The loyal,
The lonely,
The desperate,
The depressed,
They must be slumming
To hang around with me,
The d-leaguer,
The deep diver,
The freakshow.
I am the end in friendship,
The liar in familiar,
The con in confidence.
I don’t belong here, yet
I have nowhere else to be.
But I won’t be here long.
Time,
That tick-tock heartbeat,
That broken metronome in my chest,
Once an ancient enemy,
Now my newfound friend.
© 2023 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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I started this one in the middle of the night before the first day of Kitten*Con 2022: Poetry. The inspiration was thinking about an exercise I’d found that called for rewriting a song lyric. I chose “Smells like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. Over the course of two more 2 a.m.’s, it evolved a life of its own.
I had a girlfriend in high school whose church or grandmother or someone else important and influential to her would constantly repeat a little aphorism that she duly passed on to me: “Remember, there is an ‘end’ in ‘friendship’.”
And where do I pull words? In one case from the name of a favorite wine.
Picture notes:
ReplyDeleteThis illustration ranks among the most complicated pieces I’ve done. It was worked in two stages. First, the clock face, then the clock housing.
The clock face is built with Celtic knotwork. While a lot is repeated, for example, the large clusters at the corners of the dial, each cluster-type had to be built individually before duplication. Once built, I applied the effects, 3D, bevel, shadow, etc. For the triangular clusters near the numbers, I duplicated, positioned, and rotated each toward the center of the dial, according to the guides I created at the start. The great thing was that when each cluster was rotated, the effects remained oriented to the original settings, that is, the cluster by number 2 looks like the light is coming from the same direction as the light on the cluster near number 8, even though the cluster is rotated 180 degrees from its opposite. I got to use some of the new features in the software, including one that warps an object, which was useful for making some of the knotwork clusters fit into the spaces I’d created for them.
The second part involved building the clock housing. First, I had to build the parts of the clock, including the crown, the works housing, as well as the pendulum plenum and weights within it. Determining the light direction and keeping it consistent was a challenge. The 3-dimensionality of the entire piece comes in great part from the effects laid on the shapes. Essentially, I let the software do the hard work of highlighting the clock.
Throughout this process, I often looked at my own granddaughter clock, made by my grandfather for his wife in 1972, in ways I never had before. All grand-clocks have very similar features. They all have circles around each number or a feature that defines a circular space. There is a ring of delineations for the minutes. They all have corner designs around outside the numbers and a design in the space inside the numbers. Many have a design directly above the face, and some have an inset seconds “face”, and/or a day of the month (numbered 1-31) face, each with its own small hand. Some have a sun and moon dial to indicate day or night.
My own clock has a very simple face. It is driven by weights, not a battery. Many a night we've laid in bed in the dark, with only the chimes to tell us the time. Usually, we both sleep through the tolling of the hour or half hour. But it’s not unusual to find myself listening to its 2 AM call.
The wordie in me digs this especially:
ReplyDeleteI am the end in friendship,
The liar in familiar,
The con in confidence.
(Sorry, just realized the ID on these comments has changed)