Tip of the Knife, Issue 12

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CONTRIBUTORS

Helena Turinski
Massimo Stirneri
Nico Vassilakis
Cecil Touchon
Dan Raphael
Stephen Nelson
Bill DiMichele

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Helena Turinski

 if-you-who-remember











slipper-wearer

early-one-morning

series1.1-what-i-can-offer 

stop-obsessing 

series1.2-naked-talk

Massimo Stirneri

4 elements from a photo-book in progress ("Raum frei?"), section "Schriften aus der Nachbarschaft. erkennt meine Fingerabdrücke. Licht aus einer einzigen Richtung."

"Raum frei?" concerns one of my projects about experimental writing. Terms are inspired by philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers.

German language is considered "The" language of modern philosophy, so I use it to give importance and authority to all the traces, signs, marks, etc., that I find in the small rooms of my "cage". Doing this, I can also employ the technique of automatic translation, another interest of mine.

Nico Vassilakis

THIS DETACHED

You know right away that you’re in for a hypnotic  dream ride when you start viewing Nico’s video “This Detached”.   At 3:17, his sense of timing is perfect; not as short as the life of a fly, and not as long as Lord of the Rings. 

So, having established formal structure and temporal parameters, we can begin our journey to and in Malchut (Hebrew, the Kingdom).  It begins with shifting greys, curtains parting on alien atmospheres, or just as likely, on human viscera.  Quivering lightning parts the aluminum sky as scrapes or gravity crushed mountains become visible on some planetary surface.  Landing, we appear to share the physical space with chromosomes, clinging to some misshapen molecular surface.  As a darker, dearer blackness eclipses everything in small time, the march of the sperm army heads up the Fallopian tubes and explodes with the force of a solar flare (it is said that the energy level of the sun is equal to the energy level of conception).  Then and there, at the very beginning of life, old style typewriter letters do a slow dive in and out of the shadows, partly contaminated, partly illuminated.  At that final second we find a word fragment, urging meaning, spreading you out, pulling you in.  So what is it? 

It could be the protolanguage of Cro-Magnon man.

It could be part of some incomplete scroll from Lemuria.

It could be the attempt of a mentally challenged child to communicate.

It could be the beginning of visual poetry.

And maybe it is all of those things at once.  Whatever it is, follow it.  We’re already part of an evolutionary process, but there are so many things still to see, to experience, to observe and embrace, in both the micro world and the macro world.  The search begins.

Bill DiMichele

These are as you would imagine chiaroscuro snippets, ephemera that for me contained some other-worldliness, and seemed right for putting in the same sequenced container.  There's string alum foil type, a black tornado focus, and out of focus space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vR0uhAgOQ_I

Cecil Touchon

Fusion Series #3272

Fusion Series #3273

Fusion Series #3274

Fusion Series #3275

Dan Raphael

[4 poems from dan raphael   (raphael@aracnet.com)

Biquitous

you be quiet to us

you are in analysis

urban decomposition

sandstone bones

never quite here

avoiding the poem’s smell

its thousand attitudes, its delayed visions

rather wild goat, local anise,

always questioning what cuts

as the map of my hand

a new stone for every birthday

forget what you owe others

name yourself tasty or magic or don’t

I open my hand and see you

my hand    my wallpaper    my thawing dinner

Soiree

cream of impetus

            blue sky sauce

  salt from the street corner

             sparrows w/ newspaper wings

bread has the week off

         the wheel of random berries

I cant eat til I’ve forgotten

            this plate isnt a mirror but

the right glaze & temperature so my hand

each table setting includes a tiny fire

           midnight jump rope

                 curtain of bristling oxygen

take the ‘b’ from butter

      tasting the aluminum in rain

between the exhale & the inhale is a doorway

like a disc drive in the side of my chest,

a lifetime made into a map, how when folded

we’re rotund with tiny feet

The Thicker theMmeat

if i could tell the thicker meat whose essence i inhale,

lungs like caves sparkling with the dreams of bats

whose bodies are too large to get out into the alleged night

they’ve never seen but smell in the messages their intentions send out

like food from the radio empowering my polarities 

i skip like two jump ropes braiding the air between all four limbs

as i cartwheel in a concrete hoop teaching me several languages

one character at a time, where i press to spring and spin through 

an undulating meadow of grasses and flowers fallen from the winds pockets,

flushed from trains passing with their eyes closed

between large cities threatening to cover the meadow

like a blanket as big as the sea, rolling in itchy, smothering waves

on my bare summer skin as i try to sleep in a crate

whose windows are expensive tvs i see my changing face

with narrative adventures elapsing behind me like colorful milkshakes

of ingredients i cant spell—like an orange but square,

like cinnamon but caustic-- when the  two women embrace

i smell thunder and sense a change in my internal demographics

as my right arm is a complex survey  teasing me with the power of pictographs

im from the wrong culture to grok—

i don’t draw i doodle, connecting the lines, jumping the shadow of

white paper as if a lampshade it take five days to get around, where the sun is on a string,

throwing off heat and music as it asks all the air it passes through

to help it stop or at least linger someplace long enough

to mend its lifelong suit too bright for us to discern

the splendid tapestry coating my throat

to influence my voice dampered by the weight of the lungs

 so full of eager expressions unable to form a line

thin enough to escape this narrow opening

Getting Some

america wakes up like a pomegranate seed with a thousand hungers

i open my throat to the columbia river without fish to jump through

without a lifetime of nuclear waste building like the first orchestra

when strings would cut before singing, when playing underwater saxophone

lead to early thought balloons with clouds too far away to read

coming down where my hair used to, a scalp like the five loneliest counties in montana.:

we tried to house-train the sun but it never comes when called

every blue-eyed blonde in the northern hemisphere dials the same number at midnight

crackling like a 10,000 watt wedge penetrates the slurred vocabulary of escaping what i cannot change

throwing it out the airplane then realizing i dont know how to land

an orbit that couldn’t clear the rockies, so stay local, slam a pint of seeds

into a bedroom 3 feet thick w/ soil, 60 years of compost too diverse to rot

crossbred into unsustainable complexity:

         when every morning im a different size,

i wait til im eye to eye before i peel off the strangers clothes

becoming the face on the drivers license, the thumbprint opening an apartment

blaring music i cant stand, so many petals dissolving in so little water

i dont see tomorrow but im ready to dissect 2 years from now

watching the plastic im wrapped in melt beyond black chemistry & a poorly maintained horizon

not to filter but avoid with highly random, the luck of the unfocussed,

when egg & sperm fuse a new micro-dimension ripples a mouthless yawn.

no one is coming for me. i’m a dozen places other than here

i go in huminskis grocery and gasp from the middle of the world’s largest costco,

as if the vatican was having a garage sale, as if the armed forces evaporated

 and left all the pentagons doors unlocked--the first things emptied were the vending machines

what digests my food wouldn’t make it down columbus' gullet.

im changing territory with every step. standing on the platform of what got away.

my body is my compartment. im in the middle seat between an over stuffed past

and a future wearing everything it owns.

        learning to speak the language

while someones still listening: a word no ones thought since the 19^thcentury,

a tree built by someone whos never been above ground, never breathed wild air.

we havent the fuel to go to space but have a surplus of shovels, claws & dynamite;

in the future we wont plan beyond the next meal, the next storm

and how  tonights shelter wont protect me.

yet some hours I forget what  Im surrounded by and spread like a sleeping fire,

a fertile moon, a glass of something the glass cant handle  

Stephen Nelson

Below the Surface - for Marton Koppany

Integration 1

Integration 2

 Panda 1

Panda 2

It Must Pass

Bill DiMichele

Spectrum

Draw Blood or Go Home

                                          Email submissions for Tip of the Knife #13 to julie-d@prodigy.net.  Due date is June 3, 2013.