(Loosely
for Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Mama & You)
"It has been said: 'The
illiterate man of the future will not be the man who cannot read the
alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph. But must we also
take as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures?
Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?'"
—Walter Benjamin from Stanley Mitchell, screen 13, no. 1 (1972), a Short History
of Photography
"Don't fall
on your head & become a statistic boy-
Don't let your life slip away"
It's early
& the dust is piled along the floor
electro-static junkyard
the sounds are devised as mountains
a crow rests
in the cornfield
the world is barefoot
the saints are bleeding
& the new portraits are of eyes &
how they breathe in real time
meat & cornea align with numbers
if you hear them
their words appear as a text
but what they say is unimportant
They are lined
up one
atop the other like school buses
They witness like money
you watch
they watch
can't see you
you watch
until the sun bites the floor & the side of the world-
it's almost gone
The dead &
their pigments appear
on the glass everclear
shuffling lips on the mind
you watch they watch
they know you know
Sounds of
the breath sizzle on the ledge
film
jumps rope
another fills the pupil
then another
round & round
the staircase of the iris
(nothing's confined but the outline of the fetus in the hallway)
another
one more
blue
blue
black
brown green
seasons
pilots
oars
saws
pistons
circuits
(The light
is constant
statue
lake
cutlass
pistol
violin
tooth
flute
customs
hair &
politics
rape
murder
love
finally the
hands
There must
be a chair for coloring the human body
You go outside
listen to the road-
sounds like heartbreak
a synaptic knob
like your mama
like that window falling
like somebody's coming to see you
like an old lover
like feathers
like night
You look back
to that room
see the blue light shape it
smell the air-
let
someone else covet the image
the mountain don't hurt no more
that eye is a grave-robber
Water: the
muscle of facial expression & mastication(
you change
'cause
it's all skin
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