(daffydils)

for oft, when on my couch I lie

in vacant or in pensive mood,

they flash upon that inward eye

which is the bliss of solitude;

and then my heart with pleasure fills,

and dances with the daffodils.

 

william wordsworth

hildegarde, our lady of the flowers.

comet closeup.

(for eleanore, who saved us from psychocop, and who died a week or so ago.)

it is found again !
what ?  eternity.
it is the sea mixed
        with the sun.

my eternal soul,
observe your vow
in spite of the night
and the day on fire.

rimbaud,
a season in hell
 

it bugs me when the numnuts talk of government as a swamp. dog, a swamp is so much better than that. a swamp is an ecosystem. the government has no ecology. the government is a black site, a dirty war, we wish it were a swamp. the government is ground zero.

mus be spring
god damn them
theyr wackin 
at the trees
wit machines.

patience might be indolence. a cat might look patient but if purring may be indolent, and indolence may be content. patience in humans may be a form of indolence. indolence might be peace. peace may look like patience.

you feelin alright? you feelin pretty good today. you left your squeaky ball behind you know. ah well, life is short, it is what it is, it's a lot more than that, this is. that was so coot when we saw that chinese family, the two ladies leading, i knew they were timid and you of course walk right between them, then two men on the sea wall reaching down to you, then the girl who speaks english, the translator guide and documentarian, gets down and loves you up and i get so immersed i forget about pictures. you look real good today. reeeeeeeeeal...good....to.....me.

trish keenan has died and it's already seven years of ignorance and listening to her voice as if she were alive and brilliant. this is the amazing thing about music, it's as though they never die, really, they're ready to spring to life at the touch of a tender button, as though death is just a dormancy.

man, dog, it's sad when a kid out here don't even look up from his personal d-vice. oh, well, it's none of our business. and i know his grampa is a peace activist. i see him standing at the bus stop with the kid totally silent.
we saw that dog ama who escaped the model yacht pond i guess or was abducted and escaped her abductors. girl was found knocking on doors on woodlawn at 61st. scratched about the breast and neck, but playing happily with a bunch of randy girls and boys back in the circle today.
kids, be very mindful of your dogs and you will be mindful of yourself by nature. remember the world is largely on autopilot and automatic war run by autocrats without conscience. hand on to your conscience. 

you lose some things you thought you never would. you get some things you thought you never would. you move around a lot and stay put. you dream some things that never happen. things happen you never dream. you feel recalled by a life you know is all around yet can't quite recall. it's as though everything is alive with memory, and you are being remembered, as you walk, it's different than a dream, more real than workaday life. 
it's not the objective. the objective is not life.

the kiss.

on the verger between the parking lot and the highway we saw two crows taking down a wasp nest from last year and eating the honey crust inside.

 honey crust on the verge. i got a picture with mister and left the comb for the crows.

i pretentiously called it bone and glass drop assemblage as when i glued stuff together and called it collage, like french is elevating. 

r. said, contrived. she likes it au naturel . french is so elevating. i say well i like it both ways. i say i've been told that before, and once in bucktown an artist in an air conditioned room ventured out to put a sticker reading not art on my collaged wall, in the hellish hot factory hall. i know the mycelium underground comes before the mushroom and my ground was fertile for the musky fruit of humiliation before the sticker was applied. but now i'm just glad i'm neither in nor of le monde de l'art i have nothing that needs to be endorsed or bought or rejected, and is still a kind of offering, natural or contrived, humiliation and pride, both are what i find.

dead tree art and live swallow.

blue crustacean in tumbleweed nest.

blue crustacean on white feather breast.

mister was happy in the wetland. a duck couple was curious and swam by him and they all shared the sunny water quietly.

birds and plastic. r. said well, that was probably a migration thing, like too tired, you know. but i don't know.

is plastic killing the waterbirds? i don't know, but i know plastic can and does kill waterbirds. and we see many dead birds laying among the human refuse on the eroding shore. now i want to fill a plastic bag with plastic when i go beachcombing. it would be fine if the tide was just water, and the birds were leaving footprints and flying over us.

i was wondering why some things appeal so much to me. i just had the thought, more the feeling, that everything and everyone can become someone or something else.

you call that featured?

girl with features obscured by flaccid cactus.

this tree is deadicated. there's another tree but it's not this tree. it's not the old tree. trees don't live that long in the city nowadays noways. now we make art out of dead trees, now trees in death have human utility. we say it's the same way with people. we see them more clear when they die and we eulogize em before they disappear.

 

r. speculated the large poles round the driving range are remnants of the nike missile site.
the trees around the edges are haunted and contorted, they push and crush the fence in places. there is an aura about this place that feels like deep gravity, a downward pull, and a liminal radiation, an ill effect between strata, between times, a toxic past haunting a precarious present. there's a dark here obomba's illuminated tower will only radiate more hauntingly.

n.b.  i might be wrong about that. it might be high because it's a driving range. -r.
yeah, it may be to keep balls from striking autopilots on l.s.d. rather than to keep people away from a stupid missile. still and all, it's a toxic doom-riddled, haunted plot, by golfers and evil nuclear warlords and the looming imperial spectre of obomba alike.  -r.& d.

flaccid cactus.

 girl with flaccid cactus.



i told r. there was a cactus that grew around here, and she didn't act surprised. i found one and she said that's a flaccid cactus. i said that's a good name for a band. she said that one that looked like a pink and orange homunculus i showed her before was a flaccid cactus too. on the way back mister was dog tired and kept eating stuff on the side of the path like pizza and god knows i had to literally and figuratively push his ass. and there were a lot of cactus there too by the drive that will be obliterated if obomba gets his way. 

this morning i asked r. if we would ever be able to record our dreams. no she said, they are just impulses and synapses. but they're pictures. if our brain sees them where do they come from, where do they go? it feels like our dreams are recorded, and our brains are taproots tapping into them. i know it sounds silly, but it feels like our dreams are records, and teachings.

one swallow pooped on my camera hand. i felt it a blessing, being allowed so close.

a turkey vulture chased by a cooper's hawk above the purple martins houses who just returned resting on their balconies after their journey.

 

    i read in hope in the dark that everything is coming together while everything falls apart. is it the same to say that there is more than meets the eye, 
there's nothing new under the sun, or
faith in things unseen? 
the world is composed of what we witness 
and what we miss. if the world were only what we see 
how many worlds there might be. but who 
would see all those other worlds, 
and if everyone saw the others
would all the worlds be all one?

i read that flowers grow at night. i didn't think of that, i guess i thought they went to sleep. but maybe they sleep in the sun, soaking up energy to grow at night and dream themselves awake.

it's sad to not sense things, particularly about oneself. apparently i have no sense of smell, or a poor, or rudimentary one, like the eyes of a blind cave fish behind sealed eyelids. maybe it's because of all the chemicals in the world, maybe my nose got dulled by exposure, though i smelled the chemical attack from the 11th floor, and i think i'd notice if the government launched a chemical attack on us. what doesn't kill me makes me stronger? or dulls my sense of smell, and kills me slowly. but this scares me, as a missing sense means trouble reading the world and the self in the world. but i get by. i guess, don't i? get by? i must have some threshold, maybe i sense the smell of things that matter to me. i know my threshold is low in some senses, my threshold at home is dirty, i hope other senses sense the lack and become keener, but maybe all my senses are compromised. maybe i've been exposed to too much poop. maybe the modern world dulls my senses. maybe the modern world both dulls my senses and makes me paranoid. maybe when one sense gets keener another dulls. mister seems to have an exquisite nose while he gets more myopic and hard of hearing. though it may always have been his best sense. i don't know if any of my senses get sharper. my eyesight probably weakens and yet i think i see more particularly, and see a particular way, though i may have seen more and sharper before. with words and thoughts, my focus, my sense, comes and goes. i s'pose we have to play with what we got.

nobody's home. i always thought the phrase was poignant. it recalls dark homes of memory. houses that would be home. i think of the guys sleeping on either side of spider bridge under the walk ramps. of huts that were built once in the no-man's land by the river in the industrial zone that the city would come and destroy because homelessness is shameful and unsightly. those beautifully made little homes for the homeless destroyed by the powerful who decide these things. and how the people made camps under the freeway and the city clean-up crews periodically came with garbage trucks and swept them away. and here we have a nature sanctuary with nearly all the materials for homes removed for security and human utility, so security can see. and one little hut erected in place, that remains homeless with nobody home today because who's to tell if it's human made when it may be taken away.
i think of the phrase, the light's on, but nobody's home. in the daylight it's that dark hollow that draws my eyes like an inverted light.

behind the museum swallows fly about our heads, and swallows dream in the sun.

mister has a following. he's following.

i'm still subject to abject fears, like i still get afraid when i see him trying to keep up, though i know sometimes he's just thinking. 

also i know he is slowing down, and we all have our days, and i'm just glad he's here. and i'm here with him, and r., and those up ahead, i'm glad we're all here.

bringing up the rear.

ivy tower leaning.

the waterfall is turned on. a girl asked me if those lil tweeters were kinglets assuming perhaps as i'm gray i must be bird-wise. so i speculated thoughtfully and admitted i don't know. i remind myself of when this black girl with a british accent asked where a beauty supply shop was and i speculated while enjoying her accent until i had to admit i had no idea.

lest we forget, mister. you may say i'm obsessed with mister and i should give it a rest. to that i say, bah. he's a healthy obsession, gnome sane, i could be obsessed with hate or guns or nihilist capital cults, gnome sane. he's just a dog, i'm just a dogsbody. 
yesterday we were both kind of depressed. i noted his limp and i felt sad and he noted my sorrow and felt deflated. then we saw our friends and noted mister's condition and i said we're just gonna go lie in the sunny field. then we perked up. we just stopped and hugged and watched the world spin, and shook hands. then we felt better. then i remembered how i rely on him for my positive psychology, and surely he relies on me. so if i'm feeling low i may make him remember his aches and we together might be a feedback loop of woe is us. or i can shake my tail and get happy, at least enough to get him wagging, and soon both will be goosing each other on, in a positive feedback loop, a positive obsession that does a body or two good, gnome sane.

ha, i thought something was missing. i forgot the other seven pictures of lest we forget, mister. now i'm satisfied, now it feels complete, gnome sane. i think it is enough, for now. are you satisfied?