Diurnal hours on planet earth
It’s as if I’m alive, I’m almost sure.
Strangers know me at the supermarket,
people knock and peer through windows,
ask me why I wasn’t where I should have been
by rote and custom.
Yet I know when I awaken every day,
I’m here for the very first time.
I smile in the sunlight,
laugh and flatter,
ignore the fluttering flags of night
that hide behind my mind.
But in the quiet moments I regress,
a slowing down of knowledge,
seeking what each morning’s light
has taken from me.
All that’s left are wisps and whispers
from the me who touches luminance,
swims in a tide of photons, sees
the flames of a different night.
Does he wonder what the daybreak brings?
Nocturnal hours in a place where time is upside down
From the mother earth, a gentle warmth,
a sinuous glow intertwines our being.
We are separate and together.
Soon the sun will rise, draw our heat away,
and we will rest until tomorrow’s darkness.
But in the season of the harvest,
every meeting hides a parting.
We’re taken, one by one,
life to stellate darkness, an ending
and a beginning.
Tonight Camille, who once I loved,
will leave this world behind.
The cruel machines have come for her,
plowshares spin and wound the earth around her feet;
bleeding corpuscles of light are leaking
from the tear.
Now Camille is freed, carried upward with the flux
on petalled wings,
rising like a candle kite
towards inverted shadow, the starlight
of another world.
about
Gears of time: Forward and Reverse, Park is difficult.
artwork
after all, here is some detail:
Go Camille, go!
She’s definitely going somewhere. 😀
A great piece. I enjoyed it much.
Thanks Frank.
Drowning in beauty. Almost too much for a mere mortal. “The me who touches luminance.” You surely do.
Muchas gracias BG, but I have to admit that my own nights mostly involve snoring and a little talking in my sleep. 🙂
wonderfully dreamy…love the word luminance!
Thanks, me too, and you need a luminance of 1500 candelas per square metre for watchmaking, a handy fact for trivia nights. 🙂
🙂
breathtaking! you are a true poet <3
Thank you Paulina. I very much appreciate the thought <3 , although being uncharacteristically honest, I see myself as more of a Renaissance failure, 😀 a hit-and-miss jack-of-all-trades. I do enjoy what I do though.
Sorry if you’ve already answered this question: do you illustrate before or after the poem? What prompts what? I become delightfully lost in your images of both words and color 🙂
No I haven’t, and a great question, especially for those of us who like to talk about their process (who doesn’t?). The short answer is every which way and loose, but with this particular piece I started off thinking about my imagination and how it was limited by my own experiences, and then about computers/androids. We think we’re the creative ones and we program them to mimick us, but because they have no imagination they’re not limited like we are. There are examples in maths/technology visuals, eg chaos theory, where they’ve produced what hadn’t been imagined before. Next I wrote the intro to The Harvest and did some recoding of VEE (the visual evolution engine I wrote for art), made it a little less constrained, and went from there, trying to be a little less limited in my own thinking with VEE’s help. 🙂 I should mention that I don’t do this just for the blog, I have plans, hahaha … Also, thanks for giving me the opportunity to ramble on. 🙂
Wow! Great ramble, I learned a lot! Never imagined (oops, pun) that imagination limits us but thinking about it, as I drink my very strong black coffee, I understand what you mean. Any more, about 85% of my poetry is about music so I just plunk my ukuleles outside and snap photos to accompany them. But I’m looking for a more creative way to use my photos as prompts. Good luck with your “plans” (can’t wait to see what you come up with!) and thanks for the explanation about your creative process. I think it’s the most fascinating facet of any type of artist because we’re all so different 🙂
Parts of this feel so much more personal than your other work, which you know I admire. But this, this resonates with personal beauty, something more tangible that just *feel*. And will you tell me I am mistaken and that it comes from photons on another planet?
Thanks Sascha. No, I won’t, because you wouldn’t believe me anyway. 🙂 There are some very real experiences behind this piece, more than for some others.
Now, in my typically evasive fashion, 😀 I’m going to quote a little from another poem I have lying around:
Farewells ride on all our stories,
they spur them on through flames,
through frozen effort.
Beautiful. But “farewells” in poetry always make my stomach curdle. Actually “farewells” of all kinds have the same effect. It’s the cymbal…or is that symbol?
I suspect that my brain (or something more specific and particular dealing with intuition) is honing in on those more personal parts as truth that feels even more real than facts (because we are in the age of true facts).
Thanks. With goodbyes, I don’t know whether to quote the unrelentingly realistic Buddhists or Billy Joel. It’s too early for Pinot so… Say goodbye to Hollywood/say goodbye my baby.
I think that resonance/intuitive perception/human truth in poetry is usually somewhere in the shadows, and if we try to spotlight it, it will run and hide (or maybe that’s me 😛 ).
If by ‘the age of true facts’ you mean ‘the age of magic,’ I agree, but then what use are facts? Oh wait on, they’re the only way we can save the planet.
ps how do you do your paintings? Is it something an unskilled artist (me, me, me) could learn to do given enough time (heh).
Si si si y no no no. If it took any talent, I’d be in trouble (with most things). I wrote a program called VEE (the Visual Evolution Engine) that I use. It has two unintelligible screens of user interface with sliders, buttons, numbers and obscure symbols. My coding is similar to my writing so perhaps you can imagine it: there is one button labelled ‘xxx’ that must not be pressed under any circumstances (no, really). Also it requires an enormous computer with liquid cooling that sounds like a jet taking off when you start it (but I still love you, computer <3 ).
Possibly more practical is Google Deep Dream which turns out some fascinating stuff. It's fairly straightforward to use, free and you can google it hahaha.
A button labelled triple x that must not be pressed. Interesting.
What does Sascha mean? It is a mystery. But apropos of nothing, the inconstantlight site has a G rating. =^-^=
Good question. I mostly don’t know what Sascha means. 🙂
lol…G rating? Not PG? Or is that only if we understand it?
However, I did think the triple x referred to only an indirect contributor to inconstantlight. 😇
Well an editor did ask me to change a scene in one of my short fiction pieces because it meant an advisory would be needed (it traveled a little south of the border). I jumped on my artistic integrity high horse and insisted it stay in. 😈
…what’s south of the border in Australia? Tasmania? Hmm…advisories for Tasmania. Who knew? 😉
Thank you for telling me about Deep Dream. You may have created a monster…but a fun one. 🙂
A fun one is great. The ones that I get with the thunderstorms, lightning rods and grave robbing are all ‘Why don’t I have a soul?’ or whatever. Bo….oring. 💤
Boring? Ha. One of mine was a little too freaky…little monsters with Picasso eyes.