Life in the Bowl of this Forest, Consumed.

A Confounded letter about growing and not growing.

 

Through forests forever wet, always glorious green, standing first verdant. Sheets of mood. Dripping silent pauses, damp now for consideration. Colours, greenish, brownish, black, changing tense.

Do you see what I see?

Bird, plant, insect and animal punctuated with shaking wet. Expectant dripped reflections. Musical noted tea brown cascades over and under, through lines of standing for evergreen. Spaces textured and woven. Insects carry line and wet web across such coloured space.. 

Mathematical nature growing already framed. Warp of organic courses, weft of liquid mist. Rock sculpted miniatures covered in elven and misty fruiting forests.

Hearing this, pause. A bass line of rumbling softly, away. A percussive growing and giving to the creaks and poke spears of hunting trees. Written, treble melodies, windblown and whistled. Sung arias glossing into sunshine chords and shafted timelessness. Leafing choirs shouted about.

Light flares, coruscates into tertiary greys and diminishes. Madness is growing; poisoned in primary colours. Overnight organic erections sprout and spore, sparing the alighting fruits from scared but naked promiscuity.

Shafting light rests, revealing a tentative history. Overgrown and forgotten buildings contracted out but containing life, death, love, eating, growing familiar and sex. An all consuming forgotten crowning life. The changes in tense and tempo are deliberate. Fecund becomes hopeful in this meaning and that. Irritating heat and insects. The pricking of false memories captured in blushing red thought. Undergrowing glowing against constant darks.

Underline these smells. Capture the distilled essence of diverse growth with inevitable white consuming rot  For this is how poisons are made.

For this the fungus grows. Neither fish nor fowl but necrophilia into life and back again. Blood red and white spot. Bat eared and rippled. Slow contrast and fur. Deep ghosts and fly blown faded antler. Taste and not when deciding upon reasons.

The damned rest in the arms of brothers, bloated green and seen only through gaps. Roots are washing the feet of their neighbours. Shelter is in injury.

Flight through the negative spaces is drawn with black pen over and over in Escher layered lines. The loamed mattresses of the fallen are in hangers, on small hills. Shapes of landscape seem under painted over and falling down. Gravestones reveal ancient heroes turfed over and forgotten. Life is in the bowl of this forest, consumed.

Author's Note

The changes in tense and tempo are deliberate. The painting is mine and called Dead in Light. Watercolour on paper.

Reviews

[Tree]

You certainly brought this forrest alive, Ken. And I felt as if I did see what You saw ... through your words. I think as a visual artist you have trained yourself to not only notice the minute details in nature, but the relationships found within, too. We can all learn from this type of thoughtful observation.

Thank you for sharing.

[Ken Simm.]

The underlying dark mathematics of nature. I always found myself looking for words when confronted with pictures and visa versa. Thanks so much for reading Diego.

[emmajoy]

' Warp of organic courses, weft of liquid mist. Rock sculpted miniatures covered in elven and misty fruiting forests. '

EXQUISITE! Whatever you write, wherever your imagination takes you, it becomes real with every single letter, dot and more that you use. I've often imagined you writing or typing with your eyes closed so you see the scenes and people in front of you and, having such amazing skills you transfer everything to me, the reader. so i can walk, look, smell and feel with you!

Even the tragedy of the last quarter sings its own song, creeping deadly, it is; but it is what is, like it or not, a part of your masterpiece, dark but very much alive.

[W.k.kortas]

The world--the universe, indeed--in microcosm in one section of forest: Expectation, birth, and fecundity, then onward to birth and death's paradoxical intersection ("...necrophilia into life and back again"), and finally to the poem's final image of gravestones "turfed over and forgotten." The central concept is tightly advanced, but the wonderful wordplay and the vivid imagery serve to make the pacing somewhat (surreptitiously, even) languid. A virtuoso effort from someone whose use of the language is unmatched.

[Chris]

I would have used Bowel... but the flow and feel is pure, freeflowing, gut-grasping poetry. after line 2 - I forgot about prose and took the plunge - and it was right and it was moving at a run.

I'ld read you again in a heartbeat.

Take care Ken.
Chris

[Emily B]

I came and read and ran right away to share the words with a friend . . . I'll have to come back to these words another day, though, when I'm feeling taller. I couldn't begin to do your work justice today.