unsung basquiats

The black angel had vouched our silence

Amidst the scrolling tales of Reason

Held the trust in confidence

Lest the old world haunts mingled with the vested new life

Lest the abandon intruded the current fashion

A ghost in the machine

And stole it away

Like thieves in the night

Shifted the vagrant motions

To the other side of things

As the unicorn stepped into the abyss

Pointed first

The all seeing eye fades to black

A darkened heart chained to the hope less belief

There was no choice in the matter

The shadows forsook when hath turned to the light

No longer writhed their pressed firmaments

Like fake smiles to ploy the intellect

Brush the ephemeral disgust from thy lips

In gallant strokes of humility

An ailing preparedness for death

And the embrace of this new life perennial

Once such abandon smoked the mirror

Broad divestitures of the real

It mattered no more

All thy chagrin and grit a farce

All the hard skin a wish away

The abandon of the moment

Yes despite the wisdom of the sages

I clung to that which tore a hole in my shadow

My beautiful soul was a black denim

That was tearing at the seam

As the snake which cannot shed its skin

Perishes

And I have seen one of the lights of the universe

It is that we must continually renew our pores

The holes in our spirits

In order that beauty might forbear

And if now I wax ephemeral

It is because I stand on the shoulders

Of the unsung basquiats

’Las it was ours

Fell to the hands of a Rusnak thief

Exploited as the child of the midnight river

The underground current

Moved under the dark side of the moon

And we are chasing the tail

That scrolls through the fog of Reason

The black star that keeps shining on

An angel wooing us to heaven
The black kingdom in the night clouds


Muchas gracias por la inspiración, Intervenue (www.intervenue.com) and Dreemz & Co. (www.dreemz.co), notably Basquiat's Black Kingdom.

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Constant Progression

On the road we encountered authenticity in transition
Always moving forward
Never looking back
And this forthwith motion was an inevitable force
Slayed the black beasts strewn along its path
A teeming existentialist wake
As life can only be understood backwards
But it must be lived forwards
Skål, Søren
Fake out the night
A snapshot of the derivative of domestic still
Would reveal the deaths of lesser beings
Feeding the semblances of nostalgia in the glass menagerie
And children’s playthings
Puppets of the wayside murders
Passed in the driven moment under the halo of Reason
Memoirs and figurines of a fake life
Painted to resemble in living color
That which was lost in their retention
The mandalic essence of the downward spiral
Forsaken the grace of the natural dance
As it is not that life was taken
In the chase for freedom quite material
But that life was disgraced and there was no repent
A blind eye to the sacrifice
And we just kept moving forward
Hastening the production of things to epitome
In the still essence of the derivative snapshot of the race
Nothing left but deserts and brushstrokes
And stark snaps some decay
The vultures’ feast awaiting their talons
Beckoning to rip and tear
The carcasses of childhood dreams
Reminding us of the world’s soul
Outside the windows of transitional space on the road
The horizon of our finitude
Gently looming the direction of waning aspirations
Spinning the dress of our lives
In a grand linear motion
The resemblance of a divinity driven wind
And all the figurines they sat silent
In the company of vultures and death
They were still even in vibrant swathes of color
Emanating the essence would they represent
Amidst the tender loins of dead animals
As if they were soon to dine in memory of their creation
Having never known the spirits of their sustenance
Blind to the invisible hand that feeds our forward motion
This corporate life a constant progression
In the still hum of the process flow
Bury your rivals, not your desk

 

 

Muchas gracias por la inspiración, the cell, www.thecelltheatre.org, their exhibition, On the Road, January 17 to February 7, 2013, and particularly the work of Cara DeAngelis, www.caradeangelis.com

 

 Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Natural Progression

The days of the fall

Were these beautiful symphonies

Orchestrating gently the reason

In lethargic awakenings

Greeting the chilled but rising light

To thy glassy eyes

And world weary machinated motions

Creatures of habit stroked like regal dogs

Delegating their energies

To climb out of the slum

And into the city proper ’cross the great river gap

Bridging the suspension of its flow

Each day met with the question

What’s the point?

Each day moving forward

Driving the weathered machine

To the heart of American beauty

The stitches that closed the veil of class

Quite casual

Clothed the steady crawl of the mourning streets

In the relentless waves of necessity

Detailing the algorithm of consumer thought

In passing wayside distractions

And the singular swifts of pigeon flocks

Drafting the abstract of the grid

In thoughtless swathes of sky

Waxing ephemeral

Composing the negative space of perpetual rise

Always moving forward

A natural progression

The only constant in the capitalist experiment

And each morning she entered the vacuum of the current fashion

In the dramatic circulation of trends

Weaving the fabric of days to come

While he kept driving on

Crossing the further river gap

To the fringes of the machine’s cognizance

The implementation of its subconscious ends

In the automation of human processes

Reducing the measure of distraction

Masked as the liberating of innovation

A global movement to free your mind

From its enslavement at binary hands

Gripping his keystrokes in a streamlined legalese

Embedded with silenced poetic gesture

And incorporating the evolution of humanity

At the close of the world’s curtain

Upon which things shifted to the other side

To the silence of the Eastern shore

A reason unburdened by its linguistic permutations in history

He raced back to the swing of the Big Apple

Now the black heart of an evening Grace

A dark glass veneer

To masquerade the void of endless light

Wherein the aspirations of thy reflections were the black beasts

Bags in the wind on Fashion Ave

Watching the cars pass outside the temple

He sat in a moment of quiet

She left behind the vacuum

Pulled herself from the wall of the abyss

Having cleansed herself of the question

Ready to dream another night long

Let late come rest steal us in the sleep of stones

Cast in the forces of the world’s soul

Holding on persistent through the silent kisses
Every brush of the hand

A love that never questioned the source of its becoming

But poured forth in dreams and daily drummings

Sounding for our consciousness

The sweetest nothing of the All

Vegetarian Manifesto

The shadows of the trees

Had lapsed into the growth of light

And the canopy was enveloped

In the traces of materialism

That crowded out the forest floor

Hence the fall from the fiscal cliff

The pinnacle of reason

Was a long groan

In the solitary contemplation

Of imaginary numbers

Expanding exponentially

The valley had opened wide for thy coming

And a shadow passed away from the trees

To the fringe of thy consciousness

And spilt the devil’s kiss

All over the concrete floor

Beneath which thy roots writhed in offense

’Las we’d sealed them from the light

To better garnish the appearance of things

In the impression of soft brush strokes

Splashed of sin upon the feign of dress

The mandalic derivative of style

A posture of liberal enlightenment

Veiling what fury

Seethed at the coy placation of tradition

The cowardice of moving with the shadows

As some respects towards the lights

Of the eternal flames of Hell

Their dark slumber an opacity that transcended

The translucence of God

His Ephemerality

 

And what death must glisten

In some human bead of sweat

That falls like glass upon the African savannah?

Beneath the watchful grazing of a golden giraffe

It shatters any semblance of a democratic morality

Through the journey of a tilled field

To the blood and sinews engorged

With the malleable guts of the wealthy

In a feast of shadows

The lack of guilt lending the appearance of new age kings

Upon those fed by the sweat and tears

Of the human machine

Commodities of pliable labor

Dreaming on a midnight star

That some God will find in their work a meaning

Aside the ambiance they never greet

Život, robota

Beneath a third world moon

A third person account for thee

Hustling white lines for Grace

The tills were carried over the great blue ocean

To mix with the hands

Held the red rum of domestic grazing

The lethargy of the sheep

In their posts at the whim of American greed

Praying to some God

That the masters will overlook their miserly existence

Covered in the blood of lambs

Long enough for them to die in Godforsaken peace

And the tender loins of their animals

They reached the gullets of the devils

Whom dined in the celebration of death

Having never felt the spirits of their sustenance

The blind caws of vultures

The pigs with their pork rolled out on a red carpet

A toast to the red rum

To close out the feast of shadows

And carry home in gluttony

The reflection of some Star

In that glistening bead of human sweat

Meeting the midnight river

And shattered like a cordial glass

Slipping the hands of the new age proletariat

Cannibals in some sense

Devouring the forgotten deaths

Of slaves not to themselves

But to some machinated new world order

Commanding the vultures

Not to bite the invisible hand that feeds

In the belly of human desire

An opaque reflection of king and slave

 

In the crystal ball glass bead mirror

I hold my vegetarian dish

Like a violin against my clavicle

And with a bowed wrist

Sound some motion for reconsideration

And so one less soul fulfills the destiny

Of that poor glistening bead of sweat

Fell off the back of the bête noire

And shattered thy humanity

 

 

 

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com