The Blush, a drawing with pastel

This is very early drawing of mine in ink and pastel. I think the degree of embarrassment is quite evident. I was thinking of the look of John Lennon with the granny glasses and sixties haircut -check out that hair!

Unfortunately I never matted nor dry-mounted this piece and now there are two creases in the paper that run all the way across it horizontally. It's not enough to create a work - you have figure out how to put it use and preserve it too.

When I was web mistress for the Wed Night Poetry Series I used this for several years on the web listings and emails for their Erotic Exotic Neurotic Valentines event.

Poetic license

As a medium, oil pastel offers a lot of possibility. This is a none-too-flattering, not particularly accurate self-portrait of the puzzled dragon at the easel. This was just after I came back from Maine when I lived in the attic of the house where I grew up. I like the crazy colors. The curtains were really white but that wasn't that interesting somehow. My hair is not really green either. haha.

WRITING NOTE: Writing fiction or poetry is a lot like that - the details can be altered to good effect on the bottomline of the story. Non-fiction has another standard - but the filter is still the writer's, reflected in what comes first, what details are included, what items had follow up research, etc etc.
 

Valentine's Post Script

Valentine's Day. Whew. So many flower ads, and ads for diamonds and chocolate -- I might have to sue Hallmark for demensia sentamentalis!

After watching all the heart-warming Valentines Day TV specials, I've been reminiscing. And it seem to me that Lover's Lane was always full of potholes and paved with self-deceit. Maybe I only feel that way because I had a brief, odd marriage that began on a truly appropriate holiday - Halloween. To add to the charm of the occasion we were married in a funeral home, by a mortician who was also a justice of the peace. We didn't know just who was being laid out at the time, but they had some really spectacular flower arrangements.

Why Halloween? It's a lot better day to begin a marriage than Pearl Harbor Day when some friends of ours were wed. (I have a poem called Ceremony on this very topic.) After all, a masquerade is safer than a war. Besides, don't most starry-eyed couples clutch their masks tightly, as well as their delusions about the true nature of their beloveds?

Ghouls aside, removing our masks is the stuff of true intimacy, the thing that separates infatuation from love. So, what could be more appropriate for a marriage than Halloween when one puts on a mask only to remove it later?

This leaves the nagging question - just what is Valentines Day appropriate for? Staying home and drawing the blinds has always worked well for me....

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Short poem with digital foolishness

Here's a poem to go with this crazy digital sea:

The mix, the shrift of wave and gilt,
all gnarl or growling storm
All life's atwist in azure time's wild light.
Adapt! Transform!

Quiet streets after polls close

On Super Tuesday, I came home after a poetry reading around 10 p.m.. I drove up old Route 7 and though the streets of downtown Danbury. No one was walking. No cars passed. The streets were eerily empty. Really empty. I could have been driving though a deserted movie set.

I can't help but wonder if people were so interested in the voting results, that they were cloistered at home in front of their TV sets waiting for the tally. If so, that's a promising sign in a democracy where most of the electorate traditionally stays home on election day. Whoever you favor, whatever party, whatever philosophy - register to vote and have your say in November.


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Pixies pluck forget-me-nots

Being an agnostic heathen doesn't mean one can't draw fairies or angels or sing scared music. Here are two versions of something I drew for My Not-Quite Blank Book, a book of writing prompts put out by Hanover Press. One was used in the book, but I forget which.

 For elegance and lightness I like the angel on the top. For impudence and a sort of solidity, I like the one to the left.... Forget-me-nots are my favorite flower which grew in miniature in the yard of the house I grew up in. They were originally planted by my father, who also mowed them into mutation when they spread out from the corner flower bed.

Department of delayed reactions: fear and its uses

Looking Back: All my life I have had a most unfortunate coping mechanism. When I am overwhelmed and don't know what to say - I freeze, stare straight ahead with a blank look, utterly inarticulate. Like the white tailed deer, I usually have a narrow escape and leave some angry driver zig-zagging down a dark road.

The first time I noticed this effect was in economics class in eleventh grade. (This was in the late 1960's; let's say the dark ages or there abouts....) A teenager who sat across the isle from me, and who I joked with every day, asked me to the junior prom. He had slicked-back hair and pointy black shoes - trademarks of a greaser or "hood" in those days. When I heard his invitation in that husky masculine whisper, I was terrified to the core. The idea stirred all my teenage hormones into a frenzy. But I froze, stared straight ahead, made no reply at all - as if I hadn't heard him, as if he wasn't there. In my demented teenage brain - I knew instantly if we went out, things would happen, things like sex in the back of his car and all the life-altering consequences that might follow. In a second it all unfolded in my mind. My throat closed. My eyes glazed over. He never spoke to me again. The prom went on without me.

New-age shrinks have a field day with this sort of thing. Strategies for overcoming fear are legion. But deer freeze for a reason. Deer who are still escape the hunter's gaze. As it turns out, this young man was a Moltov cocktail-brewing future felon who died in jail at a very early age. Despite the popularity of "conquering fear" and "living in the moment," it's worth considering that fear can be nature's useful warning. It can save your life.

---- Mar Walker