Atlantic City - 2/20/08

Atlantic City - New Jersey - 2/20/08, originally uploaded by levari.

art 1

everyone's watching everyone else.
jealousy has eyes, especially at dawn

(it gets so you can't notice anymore.)

hunger's started living outside the stomach,
but the townspeople won't say where.

last night someone showed you
how the planets continue on
in their repeating orbits
not because of some subservience
to the so-called laws of gravity,
but simply out of fear

(just don't ask him how he knows this.)

~Saltine Sea - 11/00

Las Vegas - 2/12/08

Las Vegas - 2/12/08, originally uploaded by levari.

Ocean

transition as
tradition,

eternal
return,

togetherness
separeteness
aloneness
bridge-less.

forever us
less
than it is
and has always
been,

except
for your now
becoming
mine,

then breaking
without shattering,
passing onwards,
through:

painless.

nature, as it is called, has
never been less
than clear with us.

~Longport, New Jersey - 2/18/08

Father and Son

"All I want is to enter my house justified."

~"Ride The High Country" as quoted by Mr. Peckinpah to his son Sam.

"I don't use the accident. I deny the very idea of an accident."

~Jackson Pollock

The Concert Goer

The Concert, originally uploaded by levari.

Night

"It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A "bad night" is not always a bad thing."

~Brian W. Aldiss

To The Climbing Tree

To The Climbing Tree, originally uploaded by levari.

Your simple, sturdy branches
between scratched legs and
bare feet once transformed
a simple boy into

a king,
an emperor,
a conqueror

of jungles, oceans, deserts, mountains -

so many that I believed
your powers were endless,
and were mine.

Just a boy, we are always being reminded.
Just a boy, we are constantly being told.

But you let me have it, for as long as I wanted,
in whatever way I could imagine,
as long as I stayed within your budding grasp.

Now
I have come back to this backyard,
these woods, and I am
so tired from living with the brutality of the decorated world, though I know it is my place, and I must return.

You stand here dying, my old friend,
on this February morning,
in snow falling too soft and meaningless
to ever stick.

You stand here dying, you son of a bitch,
and it's only a matter of time now

as I sit
leaning my back against
your hollowed trunk
wishing you
would now
lean against me,
that I could take the weight,
any weight,
let alone yours.

If I could, maybe for a moment,
we could make each other young,
strong and fearless against all comers,
while laughing at these seasons,
the way we once did
together.

Dresher, PA - 2/9/08

After The Performance - 1/22/08

After The Performance, originally uploaded by levari.

Flower Pots

Flower Pots, originally uploaded by levari.

Crazy Horse

"He would have preferred, I imagine, simply to avoid them and go on living a traditional Sioux life, raiding, hunting dreaming; but the option of avoidance was not available to him for very long. The whites were too many, and they weren't satisfied with the Holy Road. They weren't satisfied with any one place or one road; they wanted everything. So he fought: on the Bozeman, on the Powder River, on the Yellowstone, in the Black Hills, on the Tongue and the Rosebud, at the Little Big Horn...He didn't win the war. What is hard to judge is how long he really expected to, if he ever expected to. Despite much urging, and unlike Red Cloud, Spotted Tail and Sitting Bull, he never went east, never saw the whites in their seats of power; had he done so, he might have drawn the same conclusion they drew. But he went his own way, travelled his own road, until it dead-ended at Fort Robinson in September of 1877. Looked back on from the perspective of one hundred and twenty years, Crazy Horse's doom seems Sophoclean, inevitable, but perhaps all dooms do, once the roads taken and not taken deliver the character to his fate."

-Larry McMurtry "Crazy Horse"

Oliveira Street - Los Angeles - 11/07

bedside reading

"You see, in this world there is one tragic thing: everyone has his reasons."

-Jean Renoir