or singer???

With God Like Powers I Pardon Dead People

The Hanging of John Gordon

Indicted as the Bacchus of whiskey
no he didn't make that amber water shine
along the banks of Pocasset River
convicted of pluckin' Amasa's
head ripe off the Spine


catholics vs. protestants
on the soil of the free?
John Gordon stepped on the stage to break a neck
though no one intervened

her worshippers salivating,

Madonna della Civita, fammi una grazia

well John Gordon, may your soul rest in sweet Providence

poured his libation protecting his kin
a head for a head,
Maria Santissima della Civita feasted on his sins




JM&I

Chained

Elegy For the Giant Tortoises

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon

the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:

everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation

upon the giant tortoises

withering finally on a remote island

I concentrate in subway stations,

in parks, I can't quite see them,

they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there:

already the event

like a wave travelling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize,

plodding past me in a straggling line

awkward without water

their small heads pondering

from side to side, their useless armour

sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed

lumbering up the steps, under the archways

toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,

the relics of what we have destroyed,

our holy and obsolete symbols.

Margaret Atwood

Find Old Words

"Bottomless inside a four-walled cold room I lay confided to my bed. Wrapped and tangled within sheets, my eyelids beg to differentiate my sleeping condition. A ray of light escapes the sky and breaks through from one of the shutters. Immersed within my dream I realize my desire to wake up. Deserting the tormented sheets I sit at the corner of the bed examining my pale cold thighs. 

I open the bedroom door letting the sunshine flood in. Each ray that betrays the heavenly world taunts me. I invite the rising morning sun to spread shadows of strange images along the south wall. There is movement. Subtle, delicate small movement

Once outside I sit and listen to the wind, advice vibrates through my ears and hair. Something calls, something calls. I notice the rotting grass growing pathetically from the dirt. I get on my hands and knees, digging deep in the sludge of mud and wet grass. I feel naked. I feel alone, gloved in mud, as my eyes wander along the ranges and ranges of empty mountains. 

The vastness of space heightens a trapped anxious twitch. Constant repetitive cocking

of my head and neck fuels me to dig deeper into the mud. A deep masculine cry crawls out of my throat. My saliva sprays, catching on the tips of intact grass.

I can feel my nails loosen as the dirt wedges between the fresh skin and keratin proteins. I dig deeper. Let me be the one who twirls on gravity's mistaken trust. Then there is the rush of endorphins. I spin. The mud bubbles beneath me. Now for the dip. I go head first into the muddy grave I dug."

This is an excerpt from a short story I wrote when I was seventeen. Although the rest of the story is unreadable/ unworthy, the first page was never thrown out.