In this blog we will share with you our vision of beauty, balance, harmony.

As Mark Leach writes in his book Raw Colour with Pastels: “Sound is all around us, and it is musicians who refine that sound into something of beauty. As a painter, I have always felt that my purpose is to craft colour in a similar way, to see through the confusion and seek harmony and beauty.”

And we add: Words, fragments of sentences, spoken noise is all around us, and Ken arranges words in such a way as to capture beauty in the accidental, the ambient soundtrack of life.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Working on the Weekend

Fantasia 30 x 40 cm - watercolour/ink/gesso - painting by Karin Goeppert





JOBS

Take this paycheck and stick it where
the sun doth shine—and p’raps it

will grow some zeros there. I’m one of those
who still believes in photosynthesis.

Worked the early shift yesterday,
found to my bitter disappointment that there was

no double-time left over, not a scrap, just time-and-a half
though none for me. “You came early,” grunted

the shift patriarch, “go on home and take care of your kids.”
But I need some moneys, I need some moneys bad.

My kids are a going concern. They deal by the monkey bars in the park.
One big difference between Old World and New: Hispanic women

clean the toilets of tax consultants in La Jolla, while in Brussels
slender-armed Slavic chicks scrub, after using, the bidets of inflated Eurocrats.

Speaking of occupational hazards, subtle distinctions, etc.,
someone who was in the army once told me that right after landing

airborne soldiers almost always pee: 800 paratroopers
urinating on a sandy drop-zone in North Carolina. The world

is weird and wonderful. Sometimes. Every Friday we get free beer. If not
for that I’d have quit years ago. Not precisely weird but exactly wonderful.




As it appears YouTube has blocked us. So no music at the moment.
We might just change the name of the blog! ;-)

Monday, February 9, 2015

Venetian State of Mind

Lagune - Lagoon 50 x 60 cm by Karin Goeppert






VENETIAN

Maybe I should mention American
universities and banks, how they fake
Venice: gothic windows, phallic bell
towers, all those genre pieces
of plaster and brick, a gondolier in the Dean’s

office, in the lobby, whistling a Corelli concerto—
and there’s this stretch of marble and stained glass
in Hamburg that’s not a bad knock off at all.
Which brings to mind John Ruskin who thought
that Venice was a simulacrum of itself. Also a fake.

Nobody cares anyway. Could be Disney Land
or Vegas, just another place to go.
Attractive to honeymooners, to depressed aesthetes.

Somewhere in history
a fat man’s being led out for the last time, his last time,
hands bound, and the fat lady
is about to sing, and that the Bridge
of Sighs has the last laugh is an

irony much admired in these parts.
Want you scampi or Bellini? Says the Harlequin.
He means the composer, of course. Even an execution
is an overture of sorts, a flourish, the beginning of something. 





Sunday, February 1, 2015

In der Wildnis - In the Wilderness 29 x 29 cm - pastel by Karin Goeppert





ORIENT ESPRESSO

It’s hot and wet, water dripping
from palm leaves, thought as dull as the glint
in a water buffalo’s stupefied eye

Mekong Delta, Kandahar, Sunni Triangle
reflected therein when you are knee deep in 
one of Uncle Sam’s disasters or have just enough luck
to be smoking a joint alongside the Ganges  

while some private first-class grunt
crawls through the elephant grass

there’s always someone who’s had the runs since ’68
and could really use a shower
and some tapioca pudding too and

a little R&R, perhaps, China Beach for the grunts and Goa
for the spiritual type whose knees hurt from prolonged
meditation, and the fragrance of fabric softener
on a summer morning in Des Moines—that would be nice, too.