MICHELE GIBBS-The Bottom Line/SNAP-FLAP-FLASH

THE BOTTOM LINE

If you play bass long enough
You give up your fingerprints
To the instrument
Your whorls
Become the wood’s.

Imagine walking
On your bare hands
For fifty years,
Several hours every day
Over the same terrain,
Each time a different way.
 
It mus’ be
sumpin’ like dat,
With only the memory
Of fret-free explorations
Your mind’s copurse charts
For a map.

SNAP/FLAP/FLASH

shoeshine rag snaps
sharp as gunshots
startle pigeons
whose wing flaps echo
raising dust
and flashing beads of light
from fountain’s flow
in their flight.

Michele Gibbs

Michele Gibbs has lived in Oaxaca for the past 18 years and works as a writer, performance artist, painter and sculptor.

See: http://www.realoaxaca.com/from-the-field/winter2005.html