First Snow

December 19th, 2009



This house is a new mind; a fresh mine
for memories. The snow outside fades footsteps
of early day. The children played
before the blizzard powdered Mama Earth’s face.

“So what we ‘gon do?” Badu sings to me.
We ‘gon remain a blank sheet. Innocence
is coming back to me. These new beginnings
envelop me, a signed and sealed delivery.

Snow scatters in every direction. The flakes
are too fast to identify. Clouds come steady as a train.
Full Steam! Frenzy. The tree nods at me heavy,
Storm on its shoulders.

It holds
everything:
sun, leaves,
snow, me.

Flakes visit my window like children in a zoo.
I am tamed by lies, laws, sayings and school.
I want to feel, express and create. To grow and be,
just how Lowdown Loretta Brown told me.

Now I am so happy.
Everything is new to me:
this snow, this home, my family, these feelings.
I am a bird jumping out of its tree to take wing.

Ah!
This is how it feels to love God.
Free, with each attachment
as heavy as a feather.


Robert Gibson Jr.

Shy Days Come Away

*I was browsing through the R&B/Soul section in Walmart, and the album covers of two CDs struck me: Sade's Love Deluxe and Norah Jones' Come Away With Me. Something in me wanted to buy both of them, but only one was in my budget. I chose Norah only because the album was printed on recycled materials and because it was cheaper than Sade's. But to honor both artists, I wrote down the tracklistings of both on the inside of a envelop I found at the Photo Center. The next day, I looked at what I had and composed it into a neat little poem. I reccomend you to listen to both CDs because these musicians have amazing voices that could make anyone's heart melt.

" Shy Days Come Away"


This love


deluxe is nothing ordinary:

I feel no pain because I couldn’t love you more.

Like a tattoo, I wear your kiss of life permanent on my lips.

I cherish the day your pearls of thought penetrated my bulletproof soul.

Like a mermaid, I don’t know why I drowned under seas of sorrow

for seven years straight. You got my cold cold heart feelin’ the same way.

I appreciate you, so come away with me. Let’s lay in cerulean meadows,

shoot the moon and keep missing. Turn me on, light up this lonestar.

I’ve got to see you again wearing your skin. You are this painter’s song.

We are only one flight down from heaven. Let’s fly, my nightingale;

the long day is over. The nearness of you

frees me.


Robert Gibson Jr.

"Forecast: Unseasonably cold."

You, you are the gargoyle engraved
six feet into the Cathedral's skin;
fixed, overlooking the scenery of Monroe park.
Fools are rushin' rushin' around;
the weather weathers them down,
you sit silent and watch.

Their umbrellas dance to the sound of raindrops dying.

A midday sun escapes from its cloudy cage
and every shadow holds its breath.
Petals bow and a stalks sway;
the wind knows no death.

Ancient trees wrestle the sky
as hardened humans heave heavy souls;
too enslaved to chisel down their lives
they fight over fool's gold.

Their umbrellas die to the sight of raindrops hiding.
Still, you are not Sunnyside up:

If only they would rotate their free wills well
and dispatch into life, leading.
If only you could escape that stifling shell
and hatch into a heavenly being.

But indulgence is a discontinued sale; they never will, you never will.

You, the monstrous yet marvelous, grudgingly gaze
as their eyes, now swallowed by sunshades,
skim over the beauty of this scripted day,
ignore the position of each actor onstage
and forget that life is but a play inside the Playwright's Play.

Even so, you know the sparrow
will sing its redemption song
as bones descend at dusk.
Spirits will ascend at dawn
as humans keep building up.

Their buildings may fall
as the earth absorbs it all.
Yet your building will fall
as the earth absorbs it all.

Trees

We are trees weathered by the seasons of life;
Rooted in earth, always reaching for sunlight.

Our relationships bud, flourish and fall,
but memories are evergreen decoration.

Heartwood dreams leave us gorgeously scarred;
living for Life is the richest sensation.

We are trees polished by the seasons of life;
rooted in each other, always reaching for starlight.

-R.Gibson

Heavenly Attractions

(A dream I had on September 20th)


I was standing in my grandmother’s backyard when I saw another moon eclipsing our moon. It happened second by second. I told Matt and Tristan to look. But they couldn’t see it. I tried to take a picture through my camera but it was unreliable. The eclipse was over; the second moon slipped into a hidden pocket in the sky. I pondered on this bizarreness.

I wanted to go to the root of this nonsense. Tristan, with his know every human being on Earth self, referred me to a lady that could take me to outer space. Matt, with his overly curious and adventurous self, tagged along. I remember the process being quick; we hopped in the ship and within 5 minutes we were up there.

She dropped us off into a beautiful sight. We were above everything. Earth was the same as my elementary school depictions: a carefully drawn sphere circled by a necklace of dotted lines looped through the moon. Right there, I saw the other moon I saw from earth. What was it doing in our orbit? I reached to take it down. I tried to touch it but it pushed me into a spiraling frenzy and spun away into the abyss.

Helpless and silly, I twirled into the orbital wires connecting the earth and moon. I messed everything up but wouldn’t witness its affects until I got back to Earth. I was tangled in the wires, holding onto a half-opened manila folder with pictures of myself and an empty CD case. There was a blank CD in my back pocket.

I remembered I was in space so I knew I wasn’t supposed to breathe. I panicked. I started taking shorter breaths but I didn’t die. I kept breathing.

Suddenly, Matt appeared again. We were floating about the atmosphere. We were right above the last layer of clouds covering the Earth, but far enough to see it in its entirety. Maybe it was heaven.

I swam towards the pole sticking up out of the clouds that held the Moon up from the Earth. I reached for it with my right hand and caught hold to it. Surprisingly, it was cold enough to grip like any other pole in the wintertime.

He told me to hold onto my stuff or it would get sucked into Earth’s gravitational pull and rain down like hellfire. I asked “If I leave it up here, will future generations find my pictures and music as artifacts?” He answered, “I don’t know.”

We looked away from our conversation, astonished by the scenery. Beyond us, to my left and his right, was a horizonless field of red stars and meteors. We kept turning. The moon was a light hanging perpendicular to the pole I clenched. Next was the Earth: a swirl of green and blue, powdered with clouds, sided by a cold blinding sun.

We froze to a wooden bench under the pole. Matt pulled out his iPhone. He called up the lady; it was time to go home.

some type of sketchiness

So. Word is that the artwork artists upload on the internet is automatically stolen and stored into a super database for iRobots to eventually randomize styles of every artist who has stepped foot on this earth to make super masterpieces in a matter of seconds; thus, the role of "visual artist" will be made obsolete. Until that day, I will keep posting mine. Enjoy!

Dont think.

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."

--Ray Douglas Bradbury

"HOLD UP"

"Caits (Caitlin) Meissner is a poet, performer, educator and graphic designer with a BFA from Pratt Institute.

And that was all I needed to know.

rawkstar!!!

ink x digital coloring=mus(e)ic to my eyes

Starstruck - Santogold

Starstruck - Santogold

Lyrics:

Do it again
And I'll see you tomorrow
I want to get it
You've got something to borrow

Can't make it feel right on my own
That's when I turn you on again
I buy it but it don't measure up
What is the missed ingredient

Chorus:
I, I see you fade
I, I see you fade away (2x)

Under the skin
It's not so easy to swallow
Don't reel me in
To find my dreams are so hollow
What is it you got I don't get
I watch you fumbling again
Look dreamy behind your cigarette
Know it ain't true now

Chorus

Oooh wee ooh wee oooh
We all find you easy so amuse us
Don't get too heady you might abuse luck
You're starstruck

She was...

No, she wasn’t a dream;

She was a stream of breath
falling
down a spine

She was a taste—a tongue’s wonders
She was a sound—a rumble of lightning
She was a sight—a strike of thunder

She was a touch of glass
torn
along a fragile soul

She was a smell of daffodils
drowning
like a drunkard’s destiny

She was a kiss
too late to heal
the beatings
of a heart.


So again I say No
as you know
we have not yearned the right way yet.

I lust for love
to eliminate lust
for love

to thrive
in my mind
because
the organ in my chest
has become
just that—the organ
with 4 divisions
that she played
with her hands and feet
pulsing blood through my pipes
but blaring it all out religiously

I just hope
that two-faced phantom of my mind
can make up his mind
before it is time
for this opera
to begin.

"Hopeless Attachment"

I was a dislocated football player

who fumbled love

to a hyper-extended cheerleader

on the sideline.

I didn’t mean to,

but just like listening to a song on the radio,

it happened.

I didn’t like “Blame it on the Alcohol”…when I first heard it…

but I kept hearing it, so I grew tolerant of it.

I opposed everything that song stood for.

Yet, I knew about every damned word to it!

I even laughed at how ridiculous it was!

Still, I chose to listen.

And with no other selection of song to hear,

it turned into the only tune I could turn to.

It became a hopeless attachment

that I couldn’t see myself living without.

So in essence, I began to love it.

Now, I am hyper-extended

from yelling on the sideline

because she dislocated that love

and limped away.

Our time together was everything

but the scoreboard was always broken.

So by the flip of a coin,

our everything was already nothing.

And if nothing is everything and everything is time

than time is nothing.

This song is out of tune.

Reset the scoreboard if you must.

Skin is a distracting wrapper...

"Skin is a distracting wrapper to the flavor of a person’s soul."

(Directed to the Black skin versus White skin theology)

Imagine humans being able to eliminate the distraction of the physical skin and just be “gray” humans walking around on earth. We would then focus on an individual's true personality and characteristics. As a result, we would lose the concepts of black versus white and beauty versus ugly, but it would only be fit as karma to our historical affairs involving the discrimination based off of them.

So in essence, we would all start from zero. Everything before that point would be history. Then we could coin the issue of the black race versus the white race as an inferior and a useless level of thinking as a whole. Unfortunately, there would be no more significance for having pride in one’s race; cultures may still exist based off of location of a group of people and their trends, but race would no longer be a driving force behind that.

Note: I say “unfortunately” because I as an individual enjoy celebrating my race and culture. It is healthy to be involved with people you share common ground with to meet a common goal. Most of us feel it is necessary in order to function and collectively progress in this world.

On the contrary, I don’t believe in taking it to the extreme of saying my culture or race is better than someone else’s, because that would only lead to war. But the world would be boring without war to oppose peace, right? If everything was “good and peaceful” on earth, the thrill of media would not exist. So I do believe in the concept of yin and yang; it is necessary in order to keep balance in the world. But the historical matching of opposites to other opposites: positive=white and negative=black, has led us to our current way of processing everything. And personally I’d rather be an advocate of the peace found in totally denying that theology.

But back to the response of us “thinking gray”: After the shift in thought, we in our inquisitive nature, would dissect the matter and strive to find the root of that mentality to ultimately lead us to an answer or solution. At the same time, finding an answer may not be beneficial because if the human mindset remained the same when we switched from “black and white vision” to “gray vision” we would still want to find someone to blame and punish or shun to the death; causing an immediate divide in the thought of us starting from zero. But if we blamed ourselves as a whole for the problem we would not shun ourselves or go to the extreme of killing off ourselves; it wouldn't make sense. We would want our state of humanity to excel.

It is possible that we could press refresh and have a new beginning but only if we scrap our flawed ideals of the past while at the same time use them as a basis of what not to become again. Once fixed in that mentality, we humans would see each other’s souls for what they are, establish a mutual respect for each other’s diversity and finally know how to wear our skins correctly.

Nature in New York

Last Month, I performed along with Slam Nahuatl and other features at an event called "Nature In New York". It was a talent-packed show with lots of energy. Well the story behind this one was spur of the moment (like everything else in my life) but beautiful.

I was listening to a new found friend Chris Dunn perform a piece that he had 'no words for'. I listened to him perform the song and something moved me to read my poem to it while he was playing. I discovered that if I slowed down the pace that I read it at, it matched his rhythm. So I approached Chris after he got off of stage and asked if he would play that behind my poem while I recited. He happily agreed and we even got our friend Jamie to play the drum with us. So it was complete, his wordless tune finally had lyrics to make the song complete!
Here it is. Enjoy!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSVnG7-Hmv0

(Jamie, get well soon brother, you have more music to make with us!)

Nuyorican Poets Cafe + Soundbites

SO ever since January I've been practicing with my poetry team, Slam Nahuatl (pronounced na-what), for the Soundbites Poetry Festival held on Broadway in NY. On April 10th-12th, we competed against about 9 other teams, and we WON! Repping Richmond VA, we became the Champions of the first team competition (we were rewarded a nice lil amount of prize moolah too.)



Also, that Friday before the competition I got to perform at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.That too was an amazing experience for me, so I'll share it with you all:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U2FYujprFw

This is super late, but thanks Saul

Way back in January,

I posted up an illustration of Saul Williams.
Well, Mr. Tardust put it up as his Facebook profile pic for a little while AND shotted out my blog.
For a moment, I felt like I won the lottery;
only without the moolah...

SO if anybody doesn't know who this extraterrestrial is than check his work out at http://saulwilliams.com/

Your support is appreciated Saul.

Peaceeeeeeeeeee

Chronicles of Bobby

Here is documentation of my Space Research Installation Project. My idea was influenced by Mark Jenkins' Storker project from back in'06. My goal was to take it a step beyond his work by interacting with the tape sculpture instead of just observing others' reactions to it.
So here are the Chronicles of Bobby. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJWYcfmkqoU

Portfolio Review...

On Monday I submitted my portfolio to the Communication Arts Department. I have made some great work these first two semesters, and I feel making it into the department will be the pay off for it all. So Please, keep me in your prayers guys!

In the meantime, here are some illustrations I've experimented with in the last couple of weeks!
Enjoy!

Waiting in Vain...

Okay.

So I was listening to my Bob Marley playlist on iTunes and it began to play "Wait In Vain" off of his Legend Album. Instantly, I found my self relating to most of the poetry in the first verse.
It was one of those, "YOOoooOoO YOU TOOK THE WORDS RIGHT OUT OF MY MOUTH!" moments. So for the fact that we share the same first name and same thoughts, I felt obligated to share this.

I don't wanna wait in vain for your love;
I don't wanna wait in vain for your love.

From the very first time I rest my eyes on you, girl,
My heart says follow through.
But I know, now, that I'm way down on your line,
But the waitin' feel is fine:

So don't treat me like a puppet on a string,
cause I know I have to do my thing.
Don't talk to me as if you think I'm dumb;
I wanna know when you're gonna come - soon.

I don't wanna wait in vain for your love;
I don't wanna wait in vain for your love;
I don't wanna wait in vain for your love,

cause if summer is here,
I'm still waiting there;
Winter is here,
And I'm still waiting there.

*I don't plan on feeling like this for long ;)

Just thinking...

If I draw nothing on paper
but paint memories on the concave walls of my skull

I must be a poet.

AND

If I turn my head 90 degrees to the side
to watch airplanes nosedive through a cerulean sky

I must know it.

More drawings!

Yasmin


Teaco


B. Yung


Brother's Keeper (Incomplete)



Don't Drop... Ahh Too Late.


Daniel


Top Four Music Artist


Yellow H Tree


Miles Hodges


Sixth Finger


Ed Mabrey


Figure 1


Figure 2


Daniel & Carina "Curandera"