concealing. (haikus)

the ceilings are high
here, my lungs are full of shit,
not unlike most things.

a day without maps
is like a night without stars,
i just want to puke

a little dizzy
from blacking out every night.
sober just as drunk.

disease, malfunction,
ability is only
a mindset if you

are not sick ev'ry
day in a body that seems
so smooth against cogs

so crunched in those cogs
you become the oil and you
know no one is free

together we can
find the edge of the world and
then find it again

the next day while we
anchor it to some heaven
that only exists

here in shaky hands
held by another's hands
less shaky and then

we'll take turns just like
seasons share a year and life
takes over death till

life no longer wants
itself nor death but something
less nauseating.

resp.

like the little man chasing the princess

like the little man, i am like him

and can't stop leaving the lights on.

like the little man i am moving backwards.

can you believe it?

I'm sitting in this gallery, an arbiter. My presence here says something to you: it says, this is worth protecting and I am a guard. Please don't touch the canvas, there is something there you could ruin. There is a meaning and these lines are important, why else would they so accurately repeat what's been said, what's so ostensibly worth saying? "Men With Brushes" and also the converse. They bump and they brush by, they have places to be and very important things to say about the responsibility of the artist to representation, to truth.

I demand the converse, the counterpoint. Advocate, please do. I want it in ways that make you angry, in ways that make you roll your eyes and just really be full of disbelief that I could even ask you t do something like that when it's so like transparently obvious that they are all of history. Representation is all of history, nothing figurative there. Ambiguous, editorialized, interpreted certainly. But never interpretive. You say there is no need for the interpreted. I say you say there is no need for the interpretive and before you even say it here I am, interpreting. We are both interpreting constantly, literally without cease. Sans cessation.