Monthly Archives: September 2014

September 27, 2014 · 10:04 pm

Fault for the Fall

You’re just being cruel
We did all we could
To pretty things up

Trying our best to clean up after you
But it’s a lost cause and we know it
Tree-loads of leaves are down

Seeds strewn around
Berries rotting on the ground
The sidewalks are all sticky
With odd fruit no one wants

It’s cold
Getting fat is making sense
Already, some of us have given in

Frost and cold fog
Chase away birds
You’re holding summer hostage
Isn’t that enough?

Not only that
When I walked out the door
You threw my hat in the dirt

And your killing spree
Goes on and on
I know for a fact
The doe on the highway
Was innocent

*
– text by Tullio DeSantis

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September 23, 2014 · 10:36 am

Late in October

Playing the odds of one more warm day
the last katydid is hanging tough
while a mantis prepares for hara-kiri.

Nervous chipmunks pool intelligence.
They’re drawing up secret maps
and hiding them in burrows.

I hear each year they forget
where they’ve stashed them
and so must struggle like the rest of us
blinded by frozen eyelids
stumbling, falling
toward utter hibernation.

Squirrels are in my face
staring right through me
peering for nuts I may have hidden
behind my ears.

I guess I’m no threat now
compared to what’s coming.
The ones who can’t take the pressure
throw themselves in front of cats.

*
– text by Tullio DeSantis

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September 20, 2014 · 1:08 pm

Art of Collaboration

Under the same sun

Beneath oceanic atmosphere

Her breath leaves her lungs

A few seconds pass before it enters his

He says, “The world is…”

“…broken” – she completes it

It is her breath after all

Her mind at work here in her space

He tells her science verifies

The cave painters were mostly women

They compare the length of their fingers

We know we are ruined

It’s an argument we don’t have to have

He says the problem is men

Too much testosterone

We’re destroying ourselves

Addicted to thought

Controlled by belief

Money moves us

This wears us down

Wrecks our thinking

We lose the capacity for empathy

And we are repulsed by our bodies

What are we doing?

What is the message?

“Artists are shamans,” she says.

On the wall – how it is to be human

Living and dying speeding through time

From the cave to the street

How it is to have bodies created by sex

Deep generative parts

We are creations of desire

Needing rescue

We say these things to each other

To make them real

“Artists are shamans.”

“This is why I contacted you.”

“I know.”

– text by Tullio DeSantis

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September 19, 2014 · 5:44 am

The Tongue of the Universe

“The Tongue of the Universe” – Tullio DeSantis with Dee Shapiro – 2014
(click image for larger view)

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September 16, 2014 · 11:48 am

Some Fall Poems

Some Fall Poems
*****

September

once, sound was all above me
buzz of crickets, shrill cicadas
shook the trees

absent now
instead it’s the sharp crunch
of insect bodies
mixed with acorns
beneath my boots

old leaves too
one day they’re tree-bound and wind-rustled
and the next day they show up
down here

this transference
seems fraught with some meaning
it is beyond me
like the warmth that slips farther
away each day

I know it is gravity
that does it
but it seems
much heavier than that

*****

Whitetail

four million years moving through this hidden place
deep in your blood knowing it by heart
it has always been yours but now I share your secrets
you are everywhere these barren days
sex-crazed leaving traces on hard ground
on trees
making mistakes

showing yourself is your fatal flaw
you’re giving yourself away and you don’t know that
you cannot help yourself
I understand this behavior in my own flawed heart
sensing me in your space
I sense you in mine
we will both die here

but you are more beautiful
and this is why
you will be the first to die

*****

Forecast

To the mantis on the wall
I’m a shadow cast by clouds
cool stillness
interrupting the warmth
of autumn’s fading sun

Lithe green conscious machine
400 million years of insect evolution
unfazed by my superior intellect

Caught in that moment
of self-doubt
and sensing the presence
of an ancient predator
I retreat and anticipate
the uncanny evolution of empathy

*****

text by Tullio DeSantis

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September 11, 2014 · 10:59 pm