The Ants have thoughts too

Happy NEW YEAR!!!! You know where you go outside and listen to the fireworks and smell the night air and wonder how one arbitrary night becomes the source of a planetary event and the entire world is bound to that fact and you just go hmmmm , is that an ant on the sidewalk, what is he doing out this late at night, I though only worms come out at night??? Maybe there's a whole world out there I know absolutely nothing about, maybe there's a whole universe, all subterranean like and they have ant thoughts that sound really high pitched and you can make a little ant communicator out of some tinfoil and a turkey bone that you hold to the base of your jawbone and if you hum your thoughts they will understand...they will always understand...

The Mirror behind your head

She wears glasses so she can see her dreams better.

She’s talking to you  and You think she’s talking to you

You think she’s talking to you but she’s really talking to the mirror behind your head

She tries to tell you her dreams but she thinks she’s you

And she tells you are her and she’s you talking to the other people in the dream

So you begin to wonder if you really are necessary anymore

All you think about is how the plumber struggles to tell

You that she should stop flushing the Va J J wipes down the toilet

She goes down the stairs to talk to Ray the Plumber who’s mopping up the water from the drain that’s stopped he rips open his shirt to show you his open heart surgery scars.

She shows you the cuts she uses to tell her she

Feels herself

They walk apart he from the room sees her across the swollen river

Walking with her son’s hat in her hand

Their eyes meet, they’re not locked as they always been connected

He knows now he must come back

He couldn’t see it all he saw

Was her membership in the sexual disease association

He turns up the music so he can write

It’s the only way he can hear his words and see his thoughts

On the paper or the screen ---no one uses paper any more they use electrons

Electrons gone in an instant to go on a spin in someone else’s mind

That why they call it spin, it spins and it’s gone

Gone for a spin in someone else’s mind and on and on and on

Our Purpose - Youth for Human Rights International

If you know you rights, you will expect them and know when someone tries to take them away or lessen them...

Our Purpose
-
Youth for Human Rights International

Adjust to it...

Adjust to it...

When your mind starts to go 

I’m taking you to Africa and setting you outside my mud house

On a reed mat in the dirt and let people play invisible mind ping pong with you all day

 You listen to the water drops in the sink in a town with no potable water

And drink heat treated milk with dry biscuits

Having Zwieback dreams of your childhood 

Sitting nest to the the melamine yellow table with black geometric dot patters

Feeling the holes in the vinyl of your chair on the backs of your naked legs

 Watching Pete the Parakeet pulling strands out of your mothers hair to make a nest for his mate that he never finds

In your minds basement level small grey spiders by the windows waiting for you to feed her flies

And watch the web dance and tingle her to life

Thru the windows in the basement The Masai men hop and leave deep guttural notes as their beads bounce 

Off their dark glistening chests and the honey and red earth part as rivulets of sweat

Run down their bodies and leave long dark lines in the ashes to drip on the gourd

Like the drops in the sink that you never hear but are always there dropping

 Waiting listening for you to answer them back

The smell of bat urine descends from the nets above your head and my nose lays next to your ear smelling the damp wax and bat scent from the nights before

You lay spent beneath the scent cold beneath the damp morning sheets as

 The baboon stares hole at the sides of your head looking for the microwave beams that the government has been sending

To tell you of the red spitting cobra that fans its hood waiting at your office door 

The servants run and shriek looking for a way to make it go.

Adjust to it…..

The mouse knows you

He has small mouse names for you…

They talk about you like mice do

And know small mouse things about you…

Like how you fold your underwear and the lint in the corner of your drawer and how your notebooks smell and taste

Yes he can taste your words and your ink and he reads your words and finds comfort in them. He eats them, yes your words are like food to the mouse.

Your pages line his nest, torn to pieces like the dreams you once wrote for only you to see. Now he sleeps his tiny muzzle turned under his paws and tiny claws, dozing....resting breathing, he sighs amongst your words, comforted and dreaming tiny mouse dreams where he runs in tunnels and his dozing limbs run and jerk as he thinks of running in his dreams….

The Cowboy Way

This is my third year doing solo motorcycle adventure touring. The destination my past 2 years has been Burning Man in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. about 2200 miles coming and going, a little over 2 days each way. Less and less carried each year, you would have thought I was preparing for a nuclear disaster the first year and in fact that's where I went the first year, Trinity, New Mexico. I began the first year by shaking off the sleep by walking around gas stations and truck stops aimlessly. This year I slumped against the wall of all night McDonald's, wrapped myself in a Massai blanket and slept damn near under my bike or lay next to it, my electric jacket plugged into an accessory port.
In the middle of a field in the middle of a night, my helmet still on, the stars twinkling o'er my head on a cool summer night I finally felt myself approaching the Cowboy Way of life. Sleeping on the open range, alone and in wonder. Wondering if someone would come up and hack my arms and legs off and throw a sack of lime on me. Alone and out there, the Cowboy Way which is also the Artist's Way-ALONE, EXPOSED, your work out there intact and beautiful or getting hacked to bits by people with wine glasses in their hands who dramatize all the reasons someone has given them for not doing something themselves. Anyway you cut it it's great-the wind, the ride, the people who come up and meet you, the other loners you come across, the people who help you, the people you help, the lady you give a dollar to in Kayenta who is working the people who pass her by for money to buy an ice cream at the McDonald's when you know the ice cream machine is broken. The same lady who tells you about her life, her husband and daughter and son and you realize this could be your mother too, her beautiful skin wrinkled by the desert sun and her Navajo lineage. People get all uptight about their handout bucks--ooh don't give a panhandler money it encourages them not to work or teaches them to be a freeloader but the same person overpays for a whimshit chai latte they could have made at home for 2 dollars less and they get no improvement in their history lesson by exchange, they get no beauty, no brown eye shining at them, no wizened look cast a glance over the dry red desert and it all right there before them like a gift found in the dust of the playa lake bed all crusty looking like a St Anthony medal till you take it home and wash the dust off to find a belly dancer your wife can question you about....

Productivity and Creativity

Today someone came into my office asking why I do all the things I do-most people are content with home and their family life. To this I replied that everybody has other things they would like to do they just let someone else do their thinking for them, i.e. :

What do you want to do that for?
No one around here does stuff like that?
Oh I don't know how to do that?
Stupid-you're too stupid!
Don't ask any questions?
I don't know how to do that.
What good is it?
Why bother?
No one can ever change that?
Those people have been at it for a thousand years...

It's pretty hard to go through life without going into agreement with something, I guess why marketing exists but when it comes to out talent and creativity you have to be vigilant and on the prowl for suppressive thought, if you agree with it you will allow it.

Union County Hospital Commission

Recently completed work :
This version is more Rubensque in nature and freeflowing. Swooping someone up to safety reminds me of my life with my daughters.

The Rescuer

Thin Blue Line

Have been doing lots of work on this lately and viewpoints are beginning to shift or maybe not. Previously I spent time on the control element and now am seeing a tangent of this which is not talking about it as a result of embarassment and fear and how much that traps a person. I guess giving up your ability to communicate is a loss of control as well. Entrapment can be physical, threat of loss of environment, children, belongings and status.