there is an open, asking door
beyond a wall that won’t be passed,
know that it can be.
Upon the stony face
I have driven my weak form,
felt nothing give and nothing take,
… sisyphus…???
- A. Katz
an unfinished poem
Anonymous asked: Where did you come from? Where did you go? Where did you come from cotton eye joe?
Oh, shapely warm beast,
ancient giver of dreams,
I bid you bear me (at last)
away from this heavy night,
and watch over the dark
where I sleep.
- A. Katz
this is a higher resolution version of a drawing that i posted a long time ago.
i had named it “pom granite”
Dancer/Age
Do not fret for having missed
a step in this decades-long dance,
while distracted by your stars
and fussing fingers (or any number).
I was distracted by the thought
of iridescence drawn in crayon,
it was a stranger child’s version
of a bubble in the Sun.
Cut very hard into the heart of years,
empty them upon your page,
and let the colors run.
For the dance that truly dares
to move is ever in our step,
the decades made a moment,
when the moonlight makes you, dancer,
the most honest kind of ageless,
beautiful and barely there,
like the bubble in the sun.
I aim to treat you as the child did,
but with words instead of wax,
I mean to rise and find the circles
within circles, join the dance.
- Abraham Katz
the Joke
a brace of the well-bred, the well-dressed, and
insufferably well-read, somehow real readily unwell,
were standing and smoking a safe distance from the
temples, a safe distance from each other, chewing
on talk that is got and shuffling slowly, deeper
into the alley, when they heard the Joke. it came
down upon them from the underworld, or from some
other world, was told in a lingering all-at-once,
like a Pollock splash of paint, a joke at everything’s
expense, and they went laughing. the busy laugh a
tuning band, ululating between imperfect fifths and
sixths, it made to explain the grits in which they had
grown. but their mother the grain of the wood and the
space between words did not laugh. she lay listening,
bled sugar and soot into the sand where her kind had
gone to rest as beaten fragments. she thought of the
sun in the rain, and how that was really something.
she turned to her left and she sang, but only the
dead ever heard her, and only a few ever cared.
- H. Nag
i’ve been working on a very lengthy piece of writing, as well as a new album, and therefore have not had much to share here lately. i hope to have something soon.
i don’t know if i will share either of these things i’ve been working on though, i’m really not sure if i can. i probably will
Ben.
Brett took took this photo of me. i think it turned out really great. it was quite dark in the room and the shot was pretty casual, so to me this photo, along with his other work, is very impressive.
(via leadmouth)
for a couple of weeks, about a month ago, i laid with my dream journal and favorite pen each night. i wanted to see if i could write in my sleep. i couldn’t, but then, i also couldn’t usually sleep. however, while somewhere between sleep and the waking world, i did manage to scribble down the last, mostly incoherent thoughts as they passed unhindered through my semi-conscious mind. they are poorly written, and i’m not sure what some of the words are, but i thought the result was sort of interesting. the marks and scribbles above and around the words are a pretty good indication of how long it took me to fall asleep that night, or that morning. they are not in chronological order, and i’m having a hard time arranging them properly, but i guess that doesn’t really matter. these are the nine pages.
“the beach”
i used up some super 8 film last summer, the last summer, on the coast of lake michigan. we were in manistee, and then by glen arbor and the dunes. i can’t say for sure, but i think this might be some of the last kodachrome film that will ever be processed.
the soundtrack i’ve added features a bit of “hollow press” by grouper, from her split with roy montgomery, and the song “a hundred languages” by dirty beaches, from the seaside ep.
a candle
there is a last candle burning at the end of the room,
a windless room that might gladly close upon me,
it moves not unlike my brother’s daughter, and far from
unlike the way i’ve again foundered, floundered, fell
winter pale with what hasty final thought fails to find
its way out from my everything, for it is from everything
that love comes. if i have not waned into my waxes,
grown feverish and dancing at last, by the light of my
own receding, bowed hard into the cool darkness that
threatens and that welcomes, it will surely come to
pass, just as said glass kept wick and wax will soon
be put out, with that happy birthday smell i’ve come
to loathe.
-Abraham Katz and Harvey Nag
