As always, all art on my blog is created by me.
36 comments on Two Works of Art
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Shaman Posing for a Portrait 
Tribal Conflict -
November stilled.
Air hangs like ether
Carrying the distant sleepy
Songs of circular saws
Counterpoint of cars, and the
Periodic rise of a child’s laughter.
This sound seeps
Between definition and opaque
Holding fast to forgotten fields
Lost............In............Words
Found in wind-frayed books of years
Settled in greys and grasses
Ruffled by the hum of eyes.
Fall is a field of words.
The eastern part of the Columbia River Gorge. -
There is a crispness to clear cool fall days.
The leaves... wait for the first real rain.
Chestnuts, who fall first, appear like
Pebbles on the streets, eventually smashed
Into an orange/brown bumpy pulp pavement.
A stubborn rhododendron flower lingers
Hidden beneath summer cooked foliage
Hops a ride, sticking to the bottom of a shoe.
When the first real rain hits, there’s a warmth
Not as in heat or the first pinch of spring
More like putting on a coat, and the clouds
Come down to street level to mingle with
Pedestrians who have changed their gait
From brisk strides, bright postures, & loud talk
To walking with arms bundled tight, close
To their sides, sometimes crossed, heads bent
Under the slight heaviness of hats & hoods
In a silence which weighs nothing at all.
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The volcano is still a mountain
For it can catch clouds
Force the rain to fall
Sculpt nearby hills.
Gone is its snowy top
Thousands of feet lost
To air, sky, and atmosphere
Settled down to ash and dust.
But this just gives birth
To new open lands
Where the wild chipmunk
Is a bit more exposed, and
The eagle hangs upon new
Thermals and air currents
They...
Who live close know
The volcano is still a mountain.
The volcano invites you to watch
The slow tangle of clouds
Talk & tumble amongst themselves
The new grasses that make up
desert-like fields, inhabit space
Where tall evergreens once stood.
Creeks have been given new paths.
Even a group of crows
Crying in their best city voices
Cannot break the volcano’s presence.
They appear like children at a playground
Full of noise, laughter, bratty, and playful.
The volcano welcomes these tricksters.
Unlike the city, there is plenty of room for
Them to wander off and stillness returns.
Which is enough for you to notice.
Notice what the volcano wants you to see.
The distant lake sandwiched between
A valley under the veil of rain,
Small dune-like hills of old ash.
The cougar, elk, and mountain goat’s
Footprints, along with yours, embedded
In the leftover dust of the mountainside.
Fragile prints on top of bare earth.
But it is stillness.
That is the volcano's most important reveal.
For the sights that surround you
Stand still, as if they were painted time
Frozen on easel and canvas.
Here, you can look and see
With eternity in your eyes
Even though you know
Everything is forever temporary
And you are but a stroke of a paintbrush
That is still moist.
Mt. Saint Helens a week before the snow arrives. 
This image fascinated me. This is because it changes the perspective of seeing this view live. That’s a river down there and the lake in the distance is miles away. The Toutle River was scraped by all the sediment and debris from the volcanic explosion. Decades later, you can still see the leftover damage. Damage? -
Here’s a poem of mine published by Spillwords. To be honest, I’m not that impressed with their use of AI art. It changed the meaning of the poem. That’s how strong images play into words. I appreciate your support! T. Ahzio
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And I don’t know why I want to begin with and.
Perhaps, it’s because my life is a conjunction, where I’m continually moving from and to persons, places, and things.
Just like you, I’m always in the middle of something.
Yet, and is tricky.
One must be careful to avoid “this bad thing happened, and that led to this bad circumstance.”
One might try to mediate their way out of that kind of and with long engagements with commas, em-dashes - semi-colons; and (parenthesis.)
But that is precarious and can lead to stringing things out for too long.
I think the answer is found by being careful with ands and taking time and patience to produce good ands.
Some ands that I have planned out have become successful, such as writing and revising.
I think one of the coolest is “We met and fell in love.”
And an and can be friendly and downright cute.
How could pralines and cream exist without a nice and to bring them together?
And what about the ampersand?
How many symbols can look cool and bring clauses together at the same time?
Hyphen, em-dash? They don’t come close.
Where would we be without ands?
The beginning? Nowhere to go? The end, plain, simple, uneventful?
So, I guess my desire to start with and is my way of honoring the conjunction, for this ode is a continuation from all my writing before to all my writing to come.
Pronouns, proper names and objects are wonderful places to begin, and I highly recommend them, and I wouldn’t be writing without them.
But nothing would continue for anything or anybody without an and.
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Cylindrical thoughts caught in symbols
Covered by an outer celluloid
Upgraded with playbacks and reruns
Of old friends and fictions who are everyone
They were, will, and want to be,
Births, rebirths, death, and immortality
I speak in repetition, stumbling into you again
No wonder gravity forms balls and circles
Our dialectic, a language of insomnia
That living lip sync of teeth and tongue
That make up the shapes of ghosts
Crawling like faint shadows of moving clouds
Our fleshy hearts tethered to the whirl
Internal, speaking of the external
Of clocks mistuned inside the unsteady continuum
With our linear kissing and stove top stuffings
Perhaps this is our mistake
Caught inside the act of noise
Trying to explain the hyacinth
“Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
Speach vanishes, with the incoming of golds
Browns, yellows, and reds.
Autumn turns, turns, turns, while the
Wind haunts sticks and stems, looking
Forward to their recycling, and our
Eyes old and new
Peering
Image taken around Tillamook Bay, where a small town used to stand. -
I feel a slight brush upon my calves
Then, a light head butt.
It’s Mr. Fry, the cat, looking up at me while I write.
He’s concerned about my Word document
My Google Docs, my Office Suite, PDFs and printables
Shared and synced, blogged, published, and backed up.
Apparently, according to him
My prose is threatening to verse
My verse is proposing to prose
My characters are in a state of mutiny
My narrator refuses to put a word in edgeways
My alliteration is acting like an assonance
My plot took a poop
“My dialogue is depressed, crying like a monologue,” he says.
My enjambments are threatening to reach the right side of the page and beyond
My cliffhanger is falling to its death
My denouement denies all involvement
I’m suffering from hyperbole!! It’s no exaggeration!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mr. Fry offers his help……
Searches at my feet, looking for stray words I may have disregarded.
He claims to have a better nose for such things.
He loves to bat words around like a plastic ball with a bell, engaging the toy muse.
He licks the side of his front paws, then cleans his face with them
Starts nibbling at his back paw toes in earnest
Twists his head as far as it can reach to lick his back.
He’s intent on editing.
Then rolls on his back, asking for a tummy rub (He’s kind of a dog kitty).
I’m thinking, the finished piece?
No, he moans (He’s Siamese).
He wants better writing
Writing that acts like catnip making him silly with play
Taking him to a higher Realization of Cat
To touch, to speak, to comprehend
All that is of Cat.
Attaining Cat.
I tell him, sorry dude, not today.
I promise to go to the store later to pick up a treat.
I return to my scratching post.
He gnaws on a T.S. Eliot book.
An artsy version of Mr. Fry. May he rest in peace. This poem is for him. -
Dark Marsh Welcome to my second installation of images! If you’re on a computer instead of a phone, you can click on any image to enlarge it. Check out Images 1 here.
Abstracts
Twinez 
Frozen Movement 
Pinched Sky 
Grass Mirage Monochrome & Minimal
Edge’s End 
Doors of Perception 
Dark Grain 
Lone Nature
Black Butte from Three Fingered Jack 
Early Morning 
Cloud Catcher 
Lost Lake with Sasquatch looking on. 
Winter on Coyote Wall People
Thoughts 
Dissenter 
Father & Daughter at the Ocean in Early Spring 
1st Annual Gothic Boat Paddle Race Extras
Switched 
Primitive 
Another State -
Aluminum foil-covered, cardboard stars above our heads and the basketball hoops have been drawn back, painted lines and circles below our feet. We dance in socks, leaving our shoes out in the hallway.
We mimic the leaves who aren’t ready to dance, because the air is still warm and we glow with a luminescent heat, moving in aimless directions as if the gym floor is a sacred grassland and the seasons do not exist. Our desires – a clutter of arms and legs. The sweat on our lips drawn down to our tongues, for the world has always been and always will be a dancer.
Winter will come.
We’ve skated on its skin before, scooped the marshmallows off countless hot chocolates, been told the stories of the wolf in the snow. It will change our waltz, starting when the rain comes. So, in this form, today, we dance in the body summer has given us and we coalesce to get ready for colder climate, dancing to escape the body, while being in the body.
When we look, it may seem like we follow the sun, aligning with the rising and setting of things, turning with the Earth. At other times, we are beings of our own choice, crisscrossing the paths of others. In these moments only movement exists, nothing else is real, we can only dance. The galaxies are no different.
Look. See them samba with our own eyes.
For all these moves are known by heart.
And when we sense we know our hearts, we feel the floor beneath our feet.
Image be me.
MoonCat 