I stand at the intersection and listen
to the obsessed buzz of the pale walk-light man,
a man never known to actually walk,
as I scan the streets for my wife.
She comes across my eyesight’s horizon
carting the wheeled bag as she hustles to make
her train to Boston. Honey, I tell her, I’m
taking another night here by myself
if I can get a room. Her eyes widen
and film a little but she knows what I mean.
I hurry to the hotel and secure one of two rooms left.
After the evening reading, where labia and clitoris words
resound the Universalist sanctuary, I find my new room,
stream Mahler’s Fifth through tiny notebook speakers,
and revise two poems I’ve carried for thirty-six hours.
But the bed is vast, much larger than last night’s.
It swallows this alone poet’s post-midnight collapse.
Worth Ten Thousand Words? © TJ Edson Art Studios 2013
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David always does good work. I was there for a small part of the poem’s genesis (not knowing there was even a poem in the works).
I like this poem I think it works really well with TJs art, thoughts?
I think it’s a good pairing with my poem. It doesn’t represent any of the imagery directly – but then again, there’s not much direct visual imagery in the writing. It’s both vivid and also reminds me of the blissfully miasmic state I was in after two solid days in Salem. Thanks, TJ.
Thanks, Chad – and thanks again for the posting on FB. Jason and I had a few good talks during the poetry festival, so I wanted him to have this one, made on site.
What I like about the poem and art pairing is that the art is based on a series of shots of a traffic light
Now I see that – I didn’t see it before. Very cool.
Well I’m glad you submitted thanks David
Sometimes, working with less information can create this Murphy’s law effect. A kind of cosmic connection between two things that wouldn’t be related by nothing but conceptual intuition. Jason and I are very, very close friends. We stood outside of a mall at the intersection of capitalism and the night. He proposed that I take a picture of a street lamp stationed next to the mall. I took many utilizing a distortion effect on my stock android camera. Jason and I came back to my place and collaborated on different ideas for what we could do with all the pictures i had taken. we tooled around on photoshop. we shot the shit. he had to go home. i finished this an hour or two later. anything that you see that may or may not represent the imagery- the fact that this is 10 different pictures of the same street lamp that stands at an intersection, or that the inversion filter that creates a white light buzz that hums in the center of the images, or that the parking lot next to this lamp was full of cars that would be filled with men ‘never known to actually walk’, or how we scan such lots to spot whatever it is we look for… I could go on, but I won’t. I believe there are plenty of relationships between these two things here. And it is all coincidence. I never read your poem. Not until Jason put this up online. so all these relationships I see are merely what i felt from Jason’s direction.
I’m glad how it worked out, and I’m sorry if you don’t see any of the coinciding imagery that I see. any of it was pretty much a fluke anyway. Jason said what I was doing while we worked together was going to work well with your piece. i trusted him as i always do. I mean doesn’t that pink light in the middle from the inversion kind of look like, i don’t know, something pink with a hole, like vaginal?? Strangely enough, that’s what I was going for when I was altering those middle images. Weird coincidence, I guess. Cheers.
Hi TJ – great backstory. I was thinking and looking more literally at first – and also not really examining the second picture closely enough. But as I mentioned at first, even my first impression of the images coincided well with the state of mind in the poem. And now, of course, I see more there.