This Is Not Art
: an assemblage
“The Americans call photography an art. They have
galleries, institutions, exhibitions. But what I’m doing
is not art.” Don McCullin
Cholera victim. Eyes rolled back into her head.
Cradled in arms of her husband as an offering to
Death.
Shabby woman of no particular age. Standing in
her, three-rungs-below-hell, dwelling. “Rats the
size of cats,” her son says. Whoring is a way of
life here. You have to eat. So do the boy with no-future
eyes.
An American soldier in Hue city. During the offensive.
Throwing a grenade amid the ruins toward an unseen
enemy. Seconds before his arm is blown off
by a sniper’s bullet. Before another soldier takes his
place. Throws a grenade. Is shot. Before another
man is ordered forward.
Three heavily armed, cocky young American soldiers
in South East Asia. Their captive forced to his
knees, arms trussed behind his back, rope around his
neck like a leash. Eyes blindfolded with a dirty once-
white rag. The village behind them about to burn.
Three blind black women fast walking in bare
feet past heavily armed guerrilla force on the last
days of the Smith regime in Rhodesia.
American army chaplain lifting an confused, dazed old
woman from bombing raid rubble.
A face only portrait of a starving boy in Biafra.
Oh, the Humanity!
Insanity: a poem with an epigraph and a closure by
The Poet Spiel
“It’s a good thing to die at least once in a lifetime.”
Life had become a place where
you could fall asleep in a world
that adhered to moral principles
and natural laws, and wake up in
another where all those rules had
been suspended. Even the environment
unrecognizable. All the buildings,
public spaces transformed into
creations by narcotects, city planners
on cocaine using blueprints crafted
from splatter art like those pock-
marked Bill Burroughs’ paint smeared
canvases randomly created by shotgun
spray patterns and arterial blood.
All the faceless men and women
stick figures fashioned from coat
hangers, high tension wire art made
bright with electrical charges that
illuminate the night. Nothing moves
but the poison gas clouds, the blood red
sickle of a waxing moon.
“What if, in fact, the world does not end
but just goes on and on and on….and….”
After Reading What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations,
by George Looney
Is this how the dead
assemble, by fire light,
on river’s edge near
where the spires give
themselves to the flame?
The night is charred by
all this burning, are smoking
screens that descend from
blackened clouds as secrets
contained by ash. No reason,
to direct water where
total conflagration reigns,
the passion of all this fire
must be spent, consumption
the end of this, of all things
mortal, of all things made
by man, even that, even those
who purport to rule the world.
One Life Is Not Enough
after artwork by Edward Boccia
for the allegorical voyages of all
these independent minded souls.
For the men rescued from a filthy house
of cards, pulled from the wreckage
of a breaking hall of mirrors
unfolded now as an accordion,
a shaped enclosure reduced to shards
of crystal lodged in the near perfect
eyes of a princess dreaming of her
mythic lover. For that half-man, half-beast-
thing, sent in exile to sea with a fleet
of confusion boats, consigned to
onerous duties, trials, and elemental
war. For, a lifetime of tasking before
the tempestuous days of false ecstasies.
For dancing on the heads of ship to shore
lynch pins, pulled from the tortured
flesh of soon-to-be-sacrificial virgins,
defilement inevitable as the monstrous
heart excavated from a sacred ruinous
place beyond understanding. For an
inexactness tiles fitting into a mosaic-
a map of love more lasting than all t
he misleading dreams that layered,
obstructive dead adhere to, blocking
the way inside; here, at land’s end,
the final choices are offered and
made. For the man with the lasting vision
is the one who come out whole on
the other side of night.
This war, that war, the next war, war everlasting:
with lines from Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
“Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly with Death;
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in one hand.”
Wilfred Owen, “The Next War”
Oh, brave new world of gravity rainbows,
long range death by guided missile, satellites,
drones;
all those Space X unscheduled midair disassembling,
air space disruptive, debris spewing on residential
homes and gardens;
all those air show explosions casting shrapnel
to the wind like Turner fireworks falling,
like Owen’s fleeting flares;
Oh, those happy days in the arms of death
like close combat in the green, all those mad minute
tracer rounds before the final fight,
before the shock and awe of carpet bombing
civilian targets, concussive assaults, in great
fireballs forged and deadly as Death From Above;
all those polluted by stealth bombers and super sonic
jet fighters, skirting toxic clouds and the acidic rain
that falls after;
Oh, the odd beauty of it all, the way the world
is ending with a blustery tweet, a nuclear winter
without Strangelove’s unearthly chorus singing,
“Until we meet again, I don’t know when…”
“War’s a joke for me and you
While we know such dreams are true”
Siegfreid Sassoon
Post Card to Thompson May 6, 20–: The Poet at Kurt Cobain
Landing wearing a rubber dog mask
and hand painted answers to
Kurt C questions, Private Keep Out
He wrote Anthems for the Doomed
Youth: not Wilfred Owen but Cobain.
He’d be a one name rock star if he
were living now. So famous he didn’t need
a first and a last one, just a brand name. For
personal appearances all he world have to do
is show, act cool, preen. Just being was enough.
Mega.
Man.
Went directly from his mansion to
rock and roll heaven with a shot gun in his mouth.
Fuck Go, fuck the two hundred dollars,
fuck Courtney Love.
He was already in Nirvana. What more
could he possibly need?
“I say shot gun, shoot em ‘fore he run now….”
Junior Walker