Slime

Give a child some homemade slime and some time and they may make something remarkable like this.

Stir Some Slime

~

Taken Apart Tape Machine

This is the sort of little surprise a teacher loves to find...

Cassettes!

Mom and Dad dumped a paper bag full of fifty or so old cassette tapes on me that they no longer wanted stored in their garage. Four track recordings made in high school that cause one to cringe. Tapes by some boring band from somewhere that will never be listened to. Broken tapes. Mc Hammer tapes. Whatever.

Took them to school and made them part of the curriculum. We pulled as much tape out of about 20 of them as we could in a few hours. Cut it up with scissors. Wound it around cardboard cones. Ripped it up. Listening to tapes while we did it. Music from Cambodia and Peru. Making tape wigs to wear on our heads. Paint gluing the clear cases. Busting open a broken tape machine. Pulling out some speakers, then a motor. Covering the insides with glitter glue and bits of colored somethings.

In a way it was selfish of me, sacrificing a part of my past like that in some strange ritual. Those old embarrassing recordings, now just a prop in the play of a child, never to be listened to again.

It's Nothing

•

Oktober

Cardinal at the window feeder
Two days of steady rain
Moving the plants that can't
Handle the frost indoors

Seeing you in a half dream
Wearing a made up face
With music behind you
From the island of Crete

You are always bearing living gifts
That the people turn down
They would rather drape themselves
In the corpse flesh of culture

You with your star eyes focused
Can achieve the inconceivable
Like lifting hot heavy stones
With the wind of your breath

You are a living verb while
They are noun-things in a herd
You are slow to come and
Slow to go while they hurry hurry

This evening cold and damp
Daring you to come out
Rain keeps quitting then starting
Again while cardinal feeds un-phased.

My New Teaching Strategy

If I find myself automatically rejecting a child's way of using certain materials because it doesn't fit with my agenda for the day, then I make myself figure out a way to turn whatever the child was doing into one of tomorrow's activities.

Markings

A relic unclaimed, no name

Left on the art table today

Blob of white glue and something

Looking like the iris of an eye

Black marker scratchings, cut up

Orange paper pieces placed but not

Pasted on the red rectangular page

The remains of a free form session

With scissors and creation like

The shed skin of a snake or

Wind markings in sand dunes.

The Insidious

A melting night so pleasant
A smell linked to the past
A walk to supermarket
Through thick din of cicada
Caressed by gentle sneezing
Of the occasional breeze
Walk Past sick men and women
Gazing in far out ways.

Lionhearted Marvel

Born wild, made tame
Joined a disk race of lame ladies
And gentlemen.

Bought. It.

Must find the way back
Through an otherworldly art
Form without norm.

This could be the last secret
Revealed unto you.

This could be the last forest
You will walk through, merrily.

Make. It.

Make it yours and give it away.
Dance more and slump less
Sit on a stump and grunt some, Son.

The Sun as a lion now
The Moon a lioness.

The sunflower bloom proud and bold--
The exquisite fucking clouds.

Oh lionhearted marvel of the flowering plants.