Watercolor

If the art of watercolor

were not a cenobitical

performance art, like

gauche; but not quite.

Restricting in the formal

purview like a haiku poem.

Do the best that you can.

Copperplate Etching

Copperplate etching,

you were never a

"photographic method,"

at all; being limited

by the minute imperfections

and their accrued effect

on pixelation.

Weft Thread

Weft thread,

you are the bane of my existence;

ruiner of my selvedges.

The art of turning modern

to the hand,

and all it's

imperfections.

Photography

Photography, you

are a moving target bitch.

Analog or digital, does it matter?

Does it's mattering matter?

Always second runner up

to painting, but wasn't worse,

just did less with less.

Black Wave

IF ACTUALITY WERE LIKE VIRTUALITY THEN IT WOULD BE A LOT EASIER TO GET FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER

You are telling me that the internet is not real, and that we are real, as people, with physical bodies, on the actual Earth, which is made of mud and rocks and twigs and not just numbers being calculated however efficiently and however effectively translated to something approximating of the real thing-thing, which is not true.

SEABIRD :big dumb pelican.

There you are, plodding along the beach like something weighted at the bottom, but you are not a bird, you're a man who is known for being "unconsciously sexy," in a way that "transcends gender, really," really often. Really often. You pick at things like scraps of garbage, which is sad, at first, because it seems like you're really hungry, but you're not, you're just bored and it is very hot along the beach, and your jaw seems to be twitching, or something.

the Demise of Herrick

Last month

when you tore Herrick's throat out

I supposed that you crossed a line,

may've had to leave Windsor Terrace

stay with your cousin in Blighty

until the heat cooled off.

But then not, and then one

took Siegfried's sanguine life

from two throat holes and so revealed that

he'd been dead for a long time,

since 1800 something some said

and though fabulously well-connected

not well loved. But a philanthropist

who took a gay lover

and loved him better

into penury, threadbare, for the ages.

Embarrassing Moments of Realization and then Trying to Reconcile That New Knowledge

Small bottle of Svedka, empty;

talismanic of it's consumption

out of reasonable proportion.

Lifting up the internet in one clean and jerk

as if it were something illicit

and needed to be moved quickly

to a place of camouflage

where a complex architecture of objects

is an accidental mess

of film canisters,

resumes,

sketches of the legacy tattoo,

red yarn

affixed to pushpins,

charred metallic debris,

pomade,

bits of fur

*

How when the treehouse fell out

of the nook in the low-slung branch

you teetered on leaving the children

to fend for themselves,

but didn't

for pragmatism

and whatever'd gone on before.

J. Stineman

If aesthetics would visit violence on men, then
it would be a moral imperative.

If sweetness were just a matter
of enough roushing and appliqué.

If the wrists that the vivisectionist
worked over with scalpel and elastic

in the pattern of vined-growth;
a filigree of one thread crocheted.

A ruffled bodice, and the white
forearms and fingertips.