Suprematism

"The square is... the face of the new art.
The square is a living, royal infant.
It is the first step of pure creation...
Before it, there were naive deformities
and copies of nature...

Everything runs from the past to the future, but everything should live by the present, for in the future the apple-trees will shed their blossom.
Tomorrow will wipe out the trace of the present...
The mire of the past, like a millstone, will drag you into the slough.
This is why I hate all those who supply you will monuments to the dead...
Their aims are laughable, because they want at all costs to force what they take from nature to live on the canvas...

I have released all the birds from the eternal cage,
May they tear to pieces and devour the remains of your art..."

-Kasimir Malevich (writing in 1915 against Academic realism, two years before the December revolution, and 6 years before Stalin declared Soviet Realism to be the only acceptable form for painting in Communist Russia)

Some Mayakovsky

Your thoughts,

dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by -- handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

-(From the prologue of A Cloud in Trousers, Vladimir Mayakovsky 1893-1930)

Sumptuary Law

When I eat cereal,
I like to put the milk
and the cereal together
right in my mouth.
No bowl.
No spoon.

Grievances of a Mesopotamian Farmer: The extenuation of barbarity

Detecting and repairing holes.
One giant chunk coincides
with the casting of puppies into the sea.
Apologies.
The subject has become a friend
with whom I am not yet willing to part.
Mass of humankind,
tied down, deflected from its purpose.
Life gone forth into the open air,
as a polished shell
on a dusty road.
From this source a hollowness grows--
based on evidence,
widely referenced.
Symptoms of overcrowding.
Space is the final frontier.

Olaf Otto Becker

Melville Bay 4 07/2006 Archival pigment print by Olaf Otto Becker

Kuvdlorssuaq 4 07/2006 Archival pigment print

I'm on break

The moon is a hole in my blanket,
and I’m curled there
hiding from History
which is a pure light
that blinds,
and makes me
want to stamp and scream
and never wash my hair again.

U.S. Mexico Border

love can be
like a stack of plywood
angled against the shed.