NAVAJO SASH

Navajo Sash

_________


Zachary
Scott
Hamilton





Authors note

I feel the need to write something strange, the kind of thing I see in my dreams or the kinds of things that will not instantly find a place in most minds.

As a painter I have studied others for many years, Salvador Dali, Picasso, Robert Rauchenburg, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. For the years when I was only painting, I would find things sneaking in from the corners of the room. Words, many sound clips layered up from my surroundings.

I started writing mockeries of television shows and left them in journals to rot. Years went by, many trains went by, the Brooklyn yard, the Saturday of forever left me to the birds, drugs, alcohol, sex. All victim-less crimes, but neither useful for rent on a painting studio, so I ended up Out, walking everywhere. I started making things up in my head, wringing them out onto paper when I had nothing left but a pencil and a notebook and some time.

My poetic voice, in that case came from inside the gutters, within the stories of the people who mutter at an odd hour every-night. The places I have been, searching for the never ending Saturday is a book on its own, but I didn't write a story, I instead wrote only poems, poem after poem after poem. Rotting, my feet, my teeth, my mind, rotting. I sat there and read Sylvia Plath, I wept over her gorgeous prose, I traveled with an old copy of Le chance De Maldoror By Compte De Lautremont for a whole summer, reading passages from it at every bus stop, in every flop house, at every squat or bush I read it.

I started reading books by obscure authors, who experimented with the style of verse, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot (Four quartets) Alice Notley (The descent of Alette) and at that time I would still check out books from the fiction section, reading books by Italo Calvino and Aldus Huxley, then that would turn into a novel by Philip K. Dick. I would sit around and read Finnegan's Wake, half asleep at the desk writing my first novel. Then I would stick my nose in some good prose, some obscure author, Richard Brautigan and realize something! I can experiment with layout in my poems. Each book of poems can have a separate cover! I get all excited and put out a 'Zine under my small press Surrealist editions. The orchestra machines comes out, distributed ninety five copies in a year, doing good. Then I sit back and read a book by a woman named Jeanette Winterson The book is called Sexing the cherry, I have a nervous breakdown. This book is amazing, it's similar to Le chance de Maldoror, it's like if Rimbaud was still alive, but this time he was a lesbian swinger who owns a green grocer and writes deep stretching prose of some kind.

I start to form my ideals against such things, strictly keeping my forms in verse, I hate that I can only do this, but I may not swim in that shark tank with those lunatics so I nod and smile, moving away slowly. What have I gotten myself into. I can't write like her.

I won't write like her.

I will make up my own style, this will be a new style, mixed with three poetic expressions from the past: Metrical, it will be rhythmical, blank verse, collage, Themes will all vary, everything will be it's own thing, no themes!

So here we go, let's see how this works.

Here I have selected ten poems in many varying forms, styles put together in a montage of

Navajo Sash.

-Zach Hamilton

Oregon 2011


Navajo Sash

(2011)

Indirect dawn







Theater seats unfold, twenty five yards

of aluminum foil in seat shapes

coil around

an orange extension cord

into the flower of light, a stage

made of glass wings, rotating

at ninety degrees.




Successions of thistle wiping

layers off of frontal lobes

in a mineral mars black

so deep in darkness

two lights

exit.




Through a crocheted

past moment

lines of civilization

replace the white room

bouncing coil off of

corner cut,

Eugene station

record show

wave of scrap metal

wave deteriorated

wave soup sample




bouncing mirror

deteriorated

laughter


multi-verse -

______________________





Slow opening




Fact or throat control?

As a vertical content emerged from the route of rose quilt inside of her sewing red soil, she grows her furniture out of leaves, as little hearts pour from her dress.




Eve danced the lingo along umbrellas the long lonesome saddle stitched highway of her dress climbing down the ladder of hilltops in ant piles




Three days later

the wigs are a flame twice like retro oblong word canoes, a slippery fire of lichens mesmerized with lunacy. A fire of life peeled back in here the way bobcats enter from a quarry, then a clearing into a Cadillac.




The thin lake runs under my pillow in a mescaline river. In a dream the river is crushing through the city, expressing itself against the walls of the ruining haze of pavement. A rat ship is the only survivor that is floating through downtown. It is a dark gray cloud haunting the death, black water rinses the pipes and we are part of the group who lived.

Hanger

Premixed alpha rugs light tapestry woven in stone alpha hangover piece the light

Rust

Clothes happen passed, they live, they happen by. The wood grain teal fibrous satin flood

Hamburg

Aliens eat control out of the light, the shape is eating at the stove, a broken diaper, dozens of shattered

ceramic feathers.


Curtains

Wanting the elbows of the soup, A Plexiglas theater folds near us. Shirt sleeve casting a thin light in the blue paint.

Eventually

The toast flue, the birds droppings thin perm blue Chevrolet flies break noses, our soup found in the curtain box

Origami

I wish I knew my pillow the shoes are on fire my pill bottles melt in your dress I gut these shapes

and replace flowers with the cave Oh that's pretty gorgeous I thought a line down the dark

Human hands

Sleek fierce twist goes joining fierce twist the veal arms caught on the barbed wire of the sky for heaven reaching into man.

Waist deep

Thin gruel disease thin over me Hearing aid and fist stretched far into the shades

of this window

I eat meals in a dimension but I do not remember who you are I eat twenty three flights I inhale orange rain coats from the entry way, ingest the flesh of sex organs.

Enter

Pearl geese climb into the wind folding out a back crystal of the peacock feather moisture drops a bead of water down into a well and walks to the park with a diamond gazing back into the eyes of his pea-coat shriveled face.



Teal folds

Paper tears are very real slivers in the eyes, cutting the blood out of the cavities in the brain and folding me away into the shimmering shell that I have become, a paper of things, the drool. A thin blanket of fairies dreary lines across my parachute.

The peoples

Alloy unfurls the thin grease for the dirt in portable sandwiches an old aluminum under neath.

Chairs in rose

Endless pipes in heart. Felt hands, examining room. Leaf tools pertain to microscope thin green. Few know Harold inside of the wooden sky line. Fur pills drop sectioned throat, down through the basket, down through the water, down to the bottom of the well, into the light bulb where air and water are servings, a felt friend.

Tried spelling this with a cigarette

A moss sequin shirt, thin suits mash up team. The clouds fold over our shoulder, a reflection. Right root steps out of the camera.

Rust hamburger

Layers of wax absorbing the meat of holes, strips of cloth filled in wax, clogged with rust, layered with wax clogged with paint filled with wax.










_____________________





































Habitat 9 (video)





















A cross section of a standard oven and stove appliance is shown. Melted plastic boats are floating on fire in the middle of The Lake. Somebodies brain is placed on a dish, in a close view. In a view from back away the brain on a dish is in one of the many freckles on a little girls Nose. Blue skies and puffy white

clouds behind her. A green glove on a rope drags through the mud, holding another rope that leads goats to a tree line in the distance. In a clearing, the goats are brought where there is an aura around a young girl standing in the center. While the goats come closer, they see the thousand Sesame seeds fallen

all around her, piled around the Edges of the aura, and they nibble the seeds. The girls hair billows softly in the wind slowly, ever so slowly her hair begins to dry up and Crackle, smoothly turning to thistle branches and wilting away, and breaking from her scalp to the ground.









The sky grows dark until it is black all around the Clearing, and the clearing disappears. A cave appears, the walls are covered in little hairs. The girl stands at a far wall of the cave dressed in a polyester suit that is blue checkerboard. Window-frames made into an apparatus move up to her and

surround her until she is gone behind it, and from inside, the window instrument grows a curtain stitched with flowers, pushing the curtain out of one of its slots onto the cave floor, pumping the curtain out from inside of its middle.






The little girl climbs through an attic with the goats following behind her. The bells around their necks clutter and clink. She searches for an exit way in the floor and thinks of a Room with her belongings in it, and thinks of a pair of underwear with pink rabbits on them. The candles in the attic blow out and she

feels around in the darkness for the door.

She's found a room. She stands in a dress glued on are orange cigarette butts, in the weave are satsuma oranges, and peels sewn with thread. She pours water onto the dress and it grows more curtains stitched with flowers. She drifts to a dark

Maple dresser and opens the top drawer. She reaches inside and pulls out paper flowers that are wilting over her wrist as she holds them. She searches for other things in the drawer but finds nothing. Closing the dresser, she drifts to the wooden wall where forks have twisted themselves into the knots, they twist more and more, moving over the wall and looking up at her standing above them.





Worms wiggle up to the forks, unwrapping a nail each and wiggling away. The china plates roll up to the wooden wall and unravel a bundle of orange string onto the nails, covering them over.

A wallet that has been placed before the girl opens up, twilight pours from within, where the money would normally fit; it covers the entire room in warm tapestry, October twilight. In the kitchen, she drifts passed with her wilted paper Flowers clutched in her hand, her cigarette butt dress, dropping-butts in replacement of flowers growing through from within.

The wall she weeps by erodes back into the crossbeams in a spot, and she picks up as jar with a pair of her eyes floating in liquids, carrying it from the closet and into a room where she stands.





















These centers



Valve of hack and raked ink feathers, blood diamonds

and mist – A vehicle made of snakes –




The room tastes like braille your breath

smells like braille

your mouth smells fast

the rocks sound like braille

Valve a hack of raked and feathers, blood diamonds.



________________________

Habitat 9
















Quartered oven amphetamine

aroma in lakes

the thought in freckles.

The glove leads goats

through an aura

parked in the sesame seeds

dried to the billows.




Fractured thistle for hair

fury thought cave.

An internal polyester painted by window machines

grows a curtain.




For habitat and salmon swimming in the wall, for eroded

inner light feeling this under me.

Orange dressing gown painted with cigarette butts

in orange peels and folded Satsuma's in the weave




potable water included into the dressing gown growing more curtain.




Quietly open the dresser and find wanting,with

paper flowers wilted

slow motion.




Forks lying twisted at night curling beyond recognition

into the woodgrain.

Nails of the worm, that the plates have stained orange

with string, a twilight inside of the wallets,




the wall inside of the kitchen that tore under thought

when the eyes left

from the closet for a moment

and entered a room.






______________________








Brand new pupils
















Ice angel collecting wire -

terrible – cold, granite feet

uttered silk in grass hands.

worm will worm -

an abscess of silver toenail polish

thighs curl - wet

with her moss and

her feelers and

her concrete.




It is in her wings that our diamond things wander

the threshing Mobius, petri machine

melting flowers

into wire - iron

this is the Ramblers cemetery where

he worships the drip of light coming off

of her stone tongue.




This is the ramblers new secret

that he drifts in from

dark pea-coat, powdered skin.
























_____________________________

















To become red













The stab is felt and string, unhooked umbrella the ripping slight of hand under the fur of light

an arm is picked by teeth under the grass - a photographed voice is dissipating -




A pocket rag, shellac unhinged in arcs. Dissipater knot his lonely voice was wolf, the erosion coil. Unreasoningly meet the forked up limbs of latex disguised yarn in augment; A modern woven gauze of detailed clocks.

Under the bathtub, threading glue to film the birdies enter crocheted rapture rings.




Our rare and delicate unfolding radio is mouth and talon fatherland. The umber Elysium hat, a fatigue detailed in blue. Oh, feeler, electron over the universe of stitch - the akin entanglement cloud.




In ink, all paper dots unglued the fold with microscopic eyes that drop in place.

The forest stands out late in names unknown -




Eatable trees line the oaks to corners door we chew into the thrust lock are our eyes driven by brown inside the locket - shredding - those houses with fine lichens

scourging hundreds with groves -




Our leakage of dream in songs our garden and list the hands raise to the throat songs to touch your voice in sweat-ed Monday, she asks my braille thought crashing from noses from fog of the skirts drowning hands in sway of the room dancing ghosts hold each other, short mustache, short skirt, long leggings crashing out the checkerboard dance




Last dance grows legs and sudden as it rises, turns leaps to life under the garden groaning throat drips hurled out to ocean, a shark circling the dance floor, a fin dragging wake on stage, on guitars, a drum slams out rhythm, shapes rooms with rhythm a ray of lights, ghosts dance on checkerboard games.




My Manichean hands cut across ceiling in thrown ink feathers after night pretends it sinks in steel.

Are Eric's underground Shell Fish in total stillness, the beech in television tree, a snail and glow the eyes and Barn wood Owl.






_____________________________

Figure 68










The study, a little warp

of yarns,

enough light for a bird paints the wooden entry way-- pair of warps

the fourth pair lets in Unicode,

light leaks off of one cord, dripping

purple lake number 45.




A girl hides in the rows of the welt,

braided in her loop of thirteen

upside-down type -dress related techniques-

twisted in full Peruvian textiles.




Work was done,

the arms she emerges from

within

pool the purple

in the center layer of her hands,

determined according to three types:

the apron, the mat intersection

half-hitch knot or blanket stitch.




The Chenille pile is beaten into place

Second loom: burlap, buckram,

cotton canvas hand

hooked into the cutting machine

clockwise crank

from in the curtain emerging thumb needles,

hooked to floral designs,

geometric De Luxe

holding the pile dyed thousands of years

in Old world structures

ancient draw,

felting goat hairs,

hanging from a slender tree form,

Even today

vogue feet explain this difficult texture,

actual needs that supply life

to those who rescue him.



________________________________


Perfect need

Along that carefully installed wall

a divine laboratory

kiss is set inside of the lace

where Navajo Sash is found,

Braiding some interesting hands

out of

the wallpaper

from along the varnished

gymnasium basement.




The reel of tape has been correctly woven

exactly the foundation for a perfect boat

thus said to be twin spinning methods among the amazon.




Purple nursery rhyme

revised in my headache as I look at the broken

aspect of the tape recorder gone wrong,

this is a purple nursery rhyme I must look deeper within

the springs and speaker wire, the wheels and screws, the vent.

A handbook of weaving, braiding.




Twenty three eyes - bracketing dusk -

_________________________

All poems forthcoming from Section press (2012)

To order copies of the publication contact me at Journeysintospace(at)gmail(dot)com