Folkcal Fraim 14
One Thousand Private Pendulums / Somewhere (Twice) in the Sunshine State / TSE / 2020
The Lens at the End of the Line Break
A lens is the length by which we attempt to reach the end of vision. A line break is the end of vision, the cliff of language where all linear sight is cut off, white ache, a blink of abduction, forcing the eye the option of either returning to the incipit, that medieval doorway, or roll with the succession of new lines stacked like resurrections (in reverse) down the page. All the way to the explicit, the end of the text, goes the loyal eye goes as the lens continues sight and the line break, persuaded by form, discontinues it. No breathing walk, through patterned rain, ever paired the lens and the line without becoming enjambed. Reversing like verse with a vision while proceeding like prose permitted to protest, nothing matters more than where the lens break occurs in the frame on the way becoming a stanza. His register, her station. Both they and them, their viewfinder enlarging the genre of gender, ready for accident, ready for aim, the ribs of the rangefinder’s constantly broken point of view, the creative process of having never been protected. Consequently, in a rectangle, one’s options, technical and organic, are limited. For instance: to take a unique picture, the knees bend, the arms stretch, and the top of the head, good head of hair or not, becomes a perfect camera’s nest––one that is sure to elicit a look of quick surprise or the slow emergence of disgust from any passerby. Much ado about camera settings, much ado about human gestures—the furnishings are all handpicked. A stanza is a room, a rumor, a garment morgue with a view of its own wardrobe of mirrors, the dress-up place, robes, the double deep dive made by two looking glasses facing each other, a ballet so schemed it renders each figure, master and friend, an identical stranger. Neck and neck, the lens and the line, the world’s first unfinished, photo finish. Neither a winner, merely an accumulation of feet and yards for those who still cheer matriculation.
Allow me to introduce another layer of prose, triple exposed. Anything to break the neutering that often occurs before the next line. Allow me to scatter the coincidences till they form a message, meaningful and messy. Allow me to push weight, to exercise the many sample sizes of life, to find a fit for meaning. Lifting and lowering the camera immediately after working on a poem is like stacking boxes, word-heavy boxes, boxes that contain the weariest of worlds, however (as has been said), eventually “a formal feeling comes” and a visual grid born of the poetic conceit of muse residue is born. The constant repositioning of the photographic idea, a composing stick that nominates multiple common denominators, all active shooters. Blindsided by the fertile claims of divine juju, the new poetry is weary of soul work, preferring the intoxicating vibe of two job, roommate culture. Framed externally by form, the poem (we are told again and again) needs imagery, emotional content, tension’s meal of identity seasoned with miles of smiling similes. Thus, the contemporary circus act, the lowering of the bar, the line made highwire, the lens made ringmaster’s megaphone, a trapeze of shucking and jiving hung by ropes. This is true of spoken word because it was first true of song, true of formal verse because it was first true of speech, true of free verse because it was first true of unpaged thought. The poet, the one being held by an I, is told to get out of the way of the poem. The photographer, the one holding an eye, is told to get closer to get the photograph. Sometimes light, sometimes liquid, to be page-less is to be closer to nature, closer to the birth of the beginning which gave birth to itself—the roundest roundel ever. Like a closed circle, a poem needs governance to achieve nuance, a human manual of invisible tools, a birthright that denies (in writing) being part of a system that ends. No certificate loaded with the stressed and unstressed management of contemporary life, the arriving and departing of mishap, can compete for the attention of an unaffordable void like poetry, the fatty acid of rule mending. Nowhere is where poetry begins but I read somewhere, I don’t remember where, that the eye is a hungrier creature than the ear. I read it here. Each eye, spins in place, towards the other: fisheye. And, in doing so, one of the eyes becomes an even blacker eye, the main course of being double exposed, publicly. Lens, fins. Line, gill. The myopia of hunger, blackened. To shoot in color is to pull feeling from pavement. To shoot in black and white is to put it back. Thus, where dinning is concerned, photography only has time for plates. This is true of the eye because it was first true of the entity known as Curiosity, the curvature desired by the end of the line. The bones on the table are left over from previous sacrifices, from previous crisis, the picked over formal wear of the lens less poem.
It’s Sunday and there’s absolutely nothing on the exhibition menu but improvisation, my own angle of rude vision improvement. Mood, anti-Zoom. From a citizen, the royal side-eye. Undigested, the image abandons the mouth, tongue-slapped and slanted. Belly-level, drop down; dance-move-down to the ground until the subject, trapped in the glass cube, appears to suffer from the Gulliver-ism of too much growth. Art is a giant, the food for recovery from the chain letters of theory. Many formalists drink to strengthen debate, saving their best rhymes for the end of the line. Lens cap off and called a scab, a grassroots battle of handheld signs. A grapevine heard in camera, site-specific. One vulnerable virtue after another, each with a signature it cannot help but become more recognizable than the house style of pictorial straightforwardness, the compromise that bent and banished the most righteous experiment. Stiff and dusty criticism: usually such pictures resemble stale ghost towns. Not so easy a category, caged. Not so evil a camouflage, aging. Poetic sight, one more romantic cataract for the sky-high stye. The human camera will do anything to achieve the permission that becomes a petition. Measured in the arithmetic of anatomy, in footsteps, in the well-written juxtaposition of fat shoelaces, or what was once called the metric foot way back when poets were serious about the knitting needles of sound, the contemporary poseur used craft to hide the manuscript’s glamorous glitch of honorable mentions. An open photograph, like a precise poem, is full of the vanishing math of syllabic iconography. Deep shadows plus bright spots equal contrast, that grayscale ghetto where the framed image is held together by the community’s ability to agree and disagree with the fabric of its own chaotic reasoning, a reality that is alive and full of the turmoil of togetherness, including every argumentative duel outside the archaic egg and cheese bodega. Think of it this way, narrowly wide: a poem is to a photograph as poetry is to photography. Like a sentence, dependent on subject-verb agreement, the contemporary portrait is becoming a complete thought again, torn between the temptation to present a beautiful beheading or the repaired autopsy that reposits the serious sitter, the bicameral mind, back on the body. There is nothing, either studio lighting or hired lightning can do once artifice drains the gaze. Unlike the quest that becomes an unanswerable question, the pool of faces constituting an audience is best left ignored after the photograph is archived. As for the group shot that has made a living on a roomful of standing props, gone are the units of sound and units of meaning that once magically made the energy within the frame a superior reckoning of creativity, then a lyric blur of noise like a brushstroke of likeness interrupting the eternity known as personal narrative, a supreme fiction sprinkled with facts that never fade. The F-stop that stops human trafficking. Yonder be Our Lady of Lines and Lanes, her divine pregnancy, pictorially concealed by the bright red command of being brown and parallax and hexagonal and convex.
It’s not in your face, them trying to kill you. The legal layer is not lawful no more than the right to be hidden or rid of ritual. Sacred searchlight minus the brightness that frightens the boat of refugees, each with the reverse plasticity of a negative on its face, a file of profiles. Ageless skin of shores bored by the tackiness of zig zag, what shall thy piece of light, thy darkroom on the sea, thy peeled plight of emulsion be—a poetic lecture; or a lecture, prose-born, mid poem? Above the landscape of performing drones, a mannequin on a Romanesque recliner, the chaise hug. I napped like the arm of an old pencil sharpener, turning and turning, but did not experience a single illustration stranded in concept. I rivaled the air, dreaming, arriving in the old world I helped (via art) disguise as the new world. All it takes, the curator insisted, is a cartographer and a cartoonist; no one need stand at a lectern, scrutinized by the facial expressions of rejected favors, cleverly turning phrases into monographs of dust. No one need ever become a book. Dealt like marked cards, this incident, and many like it, are stored in the memory next to the verbal warranty that rants like an arrest warrant from a badge wearing a body wearing an official shirt. Side slot, a smiling host. Before accepting a blue passport ask yourself, “What is it about the matrimony of America and photography, Camerica, that makes it the perfect container for the content of global conflict?” Pick any route, pose-struck by performance; any street corner encore—bra worn on the outside of the resolution and yet, still, somehow the image, one leg up, is trademarked male. Classic and coaxed through the epitome of aperture, appendectomy-priority, without being rushed into speeding away from the scene after the shooting. In Camcorder America, the shooting is never done, all-points bulletins and bullet points contribute to the numerous combat zones. Between haiku, another hiatus. An originator of worlds, the reach of the longest eye underscores an orb especially in the presence of the men and women of renown, the Fashion Week amazons who drop off packages, cargo galore. Fast roll, subtotal, subtle. Slow roll, sub limited, sublime. Rogue driver for the one-eye tripod, the cyclops of Croydon, the camera fears no myth, neither Zeus nor Zeiss. And yet, hardly anyone speaks of the personal voyage, the paginated patience that comes in waves, the stalking the streets through shadows only to confront the worn light of alleys minus the confidence of thrift shop racks, a native wrath, the pageantry of being at the right palace during the wrong rebellion, fully loaded, the all-but flash-less skill it takes to beat the executioner to the gallows as the cry of a newborn riff welcomes another victim, one of those attention seeking outsiders fighting for inclusion, the still life of having been caught and posed in the compromise of promise, not so well-mannered and not so well metered, a pinky swear that everything in every photograph actually happened, organically, and will continue to happen thanks to frequent visits from an auto archangel in search of the gladiator of time. Hear this: the lens at the end of the line break is glass and when it breaks, it breaks like the life of a lie, like retina ice, like yet another “like” forced to lean into yet another mile high simile, silver lining milieu, most notably the ailing ones that distort the funerals of favoritism, the preferences and prejudices thriving on both sides of the human aquarium where the afterlife of art is hard, shooting never done.
My optical limbo will soon be limb numb, without languish. One y short of ray, the syllable “ra,” for sun, moves in two directions in Paradise. Ra flows through Florida, no ego—all indentured id in the middle, like a palm tree of flamingos, the pink pharaohs of old motels whose only need is neon. A belief is a feeling. In every beached pyramid, a gold grouper nugget deep fried by centuries of solar attention, the holy curse of sustenance known for engraving deserts. Orange blossom, the state flower of local honey. The peninsula that behaves like three beehives in a buzz of insulin. Paradise, Florida, Floridise. Tincture dealer, swampy herbalist of primordial seafood, where the light goes to rise every time it retires. Able to rhyme dawn with dusk, daily, a full gulf. Not everything in paradise depends on the kindness of climate. If it rains while the sun is out, the kids say, “The devil is beating his wife,” but whenever astronauts go to the moon, the elders say, “They are messing up the weather again.” Consequently, if you fall asleep in the backseat of a poem on wheels anywhere near Orlando, Disney will fly you to crater NASA. The lens at the end of the line break, the unsolicited telescope, knows manuscript abduction comes in various regalia. Folklore is one of the riches of Florida, the texture of which is as tender as the southern accent between church and brunch. Who, the insects ask, is this humid God, this deity of heat, this thirsty swelter of sweat collection, that glides over Floridians like a wet facelift? Why does it love the slimy oxygen of every layered spectrum, every Camp Freedom, pain of camp, clumsy campaign? Like the funk of a big catch, every percussive paradise prayer can be relied on to detangle exhaustion, the decaying afternoons of August. Up, up, up, uppity as the sunshine that floats like a blood cell, the ultimate necessity of any sustainable prism, flesh and stone, multi-cultural as a closeup of a bruise. The lens at the end of the line break knows where the horse of the treason of good and evil is buried, but first, before listening to the ground, it must disobey Ahriman, and liberate the bloodshot I from the veins of materialism—candelabra of melted wax, the secrecy of galactic grandmasters that shimmy shimmy (annually) through the town’s oldest square root. The lens at the end of the line break is familiar with every hand-held item, eye temp, temporary tear duct and meta retina, that has preceded it. It is where the hearsay of history goes for a haircut—line up, blocked sideburns, baldie, beard shave, fade. Don’t fall asleep in the chair and hold your head still while the razor becomes an ism. Confessional as a personal essay about summer innocence, it is its own roll call of faces—immature hope, clean futures, all perfectly centered in a yearbook of inexperience, the endnote of nothing. Seen it all (a long time ago) but not attached to a wall. Recalled wing, what are you up to, another mission patch of coded advertisement, more gently masochistic minimalism for the spiritually trendy? The lens at the end of the line break been knew the meaning of an unfunded No, been hip to which way to go after the atmosphere ends. In the air between the photograph and the poem, cometh flying chores, cometh the moisture of morning, distilled. So much either / or in the ether. Look again. There’s Kierkegaard with a camera. Søren, shutter sound, Søren, sound of shutter, Søren, shutter sound. Take another more than seductive doubletake before you hit the road, hellraisers like red shields, their infinite lymphocytes, t cells. The role of photography is to pronounce the history of everything properly. Poche, pocket money. Friedlander sounds more like Jazz, European Jazz, than Salgado, but Salgado is tango. Have we forgotten the veiny guitar strings, the mean green ones, proudly displayed in the legs of duende? Lorca, offline so as not to surrender to data, his hemisphere cut into by the trade of tragedy. Book walk through the exhibition again, sit-in in the sit-in in the margins. Covered with a black cloth, the little table convinced me that I was an on-call citizen of the lens, the pursuer of skids in rows, my guard rails renovated by passion. The lens at the end of the line break did not, willfully, enlist in either side of the Perception War. Not on my (self-adhesive) watch. We used to lick the lens at the end of the line break on postage stamps, those nasty little portraits, flowers and flags. Once, there were pyramids on the great seal of Florida. They became mountains then mounds then mud, all worth blasting or covering with trees to hide the underworld. One, two, three Nobel Prizes in need of dynamite, smaller now, excavated, saved by fashion from the historical fads that never fade, the last pure patriots in paradise ready to use their secondhand votes to riot. The camera’s real name is Courage. The poem, Big Witness. The lens and the line, Look and Loop, identical twins. I gave my youth away listening to people read.
Because there is a lot more to a room than what a camera can capture, much more than the Post-it, super placement of the caption positioned to bully, if not blind, the byline. Because a stanza loses its soul every time it’s left on a page like newsfeed for the animals of community, betrayal be damn—pride aside, the packaging and purposeful nostalgia of black and white at conflict with the packaging and enhanced endurance of color, so we segregate the aesthetic charm of harm, same painful technique as a racial harvest, gate kept in grey, the slop of developer; so and so and his ISO, bypassing the unruled pages between livestock, the white spaces, the conservative grounds for contempt, vertical strips of plastic permanence. Cultural Futurism in love with that two-timer, Techno Nationalism—admitted and caught on film like the formal restraint of human behavior, poetry forced to present as poems, more smart bondage, the seedy garden of creative trolling. Lonesome Noir Art Guardian, is there anything more terrifying than to be empty of meaning and not know why? I heard you selling wolf tickets to your false pals in the sheep pile, old wool eye, in the big shade of a learning tree behind St. Vincent’s. The moment you said, “at the end of the day,” I knew it was time to defend tomorrow, to skin my camera like a smoke wagon, Tranströmer à la Tomatsu. This time the lens saved the line break. To see which me is more likely to attempt to trigger me, I am shown another point of view of me, sharply focused but too much motion, fleeing the identity-based marksmanship of contemporary noosethink—the love of a neck that lug trust teaches. A silhouette, inside out, turning itself double dark, soul searching the surface. Our permanence, however, fades into poverty. Filed away in a plastic sleeve, older than creation, the now notorious negative of being. A couple of nice rides in the exhibition, wheelchairs, and vintage whips. Certain resemblances, strangely enough, bear a likeness to low royalty––the sad day “is” became a verb, one civilization linked to another, mirrored. Nothing beneath the yardwork of earth on top of earth on top of earth on top of earth but dead pictures buried in verse. Forgive me, as I dig, because even in the oldest of photographs, privilege is the end of civilization, not the beginning.
At the end of the line break, you, below yourself—nothing above, no one else. Blurred, grainy and full of the fog of the noise of antiquity, both giant and ant. Three shots are all it takes to edit any epic—torch whistle, torch whisper, torch song. Nude friendly, the economic castration extends to the camera, piles of wishbone deficient men made of fish, pointing and shooting their lines and rods at the rooftop where the trojan red snapper beguiles evening, the baptized land that was once a gland. Life lives on life. Another word for program is name, labeled and numbered from birth. And here I am, rollin’ sunshine way, along the waterway, not enough chairs at the blank table of contents between the images I am interested in…which outnumber the ones interested in me, yet here I am, ready to undress the entire Movement—every apartment ark occupant, electrical loins not extension cords, every subscribed member ignorant of the natural spoils awarded those who swab the deck, the clubbed hearts below Down Below where the primitive-future is equally advanced on both sides of the emulsion, musical and mute. Long before slang slanted its way into our lens, “nice” legally meant stupid but yo, fresh and dope, like names of nations, are about to change again. Multiple meanings and multiple exposures widen the cultural currency between the once thought to be under-developed Other and another even less developed Other, self-esteems of steam. By estimation, a dictionary entry is just a double exposure of double talk, the lottery of vocabulary dragged through time by language cannibals. Layering that rotates—windmill, pendulum. A lens to nail any ailment, the cure for the malignant monad dream—the motherlode of broken lines that proves that both typeface and handwriting are raffles, the framers not the writers, the groomsmen of architectural graffiti viewed from the subway train of arts and letters—a couple of homeboys peddling expired boxes of candy declassified as the conjunction between Jachin and Boaz. Long neck of the line-lens, a giraffe. The look is urban. The vibe, Neo Soulmate, mango nectar on a nipple of maduro. We are the inheritors of the golden Day-Glo that made the void glow long before our home became a boulder, before the Dark Age throbbed, before the whole earth enlarged. Much of the Blackness in the photographs is purposely over-exposed to balance the areas that suggest Whites Only without having to say Whites Only. Respect the game. Don’t paginate the pages. Like Samson between the pillars, prophecy adores collapse and collapse interrupts art.
Scary place, the end of the line break. The death of depth, field of ascension granted to every sense except sight. Orpheus so hardheaded he rolled the dice, snake eyes, despite the camera’s low battery warning. Silence has many cages, including the non-here of no place, an absence of physical presence, no absent-minded one swimming in the secret ode of equinox. Mental health’s chief treatment, enjambment. Coma tail, a comma. The body odor of morbidity, of memories embalmed in hippocampus. The inability to concentrate on one lifetime at a time, the split decision of flesh. Patient poet, no patent. Passive photographer, lazier than an uninterested viewer. So many things outside of the frame need adjusting, repair and the freestyle fixins’ that accompany the perpetual victim, so we call upon the last lighthouse in the digital dystopia, Lightroom, whose nickname was once Lucifer but whose friends, all fiery as the retinas of prophecy, call Lucky. So many adversaries in the selections and a few like-minded shadow workers, all converted to the burning deliverance found along the roadside in Tampa. Big proverbial sign, a trailer office and a protective tent, the exposed religion of the sun world of design. We knew it lived in the details but were not aware the evildoer had creative control of the entire village. All stars, fallen or permanently fixed in public assistance, need just enough rage to injure a dry weekend. Like the foul tip that jumps from one night wrestler to another, the heat will do anything to prevent us from photographing thirst. Mismatched boosters of the lady-like launch, one leg a hyphen, the other a boomerang of grammatically correct grace—hellish heaven, an easy sell, header to jammed toe, sorely missed toe to footer. Coincidently, there’s no time like museum time to fall out of love with one’s own body or work; there I heard the personal journeys of those who visited the exhibition. Like a deaf eye, I heard what I saw. I had to diss disappointment (and there was plenty) and reward the shutter. If not for the broken lens, I might not have properly focused the line while my own photographs watched. The great teachers were servants not supervisors. From the vanishing island beyond the line break, they whisper, “The white spaces are the places in history, the harsh climb of resistance, where the light meter refused to cooperate with metaphor.” Others, solid as a stare and in tones more hushed than any kitten’s yawn, are sure the distances between images are there to induce forgetfulness. No pores, no pixels, just fright—the thought of having to delete an entire nation of pictures of real people, mostly workers. Wild card dealt like a rare tarot, neither will allow these pristine sheets of wall to become doctrine.
A room of rules is the opposite of what I was after…the flat pictorial factory-scape must honor human sweat, the slices of waves becoming one wavelength of water, phantoms of composition, something akin to a transparency bearing multiple grids. Please do not touch. And if by the chameleon of chance, you weren’t expecting one hemisphere of sight to bleed into another and the reflection to become an x-ray, let me offer you another stone of form, a polished sonnet known for soft landings, or better yet one of those mild-mannered meadows of voiceover possessive of lovers on a blanket. Summer, be my snapshot, my unworthy wallet size anthology of old phone numbers; help me reexamine what was once mine. As if lens cloth handy, I’m as camera-ready as the imposters of free will. Whatever, O, whatever happened to “whatnot?” I don’t know but please do not touch. Nature’s perspective, the conquest of unfocused intimacy. Too glue-close for glucose, the history of photography contains so many sticky incisions I fear we may have wrecked the side-to-side equality of the sweet rectangle. Image, title, date. Outside of realism, nothing. When we overexplain, we invite a parasite into the paragraph. But, near the barrier of fence, the false border of genre, there was a go-between, a boy in full rebellion, knifed into action by the maternal, sliding board of a sharp pair of legs, a decisive child about to take a coke bottle to his father’s back, the fizzy contents useless as the “g” in lasagna. Please do not touch. Only use the weapons in your eyes, as every elegy contains an allegiance, an ape-to-man aperture of the chronology of cave walls, sterile and uncontested, no different than one of those scientific self-timers trying to make a specimen of the human pulse, the rare world punished by facsimile, a reproductive non-reality. Poets, prohibited by poetic form, from freaking out. Ignoring the hearsay pertaining to the break, the line is able to relax but only face down. Scary place, the end of the line break. So much scarred paper for the sly fire.
A paragraph like an unstaffed musical staff, pointlessly depopulated. There’s a tendency to place happy notes, non-threatening words, at the beginning of the line where the iris begins. No matter the direction of the recognizable wreckage, the single file of profiles is forced to face a pair of weathered radicals, the layman’s way an error prefers a roof view of the shore. There will always be a survivor (or two) unable to avoid the Pluto return of collaborative exile. Point your camera at night and night is mostly what you get back. Hot temperatures, the contemporary Hotep of holidays, a dazzling lid. Hop along, Sleeper. Of the real photography, the graphic leper, the poetic relics are in the lobby so which laboratory should I labor under, lobbyism or the lobbyist that lobs a long bob, a bomb, like a waterfall, above the shoulders of science? Other than praise itself, the most praiseworthy element of paradise is contrast. You either know your way around the symbols, or you float from mirror to window whipping yourself, your born old (not “born whole”) self, with the same dependable nylon, camera strap and plastic lens cap used to protect the glass gaze of literature. I grazed the manuscript; it wasn’t worth reading. In my responses, I attached some extra sheen to chrome, and it became chromatic, another machine of Rome. No comrades, I have self-assigned myself the task of disassembling a once popular dinosaur by way of associative description. That’s me you hear feeding off my own signature anecdotes: the image taken versus the image made versus the image given versus the image shared. Topical as the optic tropics, tripod and pic, the controlled composition, the positive annoyance of oasis, of drifting deeper and deeper into allegory where the photograph, if the subject is not forced into the center of the frame, becomes a bit “letter of the law” or simply a boxed occasion. Let me repeat myself: there is a right place to stand in a poem and a wrong place to take a photograph in a stanza. Behind the verb, the predictability of experience. In the shadows, a new menace with a very old and reused serial number. Allow me my chunk of poetics, my didactic clay of miscues. As whimsical as a wedding poem, as annoying as its sequel, the wedding photograph. All light, including quarterly brightness, is available light despite the quartet in the quatrain, the quarter bag of quartz and the downpour of drinks between fishbowls. One can wait forever for the right audience of eyes, for the best nest of picture-ness. Armed with warmth, the thickening watercolors of lightly drenched morning, and the grounded tattoos from the night before, paradise reproduces more paradise, more rolls of the solar dice. A palette of fruit at odds with a parking garage, the latter spiraling upward as it imitates an onion. The image lays there in the year that lays on top of another year, dissolving into the solution of nothing but a concrete thing to see. Most of the perishable problems have been covered with gardens, a few parks, liposuction for the pier. Show off, shot, shown. One must be careful not to allow the documentary to turn paradise into a series of shoot-through palm trees, opinionated as wigs. One must be willing to abandon the rigidity of rerouted identity. One must be an umbrella, skull enough to reject the darkroom safelight in the mind and leave the line break in stiches.
Lined up like a line of lens ill literate losers, why, because no one told the grunts of group shows exactly when the age of signage would end, the photographer continued to play the role of secretary to local legitimacy, confidently connecting the interchangeable limbs of picture quality to language. Some of the utterances, I admit, were visually ugly. And many of the shots shouted, synchronization punctured. The lens contains a collective lesson; the line break, an individual one. When I saw a shack, preferably hand painted and covered in alphabet, I shot the shack. Sometimes the shack conquered the frame like a stone tablet. Windows, uneven lettering above a door. Other times someone would stroll by, reclaiming the lane between me and the shack. A pencil with a head, arms, and legs. Loud lead, no eraser. And for a while it made sense, the further away I got from the bars and lazy cigars of downtown, the more original the vernacular. More shots, more shouts. The photographs, even before they were born, pulled me into poetry but not the same poetry as before. Poetry that had forgotten poems, skinned alive, and peeled like the chemical surface of a Polaroid. A tool of orality, the camera. A vacuum of voices, lens throat. Sucked in through the opposite end of birth where the line break is chopped down, not broken, like a cherry tree of Cherokees. The reaper of revisionism, repetition, does not require a paper jurisdiction. Poem in camera, I surge like surgery, transplant deeply uprooted. Newly grounded body: infrared sun, x-ray moon, color negative earth. Our excellency of spirit, lawns of poems like pinecones behaving like grenades, mostly triggered by metaphor, one explosion swapped for another like a double burst of cloud smoke, casualties charged to both the lens and the line at the behest of the ground. But the locals, being former minor shiny ones, need a shining star, one best photographed in its own clear, dust jacket of titanic night and hammered into shape by frequently used golf clubs like an encyclopedic landmark, the haunted pink unicorn that separates the hustle of hammocks from the charity of tai chi, two of the soul’s easier casinos. These are the spiritual benefits of living in an octagonal house.
At the end of the line break, separation. Neptune from Steichen, Narcissus from Stieglitz, Nike from Nabokov, Nasdaq from Neruda. Another resort of references not worth resorting as one walks and wonders if there is anything new to see, to read, to love, to write. Musings as pure as process. A willingness to work from background to sestina, foreground to sonnet, boredom to portraiture, forces the anxious bard to take on the streets from hostel to hotel, bay to gulf. Bulb at the beginning of the line begged to sponsor a daydream, the noble notoriety that casts a shadow the other figures, lost in the harmony of getting along, never recover from. All application deadlines, detested. Unit after unit of squarish fame, of celebrated sameness, uneasy yet essential to the shape of conformity, until the word user says to the picture maker, “What do I mean (to you) and what do I make you mean?” At the end of the line break, a postcard of the absence of motion, infinitely final as the longest finger of nightlife. Cramming super rich color and cultural substance into a frame will not make it fine art any more than sprinkling the names of so-called classical gods throughout an average poem will render it worthy of heroism. This new headache contains a voice to skull tragedy, an incoming lyric, prolific and emotionally insecure. As the references lose weight, they become the referees of outdated reasoning, the ridges along the rim of the lens forever obedient to a grip that easily becomes gripe. A part of Spartacus forever out of focus. Two used cameras possessed by the karma of the previous owners, their dead eyes. Camera walk, instinctive. Poetry Reading, intuitive. Touching the apparatus is necessary, massaging the bottom of the camera (where the coin slot accepts foreclosure) keeps the approach mildly wild. Whether there is an audience present or not, the gig is made deeper by things to dig. A photograph presents the world with a presentation of itself, many alternate takes all different. Poetry did not print itself onto the rush hour of papyrus, but it did help plow the rows of liberation known as the seldom noticed. Without being overpowering, poetry helped photography see everywhere. A prose I learned: seeing is the only utopian surplus needed as everything seen becomes a seed.
Unlike organized time, unlike the weight of blinding darkness, a lane of sight is a line of light. Poetic sidekick, the rising sunset, determined to mix coming with going. Complex complexion aglow, the workload of creative love. Workshop matchmaker. Two lines, a couplet, a couple of lovers. Three lines, a triplet, sometimes a tercet when one of the lines is keeping a secret. My stormy meter. Four quarters of rain, a quatrain. Not a line: time. Not a break: breathing. It takes, at minimum, five frames to create enough room to construct a modern argument. At the end of the line break, we are just a “Thank you for your service” society. Straight from the eye to the subject, the movement within the room desires roam, requires conflict, a thing to bump, micro misdemeanors that change our energy if touched. At the end of the line break, the protest of snapping fingers, recurrent rhymes, the double Italian ballade that refuses to open then close like a venetian blind. You can’t make a cinquain, not one with structural integrity, by simply stacking couplets and adding a line. No. Doing so destroys the accordion that gives the stanza its sound and sense of respiration. Congested in a raspy wheeze, there must be a lung in the picture, a donor by the donation box at the exodus door. At the end of the line break, the anti-identical refrain. You can’t make a couplet by merely pairing two incompatible lines. A good ear will hear the distrust, the dissatisfaction, the divorce. There must be a kind and kindred kidney between them, many pairs of flexible reading glasses, a spare knee. Together, they are yard stick and ruler, co-conspirators nursing the same secret. Apart, a conceptual coup d’état minus the concrete that makes the logic of love a long-lasting mental cement. I have pulled the basic idea apart, the lens from the line like a lien, so that it might keel over and die a kaleidoscope, made even further abstract by the justified lanes of these reflective shards. I’ve walked you through the exhibitionist known as paradise, bit by lushly layered bit. I’ve faced the lens and allowed it to name me, but I have other names. Forward we crawl bright as the splash of utopia it takes to artificially light an entire generation, the brave surface breaking like wet flash, the gaslight beneath the oil spill. A young student, who eventually became a very theatrical Slam Poet, once said, “I like the gymnastic parts of photography but not the math parts.” My guess is he feared the speed of decimals, the animal in the chimera, the lion in the lens break. You can’t make a triplet by adding a freeloader to one plus one. A third of the rent will still be due even when the line does not work. Stanzas are famous for roommate drama. Cameras, perpetual home repairs. No security deposit because your most dependable friend, your lens cleanser, has yet to repent. Too many dead specks of floating bacteria, Jesus Fish, twelve per picture. The lens is a lifeguard. The line, a shore. As swimmers, we had no use for “butter,” so we simply refocused the focal length of the stroke and said “fly” as if taking an esophageal photograph of the whole fat word would slow us down. Sleek slick in Speedo caps, we looked like the biology that makes life, the whole pool of soft contact lens plastic we wished we could see ourselves diving into. No shot of the Trop, the big tent where La Divine String Theory broke into the camera’s curriculum like a calculus of death-defying lust. Lid of eye nothing but a ladder back to Canada for some royal money. The purpose of travel is to unlearn home, to expose the vacant lots of vacationing. No more obstructions in the soil, red herring or false dichotomy.
Neither the poems nor the photographs are mine. I got them from the ornamental world. I was born of a lens, and I will die in line. I am known in other worlds as the picture of all words. First comes the clay, then comes the scaffolding (also known as craft), then the substance (also known as content). A bluesy quarrel, trading fours, as if upset to still be behind a page of bars—such a horizontal demise, so when you speak of poems, rhythmically speak. Accept no bribe, offbeat. No emotional appeal. Becoming a prize limits the mind. Coerced in the door toward a sort of skillful captivity or something of an art-holy hallucination, both the poem and the photograph rely on pulp phantoms, the pictured physicality of mental usury, anatomical amnesia, a visible lens and an invisible line. In the latter, the vision moves inward. In the former, outward. One circles, the other rings. Ku Klux, from the Greek kuklos, a lone “my” not a myth; another overused “our” doomed to an evil orchestration. Out of the lie comes the knot of nothing, not a teardrop of auto save, certainly not once the line has joined the Look Industry. In manual, fractured. Unless it is layered in levels of awareness, no photograph of paradise is capable of rescuing honesty. In automatic, all the facts have been raptured, fake checked. Stare as you may but staring is but a staircase of air, vapors caught by the solitude of cowardly storage—like a bad poem swayed into sentimentality by what the photographer did not mean to mean. One improvisation per visitation but visibly siblings. They say narrative arc but what they really mean is career goals, bottled. The last line break, the one above the medicine cabinet, looks down on the rest of the page. Perspective, superior. Stanza chest, S. Endangered, the language at the beginning of the line is elder to the language at the end of the line, not by age but by the position of its grammatical arrival, born in demand. It was cast from the projector first, long before consonants became the mandatory membrane surrounding vowels. First in meaning and first in madness but best in sin, tense.
Through the lens, the lair, I’ve visited the last line break, the cartilage and carnage, the veil of tendon and bone—vision’s bountiful boundary, the result of being occupied, a border patrolled breadwinner divided into piecemeals. I’ve lived like a lens. From pentameter to Pentax, all evolution is formerly iambic—a combination of verse drama, photographs with feet, every tenth syllable an indication of art marketplace need. Most leverage is linguistic, my work and the new I. Continuous, no more spaces between exposures except the small lanky glory of hurdles—rejection letters and rejected lovers commonly placed near the tray of discarded drafts, photography’s phraseology of image hawkers curled beneath the level of letter-basement where, seeing unseen, poetic failure (like the future) is trapped in forthcoming. A fiery fort is coming. Line breaks burn slow. Once a strategy for comprehension, reading between the lines no longer requires showing your ID to the librarian who named her child Sensitivity. At the end of the line break, one of those photo editors who graduated from turning contact sheets into crossword puzzles, the dragnets of tic tac toe, minus zero real world application. To lasso the ache of achievement, choose one of the circled images then get back out there and yank something new from reality, some equation of a plastic dispute that interfaces with free speech. Photographs lack the ability to talk and yet some of us can hear the oral print being pressed onto paper by the printer. The sacrificial ink that bleeds significance. I try to make, without the evidence of external judgement, photographs that roll off the tongue like a filibuster of hot air balloons attached to all four of its screaming edges. Fly or float, this fusion, this draft of confused written mixed media, this hybrid of hype man and montage mogul, struggles to lift itself above the exultations of the town crier where, thanks to the loan sharks of rickety lyricism, the lens at the end of the line break barters with the bad guys, snapping the neck of what we used to call the big picture and not a series of app-infested filtered moments of confessional self-devotion broken into by elevated teasers, the toy avatars of Gen This and Gen That, the prison to martyr to mayhem program in effect, a rash of bacterial tweets trying to shame aim, emotional emulsion seared.
Despite the georgics of the Bismarck Palm, there’s never enough storage for a file as large as Virgil, never enough virtue. Angry culture: the lens sacrifices the first word, the line worships the last. Still learning the ABCs of light, still in search of abandon warehouse space to practice drawing my camera like a gun, no longer using hotel rooms to time how long it takes to deliver the perfect poetry reading. A routine is a pattern. A pattern, a ritual, our protagonist (the one with the seasonal schedule of duels) ousted from the route preventing anyone but the deepest seekers to discover him. Discussed only in shadows where whispers go to marinate. The black and white fracture of nostalgia, a flexor strain not a break. Another vigil. The evolution of dig to dig it and digit to digital is older than the leg-loose ligaments that once bound fee to free and feel to film. Lens, a search engine––for work and for play. Line, the reliable stitch between loves. In the time that God did not create, the beginning of time, poems broke up with poets to be with other poems––not a good look for humanity. A unification not a separation, spending cut by both interested parties. Whether the lines sings or not, each registered break beat is a lens, an entity, from head voice to chest voice to vocal fry. Even as the spirit soars, deep is low. Cherokee cheek bones, our cherry tree. A whole nation, the original Iroquois Federation, chopped down by book reviewers in drugstore frames. No flag to be found worth being faithful to, adulterous prescription half-flown like stork-ish gnome. Known for being more monochrome than monogamous, the inner native has been double-crossed by more than one subject. Eyes so late, isolate. No owes. To my anatomy, no train to the past not even in photographs where there is nothing of merit left, not even a worried face of pimples. An altruism, lens absorbent and line abnormal. Odd number of dodo eggs in the per diem pantry, unedited yet edible, protection from the parasites I’ve already conquered. A new lens on life, half online and half off. Mistaken for peace, the paradise at the end of the line break is not a place of rest, not the last plot of earth ever reused, not the final focal length of oral growth. Lens, line. Lens, line. Lens, line, it’s alluring, a repetitive lender that attracts the flower of writing, a signature that blossoms in the soil of poetry alongside aesthetic sects like the private sector where the heart rejects what’s written on the palm. Up-tempo top, ballad bottom, the lens at the end of the line break consumes its own leash.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.