challenge: post;
no overthinking.
take a ghost,
black eyes unblinking,
lonely, drifting,
yearning wraith;
add a just-
deceased lass
Faith.
have an afterlife, you two.
have some ghost-kids. have a crew.
have a picnic on the moon–
post complete,
and
none
too
soon.
🙂
clumsy
stumble
wobble
nearly fall
obstacles define you
navigation
of a wall
tends to misalign you
breathing ragged
eyesight blurry
strategy
a mess
don’t be jagged
what’s your hurry?
long live
Clumsiness!
..
Friends, I am still in the running for Johnny Depp’s The People’s Artist competition. If you would like to vote for me, this is the link:
peoplesartist.org/2026/g-bowers
This round’s voting is through May 22nd. Thank you!
you get taken out of the thusfar when you die
and are brought back when you are reborn.
flour and water are mixed and flattened
and briefly brought to flame and tortilla life
reborn how?
your birthday comes and a You comes to memory.
and the tortilla encases spiced meat and green chilies
and a mix of cheeses
a poem you wrote long ago is reread
and the reader hears your voice, thinks your thoughts.
and is plated with salsa and sour cream
and a cooling mix of shredlettuce and tomato dice
you will be dreamt. a cousin will mention you,
sounding like you. there are photo-traces of you.
and the diner carefully puts salsa on every bite,
sour cream on some, and when the burrito is gone
it becomes an indivisible part
of the diner’s thusfar.
one eye squinted shut the other bleary
nightshirt x-men ’97 underwear camo (????)
pills to take teeth to clean stubble to shave away
then a shower washes evil away
and coffee provides a fortifying elixir
..
five days a week for more or less 150 weeks
this is the way things begin
the odd and reassuring way I say
“gentleman, start your engine”
My beloved, bluesy Hawaiian shirt had left-side shredding beyond repair. I placed it on my front room floor to take a farewell photo, but the front & center, arms-at-sides pose made the poor shirt look like he was facing a firing squad, so I moved him around, and lo and behold, he resisted on direction, flowed in another, acquiesced in yet another. He ended up looking like a cartoon profile head of Picasso with a touch of Mussolini, depicted cubistically, the shirt tags providing the whites and the beads of his beady eyes. At the top of the back of his head he seems to have hatched a spectral descendant of the Warren Publications narrator Uncle Creepy.
This is an example of ephemeral art, Friends. It existed only until, seconds after I took the photo, I picked up the shirt and dropped it in the waste-paper basket for conveyance to the dumpster. The photo not only memorializes it, though; it extends its existence digitally, and multiplies it by as many people who see this photo. It will, as popular parlance has it, live rent-free in your head for the rest of your life.
I have been posting an image from my artwork daily in gratitude of the friends who have voted for me in the People’s Artist competition hosted by Johnny Depp. Today I offer this acrostic portrait of my fellow Glendale High School alumna Colleen Kennedy, who had a distinguished academic career at the College of William and Mary; the double-acrostic I made of her name is one of the few I have done with all the rhymes true rhymes, and a pretty near metronomic meter-faithfulness to boot. The illustration illustrates that I illustrate my acrostics more often than not, and is based on a sweet photo Colleen provided–WOW, that was twelve years ago.
Thanks again, Colleen!
mosaic stochastic
few variables
but infinite possibilities
myriad myriad patterns
..
diced turnip floats
and crowds into an array
and the dicer of the turnip
suddenly remembers a byzantine mosaic
he saw in a book fifty years ago
..
the probability
of that snapshot memory
floating to the top of his thoughts
leapt from vanishingly small
to certainty
..
our memories cram a landfill
in the hinterlands of our souls
but make the right soup
and all is available
When you take a pot pie from the freezer to zap it, it is rock hard. So when you try to follow the instructions to put slits in the crust, the pie responds with extraordinary resistance. You have to do a Norman Bates with your knife to get a good slit…
Unless you first start the microwave, stop it about a minute and a half in, and THEN slit your slits effortlessly and much more cleanly.
I have been hacking away at pot pies since the 20th Century and it has never occurred to me to do this!
..
Where do you take a cat who has stopped purring?
The Repurr Shop.
..
Here, fulfilling a commitment to my People’s Artist voters, is image #7 of 10 of my artwork. This photo was taken in situ after my “Shuttered Bird” was juried into the Glendale Arts Council’s 62nd Annual juried show early this year.
One with Clay, Image and Text 