The Visual Art of Poetry

Poetry by Dan Jobson

breeze shimmer

the wavelets travel and embrace
as mental counterparts and counterpoints
yield their discreetness to revelation
of reality's ultimatum of luminous liquidity;
precision's allocation disrupted
with fertility's ambiguity

no edges; segments; or modules remain
all things are of one soul
all sway and interplay
in overlap and lanquid overlay

water and air and light syncopations
dance to the music of dappled day
and drowsy streetlit pools of night
with percussion of persuasions and complexions
in unified derivation
from a softly universal quaking

quivering- no we, no they; no you, no i
just a whiff and poof of notions in rippled disarray
in touching complications and stable oscillation
about the axis of improbability
where life defies the merely conceivable

Abstraction

Clutter simplifies; unexpected forms emerge
But still related in some dreamy way
To the previous scene as seen

The painter's experience contains this frequent occurrence
Which winter gives us as distraction;
Visual plethora reduced transformed
Into the beauty of abstraction

A black and whiteness more refined
Resounding with octagonal bangles;
Simplicity of stark design
Wtih restrained stylistic embellishment
Travelling toward becoming an idea; ideal

For those who pooh-pooh the abstract in visual art
Claiming beauty resides only in accurate rendition;
Watch the magic disappear
As the scene comes into focus.

Age of Alienation

I call and listen to
The pre-recording and speak
As requested after the tone always
And hope the party will
Listen to the message
And return the call before
I forgotten the matter
That prompted it.

But there is a whiff
Of sinking into italics within
Parentheses with little emphasis
Just for instance

But instead perhaps
I'd rather not trouble
And just stay in my bubble

Has sentience been given
A prison sentence? And human touch
A exile into the thinness of
Fibers and air?

Airs of Language

Not a whit or whim
That can't be netted in this
Shimmering hiss of syllabic grasp.

Rudiments of speech as musical notes;
Vowels, consonants, tonal choice and timing;
Conjunctions at intersections of phrases
Embrace the quicksilver
Of moments and motifs
That when properly sequestered
Assume sequences
Of ambrosial composure.

Antique Amours

Swathes glide with orbital curvature
Through spatial vacuum; present vacuity.
Distillations of the love of old;
Rosewater; rose colored glasses;
Past greatness belies-
Denies present pregnancy potency.

Mass mania for collecting
Relics from posthumous eras;
Doting on yellowed doilies;
Grotesque historical junk;
Silly equations of age and beauty
In blind allegiances to idle butterchurns;
Black wash pots; velvet cased dueling pistols
And illiterate literal Biblical;
Engulfed in the quaintly bygone peculiar.

The past was left for critical probings;
Gleaning and sifting through the follies and fables;
Marking the truly major
And there is a residue remarkable.

Antiquity and verdi-gris
Intrinsic beauty and integrity;
Textures of the passage of time;
Demises alfresco; puzzled Pompeiian frescoes;
Alluring missing links; mysterious sphinxes
Polygonal coinage; veiled views;
Pastiches inquisitive of confluences and consequences
Leading to this very instant;
Chiaroscuro through camera obscura.

Avidity and fascination arise
In the confirming reassurance.
Time really does proceed.
Blistering shines surely weather;
Pains and foibles drop into passing holes;
Newness all too bold
Will mellow old in vintage
Burgundy sediments; algaed bricks
And zigzag patterns of fallen fluted
Segments of Corinthian columns.

Participation eventuates encrustation.
Dried sprigs; dessicated petals; sprinkled
With fresh violets; Ensembles
In semblances and choruses of old with new
And generational continuity

Past, present and nascent future;
Residues of change weave through these
Chemical reactions with nature.

The panoply and pantheon
Of pocked patinaed statues
Greet us with cosmic grimaces and grins.
We are the current scene;
Off-beat; off-key history in the making;
Peeling; flaking.....

Auras of Grass

Seething opulence confiscating acquiescence-
Tidal flat, meadow, prairie and savannah;
Streamside, wood's edge, thinly meekly into wood's zone

Diffusions of rampancy
Constructing diversity's habitat

Spartina of marsh, fescue of lawn
Sea oats of dune and tall grass of Kansas
Bamboo of China, steppe grass of Caucasus-
Oscillations through form, color, location
Green green, blue green, gray green, chartreuse
Centrifugally chlorophyll green
Accelerating solar transducer producer
Burnishing autumn tawny

Wheat, rye, barley, corn - tinkered grasses
Food on earth is peace
And peace in turn is pastures

Gracious garden ornament and weedy bane
Propulsive in propagation; first in the great succession
Converging in vegetational temporal increments
To the approach of old forest growth

Roots of grass below bellows of motion
Resisting rain erosion; sea inundation
Never still yet keeping place
Setting all else's pace

Grass says it all in rushing sounds of ceaseless manufacture
Utterances of grace and wildness in rustling repetitions
"The meek already own the Earth"

Rondure of sinuous verdure
Whimsical laxity of dominion
"The meek already own the Earth"

Azurean

Mood spontaneous of deliberation
Engulfing as clarity's October skies endless
With the soul's verdicts emerging
From this crystalline cerulean purity.

In these times with their perfusions
Understanding arises as an infusion;
A midnight blue-blackness backdrops
This most serious of comprehensions
Comprehensive; pervasive; and epiphanous

Delicious in its savor,
The truth sheds all of its hurt;
shreds the finiteness of image
And the soul finds an entablature
Absent of relief
Full of meaning at its most
Upon a song mellifluous
Grandiloquent and complete in the scantness;
In its utterness and utterance;
Indelibly written into the expansive parsimony;
Delphic oracular
Orations Horacian and Balzacian
Of merely enormity

All we can know and experience
Of space is the blue blankness
Of ocean, mountain, and sky

Which acts as a screen which
Automatically entices from us
The hidden graphics of the innermost.

We flow and fill the vastness of azurean
And find the self;
This is the purpose and pleasure of space;
Our own unreeling in the revelation
Of reeling.

Balance Rock

The so seeming delicate balance
Is not
Having endured already
The sway of eons intact
Stalwart and erect.

We worry much too much
That facets and forces of life
Are teetering so precariously
Even though the rock
Does never fall
Fixed as it is
With obscure but certain equilibrium-
Just as youth does find its way to age
And life mutates to stay
And prophecies of doom
Slide by uneventfully.

Billow in Beige

Comes winter's culmination
Bursting pillow of silky seeds await gliding
Complete commitment to the indeterminate
Faith and fate in brother wind
Multitudes hang on the brink of a breeze
Before sliding down the air in wandering flotation
A plunge of the utmost delicacy some few will land on beginnings

New shoots to emerge waving

Meditations on Mutations in My Bureaucracy

Then reason(or is it madness in disguise?)
Encroached to overlay particular or peculiar granules
Of more conventional logic
And formulated master plans
That avoid the reality of true human resource
And resourcefulness with the dictates
Of the latest fads of Human Resources' curriculums
All to account for the unaccountable and Uncountable
And courage and creative impulse are drained
And lose in this now game of offset patterns
In the legerdemain of buzzards' roost
And buzz words domain
A poisonous askewness of emphasis

Just more futile hoop-jumping
That preoccupies the real talents-
The humans who know how
But now can't understand
Why they aren't understood

Christmas Colors

Velvety burgundy ribboning with gilt gold
Winter sky grayed some
With metallic silver and
Swirling with snowflake lace

Antique parchment imprinted
With the bright patterns of now
That run across the creases
And camouflage these folds

The boxes decorated so they
Seem not just to sit
But dance with restless visions

Just as we try to fix and fixate
This one specific day and
Pin upon it all the hopes of the world;
The day itself spins rapidly upon us
On the heels of winter's solstice
As time refuses to stop to let us savor
The Christmas long awaited already receding

The boxes open
All that's in them now exposed
The crumpled paper; scattered bows
Disarrays of wishes fulfilled
And awkward disappointments;
Missed appointments with fate

Did someone just forget
Or did we expect too much
Of what we got?
The lacks stack up
Against the fact
That the color of Christmas
Is evergreen renewing each year
The question of what it is
We really want
And what we really have to give
In this risky business
Of ritual exchange
That turns hope
Into a watercolor wash
Of more and less
Whizzing with
The chromas of quizzical

The Joy of Cooking

The construction of collage
Of taste, texture, color, and smell
Guided by no recipe at all

Gustatory gusto in an intuitive culinary lotto

Pervasion; flour dust patterns
On counters and apron; the feel of a French knife
Mincing onoions leaving remnants of
Brown tissue and root nubs scattered wantonly

Gloriuos garlic and olive oil
Sizzling saute sounds or quiet burbles of simmer
Heat: always warmth and rich atmosphere

Aromatic palatal gutteral scrumptuous
Sumptuousness enhanced by
Some of the glow coming from
Sipping along the way from the bottle
Of what's left will be served at the table
Viva vino! Origins of bon appetit.

Crane to Crane

Wading fishing bird of swamp and tidal shallow;
Neck stretching from an odd hinge;
Peering leaning tilted sideways;
Statuesquely still waiting for fin flicks;
These pauses interrupted by methodical jerks.

A crane is a crane because of the bird;
Semblance to long levered actions;
Arms hung away from center of g;
Mechanism moves with creaks;
Pulleys whir in place of avian muscles;
Pivots that always stay in place;
Navigation by human eyes;
No primal screams ad here.

Bird all curves
Machine all angles
Feather cloak
Naked salt-eaten steel

Crane and crane
Expressions of geometry; lithe and bold;
Cantilevered through air and space;
Both seminally same; both different;
One extracted by the other.

Contrasting visual music
Sung on cycles of the tide
Together at the waterside

One word; Two things
Mapping the strange transference
Of lingual growth.

Cricket decency

So small and camouflaged
By gray-brown transparency;
Waiting just as cymbals do
For the precise symphonic pause-
The moment when you are drifting,
They emit shrillness sporadic
Shattering cushions of silence;
Chirps of deceit cast toward misdirections.

As you rise to inspect,
They quiet to fill yet
Another layer of frustration.

But good luck finds some
Occasions to surprise.

In the bathroom I was staring ahead
When minute movement
Broke the corner of vision.

There among little soaps
In a porcelain dish jerked
Telltale animation allowing (for once)
Rapid target location.

Carefully removing these useless
Lavatory objects d'art one by delicately one
Until one remained as an obviousness of hiding

Refining my bead and preparing
A destiny two-dimensional
I reached and the prey leaped
Into the toilet bowl.

With an ease of adjustment
From the hunt to opportune disposal
I pressed the lever.

Cupric Serpent

We behold this bold sinuous statement
With tormented ambiguity as it
Entices us with alluring form while
The mind of our time so clearly speaks
"Environmental abuse".

But if we did defile,
Much humanity acquired much
Comfort from its plumbing and church spires
And weathered verdi-gris of weather vanes.

And even so beyond this
There seems a livingness here
Much as we have come to own
That snakes have an ecological niche
And an overrated evil effect on Eve.

And besides this utterly relaxed earthen liquid form
May beneficially smooth out
The cracks of our too awkward and nervous demeanor.

Da Vinci Notion

A noted Da Vinci scholar
Among reams of his own
Fastidious rendering of Leonardo
Underlines this oddity of genius-
"A most improtant and neglected area of inquiry"

In the master's own notes
"Concerning the Flow and Ebb.
Concerning whirlpools, and Concerning Water"
But these fluid patterns appear vividly
In incongruity in the drawing of
Stiff and static plants-
Star of Bethlehem and iris foliage

This reality vorticinal
Perhaps of something unseen
Urging its way into visible;
Perhaps the purring perne and gyre of Yeats;
The Van Gogh swirls of Starry Night;
Even the harlequin plops of Jackson Pollock;
Perhaps the double helix spiral

This animation of animus;
Structure beating the wings of function;
The notion of primal motion; of ocean;
Time flooding through space;
The liquid quality of experiance;
Sense and essence of music;
The force of spirit underlying
That other face of life
So transparently apparent
In most Da Vinci work-
Inner luminosity

This must be
The pulse behind the glow
Of the placid complexion

The wildness beneath
Intricate regularity;
Beneath his own social poise
That attracted the retinue of illustrious patrons
That projected his life through
The turbulence of his times-
Politics volatile with upheaval-
Bearing a naked beauty of continuity
To the museum halls of our time
Achieving the archtypical
As a vine that kept Leonardo from being
Just a dry architect, military engineer,
And court sycophant

He observed and responded ignoring
The lunacies current in his time
And left us with the way to
See through his eyes

Deification

A form of praise diluted in
Wishy washy flattery, political intrigue
And often swift reprisals; blood pooled
Beside the robed vainglorious corpse
Still oozing cycles of further retribution
Ensuing upon the Latin subversion
Of Greek ideals.

Wheeled moral defunctness mushing
Through the muck of history
Of steady misery and trampled scrolls
Engraved with pompous human folly;
Transient but repeating processes of
Greed, power, and utter smallness
Within the grandest of facades

Poor Claudius saw through it all;
Gave Rome the Nero monster;
Was himself plowed under by his own design
And watched from a distant star
As futility took the plot to save
His beloved son, Brittanicus, who was
Not close enough to Claudius
To sense the blood stained toxic decay
And entered the fray;
Nero's easy prey
At least as Graves saw it.
oxidized rome; already loose dust
in barest cohesion; mindless of the
effect of gravity on fragile states.

Modern times in Western industrial societies
With a subtlety underneath democracy and freedom
Caresses still the making of the gods
Made easier by the cryptic aims of the Creator.

A natural urge to elevate
Beyond the innate;
Chaotic streaming contradictions
Of under and overestimation;
Built-in offshoot of a basic passion
To let loose love and so we
Overstate the case
Of rock idols, football heroes, and Hollywood stars
And for children- cartoon superheroes.

The people jumped by adulation
Often share the caesar's fate;
Praise breeds praise
And success of any kind persuades
Those gullible of their own invincible triumph.
Should they and we perceive the transcience of fads
That is their own quick undoing.

The Roman pedestal is occupied
But by figures still in motion
From the entrance; non-stop exit
Of the stage
We oblige by being tickled and titillated;
Tricked by a fleeting image

All of deification is falsity
Somehow connected to our need to enlarge.
What a poison to trump up these gods;
A toxic vein that deadens us
And can be deadlier for them.

Available option- vivify our own lives
With our own agonies and ecstasies;
Praise and enjoy the work of profound talents
Who elevate us rather than themselves
With deep feeling, wisdom, and the
Injection of humanness into our plight
Mortality, morality, sublimeness-
Edification

Deposition

The flaws originate sublime rimes
With gust skews and pleasantly unstable strata
Heaping to the taper of an asymptote that
Challenges the ledge of the possible
With its response to natural wildness

Conversely tame begets tame
In the scientific manufacture
Where crystals grown as bulk or epitaxial film
Admit no imperfections save dopants
Or computer chips would chirp with glitches;
Only the careful cliff of temperature dip
Is precipitant but in spite of all
The lattice is sometimes spoiled
By reality's multitudinous nefarious variables

Maybe Murphy can be foiled by removal of gravity;
Black magic for a seeming science
Provided by the midnight of space

But still with the advent of success
There is only function smoothly
Riding on the sleek sterility;
While our terrestrial outdoors
Produces a mere sincerity
Of useless compelling beauty
As a factual affidavit
Of splendor crystallizing
From the whim of mishap;
Lyrical evidence that sometimes
Murphy should be given the reins
Of the wind to win his way

Dwindle

Fabric of one year disintegrates; enters inters
Smoldering and moldering dissolving into crumbled nets
Achieving particulate nutritional status
Disappearing into blackest earth
To return in cycle to the tree
One more expansion of the girth
Green legions to capture photons by the googolplex
To brew chemical stews of dizzy equational complexity

Adding up to the stuff of growth;
Climactic crop of nuts;
Outrageous autumnal colors

One leaf in isolation
Just a simple thing of winter beauty
A single dwindle kindle

Epigrams

The price of love has gone sky high
The price of lossing it even higher still

At this point I would have to say
That I have the gravest skepticism and apprehension
About love
About which I hope to be proven wrong.

Either life is crazy or
Fate is a peculiar lathe
That turns our destiny
With a razor sharp wedge
And shaves our grain
To a finely honed form
That only with luck
We perceive before its too late
To muddle our way after this
Hidden model

Wayward is toward.

Eros

Mechanistically the hormonal limbic surge
Can be discharged as a mere matter
Of release to ease
Or be trickled and tickled with anonymous titillation
By the detached images of an unknown person
Whose body is displayed so appealingly

A hard subject for soft engulfing

But there is an if of cliff;
A hieroglyph of ancient mystery
Beyond deciphering of
When two souls themselves
Are drawn magnetically and unexpectedly
To offer totally up each to the other
And bodily adoration is an intrinsic integrity
Exceeding all convention; for love redefines totality
And all its constituent particles
In the shining lubrication of giving
And dissolving into this liquid satisfaction.

The touch that slides deeply
Into the psyche in cyclic revelation
And profundity's commitment autonomous

The silkiness of skin;
As much the scintillation of a smile
And daze and dazzle of the eyes
Glazed as the driven wedge
Parts the grain of the soul
All has a parallel excitation-
The phallic-clittoral conundrum
Where the nakedness of the soul
Far exceeds the nakedness of the body
In absolute vulnerablilty
With its absolute terror
Which must be soothingly stroked
And quenched
Or the entity human
Can catastrophically flinch

All flesh aside
There's more inside
And motion is its magic and its tragic

Evensong

Union of remote communion
Under soaring dissonant contrail
That further joins the wilderness
To airport bewilderment
But blurred and only vaguely;
Visible but far removed;
Touched but untouched.

The hole looks into the heart of the land;
Defines a ragged opening in softest pearly tones
That counterpoint the rugged fascination of silent solidity
Engraved with time's arid preservations
Bathed in luminous transcience.

Deserts weave the wild extremes
With limits that define the limitless
And synthesize all manner of calamities;
Interlace the advance and retreat
Of chill and heat.

Beauty always starts to flow
In these halfway marks and in-betweens
That tell all at once
Of what has been and what will be
But always radiant with nebulas of mystery.

Wind Feathers

Fringe- More Lexical Companions

But more real possibilities are pure indulgence;
Frittering away time
Eating oyster fritters

Though frivolous and frollicking,
What can be is more than a frill
And what cannot be can still be
Indulged on the fringe
Of imagination's capacity which
Is firmly connected to life's fulcrum.

Not to fret about fronds and frost;
In the translation- little is lost
Not even the froth
In the seething fugal
Fungal past and future

There is still the steadiness of furniture
In the furor.

That Genes Can Fling

Immediacy- stretching with
Majestic elasticity back
Into the farthest reaches of ancestral time-
Shoots a dazzled blast
Of radiations into myriads
Of streaming distant future potencies
With the exsquisite poise of natural gesture.

Structure and function incited and circumscribed
But not in the least foreordained;
Sonorously in the the space of silence,
Dreams are not to be denied.

Glaze

When We Go Home

And come face to face
With the inner one
On whom we should have lavished
Such self love
And instances of communion
To fill this extravagance of space and time
Inside that is outside of social circles

If not, we can be driven
Just to diversion's busy substitute
That refuses relaxation
And confines the bellows
Of supine expansion

Gumbo-limbo Tree

His dark eyelashes relaxed down to
Brown lower lids; daydreaming or asleep
But there's music running through his mind
Absently but with vital steady spurts
Of rhythmic syncopations Caribbean
And shadows of lush tropical foliage
Swaying in wind's exhalation.

A charcoal inner animation emanating from embers
Seemingly percussively accentuated
With aqua, orange, and lipstick pink color bursts
In forms of mysterious information
Sifted through the slow pulsing marimba sound
Like sand running through soft sap;

A presence felt
As a strange comfortable
Singing with a deep oom in an ooze
Down within the mambo-rhumba mumbo-jumbo

What! What!
"Henrique, are you asleep?"
"No I was just absorbed in a dream-song."
"Henrique, your hair is stuck to this tree!"

Icy Grip

Impromptus (Prompted by Schubert)

Scintillae

Deliberate

Skimming

Suspicion

A pianistic wobble of excitement in our axis
Warble; bubble; rippling unfurling
Swirling to the final chord struck
Dumbstruck with the soft hammering
In our brains afterward

Position

And in its place
Retraces something we seem to have vaguely
Known before
Entwined in these wandering spots with
Stems and flags broadcast
Across the horizon's lattice of the page
That leaps with mystery into the air
Perhaps no where

Confluence

Inoculum

Cultures awaiting
Opportunistic disease bacteria
Or injection producing
Catalytic benefices; parasitic useful symbioses;
Pathogenic devastations
Or vaccination against future diagnosis.

Prognosis so peculiar
That so much of stasis and inertia
Is a pregnant pause of accumulation
Of suseptibility;
A pinnacle of equal inclination
For infection of affection.

That such power could funnel through
The microscopic orifice of a needle
Or fall from the air as a random spore
Or come as a flutter of glances.

Interlude

We spy upon a natural scene
To steal its milky melody
Knowing nature will forgive our crime
If all we do is borrow for a time
Smooth respite we acquire
Some deepening of soul
Seasoning our daydreams
With cattails and pond ripples

Nature gives just by existing
Pathways for our thoughts to wander wide
Reaching reverence is her return

Of Lessons Learned Too Well

Lolling in futility that masks
The next movement from within or is it from without?
What a surprise!
Or an upwelling spring of energy of art

The null to be displaced
By whatever meaning fills the waste
But never again that wasp nest of striving
Against absolutely useless odds

Meaning to Light

They simply took the time
That is our license to think and feel
Observe,inquire;
Opportunity perpetual in its availability

Simply to breathe with cranial capacity;
Contents related to the surmising
Of the heart and soul indigenous

Creating excellence in explanation and action
From the rawness of obscurity and ambiquity

But questions remain
About the value of valor
(wisdom is a form of courage)
and the virtue of martyrdom
when wisdom is the victim of revenge

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