Future is Now (And Then)

And We Are (Prepared)

An Aspect of Desire (Sky's Limit) 

The Bed Of Rest (Thermal Blanket)

The Hope of Leaves (The Grasp)

Waiting In The Wings (The Red Dress)

Whistling Down The Tracks (Vanishing Lines) 

Earth Spirit Rising (The Embrace)

Every Journey Begins (One Step)

Concrete Lust of Rebar (The Yearning)

Shelter in Place (Now Leasing)

Like, There Is No Tomorrow (What's Not To Like)

Occupying Sacred Ground (The Thinker)

And what have you to say about these flowers
late in the season, so desperate and calm.
The whine of hope perishes
in time, just in time, for the jackhammers
to build an emblem science, and the small figures
to move in its midst, like so many futures.

-- Ann Lauterbach, from her poem Lines of Flight in Or To Begin Again (2009)

PHOTOS: Election Week, November 2022

A Downtown Near You (Whats New?)

Click to Enlarge (If You Dare)

VEXICON: In A Word

We roll on wheels of words and dreams.

- N. Scott Momaday, from his poem In The Telling

A freeway overpass crossing the river.

Painted over in hopeless gray within days.

Please Do Not Pick my Sunflowers ... 

Ukraine's State Flower...

Love and Resistance. Turmoil and clarity. Freedom and hope. ... and don't pick the flowers....  

Eugene Oregon Summer-to-Autumn 2022. 

EVERMORE, as seen/scene in Seasons 1-5 of VEXICON: 

VEXICON 5: MAY DAY. May 1 2022

https://tobecomevisible.blogspot.com/2022/05/vexicon-2022-may-day.html

VEXICON 4: Desire Anyway. December 31 2021

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/12/vexicon-4-desire-anyway.html

VEXICON 3: Loves & Forebodings. July 2 2021

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/07/vexicon-2021-loves-forebodings.html

VEXICON 2: Signs as signs as signals. January 25, 2021

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/01/vexicon-2-signs-as-signs-as-signals.html

VEXICON:  Signs of the Times 2020. October 9, 2020

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2020/10/vexicon-signs-of-times.html

WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS Productions. Open Source 24/7.

QUATRAIN

In my solitude

I have seen very clearly

things that are not true.

 — Antonio Machado

Full zero rising beginning end every thing in between

True gravity bathing pink contained gray yielding

Origin of the known universe unknown unborn the other

Attending yang honoring yin space tension grace

Images and notations, a morning walk downtown, October 17.

...

There is no city

But the city within.

No door, but the door

To simple wisdom.

We walk, dumb

As newborns

Into the tremendous and endless

Blessing.

 — Cynthia Cruz, from her remarkable poem The Hinge, in How The End Begins (2016).

Then and Then and Gone

Suspish appearing Winter 2020-2021

Summer 2021 Suspish repainted

Fall 2021 fishy gobbled up?  

Sharkies prevail, conjured by Suspish, a happy family?

September 2022, Sharks - wow - in place for a year;

here two hearts added!

October 2022, the puritanical powers who rule

with fog-gray wash eliminate Suspishous Sharks.

But... for how long?

On the banks of the Amazon, a tributary flowing from the south hills of Eugene to its confluence -- not as one would expect with the Willamette (Whilamut) River -- with the Long Tom River and Coyote Creek. The original marshlands, now dammed by Army Corps of Engineers as Fern Ridge Reservoir. Then, flow pulled by gravity, turning and finding the way north to an eventual mating with the Willamette, then north to the Columbia, then to the sea -- the maternal Pacific -- where all is embraced, dissolved, reincarnated as bright-turquoised insistent beings, swimming upstream to spawn.  

Remember: Suspish may be an artist imaginary -- but the teeth are real.

Further... Feature story about Suspish in Eugene Weekly, July 2022

Silencing shadows

you withdraw from the names

that spin the silence of things

—Alejandra Pizarnik

shadow singing silence

shadow longing eyes as I

shadow spawning iron bone foam

shadow chaining gaze totemic

shadow forgiving ironblack

shadow receding fabric of time

shadow kissing infinite light

now

at this innocent hour

I and the one I was sit together

at the threshold of my gaze

NOTES

—Two poems by Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972); poems XXVIII and XI in Diana’s Tree (Árbol de Diana) (1962), trans. Anna Deeny

—Photos and captions, an hour downtown driftwalk, Douglas Beauchamp

Genealogies

Forget alone and

forget you have forgotten — 

have it both ways. 

— Sengai

Objects becoming subjects

Lineage and longing

Arriving as if nothing...

Heritage and other disappearances

Desiring darkling days

Believing ancestral oracles

 "I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

I wanted everything in the picture."

"There is no world, there are only islands."

"Let the pretty beast and all the world know peace,"

NOTES

- Epigraph: Sengai (Japanese poet and artist, 1750-1837), Trans. Cid Corman

- "I wanted not a ...." Joan Didion from her 1976 essay Telling Stories in Let me Tell You What I Mean (2021). More: "I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture."

- "There is no..." Jacques Derrida from The Beast and the Sovereign (Lectures Vol 2, 2002-2003)

- "Let the pretty..." Joy Harjo, a line from her poem The Last World of Fire and Trash  in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015)

- Two poems below by Cid Corman from The Next One Thousand Years, Selected Poems (2008)

- Found Objects-Subjects photos and all other captions conjured in Eugene Oregon by Douglas Beauchamp (2022)

And now the

words — remote:

another

life, not this

obvious

makeshift. I…?

Don't tell me

who I am,
let me guess.

Existing

Is neither

a right nor

privilege

nor any

thing but a

miracle.