In a field of shorn wheat
I jerk off into the stars
and dig in the dirt until my fingers bleed.
This is Nebraska.
Nothing like Iowa.
In Iowa it would be a field of harvested corn.
I’d still masturbate.

I take a drink of deep water and weep.
Cry myself to sleep
and dream of potatoes.

But that’s Idaho.

Would you think me mad if I said god speaks to me
or would you think me madder still if I said he didn’t but I believe?

Shining women scream and I taste the sounds of their words
and hear such colors as to make gods jealous.
I still feel pain.

I’m a simple man, not holy at all, not a praying man, too simple by far.
Feed me completely.

Whisper words into my soul:
Love and lust and compassion. Music and desire and death. Addiction and prayer and
weakness. Water and loss and orgasm. Vindication and forgiveness and nothing else.

Allow me this full harvest.
And under a cold moon I will rest with my cock in my hand.

christopher…. ‘08

My most recent poem. It still needs a bit a bit of work, since, as has been pointed out to me, Idaho isn’t in the Midwest.

I look like I am doing art therapy. I’d have to say this is actually a good shot, but it makes me look pretty stupid, like I’m recovering from a car crash and learning how to talk and use my hands again.

I have a few addictions. Dexter, crane games, spicy food, and ugly shirts. I’m going to post a picture of me in one of these shirts every Saturday for the foreseeable future. I haunt thrift shops looking for truly evil shirts. Usually I have to merely settle for the obnoxious. I don’t remember where I found this one, (probably a Goodwill), but the photo of this shirt doesn’t do it justice. This shirt needs to be seen live and in motion to truly get the epileptic seizure inducing effect.

This was one of the first shirts I picked up that I considered ugly, and I still wear it enough to have made it worth the few dollars I paid for it. I love buying secondhand clothes. My clothing budget is small, I get to shop more often, and if I buy something that doesn’t turn out well I’ve lost little cash. I have rules about what truly constitutes an ugly shirt. I’ll go into some of these in later shirt posts. Once I get a year of these posts behind me I’ll make up an image gallery with all the pictures in one place. I’m thinking I can make a year’s worth of posts out of my shirt buying (I am an addict). I don’t have 52 yet, but I haven’t stopped buying either. We’ll see. Check in every Saturday.

This weekend I am going to a friend’s place to play in his wife’s studio. I’ve been making twisted and malformed masks that I then torture with bolts and nails and such. I am up to nine masks created so far, but have only shot images of the first three (I’m including those in this post). I haven’t seen the ones I did last time, so am anxious to see how they survived the firing. Long term I want a dozen ones I am happy with (at least one of the ones so far isn’t that exciting to me, but I don’t hate any of them). I’ll probably end up making two or three more this weekend. I have more ideas than I can do in a day.

I want to turn around and take these masks, shoot pictures of them, and then make another image/poetry/photo gallery like I did with my “A Bloody Dark Pastryman” project. Then I want to embellish the masks and put them into wooden boxes and sell them. I’ll probably finish this project in 2010.

Originally, the idea for these masks came to me when I was staying at a monastery and wrote the poem “Making Baby.” My intent was to create a few masks, then take one and smash it, so I had mask pieces. These I was going to to put in a shadowbox with the poem and other found items, but I wasn’t unhappy enough with any of the masks to actually smash one.

I’d really like to get more images posted on one of my sites. Maybe this weekend I will make a concerted effort to get all 9 of them photographed. If I am on the ball, will even try to get “before” shots of the ones I make on Saturday.

[Update:] I found images of my second set of three masks. The can be seen after the jump.

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I sometimes wonder if it’s wrong that I actually like the things I write. All the time I used to hear, “You are your own worst critic.” I don’t really believe this. There are plenty of people out there willing to piss all over anything creative anyone does. So I write what I would like to read. Enough authors I have met have said this to me, but the first was Steven Brust. “I write what I would want to read and hope others dig it as well,” he said. I believe this is a fair enough paraphrase.

Anyway, yesterday I wrote about how it had been over a decade since I’d written a poem. Follow the jump if you want to read the first poem I wrote when I took back up my pen. I still like it. Let me know what you think.

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