This set will take me awhile to write, and I'm adding daily, bear with me and scroll.
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Subsistence
by Sylvia Puglisi
by Sylvia Puglisi
Four million four thousand
Three hundred twenty-four
Corn flakes. In neat boxes
Is enough to survive on for
The average expected life.
And, if you run out, due to
Proclivity for carelessness
Or unexpected emergency
Or plague of cereal locusts
You can always eat the box.
The Egg, the Girl, Mozart and a Tiny Guard
World-Champion Bullshitter
by Sylvia Puglisi
by Sylvia Puglisi
This next piece addresses
the fundamental impossibility of art.
The blank wooden canvas represents art
into which the frustrated artist cannot cram the themes he desires to address
the personal and the political.
Frustrated, he instead takes a step back
and photographs this abortion of his artistic process
in turn framing and presenting that photograph to the viewer as art.
This abandonment of his artistic goal
in turn achieves that very goal
and creates the original piece of art that he was unable to create.
Thus his inability becomes his inspiration
and the paradox of art
draws the viewer further into the empty frame.
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The Immigrant Woman
She worked in a seed factory
In Philadelphia when she was
Just twelve years old
A city of bricks, mortar, history
And industrial explosion
Her job was to put the tiny bits of life
A dozen to a packet for seed catalogs
Her wages kept her family in a tenement.
She bought a tiny copper bracelet
From a first paycheck for twelve cents
It is in my jewelry box drawer
The only legacy left to remind me
Of her, her needs, desires, decoration
Passed from mother to daughters
Until it fades out for my girls
Only a shadow now
Her womanhood would bloom
Blossoming into people that gave me life
I teach school now to other immigrant children
Alive with hope and dreams
My great grandmother had no
School room days past the fourth grade
Destined instead to factories,
Building the future
With her beautiful tears.
Twentieth Century City of Angels
Overlooking the age
This erect angel
Stands gazing down at
Those climbing
Those descending
Staring and sitting
Caught in repoussoir
She's wrapped, bronzed in a nude's
chiffon slip
A female fertility goddess
In a Kazan film
Stella and her sister
Breeding life in LA
Humanity climbing Bunker Hill
For a shot at the view.
The Kentuckian
"take life in big bites, son"
Lil Eli looked to Big Eli
Set down on canvas by Thomas Hart Benton
Then one day onto a whiskey label
Burt Lancaster conjured some
Hollywood promotion
For his The Kentuckian
Starrin' America's own heartland
Father and son headed for a Promise Land
Milk and honey in Texas
Blowing Gabriel's horn
There was teacher Susie, servant Hannah
Elias Wakefield, his boy
Sam Bodine's bullwhip
Ole Walter Matthieu grimacing in a western
All landin' in LACMA
Publicly not seen since commissioned
(except on the booze)
Pulsing with movement
This man stares toward
A future in the great American West
Our artist's vision projected on their screens.
Bubbles
Circles with infinite points of symmetry
Bubbly soapy instant points of happiness
Floating form follows function
Pop, it is no more
Riding the iridescent wave
On a celestial plane
The Hour Glass
Life is where time is kept
In an hour glass
Precarious sand runs
While
Tottering on a
Vibrating universe
Fire Escape
Crawl out of this building
Escaping the reality
A hand runs on cool metal rails
The past recedes
Corporeal dissolves
Raise fire alarms
Screaming danger signs
Freed in the panic
The white starkness
Turned to glare.
Zantedeschia
Your inflorescence
Bring forth the spathe
A spadix juts
fertility goddess
calla lily
carried to market
displaying his wares
she weighs
he waits
The real thing
This is Mrs. somebody or the other
She can easily afford to hire
Diego one figures and she sits to
Have her portrait done
Because she's the real thing,
Her fur can buy and sell him.
Those pearls exquisite reminders
Of aquiline elegance
No peasant, she inherited,
Cocking a look
At her artist in repose,
The reflection of her beauty
Is in his strokes,
He strips away her patronage.
Impression Doomsday
Steak knives
Steel balls
Flying techno
Christmas tornado
No Loose Ends
One arm bandits
Pineapple coladas
Apple cores
Just a collection of unrelated items
Gets assembled in the mind,
What do we draw from this?
Metaphorical connection.
Pictograph
There was a house
A man, his food
Built on the foundation
Of all his ancestors
He spoke, he wrote.
Beliefs rose
Under one roof
They watched
Centuries.
What was Broken
What was Not Broken
What was broken?
This back, yet I hold my head aloft.
What was not broken?
The spirit, so I send my soul on high.
What was broken?
The rib, this Diego was once my Adam.
What was not broken?
Just bones shattered, I am whole in my father's tribe.
What was broken?
This pelvis held unborn and it was crushed.
What was not broken?
The birth of my creative vision remained intact.
What was broken?
My foot I step upon the earth, absorbed the accident.
What was not broken?
The blue hearth, my earthly home, alive in my time and place.
What was broken
in the woman,
Was not broken
in the artist.
Pain's Pageant
Coconut Khalo olive skin
Lemon lime Diego squash belly pumpkin
Pomegranates tequilas infant heartbreaks
Tears mango sienna bloodworm
virgen de guadalupe
Mother of Mexico
Sweet vision of Juan
"These roses I bring you Bishop"
So they may transform us
Turn our blood
To the rose petals of our days
Enfold us in her visions
That we may see her running
In the veins of our children.
at your own risk
if you want you can walk over a pile of gravel in the la art museum
at your own risk
you can not get a big handful
and throw it at the other patrons or paintings
or at a donor clearly because you can read that
on the sign conveniently located right there
so you know whats allowed
in this artland of gravel walkers
singlefile
holding hands
up and over you go
(their lawyers commissioned the sign)
call pensis.is u
fseuo.gdsuop
it.s you birtda go marc
noeebudy knows..
flat oout soewesoome
you for.T
eyes Weslfchfydh tt.y
ed.jdd/.itrs.gdt
jfduy.gydutl..
grilla s.a
They may not have written "Art id ded"
If you left a pile of glass letters
on a platform in a museum
would you expect someone to write "eat me?"
Or feel afraid to interact and touch one piece
to spell out some message
There was a family fumbling through
From the hood
with kids that were climbing over the elevator
like a bizarre reenactment of a Gene Kelly movie
sideways at the ceiling
As doors opened
invading the art rooms
laughing, crawling, tossing, loud
They touched the letters, so hard it sounded like
Lots broke.
Flayed Alive
We don't need in this modern world medieval torture
The mind is wired to explore those notions
Without an actual rack, we go virtual
Modern neuroscience can tell us what synaptic network is pulsing
With their authority of science
Sans the scalpel,we pathologize life in nightmarish depths
Fear of acceptance, magical thinking, splayed across the psyche
The greatest of these tortuous mechanisms embedded in the possibility of poverty
The reality of cruelty on display to shock one into awareness
Then there is anonymity, weight gain, the disregard of the other beings
As you are hoisted on the committees tenterhooks
And found wanting, going to die, commented upon, spammed
Beaten alive perhaps for your woman's figure, life giver be damned here,
Beaten for desires, inadequacies, cellulite, aging, sagging
Hung by the skin that lacked the proper Max factor finish, had a wrinkle, a surface
That bespoke only what you were to others, a shell.
Womanhood today has found a way to art's canvas as the modern scream
I stood, I was ugly in their eyes, I am.
Gasping for Air
She might be thinking
that the smell from this elaborate wooden
particle board display
needs venting fans
She might be thinking
that the native art
on display would not have understood
press board
Walking there trying to see through display glass
it reflected your own image at you obscuring every piece
It seemed more of the same timeless stupid carelessness
a stage set
Built in the city that gave you the western
The horses rounded up and the whooping
calls as the slaughters began
blazing on the screen, now this mess
A giant couple rooms caged pieces of simple life
Vessels to eat, utensils,
Elegant baskets
papoose holders, the things that lived and breathed once
Out away from this museum of caged natives
On plains, in villages, a native people with wisdom
That foretold times
So indifferent as to asphyxiate those looking here, choking on meanings
Entropy
I was used to the museums back east
With collections that were so magnificent
Rooms in The Carnegie, East Wings, New York
So Los Angeles was different
It was pretty ratty public art space
Had a few expensive things
No sign of volunteers and involvement with community
Nothing that said let's talk with the children
Just a courtship with celebrity
Guards from the hoods
Something very different happen here
Didn't seem to invest in its art as a city
And we sat outside
On this courtyard to rest there, bad chairs
That didn't want you to sit down,
I recall a recorder player
For the longest time in the eighties
That stood along the one wall playing
Renaissance stuff, threw nickles in his backpack.
Now they've got a corporate monster
A house of glass and steel
Falling in permanent things
amateur hour
Arranged with paintings blocked by furniture
A room to Indians with particle board shapes
drenching you in formaldehyde fumes
The same plaza sits undisturbed
Orienting me again to my times now in a sadder iteration
And there's a new happening courtyard built
Moved over to smooze those contributors
That must not walk over two buildings to see
Things are still really falling in.
Like a lot of the city.
One that bleeds the new.
Disinclined
"Why would this get here
It's a bale of hay?"
She quipped as we
strolled down
The Japanese pavilion
Stopping to see some roosters
Stylistically scratching
I never saw the hay bale, truthfully.
The roosters seemed
Playfully pecking the linen
That might have a moth or two
Such were the fallen times
Of LA's art erosion
Worn carpets, bonsai with no keeper
Just a hacking mess
The guard said,
"I saw you folks before."
To wave off ticket showing.
He told us, "You'll want to go to the top floor on three
then walk your way down."
Saving me the climb.
A kindness
I had forgotten this.
In spaces declined
I started to tell her
How once, twenty five years before
I found it so lovely
Balanced, meaningful.
How
I never could get her father to go in this part again.
Not once in the next twenty years.
But it seemed
My story
not hers.
Screens
Folded
You approach
From any angle
Much is hidden
The plane of existence
Bent
Images
Dance meaning
In time and space
Glimpses
Hint
At secrets
Beyond.
Photo Reality
There was not a single picture in the museum
Of the art that I loved once, which had sought to just be a photograph
Nothing photo real there, no Close, no Perlman, no Fish.
Coming out of the exhibits, driving home in a cramped car
Everything was a painting to me then looking out, there caught in the evening golden light
I lost the dimension of the living
It just flattened into what had no boundary or frame, two dimensional image
It was that missing photo reality work, I understood that empty language speaking
Better than what was being cloistered
IN a modern art space in LA.
There in the art world this group was being shuttled in for 'the auction' party,
People that we mortals couldn't disturb, that was not the art there on the 101 highway
As young fashionably dressed girls teetered on heels
With walkie talkies
To light candles on a walkway , cradled in glass jars, men holding trays in white coats
The LA patrons were feted, (they know who they are),
We held the door for one
Ancient in her wool.
After walking through a building Broad built, we were going home.
What wasn't purchased, or placed in the new museum,
Outside of this place
Actually then held the wonder of the artistic expanse of my mind.
The End
Hanging over the city
Shone a paper thin cellophane moon
This sci--fi looking set in the city of make believers
It appeared over Korea town
As the traffic rushed through a narrow shoulder-less labyrinth
Concrete roads rushing me back to a gated community
In a hollow echo on the freeways I moved
Couldn't find a way to play our game of hide and seek
To get the image captured of how it looked
Or how it felt, for your eyes to silently share the moon with me.
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