Measuring you
(Found this. Liked. Reposted as reminder of more competent verse...)
I've tried to take your measure,
each night, while you lay sleeping,
counted your heartbeats,
your liters of breath - light, fragrant, and somewhere in the night turning fetid like a dragons and you will wake in the morning with a birds nest erupting from your head,
by then I will be asleep, until then I
lie awake thinking - this is perfect;
But how can I measure this?
the volume of your breast in my palm,
the curve of your buttocks in my groin,
the perfect hollow in your shoulder where I rest my chin,
wiggling it to evoke those spasms
your hair tickling my nose, pulling you closer -
blown whispers tickling your ear
how lightly can I bite before you scream to quit?
imagining, reliving the nibbling of your toes;
the perfect fit of every limb to limb;
your breathing, softly out, softly in.
Our days measured with coffee and cigarettes,
trivial and escalating quarrels,
quiet moments of reconciliation;
evenings with glasses of wine
nighttime's, sleeping.
Nothing lasts forever.
This will not last forever.
How rich are we?
in the midnight hours, counting our shared pennies for a final bottle of wine, pack of cigarettes,
There is no one richer than us
we can count ourselves the richest people we know
Richer than kings, than Midas or Croesus
No-one, nobody is richer than us
Nothing would I trade for this.
Your cold hands and feet warmed upon my chest,
I've counted your teeth with my fingers
tongue interrupting -
thumb pressing, whorling in your navel.
the pressure of my hands upon your throat;
and afterwards
lie awake thinking - this is perfect;
But how can I measure this?
You cannot measure this.
Our conversations:
I have counted the words, sorted the lies from the truth, the wisdom from the nonsense, the love and the hate;
The long unending silences:
The full spectrum of white, grey, black lies told and ignored
The countless unspoken, unasked questions
Traced lightly upon you the infinite shape of exulted nights
I have mapped the constellations upon your back, joined birthmarks and destinies;
breathing quietly upon your neck
Nothing lasts forever,
I want this to last forever.
And I've taken your measure, tried to somehow preserve this, these perfect moments,
to distill them into pictures, feelings, smells, tastes, words
From photographs,
I've tried to paint you;
Somehow, crushed foil tubes, every hue mixed upon the palette
the smell of linseed and turpentine
A photograph of you for reference, I need no photographs,
an eye, rubbed out, fingers stained with colour - alazarin, pthalo, cerulean blue, naples yellow, titanium, zinc white,
painted again, rubbed out, my talent not equal the impossible tasks your love has set for me;
but I try again and again and if my painting is futile then there are always those inarticulate words, there are rare moments and gestures;
You cannot measure this.
smaller rations of joy,
greater portions of sorrow...
and always we left the repairs to tomorrow
Nothing lasts forever, no one lasts forever;
I thought that you, we'd last forever and so guessed at the measuring,
Fools that we were to think there would be time.
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- Category: Uncategorized
Art as Commerce
Refer to the original: From Art to Artifact.
Art, when it becomes currency, has a variety of possible evolutions ahead of it.
There is, of course, the endless replication of it, which generally raise money, or more currency, in the instance of music, for the artist while alive, for those in the visual arts more often when they are dead. Music, we've come to accept that the primary revenues for a successful musical artist will come from the reproduction of their works, whereas with the visual arts the primary revenue comes from the sale of the original; there are entire conversations to be had on that topic, but that's not where I'm going with this.
This will be about Copyright. This is the inherent right of an artist to maintain control over their work and realize a profit, the original point of which was to allow the artist to make money in their lifetime without fear of plagiarism or being undermined with cheap imitations. At the end of their life the copyright would expire (most people, artists or otherwise, have no need of an income in death). A good and a noble idea, but let's see how it's played out...
Copyright laws evolved such that they became currency as well, the artist could sell the rights to his/her work for an initial lump sum, and the purchaser would be free to exploit the work as they saw fit. For some artists this would be good, lacking the means to reproduce their work, the new copyright holder could make prints or records, commercialize the art and bring it to the largest possible audience. This freed up the artist to create, no longer do they need to worry about the manufacture of product, but it very often paid them a fraction of what their art would prove to be worth. With this new paradigm Art becomes a commodity.
Those "brokers", who purchased the rights to the work, then lobby to extend copyright to allow them to increase revenues from the purchased work - in Canada, Copyright duration is the creator of the works lifetime, plus 50 years from the end of the calendar year that the creator died. We begin to see the perversion of what was once a great idea. The arguments made that posthumous profits could be used to support the artists heirs are largely spurious - why, a) should the artists work be expected to support his/her heirs, and b) in application it's largely used to benefit the people who've commoditized the work and seek to maximize returns.
Abuses of this are now legion, think of Time Warner's Claim to Copyright on Happy Birthday, now largely invalidated, but still having denied for decades fair public use and collecting tens of millions in fraudulent royalties. Think of every format change in media - you bought the Beatles Record, 8 Track, Cassette, CD, and finally you want to throw it on your iTunes, you should expect to pay YET AGAIN for "copyright", when in fact you should have bought personal rights the first time, subsequent purchases applying only to have your "right" as purchaser rewritten onto the new media.
The system, as it stands, is rarely enforced by artists and frequently enforced by corporations and brokers who have no legitimate claim upon the work. "50 years from death", in the age of the internet, given the population of the planet and abundance of media being created, is easily equivalent to the previous 10,000 years of human history. While I have no simple solutions, it might be time for some intelligence and reason to fairly visit again the notion of Copyright.
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- Category: Ideas & Questions
Small Feuds
Small feuds grew large
and became the agreement not to speak of certain things
weaving silence into every conversation.
Silence, grown into the cracks and ceiling, stifling;
Questions spoken with back turned and answered to windows,
Every word a sigh or lamentation while the clock winds down impossible hours.
Grown into days, months, years, their life,
Cold, tight, polite smiles and a fixed gaze into the middle distance.
Unspilled letters form crusts in the inkwell;
apologies blot pages
Under cloches, filtered sunlight checks unformed ambitions,
mottled fleshy hues;
Motes hang in the rays, descending...
and everywhere the stealth of dust fills corners.A stillborn gesture,
Dumb birds flee the morning, the crickets the night,
And the curtains whisper of better things.
Until they become finally quiet shadows that flicker in the corner of each others eye...
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- Category: Uncategorized
Summer 2015 Paid
And today I caught up with all the bills from the daughter's visit in the summer. A lean visit, we accomplished next to nothing on my list, yet still there were an abundance of pawns and debts outstanding that had to be caught up upon...today, for a limited time only, what's mine is mine. I should get rid of it quickly before all is lost...
Looking for a new car, the old one, well, it's done, even to buy a tire for it, given how long it has left, seems a waste, and so I"m shopping for the ultimate 4X4, in my mind a beat up old Mercedes jeep styled SUV, but I'm open, and so searching Kijiji I find not 1, but 2 1986 Volvo's, 240 DL, Manual Transmission, and everything looks as if it might be pawned again...but I can't, the daughter's due back at Xmas, that's the next imminent bill, afterwards, for a couple months at least, my money's my own...
Oh, and Xmas, probably too late now to even try or hope, but if I thought of the children (THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!) and ordered them some online presents, some of them stand a roughly 24% chance of being here by then...
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- Category: Miscellany
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