Immaterial

 

10x13.5 inches; Pen and ink over graphite pencil on tinted drawing paper (Click on image to enlarge)

We are at war with ourselves.
Fighting for life with ‘Self Destruct’ programmed into our motherboards.
Do and die. Kill and be killed. All guts, no glory!
It is a slow burn horror flick with no survivors!
This IS civilized; we are assured. This IS progress.
The world is an orange.
We have peeled off the rind, dug our nails deep into it for oil, and squeezed out all the juices from each one of its carpels, and dumped the rest in radioactive waste.
The corporates own the seeds; also the air, water and our freedom.
The filthy rich and powerful own the corporates.
We own nothing, not even our own selves!
All of that conceit, that greed, that deceit, that unbridled need to win, will come to nothing.
The genocide, the ecocide, the hate mongering and democide will not make us invincible!
We will perish, and rot, and so will the memory of our plot.
What will remain is speculation and dust, on our toxic dreams and lust, in between the layers of the earth’s lithosphere.

Pancha Mahabhoota 3 - Kshiti (earth)

12x16 inches; Pen drawing on acid free textured paper (Click on image to enlarge)

The End Of The World

Here, at the end of the world,
the flowers bleed
as if they were hearts,
the hearts ooze a darkness
like India Ink,
& poets dip their pens in
& they write.

"Here, at the end of the world,"
they write,
not knowing what it means.
"Here, where the sky nurses on black milk,
where the smokestack feed the sky,
where the trees tremble in terror
& people come to resemble them. . . . "

Here, at the end of the world,
the poets are bleeding.
Writing & bleeding
are thought to be the same;
singing & bleeding
are thought to be the same.

Write us a letter!
Send us a parcel of food!
Comfort us with proverbs or candied fruit,
with talk of one God.
Distract us with theories of art
no one can prove.

Here at the end of the world
our heads are empty,
& the wind walks through them
like ghosts
through a haunted house. 

- Erica Jong