Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Gustav Klimt: Time and Magical Illusions


Gustav Klimt: Time and Magical Illusions
by Armando Ortiz
Gustav Klimt made magical paintings. The bright color combinations are executed in such a manner that they are emblematic of the ever present. The master pieces remind the onlooker of life’s dissipating moment that escapes our hands like water. Klimt’s creations nonetheless flow in a timeless river where rocks are suspended by the currents of nature. To see them, is to be transported into a world that continues to exist, the works being a wormhole into the anxieties and dreams of the living artist, that stands observing his patient models, and evergreen landscapes, making representations of that instance, where flickering hearts mirror the flames inside through the eyes of living goddesses.
Pleasure and sensuality are brushed onto a canvas that makes up a woman’s profile. Her eyes, closed, remembering that instance of past time where a warm embrace seemed to last longer than seconds with eyes, closed, covering that sunshine as her tears become gold smears.  Time and life, so invaluable, amazingly unchained, as tiny bean shoots that unroll after breaking through the earth, depicting youth in peach colored tones, and age in a darkening pale beige. Forever drifting in an ocean of imaginations, all eyes changing its point of view, an ever changing perspective of bodies that continue to live standing through the ages. Refinement being found in a delicate smile and a nod of ecstasy discovered through interior light. Even in a perfectly sealed beaker, we are swept by the tick-tocking clock of the universe, with rich and poor succumbing to the same fate, mass and matter, disintegrating, returning to where it all starts the stars, becoming magic illusions.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Sacred Time: Short Piece



Sacred Time

Armando Ortiz


Life is not the holy moment; at best this mundane time becomes a break into the extraordinary, where eureka is hollered after years of mistakes. Nirvana is only the waking of eyes, where for a lifetime your pupils are pried wide, and blindly live every second that passes, thinking that life is forever.


This dream is just as a rose dropping its petals, a sakura that is released from a branch, only here for a moment. Our Mother’s hand slowly opens, letting tiny birds take flight, while Father’s arm swings, to sow seed into the air that becomes a cloud of butterflies floating on bye.


Thursday, February 12, 2015

Love and Hate: Five Pieces


Love and Hate: Five Pieces

By Armando Ortiz

1.

I love you like party time,

as the sun goes down, and

bed sheets cover us to hide

what we imbibe.


2.

I hate you like the emotional isolation

that is felt when beside me you cry,

shedding those tears

through the night.


3.

I love you like party time

that’s when its Friday at midnight,

and though tired I fight the urge to sleep

keeping on the mild cool light.


4.

I love you like dark chocolate chili

that is sold in the old markets

of towns found in between green valleys

where on deserted imaginary lands

abuelitas wearing aprons

carry those delicious goblets

on dry baskets, and covered

in golden maize husks.


5.

I hate you like clammy handshakes

that leave that water residue on the skin

as a sign that time has come to say goodbye

like eyes that splash you with darkness

with abysmal irises of black unknowns.


Sunday, January 18, 2015

Life and Death: Short Piece

Life and Death: Short Piece

by Armando Ortiz


Yes, we all die

but that doesn’t answer the question

as to why.


Into this confusion we are born,

and just when we thought that this fusion,

of love and nature could endure,

your neighbor dies and

souls begin to knock on our door.


We end up visiting the hills where people,

still cold and stiff, are laid to rest

and every time we return, it seems that life’s

duress reveals its empty self in the shape of death,

where memory can no longer regress to that time when

lawns were used to play ball, and trees blanketed

us with that cool shade.


No one knows the suffering of others.

we walk kilometers forgetting that there are those,

who’ve trampled through the heat of humanity,

walked through valleys of glowing embers and silently

swallowed the bitter drink of life.


Broken remain those who hang from trees and tattered are

the happy times that we barely reclaim, yet

there is no prejudice with life and death.


It’s the stuff in between that stirs waters,

that creates hurricanes and tsunamis

of labels and names, and

painful experience.


Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Peasants


Peasants

by Armando Ortiz


Sun weathered,

weather beaten.


Feeling mother’s warmth

inside the furnace of creation.


Where the wheat

is sheared and beaten.


You embody the perfect mirror

un-fragmented by life’s tears.