Art

Art 1

What is your art?
What game do you play with shadows?
What are your materials?
What is your particular dance?

Someone cut off your voice
Someone told you were not allowed to flower
With a tightness in your throat
You went underground

There you kept a record of your nightmares
you wrote strange syllables the prison walls
you were suffocated and nearly drowned
in endless self reflection

You choked on the question
That was always on your lips
You wrote a million words
And they all proved to be insufficient
you choked on your narrative
On those denuded fictions

Was it true that reflections no longer loved you back?
The pond of narcissus was frozen
You sang and shouted to crack the ice

And in that crisis
and on that bridge
your body became a song
That was when she came

Oh what a short springtime
of terrible bliss’s
the youthful love

Her final gift was in her leaving
to show you that dark planet
that the world was without her

Now must find truth beyond dependence
you must find courage and fire
now you must make Art she said
no business transaction
if will ever win me back

And if you make Art you will be worthy of me
You will be worthy of this earth
which is my home and which was never yours

For the Art is the key to releases,
to the melting of ice and iron
to that furious dance, to that serene dance
to all the dances

And so you went on refining your craft
with doubt and trepidation
rebellion at every step
to take a gift of your Manhood

For why else would you Fein to create art
if it was not to break the iron, the ice, the
artifice, and restore the world to its original
pristine and innocent state

But you found that after awhile
the notes soured, the art became artifice
it had become a ritual done in sleep

Fame or boredom
had killed your Art

And so you not only lost
the primordial lover
You had lost your voice,
and you lost your snowy lake
and you lost your pine tree and your sky

For now you made the art of loss
the art of morning
the art of weeping

And everywhere you looked for Art
in artifice, in culture, in those false things
that are deemed to be Art

Did you ever imagine, that the Art
was not something other
than the true condition of life
and not those shiny artifacts
imposed on life, the endless fictions
the narratives, that false ritual
that story you tell to yourself

Did you know that Art was the primordial condition, the giver?

For there is nothing perhaps
more useless than your Art if you do not return it
to its source, if you do not make
it the total gift of your entire life, she said

Those other arts, those other magicks
do not mean much of anything
without that reckoning, without
that return

The return to life, to harmony, to meaning
that is the Art

It’s all or nothing, she said
freedom or death
and Now you must chose

Art 2

The Art is to live here
Where it is nearly impossible to live

The art is to to subvert mechanical living
and show through symbol and form
what is prior to symbol and form
Therein lies the paradox

There are degrees of artists
the highest being the most paradoxical
the one who expresses innocence
and yet is highly refined
the one who is primordial, basic rawness
and yet highly sensitive

The greater the Artist
the more paradoxical he might seem
the more like an idiot
the more like an angel

The greater the Artist
the more extreme the labor
the more effortless it appears
the more indifferent
and yet fundamentally caring

There are many faux artists
great technicians, craftsmen, savants
who are not great artists

There are many who smear shit on canvas
and give the world their anxiety and neurosis
And call that evasion Art, but it is not

So called ‘person expression’
is lowest form of Art
for Art can only be know
in labor and humility
not in fashion or ejaculations

Let us first become Human
before we become artists
let us first become Virtuous
before we are celebrated
Let us first become dedicated
before we can be anarchistic
let us first bind ourselves to the work
before we can express great freedom

Oh let me be a slave to beauty and goodness
and not to form or academy
let me be a scholar of to truth
and not of sophistry

The Artist, in other words, the full human being
Never lives there, in the marble halls of power
The true performer never is a slave to the spectacle and din
but to grace and shadow

How wonderful to be to be that kind of slave
how terrible to be set apart or above

The greatest enemy the artist may be his talent
for the talent causes one to bloom to early

The genius is the one who transcends talent
and gives us the enduring gift
For if one has too much talent
it will swiftly degenerate in mechanism
comfort and spin

Talent and comfort are bedfellow
The vivifying artist is able to move beyond
the readymade forms

Form he must learn tradition
And then he can destroy it
That has always been the way

The more readymade forms
Destroyed and sacked
The more space for new life, new illumination
And yet one must humbly learn from the traditions

Who can say why the gift comes?
She is a most irritating lover, she brings up all of our inadvertence
our darkness, or sleep

So in resistance to comfort,
in the domestic life
she offers the work which is our Art

In our resistance to slavish mechanism
to mindless employment
she offers the play which is Art

She opposes, all that we are, this Muse
she burns away all that we are not
It is not a paradise she gives us in our Art
For paradise is the prior condition

She gives us instead separation
an underworld, a hell, a hole in the ground

And then faced with that no-existence
And with nothing more to lose
We find again the means, the form, the instrument, the breath

To draw the horizon
to paint the sky blue
again

Art 3

Art might be the in-between space
between spirit and matter
between flesh and scholarship
ideal and form

Art might be the place of meeting
between mystery and the matter of fact
the invisible made visible

It might be a manner of touch
a manner of looking
the way eye meets eye
hard penetration meets soft return
it might be that kind of lovemaking

Art is not mannerisms, yet it is manner and manners
it is the way you approach something
and by touching it, giving it a reason to be, a context
illuminate its form and season

Art is not some specialized activity
some secret handshake, some esoteric game of numbers
No, it is more basic than that
and more fundamental

For without Art, the world would be entirely dark
you would certainly commit suicide here
for there needs to be a means, a way
to touch, to illuminate that mystery

Without art everything would be empty conversation
The elements couldn’t touch you
The sky would be a barren womb

Let us agree on the value of Art at least
above politics, above theology and culture
Above mechanism and technique

The ones who labored in obscurity,
who went mad in the cornfields,
gave us regeneration and grace
and saw beyond the cultural din
They were Artists, but they were also your own very heart

And yet as soon they gave birth to works
dollars were attached, glace cases built
the original power rendered a cliché

Do you remember when you saw starry night
for the first time, how you lost your tongue
and how you forgot yourself

How hard it is to see that purity, behind the dollars
the mass produced postcards, the adulation
and contempt of the man, and the endless biographies
and psychological explanations

how it renders the Art sterile useless
those biographies, those stories, all that analysis
that safe intellectual posturing

The danger when the divine is glimpsed
is always a certain kind of madness
You might go mad if you look to long
into a starry night

That is why Art is discipline
and you are disciple of the muse
There is no applause, there is no triumphalism here

There is only the joy of those solitary moments
of communion, when you lose the boundaries
between you and the evening star

There is only the silent joy of true discipline
Not the masturbatory joy of spectacle

The ones who had something to say
were willing to endure the contempt
of the world for poetry
for they loved being more than death

For the world of machine is antithesis to Art
The world of control and power
Is the death of Art
Art bows down deeply
To the earnestness of things
to the serious play

For you must be a bright light in these heavy dark realms
where people are callous
and come only to the show

To be entertained is one thing
to be moved is another
For when you are moved to your very core
You are beholding the Art

To moved shaken torn sung enchanted
out of the ordinary, taken to that primal mystery
beyond artifice

The communion of a child with a pinecone or a planet
that brightness in the eyes
beyond our constructions

That movement, that swoon, that audacious chord
That place where we truly meet
That is the Art

Art 4

Art is becoming intimate
with whatever appears
be it wasteland or paradise
or in between

It is taking off the lenses
of artifice, of dream
even of imagination

and yet it is sold as just that:
dream, imagination, fantasy

Let us just for a moment reverse the tables
and say that our society itself
is dream, imagination and fantasy
and only the poem is the real

Let us see Art as real intimacy with reality
the way the know touches the unknown
the way you become and unbecome

And yet there is another kind of dream
another kind of play
that is Art

It is fine spark, that moment of return
when the adult learns
to the luminous child again
and gestures towards a star

Not that Art is childish
one must be in earnest
to undo the black magic Art

For that black magic
has put us to sleep in dark rooms
watching phantoms in sequin gowns

Art dies when it becomes a profession and identity
commodity and plaything
The art dies when it becomes savant, distant, terribly obscure
Or even worse: popular

What we have found in this ‘culture of pleasure’?
in which Art is worshiped and yet nowhere to be found

That there is a strange mechanism
it fears above all intimacy
It privileges safe spectacle and substitute
over that more challenging journey
which is Art

See how marketplace sex replaces intimacy,
how stimulus replaces feeling
how power replaces gratuity

See how personality replaces substance
in the modern temples of Art

Yet occasionally, as if my a miracle
an angel will come to earth
and bath you in her song

Occasionally, there will be music
hidden under mechanical beats
hidden in virtuosity
hidden in so-called culture

For Art is the exception to rule
a blue chicken that hangs in the air
the black lion that roars at midnight
a headless horse without a rider

Art is whatever stops the mechanic
stream of nothingness, which this society offers
and gives us another society, another
world, other laws

That is why art is Other
That is why art is intimacy
That is why art is serious

I have tried to tell the spiritual people
who have abandoned their art for mystical abstraction and philosophy
I have tried to tell the materialists
who have abandoned Art for psychology and science

I shout, I beg, I entreat, I fight
to those forces within myself
so that I can proclaim here:
Do not abandon your Art! (that love letter to existence.)

(by which I do not mean any special activity
but whatever ways and means, whatever music you have
have to wake us sleepers from our shallow entertainments
if just for 3 minutes)

So verily I say.
Do not abandon your Art, which is your Heart
which is your child, which is your true labor
your intimate and tangible proof

Thus spoke the Art

Art 5

What virtue there is in Art
Is to seek a language
That is not mechanical or reactive

It is to beatify and reworld
The neglected places
To make them once again unfamiliar

That is why it threatens
Art makes nature wild again
As much as it civilizes

Art is the making conscious of nature
And not its manipulation
The difference is in the breath

If Art gives you deeper breath
You know that it is salutary
For breath is the measure

If Art stops you from breathing
That is also very good
To show you the stranglehold
Of that shallow breathing
That is your denial of Artful living

In truth there are no Norms
No basic principle to apply
There is grace and there is missing the mark

Art is not special
It is just the upward thrust
Of receptacle to flower
The meeting of sense with sense
And the intuition of beyond

Yet a genuine work of Art
Is very special
Because it brings something
Of the divine down here
In the earth body

The sensual and erotic nature of art is the waking up
Of the heavy and the dense
The intuition and intimation of Love’s winged bird

We have been fooled into thing Art is making things
in truth it is about unveiling

It is removing the familiar and the cliché from your eyelids
it is the refusing to trumpet half truths

Art will not bear truism
It will not listen to the people talking on TV
it will not follow mimetic shadow movements

Instead it will be the movement
Of the original and pristine
It will bear witness to that primordial sound, in the unmaking

Art is meditation in the true sense
It is witness and mediator
and vivifying existence

Art is listening in the true sense
For the luminous nature
It demands your ears
It provokes in you elaboration

For if you risk sincerity in art
You may lose all those things
But those things will be known to have
little value in the first place

In Art as in meditation
you find again a world that
Is unified and whole
And in that place your meet a woman

And she will tell you
Sing to me
Else all is lost here
Sing to me
You have no choice

Art 6

Since the elements exist in perfect equipoise
why would we make Art?
What could we possible add
to world and worlds?

Yet that perfection
is most useless we become conscious of her
Unless we find ways and means
to say thank you
For art is that perfect gratuity

Art is just a way
to acknowledge her wordless beauty
acknowledge her forms, her conundrums
the razor beauty that you can never possess
the difficulties as well as the ease
that She offers us
her dualities as much as
her grace

The frustration, the task, the fights
as much as the laying down
the giving in, the acknowledgment of union

Ah love is so easy!
in the beginning and in the end
and so difficult in the middle
during the negotiations

Ah love is so difficult!
Man and Woman divided
No one wins on that battlefield
And no one ever will

Ah love is so easy
when all is given away to love
and yet we battle for our little shadow terrain
we would rather die, than lose our 4 acres and a mule,

Can we find, in the frustrations of flesh,
pre-linguistic ways and means
to go beyond the din of argument
and show evidence, of that world
Before we were devastated

The evidence is the art,
the expression of gratitude
that souls work and expression

The excess is art,
the effulgence of lovers
who will surpass themselves -

Who cannot abide
the cold comfort
the kitchen warfare
the frozen coupling

You must keep this spark alive
says the Art,
that is the ultimate ethics
(beyond stoicism, or Epicureanism
beyond logistics or management and bla bla)

What a useless credo!
Art for art’s sake.
Art is for the sake of You, the beloved
Art is for the sake of renewal

(Of given you breath
Of melting your iceberg heart)

Art is putting the paint on the canvas
without aggression
without moving away from the flame

Art is the mountain that never moves
though it accommodates
all the winds and forest fires

It embraces without need
it is passionless passion
it is cold and hot the same time

It is erotic without seed
it is naked yet ornamented
it is stillness in motion
and motion in stillness

Art is your very nature
not something you made
but something that is born through you

That pure expression
that mystery
that silent beholding

Art 7

The inquisitor wears a
benevolent masks
It has always been so,
and will always be so

But the Art will
Reveal both the angel and the monster
Behind the mask

The inquisitor is found within in and without
The accusation is that one
on has spoken too directly
of the divine

The inquisitor is happy when
when the masterpiece is
safely put in a museum
made sterile, a popular religion

Be aware of them
the accusers
they are sometimes
disguised as friends

They come to you with love and support
to keep you safely within the palace walls
And yet the Artist, like Buddha
must leave that palace of comforts

For the true artist longs for something raw
and beautiful, he cannot be converted
to the chiming conversations
he stands opposed to format and cliché

Be wary of those accusers
they usually come as protective mothers
seeking to shelter you
from the winds and rains of life

Learn to love those winds and rains
attention can break through
even that wall of pretend love
in that icy fake benevolence

For you cannot have light
without shadow
and sometimes you need
the surgical blade
Sometimes you must cut though

Stand still oh Art
When accusers are around
with their bibles and their S&M
the bitches of religious hierarchy

They will accuse you of heresy
Those papal virgins
they always have and they always will

And yet it is in your intolerance of
of that dark religion
that makes you want
to bring forms to light

And so you must find
that human form
in granite, in rock

You must find that
hidden harmony,
that penetrating light
that cool fire

and make it into the shape
of a true human form

even as the accusers
throw poison darts
while speaking of
love and kindness

Oh accuser,
by turning the wine to vinegar
you have sent me in search
of finer wines

Oh accuser, you have given me
the poison I needed
You have broken the vessel
and now everything spills over

Oh accuser, you have given me
the Art

Art 8

Art is chagrin
Art is frustration
Art is a skeleton house made
From the ribs of a woman

Art is doubt
Art is disappointment
Art is impossible

Art is everything you could never say
to Her, your impotence
the hopelessness of an open heart
in a world of metal
that fact that she never heard your song

Art is your tears
which wash the fields
your blood which nourishes
the dark soil

Art is your entire sacrifice
And yet it is not a wall
but a door

But stay for a little while
in that house of pain, when you found out
she would not bend to your desire

Stay for a moment in that realization
that your love was imperfect
that flesh could never be its container

Stay for a moment utterly lost
was that not the moment
when the divine suddenly appeared to you?

Did you not see the face of love
the moment you relinquished control
of this mad machine?
When you could laugh and cry and be
even in this slaughterhouse

When you saw that even your bones
where hollow
that your most solid belief
was as insubstantial as rain

Was that not your blessing rain
those tears and blood
that muddy battlefield
when you gave up looking for
the ideal beloved
when you saw that She was here
in the sparrow, in the charred tree,
in the otherness of blue sky
in the way the hard earth
receives the rain

And then, were you not
finally ready, for the Work,
for the Art, for you had been given a voice
and you could not be silenced
by anything but Love itself

Could you not now say:
there is no breath
except the breath
that I breath for You

there is no Art
except that I love you
and have no idea how to tell You

There are only winds
though machines
and fields of broken glass
without you

That is my Art
which is the same time
a lament and joy
home and utterly alien
all opposite things

Do you understand
my love, that
all of that drama
was nothing
that there were never
two of us
that we never died
that the flower
just burst into seed
that is all…

And now I grow poems
in the wild meadows
of your Heart’s country

Art 9

Because there are
still bullet holes on an anonymous wall
because there are
still the ghosts of the dead
that haunt French villages
because there is war
there must be art

Because of that contraction
in your heart
because you don’t really love
though you pretend
because everything you told me
was just an evasion of the fact of your emptiness
there is art

Because the winter drained
the world of colors
because people live in trains
and apartments
because the flesh
is trapped in an alien landscape
there is art

Because of the bullet
holes, on that anonymous wall
that were never noticed before
where somebody fell
where somebody was violated
and other human life was abused
Because we live in the shadow
of war and the wars
because we are continually haunted
by the Jew in Auschwitz
because elderly couples
and children and handicapped teenagers
were sent to the ovens
there is Art

Because there are people
who do harm, who are so entirely
lost in violence and hell on earth
because boys are taught
to despise and rape women
there is Art

Because you can’t pretend
that nice things are happening
because you are deadly bored
with the way things are
because people treat
their precious existence
like so much packaged meat
there is art

Why Art you say?
Did you hear the screaming wall?
Have you seen the faces, pale and forlorn?
Can you bear this climate
of poison and of advertising?
Do you see how they
manage people like cattle?
Do you know the suicide rates
in the fat countries
are climbing?
do you know that pornography
is more popular than Jesus?
Have you heard that mechanical fucking
are You ready to look at
all the horrors strait in the eye?

Do you know that people
don’t really give a shit about each other
singing their sentimental songs?

Do you have enough courage acknowledge
that your heart is full of hate?
or are you going to give me another
spiritual quote, telling me that everything
is going to be Ok?

It is not Ok.
If you die alone and with nothing
Never knowing why you were here.

Issa in the 12th Century
After the death of his child
Took 10 years to write these lines which say more than I ever could:

‘The world of dew is the world of dew, and yet and yet’

It’s all going away
and that is why
It is so beautiful.

Art 10

I have been writing about Art
but I don’t really know what
that is

There are gifts of the heart
and there are reproductions
There are words and there is language

The language of Art
has no format
it is not in need of definition

Then why do
I speak about Art, or Soul or Angels?
Why do I speak?

I do not know,
only you asked me
and so I answered

It is not the words
or their literal meaning
it is that they are dancing, it is that they are singing

Because the words I love you
are not said only once
and need to be said again

Likewise Art, as far as I can see
is just finding deeper and truer ways
to say I love you,

The way to say that, however, is not always
pretty or nice
Sometimes it is penetrating

Sometimes Art (which is Love)
is the trojan horse
it comes in a nice package
but inside there is a bomb

We need to make these homemade
bombs, to explode that stuck and dark place
that hole you find yourself in
that waiting room
that you call your life

The art will show you something
behind the canvas of illusory fields
some great open secret
that cosmic cervix

She will show you that place
called home, but also the abyss
aren’t those the two faces of Her Art

The penetrating aspect of art
is much maligned in our society of comfort
and entertainment

Therefore please forgive me if
I raise my voice, I shout sometimes
But I want you to feel those jagged edges
I want you to taste that abyss
( there is a tendency to reify, to deify, to philosophize)

Who will drink that 200 percent proof
The strait vodka, an old Tibetan told me about
a long time ago?
Who wants to drink that spirit?

Who, therefore?
Or will we remain satisfied
with a dollar sun?

Who, therefore?
Will penetrate
that cervix, that hole, that midnight

Is not art about
That deep cosmic penetration
Is it not lovemaking itself?

Is Art concept
Or is it love?

Do not answer me
I will show you.