Banality of travel, every subway car
we’ve all seen in photos: Hong Kong, New York,
Moscow, Tokyo, London or Toronto;
just a visual fragment is the detritus
of modern consciousness, your subway cars
mean nothing more to me, less, than my own

How can I see inside Japanese existence or
the mysteries of the Russian soul, or feel Filipino sense of complacent helplessness
and anger (their entire stock of able, active men, and those men’s women and children,
wiped out by E. Otis and J. Smith in just a few years).

I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States,

Resonance

Images will no longer do.

Continue reading Transit Images at uncoy.

So this is how Hans felt
before the war. Hitler’s voice drones
on the radio. A toothbrush in his hands,
his eyes in the mirror. Surely,
he thought, it won’t come to this.
Level heads will prevail. Not twenty years
ago the cannons went silent.

But this time my bleary eyes admit,
it’s been seventy years. Three generations
lived and died with just whispers
in the jungles or Balkan piano clatter.
An inconsequential hundred thousand
Arab children may have starved.

Nothing real, nothing like this. Slow heartbeat,
the distant boom of the end, absolute.
Hans’ wife pooh-poohed the menace then
as mine now. Take Gretta with you my love
while you’re out with the dog. Fresh air
will do you all good.

Continue reading Presburg Mirror at uncoy.

The stage is a wooden arena, with benches on all sides including one before the audience. Above the arena sits a drummer who immediately begins to beat a large skinned drum. Talented deep rhythms, slightly foreign to our ears.

A man in a blue martial arts costume stands in the center. Drift in various young men and women in combative poses. The fight begins.

Long bouts of shadow fighting eventually bring in some long legged blondes in the back to watch the combat (Marietta Kro, Lucia Patoprstá). The dojo atmosphere moves towards that of film noir. The long legged blondes end up in writhing embraces with bands our half naked fighters. Very sexy, moving us quickly towards B movies and Russ Meyer and Tarantino.

The two Blondes Marietta Kro Lucia Patoprsta

Group sex where one woman submits to multiple partners against her will appears to be a recurring them in Ulrich’s work.

Continue reading Rumi in Flammen: Jochen Ulrich at Landestheater Linz at uncoy.

dark side of the lens whales

dark side of the lens gulls

dark side of the lens diver

This film is supposed to be about surfing and underwater photography.

For me it is about the sea and it is a paeon to this monument of beauty spanning most of the planet.

I see this and I wonder how we continue to relentlessly despoil this unrepairable wonder with oil spills, deslickers, polluted rivers, radioactive waste.

The wickedness of civilisation, at least in its capitalist extant, is to borrow the profit of today against the misery of tomorrow. Man has been at this a long time though. The folk of Easter Island expired when they consumed their entire food chain.

Even archeology has not been enough to sober world leaders apart from that fleeting glimpse of a president Gore.

Continue reading Paean to the Oceans: Dark Side of the Lens at uncoy.

Here’s the missing link..

I’ve rarely heard such awful readings of fine poetry in my life. Of all the female voices only Laura’s reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall would have got you out of high school in Canada in the late eighties.

After suffering through the female readings, I had no stomach left for the men at all.

It makes me laugh that a certain Google Adwords expert is praised as a fine speaker in English – he sent me an audio CD to promote his products (the guide is not bad) – it’s like listening to a bad radio commercial promoting AmWay. Hey, that’s his other life.

Continue reading Really Awful Online Poetry Readings at uncoy.

….

if a scientist believes not in the the chemistry of existence
but in the holy spirit, reincarnation and destiny
what is left for the hewer of words or the drawer of sentiment
to believe in but the stoned and impossibly beautiful?

and so we shall believe and live to see another sunrise
and forget time and tomorrows and remember that these days
and nights are ours and ungone belong to us, our small sliver
of the universe to see and to live as we once kissed.

Continue reading Eines Unmögliches Schones Mädchen at uncoy.

Ohne Anna und ohne Wein
Manchmal muss Mann leben.

Continue reading A Christmas Poem for Anna at uncoy.

Continue reading No Jane Austen Heroines… at uncoy.

you have to fight every day to stop censoring yourself. and you never have anyone else to blame when you do. what happens to artists is that it’s not that somebody’s standing in their way, it’s that their own selves are standing in their way. the compromise really isn’t how or what you do, the techniques you use, or even the content, but really the compromise is beginning to feel a lack of confidence in your innermost thoughts. and if you don’t put these innermost thoughts on the screen then you are looking down on not only your audience but the people you work with, and that’s what makes so many people working out there unhappy. these innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you and once you lose them then you don’t have anything else.

Continue reading Self-censorship: the inner voice and the artist in society at uncoy.

the comfort of a sixteen-century house.
life after war, health after disease
and plenty after famine.
death in bed as grandparents.

the courtyard

in the darkness, my bicycle gleams.
a small golden ribbon still flutters
on the back stays, reminder that once
what mattered most a radiant smile

the street

from this one, who writes now,
bereaved of ribbons and dinners
and your soft touch in the night
parting late into the unknown.

the air

city gusts buffet dead sentiment
streetlights force the eyes to see.
cobblestones clatter, voices rattle
discordant medley of saturday nights.

the park

somewhere here you part into
pointless divertissement, satisfied
your best was done.

Continue reading into the night at uncoy.