poem

unsaid
moments before
or after the falling
through space, time, you, me, waves--and see
again

and that
I don't know what
or why I myself do
or don't do what is undone
or why

New work online at why vandalism?

A poem of mine is in the current issue of why vandalism?

www.whyvandalism.com/issue_mar08.html#21

If you read it, let me know what you think.

Read my Helium.com articles

www.helium.com/users/1749...ow_articles

www.helium.com/users/174989.xml

New work online at Abramelin

I have a poem, six photos, and the cover photo published in the Winter 2007 issue of Abramelin: The Journal of Poetry and Magick (www.abramelin.net/). Check out my work and feel free to leave comments here.

Three new pieces in "why vandalism?"

The August issue of why vandalism? has three of my pieces -- a poem, a short prose piece, and a prose poem. Check them out at www.whyvandalism.com. Then come on back and leave a comment to let me know what you think of them!

Wedding and photo album...

Aviva and I stood under the Chupa on June 13. It was a spectacular wedding, in Jerusalem, at a restaurant on the promenade that overlooks a monastery, an Arab village, and the Old City. There was wild dancing and much joy. If you want to see photos, check out our online photo album (first installment, more pictures to come): web.mac.com/michael_dick...%20Cover.html

Story on Neon Beam

My short story, "Across the Creek," is in the premiere issue of Neon Beam, available online as a downloadable PDF at www.neonbeam.org/

Hope you download and enjoy the story!

why vandalism?

New work on why vandalism? whyvandalism.com/issue_jun07.html

Shoah Rememberance

In Israel, at any given moment, horns beep at intersections the moment the yellow flashing light joins the red light, the signal that a green light is coming. Drivers insist on moving forward, push the cars in front of them by creeping up before the green. Cars push through intersections on the other end, too, entering as the light turns red, a perpetual near-gridlock that somehow keeps flowing, however slowly, anyway.

Today, however, at 10 am everything stopped. I sat on a bus in Tel Aviv on my way to work, at busy intersection. A man got out of his truck and stood next to it. Other drivers and passengers got out of their cars and stood. Then I heard the siren.

The bus driver stood. All of us inside the bus stood. Pedestrians stood still.

A nation commemorated the Holocaust, the Shoah. For a brief moment, a siren's mournful wail, and a silent, standing people stretched time into the past. Everything was still.

Some of us on the bus remembered that during our generation, six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Some of us remembered that during our parents' generation or our grand-parents' generation the Shoah was. Some likely remembered lost family members, or at least the names and echoing memories of those lost in their family.

The siren sound fell. Everyone on the bus sat back down, the pedestrians strode along their ways again, and as soon as the flashing yellow light joined the red light in front of us, a couple of horns sounded their drivers' impatience.

Perhaps it is fitting. For even after our moment of rememberance, genocide continues in our own time. Distant places names like East Timor, Rwanda, and most recently, Sudan echo like impatient horns. Time for us to get a move on. Time to go. Somewhere. Anywhere.

Photo: Molotov Man, an Ecstasy of Influence -- SEO Series No. 3

Appropriating Joy Garnett, Susan Meiselas, and
Jonathan Lethem with your photo search (1)

Photo: Molotov Man and an exploding ecstasy of contextual influence and perhaps today a photo
framing my page will savor your search and, downloaded to your ambitious hard drive, live a new,
ecstatic life of influence. But I doubt it. My photo: perhaps you will appropriate my photo,
use the photo for a holiday photo card, increase your or my influence anxiety while my holiday-
photo-card appropriated photo dances upon family occasion. My photo. You appropriate a photo,
my photo, I appropriate your search for a photo to give you my photo. Originality and appropriations
are as one. You want a holiday photo card, digital photo printing, or just photo printing or just a
digital photo. I want you to see snippets of other writers’ texts in this work, an action my teachers
would have called plagiarism. Visual, sound, and text collage, explosively central to a series of
movements in the 20th century. Collage, the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the digital
search of the 21st. See: my photo, its life, its use—even as a holiday stock photo card. This picture,
this moment I saw, appropriated, manipulated, selected an angle for and lighting and perspective for
and framed, this photo framing a picture of my sensibility, placed here to attract your attention, to
appropriate your search. Enframing Heidegger’s technological orientation toward the task
he identified: to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis object, things pulled into relief against
the ground of their functionality. Appropriating your photo, nude photo, holiday photo card search
pulling out from the ground of the search engine an optimized photo album poem against the ground
of naked-picture backs. Central to my work, respect the individuality of the people who search
for photographs. If I find my photo later, disguised as a Britney Spears picture or sex picture,
a tattoo picture to capture your ink-mind word-splattered photo-appropriation imagination,
creating found photo art from my photo, so what? I am a photographer. Perhaps my name could
ride with the photo, for a while, this obscure and unknown photographer offering a small gift:
the appropriation of your search for image, for photo, for photographer, for Britney Spears picture,
for photo print, for sex picture, for PhotoShop, for a Jennifer Lopez picture, for a funny picture,
for a Joumana Kidd picture (who is Jouman Kidd?), a tattoo picture. Ah. A tattoo picture I have.
What joy, this practice of decontextualizing searches in my own hope as a photographer to
contextualize the photographer’s photography, an image of self: there is no denying in this digital
age that images are increasingly dislocated and far more easily decontextualized. Technology allows
us. As a photographer photography is my grasping at the world, a shout of my consciousness, a
demand for a picture framing me. The photo album is my mind. My ego. My self. I don’t have a
Saddam Hussein picture to offer you, no free sex pic here, although death and sex are on my mind. It
is a poetry of witness photo, this picture frame, the photographer’s photography, influenced by
ecstasy. My mind poem witness to an adult picture photographer, not the free sex pic, sex picture frame Yahoo!
Photo graphic kind, a graph of body, mind and creation and eye and experience and
against interpretation, appropriated to appropriate your photographer photography photo search so
that, for a moment, you might see as or what I see. Even though you won’t. Because you are
searching for a photo, not my photo, a photo you will take out into the world or view privately alone,
hands busy not looking, on keyboard or body. I cannot appropriate your eyes, hands, desire,
your perspective always outside my picture frame. You searchers of photos look for the photo, private or public,
the photo in your mind: the holiday photo card, the Saddam Hussein picture,
Saddam Hussein being executed, saving the most promising images in folders on your computer,
a photo album mirror reflects your eyes, your mind, and you forget where you found the photo.
Assembling each photo you find based on aesthetic, psychological, cultural, social, religious
criteria more than that, on your emotional attachment to their narratives as self-constructed,
into your photo-album self, the mirror of culture, the constructed dance of influence, past,
present, philosophy of digital photo printing a newly released Adobe PhotoShop self, photo
printing picture, the public-persona photo album. The private-alone-at-night photo album seeks
Britney spears pictures, a Lindsay Lohan photo, an adult picture in the picture frame of lonely
bodies. An Aishwarya Rai picture highlights the diversity of the search as you seek a free porn pic,
the sex photo you want to create in your Adobe Photo Shop mind of a photo: a Beyonce picture,
a sexy picture, you in it with whomever, a Shakira picture, a porn picture with Britney Spears,
car, Paris Hilton picture you in the nudist photo, part of the celebrity photo, the digital photo,
the passport photo that takes you to the porn sex nudist pantyless Britney excited photo of
your cultural and personal despair, alone in the Elisha Cuthbert photo. No porn picture when
spent, you return to looking for the holiday card photo you sought to appropriate before
the dance of loneliness left you looking for a Victoria Beckham picture, your superiority
sought the execution of Saddam Hussein picture, your free nude pic reminded you that
you need a haircut, and quickly you appropriate a picture of hair style that will end
your loneliness you are sure, or a dog picture, so cute, to cleanse your inappropriate
searching for a Shilpa Shetty picture. (Who is Shilpa Shetty? Why do you want that
picture?) I know that you want a Britney Spears pantyless photo uncensored, a
pussy pic to go with the dog picture, but not that kind of pussy cat picture. Despite
this, I appropriate your search. I am not a wedding photographer, but perhaps
you will hire me to take a baby picture. I have no Paris Hilton private photo, but
no photo in this digital world remains private long. I have no free nude pic, no
sex photo, no sex pictures, no 2006 Miss World Photo. This poem anxiously appropriates
your searches for photo, for photograph, for photography, for photographer. This
poem steals words and language from writers and searchers for photo. This
poem is a photo gallery of the digital cultural mind searching, searching, seeking,
not hiding, not finding. This digital picture frame strings Joumana Kidd photo gay
pic with Cameron Diaz picture with Britney Spears photo with Ivanka (Ivana?) Trump
picture with xxx pic and girl pic and naked picture, nude photo, sex photo, right
after naked picture comes horse picture, perhaps adolescent girls sublimating photos.
The seekers look for a flower picture, a free gay pic, a Ciara picture. They look
for Miss USA photo, b h photos (what are b h photos?), herpes pictures, and then a
Serena Williams hot photo. From our space we want a satellite photo, stock photo
of earth or moon or where we live; we want stock photos to appropriate in our
digital art world, a cat picture, an animal picture. I’ve got those, cat pictures, a
dog picture, animal pictures. Not sex pictures, nor am I hanging Saddam Hussein pictures
on my living room wall. I’ve stolen your searches for this poem. But you were not searching
for this poem. Who has a dragon picture? Today, we all have a MySpace picture.
A senior picture. A developing photo fetish for photo fetishes. A two-dimensional representation
of culture, an appropriation. A Jessica Simpson picture and a Serena Williams picture,
sandwiched between them: your photo shop tutorial. Beyonce Knowles’ picture hangs next to a
dragon picture on Saddam Hussein’s hanging-wall photo album of hell. At least some
of us would like to see an angel picture. Or a dragon picture. Or simply to find the photo
for our photo-album selves that would be the holiday photo card photo of our
persona, imago, projected appropriation of cultural masks of self, of whom we could and might
well be. I’ve stolen your searches, plagiarized your phrases, put together this pastiche
with my feeble scribbling, contextualizing sensibility, picture-framing, selecting,
digital photo making something of a lot of nothing, words that might bring you to me.
You may well appropriate my photos. But if you have found this poem, I may well have
appropriated your search for photos, your quest for a free sex picture. Your desire to see
for my desire to be seen. A new project having to do with the human in extremis. Will you
include a credit line? In this swirl of appropriated search, creative agitprop and commentary,
several questions come to the fore. Does the author—whose mission is to provide a public with—
control the content of the readers’ mind? Searchers of photo, did you find what you’re looking for?


—Michael Deqel
(nee Dickel)
©2007 All Rights Reserved to the Exact Text (but appropriate freely)


(1) See “Portfolio” and “Criticism” in Harper’s Magazine 314:1881, Feb. 2007, 53-72; also “Reviews,” “The Devoted,” by Robert Boyers, 87-92--some text in this poem has been appropriated from Garneet, Meiselas, and Letham (the first references), and an homage / allusion to Susan Sontag influenced by Boyers (the second reference). If you appropriate parts of my work, I’d appreciate a similar line of influence credit. If you want the whole thing, please ask.