Personal Work is a section dedicated to my own artistic projects past and present.
Basilica Poem was written for a musical performance I did in 2016 as part of an exhibition in the gallery space of Basilica Hudson in Hudson, NY. (I recently wrote about a visual poem piece I did for the same show.) It was an early attempt at something like what I eventually did on my 2021 poetry album Dematerialize.
In 2021, I unearthed this poem and paired it with some ink drawings I made. The images aren’t directly related to the poem, but they portray objects and environments I use for channelling creativity.
Basilica Poem
unimagine the page falling out of a notebook I photograph, study, compose in a medium that doesn't exist fluid lines of a drawing repeating transmissions while my goal is to have no form some kind of redemption in the parts between things, elusive sectors where I dog ear pages, want to own the atmosphere in the city above me, permeate space, arcane, covert, mutable dissolves in trance, awake in minds I show up sulking to fluorescent basements seeking my slayer rising in the basilica gold turned suddenly to lead when I touch it, failing to synchronize over and under-syncing no such thing where we meet rattling obsessions like beadwork affixed erased and rewritten mistakes eaten up, I say, by the verses coming so censored through the mouth of one seen only on film, its flesh swallowed between images on the move fire blazing every inch of skin a radiant poem I become so light when magnets are heavy and the sound of the snare snaps toward you like the crack of a whip ophidian tongues lash and crush juicing chemical jaws bottled up in labs bargained and begged earth’s pieces like desperate stained glass shards coloring your core so says a drunken scrawl on the inside of a book jacket the perfect truth and the perfect light the hardest, most electrified thought I think is, your soul is nowhere near to mine not in space or in time holding empty flowering void far out and ceaseless between you and I keep saying no, I am not a quitter
