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The Burden by Hernan Bas

My heart is like obelisks. My poems are getting tinier and tinier like 21st century gadgets. Some people tend to have Daltonism during the Christmas season; infrared bubbles popping in the brain. People often equate blanks as being something naughty. “Why hide it?” they may think or say. Response: It is not hidden; it has just lost a little esteem. Blinking out & in & in & out. I wrote a poem today. It is called, I Wrote A Poem Today. The contents: “I wrote / a poem / today.” The audicity! The neeerrrve. I erupt through nerves, spin-out like tires, grease-spot on bluejeans, like dreaming in color: green skies, blue grass. Not the music. But, the music too. “Bohor” by Xenakis. Listen to that while writing. This is the perfect utensil for accompaniment when writing, this kind of music. Examples are fewer than found when one pants over observing too closely. Patti Smith looks as though she’d have bad breath. I am sorry, Patti. I am just a wild horse, running until I become a surmise of one’s ponderable iris. I crack myself up. Someone pick up the pieces.

Crushed into thought, cranium leaks wordage. The new-old year must mean that I am now old enough to walk around the edge of the swimming pool. The poo is ajar in your backyard when the dog “messes in the yard.” “Someone in town has a crush on you”—x2—repeated in the scent of spam. The conception of the no proof of a great mind is a man’s attempt to realize his great design is planted in mindbursts, underneath a thought, to be glanced into a haunt. Who would promise not to float seedily around popular space and countenance? One must wisely determine illustrationby living examples, as if with manual arms, like the sleight hand of a juggler. Investigated anatomical views, without study, without doctrination, will form logical groundwork, like steel, with the eye of a gyrfalcon, on an arctic coast, through one’s window-panes, beyond the glass, beyond the circumference of idealogy. The rain pours, floods as if assassinly, nature is always dressed properly like a brilliant mathematician. My gentlemany exercise possesses a greater force, not ever hinting, but like how an athlete will take the field as if the field were a ballroom.

I used to learn magic tricks when I was a teenager, and I would often perform them for various people, primarily family, just to see what their reactions would be. Even when I made mistakes, it was interesting the variety of reactions. This may be one reason why I find “trickery” and “surrealism” so interesting in all artistic aspects. It tends to leave one astounded, mystified and "wondering.” I, myself, like to feel that way, so in conceptual photography I try and focus on what I can do to at least create a “mysterious moment.”

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Jim Shepard: “The water nearest the ice seemed disturbingly calm.”

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Nature, like art, often takes me to greater heights, as “fresh and unexpected” as a formal parterre garden of boxwood and lavender in front of a mystical cottage. Instant atmosphere.

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Terry Gilliam: “Later, when I started university, I discovered great films by Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini (...) I became obsessed by all those foreign directors to such an extent that American films seemed rubbish. Actually, I didn’t want to see any more American films. Those films drove me crazy.”

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Sven Nykvist did things with a camera that no one will ever match. It is better to think of a poem than to write it down. “Hold that thought.” Literally holding it, like you would a freshly-picked flower. Noticing how every trend seemingly initiates (ignites) from genderly-tender blends that begin with celebrity-awe, the television’s eye duping the “common views” of citizens like an incomplete map that “searches” for the right hands, the gods and goddesses of the world being worshipped like academics.

The other day, I clamoured around a book store; every male squinting, their eyebrows like horizons, miniature Baracks—every female seemingly wearing vintage brown boots; their pants tucked into them. Each leg screaming: “We need a revival!” Heaven is cleared out. Observation is like learning words that are hidden. Instance is steered, Trompe-l’œil, all of these familiar scenes. Reserved progymnasmatas. Pure ekphrasis. Overtoned muteness, sleight-of-sight, the sky sheilded by grey.

Certain shames like holiday shopping prowlers, or why there is not more snow in that snowglobe sitting on the microwave next to opened packs of salt and pepper. The real question is how to block out these shames (shams) like reaching for a reflection, not to blink within the discipline of the mind.

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From Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: “My livid past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart.”

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Richard Hugo said that if you are really strange that you are always in enemy territory, and that your constant concern is survival. I say that if you are really strange you do not acknowlege it, because you do not know, like how a schizophrenic doesn’t know that he or she is a schizophrenic. I also wonder who the “wise man” was that told Mr. Hugo to never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.

Words of wisdom: Don’t ever clock your clock.

Jabès once said that the book of resemblances remains to be written. My response: Just paste a mirror to every page.

Or, would this be considered a “mania”? Like,

...What we are to understand in this matter of metamorphosis into wolves is that there is an illness doctors call lupine mania...

—from Cervantes’s The Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617)

The light at this hour exuviates a kind of exhaustless equanimity.

Go on and dive into my equilibrium. Feel that spasmodic whirlpool. I have dug through every room searching for certain parts of me—seemingly in vogue—vague leaps of faith. My brain has begun to develop a patina.

When I woke this morning, I was devoted to neutrals. I walked out of the bathroom devoted to painstaking productions of memory. Punched up with turquoise.

I found the shoeboxful of high school letters from girls that apparently found me interesting. I opened a few, read them, realized that these girls just needed a head to speak to. Wall space for paintings. I wondered if my face was still at the forefront of their Mind’s eye like their faces are in mine, or if the wicker of time has become the finest history. This is what it is to keep diaries and memoirs; some of them like the brutal front of a bloodthirsty guttersnipe. Familiarity is half-understood like the ant. Restraint and Balance, pack-rat Dynasties, agglutinated by the ethereal ribbed glass lanterns that flicker in the soul, artificial flavor added to memory. I placed the letters back into the box, back into the closet.

What I love about certain things is not about what they consist of, but instead what they are lacking.

Self-portrait by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich