Body Orthodoxy

Almost exactly a year ago, I participated in a group art event called Body Orthodoxy. It was a collaboration between about a dozen artists all musing on our bodies and how they effect us. I've always meant to share what I contributed for those of you who couldn't make it. Consider this a preview for what's to come at my show in April. That is be a totally different subject matter, but the same sensory elements will be involved.

Heather(Final) from Heather Marie Fink on Vimeo.

EVERYTHING IS, EVERYTHING ISN'T

My plants are always dying. 

Curling into the fetuses
they were at their beginning.
Crisping into flowers of death.
Decaying buds of matter.
Even them, even my plants,
they’re dying.
Processing slowly into death,
Fading into nothing.
They say everything dies.
And they mean it.

My flowers are always dying.
Moving into a new phase
of their beauty.
Blooming to death.
Blooming into death.
We display them in their dwindling.
Sacrilegiously, we hang them upside down,
gazing at their wrinkled skins.
Admiring their beauty.

My animals are always dying.
Growing too old, too old to climb the stairs.
Being eaten by other animals.
Being eaten by humans.
We thank them for their sacrifice.
The ultimate,
so we can live,
and have dinner parties.

My people are always dying.
Hidden away in the ground.
Burned into ash.
I wonder,
innocent as a child,
why my grandmother’s head
is not stuffed,
hanging in the family room?
Why is she not hung upside down,
to be gazed at in all her decay,
in her blooming death?
Surely that is beautiful too.

What are we afraid of?
My fears are never dying.
They’re always alive in my brain,
and yours are alive too.
That’s the answer to
my child’s question.
Our fears are never dying,
but everything else is.

Showtime change.

There have been some changes to my show, and I need to let you all know!
SO. NEW DETAILS.
April 11, 2013
Fremont Abbey Arts Center (lower floor)

More to come!
Love to you all.

Show's On

The time has come to officially announce my upcoming show!

One night only... Thursday, February 28, 2013 from 5:30 to 10:30 at the Fremont Abbey Arts Center Cafe (Lower Floor.)

I'm still going to keep a lot to myself, including the title, but I will tell you that it's been in the works since the summer, and it features music from some great musicians, and my poetry enhanced with performance art caught on video. Here's a sneak preview of some pics we took at one of my video shoots:

Personification

I'm writing a lot lately about pictures that I get in my mind. Pictures that are a little absurd. I've always liked personification of anything... animals, objects, feelings... Unconsciously, I'll take objects and attach to them entire concepts. Entire worlds. Complex emotional railroads. Lately, I find myself constantly taking notes as I have a realization that I want to give a certain feeling an physical form. For me, taking an uncomfortable feeling, or a sad feeling and turning it into an object makes it easier to understand. Or sometimes, just easier to hold outside of myself and look at, and still feel frustrated and confused. At least it's not behind my eyes inside of my head anymore.

I'm excited about what's coming out of this obsession. Definitely a show in progress. I can't wait to share it with you. 

A New Time

It hasn't all been done before. I hope.

There will be more regular forays into the virtual world from me on this site, and information on some new endeavors to come. It's time I got my hands dirty.

The future is exciting. I hope you'll watch.

Leaving, Part 2

Leaving is not the adrenaline rush that I expected. I’ve been waiting for my leaving to fill some holes in myself, and I’ve discovered that it has only caused me to realize the holes more often. What are the holes? I don’t even know. They’re just there, like black holes. Almost an anomaly. But what I do know is that I’m always trying to fill them with things that are unknown.
Like leaving.

Things are always better when they are unknown. The unknown is glamorous. It doesn’t have flaws, it isn’t boring. So, the idea of leaving will always be more enticing than actually leaving. I think leaving can become an addiction. It wouldn’t be that hard for me to get to a place where I always needed the feeling of a fresh start, a new place, that dangerous notion that the next thing will fix all the holes existing from the last. The problem is that if you always leave, you’ll never accomplish anything. Same goes for if you always stay.

Either way, I figured out that I can’t fix my holes by leaving or staying. I think that I need to learn to live with them. No feeling is forever. I’ll always have the holes, but I can learn to let them make me better, and so can you. We can learn not to run from things, to stay when we need to stay, but to finish well when we need to go.

My friend Matt said. “We don’t need a place called home, what we need is to be known.” I think that pursuing being known will come closer to filling the holes than anything else. If there’s one thing that I believe in for sure, it’s that being known is worth it, and not enough people let themselves go there.

Grandpa

Pass the sweet and low,
sweet pink one,
pass the pink one,
sweetheart.
The sweet and low,
sweetheart.

Navy blue born and bred.
Naval born,
twenty-three years,
born twenty-three years
before the Navy.
The blue dress suit,
the mirror shined shoes.
The sweet tide,
low tide,
high water glass,
too full and spilling over.
The sweetheart in your
pocket photo.
The stacks of plates.
After forty years,
he still eats
navy blue.
He steers, at 4 knots,
breakneck,
through plates.

Navy born, Navy bred,
only ten minutes,
to eat your navy bread,
and he still knows,
that's the only right way,
for a sailor.

Pass the sweet and low,
sweetheart.
Navy heart,
sweet blue,
Navy born and bred.

Leaving, Part 1

I've been thinking about leaving lately. I know the feeling I get, every time someone close to me walks into the unknown, its long highways fading into nothing specific, like the roads in stock paintings always do. This leaving person feels so far from me because I can no longer see their surroundings with my mind's eye. When they talk about their days, I can no longer envision where they sleep, and where they eat. I know the feeling. I know the feeling of losing. I know the feeling of staying, feeling anchored down to my routine, to my locale. I am sheepish in my normalcy. I am shy and a coward, I seek no adventure in my daily work. I am at the neighborhood bar for happy hour, I am walking home to my bed, to my house I pay to live in.

I know the feeling of being right. I have learned the value there is in staying. The days fly by as on a spinning wheel, and my consolation is that one day I know it will stop, and I will win a leaving prize. I will get to leave, and it will be the right time. In the meantime, we go to Al's and drink Long Island iced tea, and I wake up in the morning to go care about my job.

I've learned the value of monotony. I've learned the treasure of staying. I've slowly become wise by the inch. I've carefully developed the ability to stop and think about something. I've learned to persevere. I've learned to not give up, to not run away. All these things happen the same way your garden grows, you can't actually see the stem moving upwards, but you look at your plants after a week, and you see that they are longer and taller somehow.

I remember when I left home. That first summer between sophomore and junior year of undergraduate. I took my bed from my childhood room, and my parents brought it to me in my ghetto city apartment. That was a free summer, a loose and happy one, a cheap one. A leaving one. I left, never to live with my parents again, and it felt tall and surreal. We lounged in the park in the sun, smoking my first roll-your-own cigarettes with a man we met who lived in the park. He was loud about his homosexual identity. We took him to dinner at Hare Krishna for free, washing our own dishes and drinking chai as dusk grayed the air. I wore loose pants, I smoked, I worked at a bakery, I wandered, I ate too many cupcakes. I had left for the first big time. I knew then, the addicting power of leaving.

But stay. Stay until you should leave. Grow as a garden. Grow as a garden. Grow. Then harvest.

Bits

I was going through some old, unfinished and forgotten scribbles. I found a few gems for you. I'll call this first one:

Hibernation Dream

At the worst time of a
dirty winter,
the stink of things
that once were beautiful
is too much.
And you, and I and
the small dog next door,
we all feel the need to die,
somehow, most of the way,
and be re-awakened to something
fresh, new and sparkling.


Rebound

In the arms of a nobody.
A clumsy, massless hoard
that I feel strangely attached to.
That I feel at home with.
Climbing up the towers of
yesterdays comforts,
contours,
bodies,
embraces.

I feel like I'm always
open to new possibilities
and they are just
a little more wrong
than the right that I produced
out of my cerebral cortex.


Escapist

I was born to paint in
colors of long shadow grey,
stifling the cryptic and
pixilated thoughts
running hot through
my body's top.

Come tonight, and be
partway blind.
The music is an invisibility,
and you're not yourself,
and wouldn't it feel like
a vacation, an escape,
to select one small sin
to perform with adrenaline
and a free heart?

Here is an interlude from the normal for the most amazing thing I've read today.

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by God, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

— Rosemary Urquico

Finding Myself

My fingers are cold on this night.
All I want is to smoke indoors.
Lazy and naked,
like the Parisian girl I always
knew myself to be.
Turning my bath water on and off,
and searching for Aphrodite in my big toe.

Outside, a pretentious wind pushes the trees
back and forth,
causing something to circle inside me.
An uncomfortable, broken wish.
A hopeless longing that there won't be another
decision or another heartbreak
to sit through.

The caloused moon cuts at my knees
in those moments when the world seems as unreal
as a movie.
I exit the theatre,
and watch the sparks fly off the tip
of my cigarette like a homemade roman candle.

We all love to lose ourselves.
Ourselves burden us.
They poke at us, saying,
"Find me, find me, find me."

How long will it take me to
realize that the chase is everything?
To settle that inside.
To believe that this searching distraction
is all we're really looking for.
The constant disorienting knowledge
that we've never found ourselves,
but we're always looking,
saying, "Will you help?
I think I left it here at this table,
outside the cafe,
when I smoked that exploding cigarette."

Losing

What happens when someone you love,
loves someone else?
When they prefer their hand to rest
on someone else's lower back,
when they use someone else as a journal.
Spilling on their day,
the dirty contents of a
disasterous afternoon.

What if you knew that you
threw yourself away?
Away from him?
You labeled yourself as a stowaway,
as garbage,
and threw all overboard,
clamoring for life
alone.

Now, hypothetical is killing your hope
in cold blood.
The knowledge that he doesn't
mean a joke,
he means no.
To you.

Final and brick-like no,
falling on your head
from the upper story,
and you can't lose your memory.

Instead, your nightmare is reality.
She is there, perfect and bare,
and you wait and watch in a corner,
pocked and exposed,
like you only dreaded
you had the potential to be.

And as you vainly attempt to cover yourself
with clear tears,
a quiet blue-eyed voice tells you
that what you look like
is a human,
and isn't it time to move on?

Morning Likeness

You couldn’t stop breathing for me.
On the night I couldn’t sleep
You lay there, and my embittered mouth
Cursed you, flickering lips in the darkness
Hissing, snakelike into the quiet.

When you wake to find me
Hungover from sweating next to you all night,
I hate the redness of your cheeks
And your hair, bed blown into mocking tornadoes
Above your ears.

Oh solvent mystery so probing
Oh you hideous spider!
Anansi, mocking my loathing
In your malicious way.
With a perfect smile
Held between black lips.

Your morning voice,
You unmemorized helplessness,
They plague my heartskin,
And with a virus like sigh,
I am forced to lace you with my love.
Coming from the rising east,
Rushing to my garnet lips
And brushing out your eyebrows with crimson.

Small Regrets

Why is this crafty long shadowed
Deception available to the
open mouth that lives inside our heads
alongside those spongy cerebral pillows?

What a disaster of latent whims
And intact insticts which somehow
Know the perfect moment
To be born.

These babies have no control.
They reproduce into
Evil alter egos and satanic twins.
Turning us into a joke.

And we wonder,
“What made me do that?”

Baby, it was you.
You made you.

You squared that equation
And produced a regret.

This Savory Past

Calm the musty horizons.
The journey is long,
And requires a ready eye,
And a slowly turning wheel.
Carry us away,
Rushing half brained
into the constance of memory.

It’s as if these moments happened
In long forgotten dreams,
In tinsel covered places,
In blurry populous forests.

The country.
The faded roads,
The dirt that coats everything,
The constant state of chaos.
Day old portions of casserole,
A conspicuous number of too old
Vehicles, no longer of any use.

This is familiar too,
Reeking of nostalgia
Causing a creeping viral smile to
Wash me in melancholy.

I will never be back there.
I can never do that again.
Never, never, never.
It echoes like a ghostly pebble
In an abandoned warehouse.

Tell me the answer,
All seeing eyes of trees that have stood
long before I did in this country place.
Savor with me the bygone moments,
Be my haven against the chill of time passing,
Against the ruckus of moments lost.

Teach me to savor the taste in the air
And not to forget its intricacies.
Teach me to remember the look
Of the wind in the water,
Teach me to immortalize
These waking dreams,
And lead me on to Mecca.

Broken.

Wild crests calling egg shaped heads,
clearing bloody crumbs from
the cream colored tablecloth.

Tension rides over the current
which resides at the top of the room
near the oldest books on the shelf,
off of the air, bouncing.
It spills out of the crack in the
heads just above the ears
ringing like a newly ready teapot.

Just for now, push the top
of your loose head down to hold in
that wavelength which rings
like nails on a hollow chalkboard.

The wraith like demon
floating about this family dinner
is the most disgusting resemblance
clutching onto wrists with the
receptive skin waving
like flags around the bone.

Broken.
Broken.
Broken.

Somehow, through the veins wasting
you couldn't see anything.
You missed those careful notes,
the climbing hopes.
Unusual as water flowing uphill,
Strangely creeping,
this blatant rebellion against gravity,
as if the world would explode any minute.

I sigh into the apocalypse,
placing some gargoyles onto my eves
and making a dusky cup of peppermint tea.
This doomsday like any other,
wintery, red and sleepy,
drowning in apathy.

Portland

Oh arched land of a thousand bridges,
posing many ways
amorous arms reaching like zombies
over the grand expanse.
Calming the heartbeats of
the rooftop dwellers,
the common city folk.

Ruling the states with an
understated quota met easily,
and empty coolness,
frosty, effortless,
quintessentially misunderstood.

Oh city of a thousand memories.
Moments rolling out
like a factory's endless belt.
Newer each second,
pushing at the heels of the last.

Silent dusk drops.
Rain falls on the concrete roses.
People open their doors
to the new wave.

Oh city of a thousand hairs.
Growing longer every unmet hour.
Curling in the damp air.
Waiting on the train,
hiding in the storm drain,
notifying each identity
with a sharp reality
charmed by fate itself.

Oh city of real faces.
Unmasked, unmade,
plain and beautiful,
stark in their openess.

A walking place,
unmapped expanse of dark.
Beckoning doorways,
Only accesible at the
perfect light of noon.
Long fruitful days spent
challenging space itself.
Challenging urban realities.

Oh city of people,
oh city of aged brick,
oh city of travellers passing,
oh city of roses,
carry on home.

Heirlooms

Plaster molds
stretch
caress
the quickly diffusing
arm of the past.

Haunting,
comforting,
as only a knowledge
that other hands held,
and maybe a few
courageous skin cells
are still crying
that it was too soon.

What's the worth?
Worthy weight, wrought from
careful palms,
censoring their fantasies
of mighty beauty.
To please the modern
working woman?

Did that woman's treasure,
held dear
between a toothy smile,
and a sweaty palm,
did it survive the test of time?

You are a rented elegance.
A tub full with harbored planes
of temporary belonging
crashing into my shins.

Making a fool of me
in front of the wise old men
in musty suits
waiting outside the elevator.

Le Secret, waiting like
a half used bottle of perfume,
it's chic taper posting
a high flag to all.

I'm not sure what will become
of my kamikazi strike.

I lost my chance to be neutral
with my only whole heart.
All arteries intact,
beating with the real thing.
Commitment.
It was easy, like breathing.

But each sharp, stilted addition
to my wall of fame
is a new tell.

That may likely be gone forever.

I'm a roamer,
wild, and I hope to
become untamable now that
I've lost my heart
to the windy Sam's town
musical novels of killers long before
whose ghosts are in this very room.