Thank you so very, very much to all the friends who have wished me a happy birthday!!  I appreciate your kindness a great deal, and after some horrible events and circumstances involving health problems that have kept me off the net now for quite a number of days, I can't express how much it all means to me to come back to DA and find all those wonderful messages and gifts.

I want to thank you each personally, and I will, but in the meantime, I'm going to celebrate with a feature.  Art looks so good to me - especially after what's happened - which makes me look at it with almost a hunger.  

Art looks to me like light & creativity, darkness & imagination, infinite hope & infinite sorrow, raw earth & huge fantasies, clear skies & lightning riven night, gentle love & bitter hate, perverse longings of taint & sensitively macabre meanderings, balloons of moss & terrors of toadstools, humor, comedy, misery, depression, beauty, ugliness, morbidity, charm, happiness, loss, lack of hope,  satisfaction and so much more that adds up to the beauty and horror of being alive in this world.

Art is positively Shakespearean.

But most of all, art looks and reads like life - not perfect (although honestly, some of it looks perfect to me), but worthy of living and doing the best that you can.

Thank God creators exist and keep on creating.


IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

Trip to tear on this chair where I stub my knee.An arrow is never more deadly
then when true.
A bullet strikes exactly where
the desire will.
I am
one of two.
The demon dead,
the dream lies true.
the hunters desire
coursed from heaven,
despite a nightmare of will,
pierced this dark heart,
and one of light,
leaving waste
to me by the side.
(I so have to drink from the ocean, the one from where I am born,
but all I can do is lie here and drown). Behind the cellar door                             There
                            lies something
                        hidden behind the cellar
                    door. What enigma, what secret, oh
          what alluring truth could it hold? Oh what 
      sown seed,                          | |              of evil would
   it perhaps be?                   Failed Bathroom Mirror Pep Talks by Nicolas CageScene One:
Moments before
losing virginity.

"Hey, guy...
Forget about
how I am now
your voice of
reason, but
I'm here to
make sure
your penis
gets from HEEEEERE
to THEEEEERE...

You are going
to park that
limousine in
her garage.
Just taaaaaake
iiiiiiiiit
slooooooooow.

Get that soldier
ready, because
he's gonna be
battle in her
trench, and it's
gonna be WET!

Now, d-d-d-did you
put a helmet on
your soldier?
He'll be doing
some hard work,
and he needs a
hard hat,
if y-y-you know
what I mean...

You...
didn't bring
a condom?"

~

Scene Two:
Moments before
punching in for work.

"Alright, Reyes.
YOU G