Messages Gleaned In Mourning

The Garden, Mixed Media collage on canvas, 2011. ©Kalliope Amorphous

i am lock and key,
shock and satiate ingratiated to the sea.
waving at the gate,
i am curled like the toll of a bell
across the horizon of a triptych sky.

i die unfurled in a metallic farewell
whose dross demands a knell
emblazoned like a cipher in the chamber of your eyes.
do not cry for me.

did you know that the bell has a head that is crowned?
she has shoulders as sharp as swords
and a waist of time and a mouth bereft of taste
whose tongue is tilled with sound.
she bows down and prostrates to stillness
when her sway is bound.

all seven stations of the cross
divine your eyes
from mud and moss.
one to peel back sin.
two to slough off faces,
three for eyes and four for tongues
leaving just the throbbing center skin to hold
a nest for words and lungs.

all you need to know of your heart is this:
it is a moth spawned from fireflies.
teeth hungry for cloth,
born from and dying by the same source.

your eyes are valentines patented in fire
and in the margins of your glance moves the sun;
the sum of all desire,
divided by one.

love is a stonemason in a mansion of bones 
-one hundred feet of concrete secreting time
against a frantic architecture
of folded moans.

we are mapped against the longitude of blood, 
latitudes of loving strapped to the skin with
the weight of a cement floor.
we are the door frame,
we are the space which came before,
we are the structure of the long goodbye,
of a rupture pushed and a rapture pulled,
of shudder and slam,
of nevermore.

-© Kalliope Amorphous

I’ve Finally And Thoroughly Quit Twitter

Audio, Glass Houses excerpt, 2012 ©Kalliope Amorphous

A little while ago, I pressed a button and magically vanished from all forms of social media once and for all. Twitter was the last vestige of my engagement with social media after quitting Facebook last year and it was a platform which I have had a love/hate relationship with for awhile. Tonight, I deleted myself from the Twitter universe.

My series of last straws began when I realized that there was a disturbed individual on Twitter who thought that all of my tweets were secretly referring to him. Next up, someone created a Twitter account under my name in an attempt to impersonate me. This was all followed by an influx of  thousands of “robot followers” which I felt the need to block, then set my account to private, then start curating who would be allowed to follow me (which basically defeats the point of the platform). Long story short, I realized that Twitter was taking up way too much of my time.

Beyond it being a time waster, I found myself thinking way too much about Twitter and taking it too seriously. I started taking it too seriously when I realized that one very unhealthy person was using my Twitter feed as a way of “not letting go” and I realized that these forms of antisocial media are just as invasive and uncomfortable as I have always innately felt them to be. But, I wanted to make it work.

I wanted to make it work, so maybe I could set my account to private or curate who follows me or just have a small circle or….or….Oh fuck it.

It had become an anxiety machine. I am forever torn between making myself available on the Internet and making my availability limited and what I have arrived at is this: Every bit of emotion that passes through my head and heart does not need to be placed on display in public and a platform like Twitter makes it all too easy for that to happen.

I am an artist, which makes being expressive a strong part of my personality. That part of my personality has always tried to find a home in social media, but now that I find myself having quit Twitter for the same reasons that I quit Facebook last year, I realize that I do not fit into these types of structures and I am not finding the type of depth that I seek within them.

I want to connect; We all do. But, if I am honest with myself I can see that distilling myself into 140 characters also makes it too easy to use social media as a distraction from my larger work. In 140 characters, I have contracted, not expanded. I have made less work. I have blogged less. It was starting to change the way that I think and process information and I am realizing that “too much information” is a detriment.

And when I found myself trying to figure out a private workaround for a public platform (which was only sucking valuable hours from my day anyway), I knew that the deactivate button was the only sensible option.

So, I’m not on Facebook and now I’m not on Twitter either; I’m free.

The Maker

I stumbled upon this beautiful short film the other day and was amazed by the poetry that it holds.

The Maker is an award winning stop motion animation film by husband and wife duo Christopher and Christine Kezelos.

“The Maker explores the preciousness of our moments on earth, the short time we have with loved ones and the enjoyment of ones life’s work and purpose. In their fleeting existence our characters experience joy, love, hard work, purpose, loss and loneliness. As the tagline suggests, ‘life is what you make it’ and we are all makers in this world”. -Director Christopher Kezelos (www.themakerfilm.com)

Mannequin

Mannequin, Glass Houses series, 2012
©Kalliope Amorphous

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”  ― Salvador Dalí

New Self Portrait: Anxiety

Anxiety, Body Language series, 2013
©Kalliope Amorphous

“Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torments his nature demands.” -E.M. Cioran

The Letter

Gesture Of The Deity, 2008
©Kalliope Amorphous

The Letter

we are atoms split apart across a palm, convulsed in the lifeline of a ruptured psalm. we are a formula torn in rapture across the heart of Adam, a contamination contained within a beam born as steep as grief. we are the steel plate in the head of the brother of Cain. we are the mother of the arterial stain and our crowns are gilded by the flawed forging of a sword. our pauses descend to skin; we thaw, we petal, we ascend in pores.

we are both fatal knowing and fetal nothing. we are the unraveled vesture of form and our breath is sired by storm. we are the threat of ecstasy exhumed only by collapse, a ghosted synapse to flesh culled by mire. we are both death rehearsal and breath reversal -dire at the onset and ecstatic at the spark of the pyre. we will teach you the texture of fire from your smoldering wounds, for we moulder under the char of bones and the sounds they make when left alone.

we are the scar raised from ruins in your glass i. we know that every moth loves the sight of hell and all descendants of dust die to ascend in a slant of light. the farewell is bright -some things shine best while burning whole. we seek a phantom carrion, a sculptured vanishing, a hallowed telegram of skin excised by inhale, exhumed by dream.

an intravenous haunting, our phantoms mine your iron. we are a burial ground hosted by the weight of skin and hoisted to the size of sound. we congeal at the crossroads where the world is sold. we are the orphans of desire. we will cathedral your decay. we will vein your vanishing in gold.

- ©Kalliope Amorphous

Pompeii

Rock, Paper, Scissors
Designing Time series, 2012 ©Kalliope Amorphous

Pompeii

i keep falling in love with
lost cities shaped like women.
i keep waking up
in Pompeii,
(love begun as the decay of sentience
finds an end in sentient decay)

we love the daughters
of downed power lines
-they kiss like an electric fence
with the viscosity
of wine.

those lights ensconced in entropy
forged in the frame of our doors;
the lacework lattice of fossils
pressed into our attic floors

a pile of bone
and hell
and thought
-an exiled stone
some citadel forgot.
her morse code gaze,
her curse mode heart,
my home.

- ©Kalliope Amorphous