2012 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
NO FIXATIVE
I trace the reverse of stem butts,
one blue pussy,
a background plug spawn,
and also
their shadows in watercolor.
Maybe it is only an association, my ultramarine on umber,
you on your Truman,
and some food sourced word not canned
but moistly buried that wreaks of the matter.
You were a Morningstar once.
I never met you.
At least not the way you met your Truman.
And I never met Julia but I can still see her lettering.
What one writer described as her “angled distinctive cursive”.
And what you and your assistants began to copy.
First love inky teacher, mother patch as the seat of the spread.
Lines embedded alive in a fungal yes. There is mayhem in these
matching patterns.
Smearing doesn’t matter as I peer into the fruiting body of Sturtevant.
The hyphal extension of an art life form.
It’s not deep after all.
Just a surface collection.
Just a roadside shovel skid horizontally headed.
Trying to keep the cap in one piece.
And when I come dressed as the chthonic accumulator with my indexical
nearness wanting to know the difference between Big Sur and the Sierras
you might say, “Ask Elaine”.
2011 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
WISHBOOKIN’, commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition The Violets Have Broken the Rocks 2nd floor projects (limited edition), San Francisco
Orange kitchen curtains. Saturated. Poppy orange where the petals overlap and it is one shade deeper than bright. With a top and a bottom like a bathing suit on the window. You would have thought she was ordering a hope diamond to hang over each pane of glass. We certainly did.
And a pair of brown nubby tweed bellbottoms. All wide-cuffed and scratchy wool with a high-waisted side button. No lining but smart. So smart until I realized they were too long, I couldn’t hem a cuff and neither could diamond woman.
Sitting on the couch when Sharon Tate was murdered and the collective “we” walked on the moon. When each page held a big decision and it was always a matter of marking it. Not so much the generic circling as much as getting your own initials around it. But alas, no pen to be found. All pencils lost. Not a pair of scissors nor a piece of tape. Not jack shit available except frustration in all colors, saturated, pastel and two-toned.
She ordered first. The curtains were to match the cupboard pinstripes she painted by hand and the new linoleum. All subdued and misplaced design seriousness like the NIGHTWATCH knock-off of Rembrandt everyone always seemed to have nestled into the dark wood veneer bookcase units in their living rooms. The cheap suburban chic of budget catholics across town where the houses had more than one toilet in the shade of the pear orchards.
These wishes came true on the Greyhound bus. We placed our orders through Ashford’s plumbing across from the bowling alley. When main street was literally the highway running through the middle of town into what everyone locally referred to as blood alley. When San Jose was still full of prunes. Before silicon chips took over the trees. Seeing your name in clear capital letters on a package from out of town had an exhilarating effect for hours. As if you were known somewhere out in the great beyond. Not so much a fantasy of famous as much as a flight of identity beyond the frustration.
So much to order and reorder in the fat book with the tissue thin pages. So easily torn when two or more were wishing at the same time. Aretha’s day dreamin’ and I’m thinkin’ of you on the porta-fi out in the back room
he remodeled but got the furnace all wrong. One time we almost never woke up from the gas. Thick brick bowling ball heads. Cross-eyed for days.
He never looked at the catalogue. He used one tool for everything. A hammer with a back-headed ax blade. It had a small indentation on the blade to pull nails when not chopping them off. His hatchet. Useful in every situation. Like the time he got the two hundred dollar phone bill and screamed at everyone to get out in the backyard and line up against the fence where the concrete was still intact. We stood there shoulder to shoulder in decreasing size while he stormed back into the hope diamond house only to return with the entire goddamn phone ripped from the wall. It crashed into the concrete and hatchet man chopped it up at our toe curled feet.
2010 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Ramparts Internal, Zyzzyva, San Francisco
2006 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Jackmamma Research: A Recovered Account Satellite
Independent School of Art (ISA), San Francisco
Just above the ground at Third and Market was an ear listening for every drop of condensation falling faster than sweat. Every third second the sphincter relayed a pithy phrase, “You’re stuck.”
There was nothing to translate.
There was only a motion.
The first time he saw the wriggling, it never occurred to him that the patients were beyond dancing. What was inherently their side effect became his trigger. Captivated, he felt his earlobes slide through loose labia. Sphincter and gut relaxing into the wet slide, he peed himself, cranium collapsing against her tail bone.
A misplaced preface here: When the patients lost their balance and hit the concrete floor, there were often complications of voice and fluid smears.
These elements never appeared in his formal scenarios. He preferred a closely controlled muscle rather than a full scale fit. Aesthetically bound to emerge, this was a public possession beyond all aptitude. And it swallowed him daily. What the eyes delivered to synaptic pathways took root somewhere between his shoulders and his hips. Now it was his motion. Personally crafted for freedom despite the constraints of family and country houses, he squirmed relentlessly inside all walls. Years passed and the umbilicus never shriveled. Chains, ropes, all forms of line ties and binding charged his blood flow. He orchestrated his coming for delirious spectacle and never cried out. The cops were his favorites.
It was never ascertained if the patients knew their place. They were his off stage chorus, vibrating degradation and swaddled jouissance, falling faster than sweat.
He, on the other hand, knew his place at all times. The words had continuously tumbled over her teeth into his heart. There was never restraint in the story. The ear condensed these complications further.
The chorus came and went howling, bring the money to me. And so, with gravity, he learned to pull arms over head without tearing the shoulder sockets. He kept these added motions in time and the details to himself. Straining just shy of frenzy, his naked escapes pointed to her open air abstinence. Her dry eye said big pay day, said secret prince, said double over, said candy that lasted was a suck and run errand. She licked him good. The ligaments released in the socket. Cartilage burned into the base of his skull. This method of struggle was a duty and a rite. It was his boy code of repayment with adult staging. By now the chorus and successive exhaustions were collaborating with his organs. He could not swallow anymore and cried dash.
A premature epilogue here: It was time for a renewed necromancy. He was a famous slave to the clinched title. She was a lady whose sacrificing dream had been to see him suspended and unwiped.