cultures of consumption...

i actually did this piece before that nut-job was let loose in the white house. i've been thinking about cultures of consumption for a long time.

and now for something completely different...

'nuff said.

Calling Mary Kay

it's always bothered me how many women's magazines and women's product companies are owned by men. not that i don't wear make up, or recognize the pressure to conform to 'normal.'

nobody got hurt

[it's an org chart, get it?]

I left Key West for San Francisco

and an artist became an executive for a dot.com.

There is no way to keep your feet on both shores.

sum of her parts

she liked to pretend sometimes
she was more
than the sum of her parts

equal interest in people and medical dictionaries can keep me occupied for a long, long time.

inspired by prodigal summer

I am learning the language of seeds

the thinnest edge

all the troubled children
gather near the water

war is so damn hard on humans. even the ones who make it back.
and what an irony that the instrument that launches the sword is the pen upon the page

Dream of Anna

Love curls around my heart
like a snake
on a warm rock
in autumn

There were a few piece that made it into this series--The Dream Suite--that were influenced by other things I was reading at the time. This piece was influenced by Russian Poet Anna Akhmatova's [The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova] poem

Love.

Now, like a little snake, it curls into a ball,
Bewitching your heart,
Then for days it will coo like a dove
On the little white windowsill

Or it will flash as bright frost,
Drowse like a gillyflower...
But surely and stealthily it will lead you away
From joy and from tranquility.

It knows how to sob so sweetly
In the prayer of a yearning violin,
And how fearful to divine it
In a still unfamiliar smile.

I loved the imagery of the first stanza. So sweet. Then the descent into the tortured Russian soul :) . Two great reads on the evolution of the Russian characters. The Moon Goddess and the Son by Donald Kingsbury is a Neal Stephenson-type novel. Big mix of characters and ideas but one of the constant threads is the cold war and a section of the book in a really entertaining way covers the Russian character.

I pretty much only like my history told through fictional narrative, but hey, it works. Russka: The Novel of Russia was excellent, in that regard.

I could go on and on