loose in the gallery of my mind

I thought, as a mind experiment, I'd just grab some famous paintings, toss them up on the screen, and then say which of my friends, lovers and/or muses they remind me of, I sometimes do that with music, to evoke memories, let's work from great art this time...

"The Scream" for instance, reminds me of Brigit...not for the figure in the foreground, but for the sky in the background. We stood on Venice Beach and watched the sun slide into the Pacific, shifting from bright yellow-white, through pink and orange and red, eventually distorting and being swallowed up by the horizon....

"Starry Night"...invokes Psyche, also known as the Electric Lady...early in our courtship we would, at the end of an evening together, stand on her porch and just hold each other as we talked, the night sky and the crickets (and her spying little sister) our main company. There's a strange beauty and comfort in this image, us alone in the universe...

Jan, my first wife, the muse known as "the Swallow" is invoked in "American Gothic"...she was and is, at heart, a farm girl, and her ro0ts are in the Oak Hill, West Virginia, farm where she grew up...no matter that the bad old city slicker from Morgantown took her off to the DC suburbs. The grimness of the picture is irrelevent to how I resonate to this work, it is the tableau, the milieu, that clicks with my memories, here.

Finally, we come to "Mona Lisa"...Da Vinci's enigmatically smiling beauty. That one is interesting to my memories, as it invoked many different women whose faces never gave away what was actually going on inside them. Certainly the Goldenheart, the Truth, even Aurora...but in the end I have to give it to Alabaster, my first muse...I never got close enough to her to really understand her (she would probably say there's nothing to understand, that she is, in course, a simple person, but we all think we are simple, in and of ourselves...)

Okay, all, and Flo, there's a start in the process...I am actually enjoying this.

Got an email the other day from a site that calls itself the "Poet's Hall of Fame"...E.J. has, over the past several years, sent them regular updates, new books, what have you...this time we got back a note saying that they were no longer going to allow poets to update their own listing, but would require documentation of all claims, references as it were. I understand that (I almost said "grok" there...how dated!) and responded that I did understand that and would instruct E.J. to cooperate. At the same time, I've seen so much self-promotion, it always gets me a little sick...I've said before, I may be a whore, but at least I am not a pimp.

There's a certain nobility in at least selling your own body (of work) but certainly not in getting rich off of selling other people's bodies (ask Hugh Hefner, the most commercially successful pimp in modern history...no one buys his magazine for him, but he's the rich one...is that "right"? No.)

Anyway, gotta run...ordered the new 'puter...should be in and up in about a week...and Monday marks my first physical in half a decade (I was always too busy seeing to others' wants over my needs...I need to at least get the oil changed and the tires rotated if I am to outlive my ennui.)