• Call – Don’t Dis Me, Theme of the Month
• Response – Musings on Nobody’s Perfect
• by – Mimi Peterson

About Me

Alone, only the distant street sounds penetrate my thoughts, Only the skylight’s my mood, Only coffee, cooling in my favorite mug, Waits within reach.

I sit at the old family table of notorious memories, 100 years past, metal and glass sculpture stood proud, Some made by Daz’s hand, Others found at Chicago junk shops. The table was Saturdays stage for stories and arias, Family chorus joined the heroic opera, Handled Neo-Classic European bronzed ideals, Now discarded in favor of avant-garde New World liberty.

Round like the trunk of a tree, Dark like earth should be, Spiraling from the epicenter, Regardless of form, A unit of expression touches sensitive edges, Different perspectives cast by glass, A contrast of generations, Triadic color brightens Nature’s alley, Speak now.

Musings on Nobody’s Perfect

The dynamics between interrelated text and imagery – visual poetry – provides a laboratory to experiment with automatic writing, as in the Post-Modern painting of Cy Toomby and Joan Miro, and free association, mind flow, in psychology. The process moves toward a collaboration between fusable words and pictures. My aim is to present a reconceptualization of OBSERVATIONS – Color Feel in October.

In practicing OBSERVATION #4 Folk Culture theory, I have enjoyed face-to-face conversations with fantastic women, each involved in perennial social discourse concerning people with disabilities. In sharing anecdotes, we confronted environmental and social barriers together. Their diverse backgrounds, having worked across many areas of the healthcare industry, showed me that we are all neighbors, experiencing mental and/or physical issues and discrimination. They are navigating their way with creativity and conviction as community activists to bring awareness to “I Dare You to Dis’ Me“, I have human rights.

Meet Beverly

I have dementia, My bones are deteriorating,

I have pain, I am an individual, motivated, mindful, unable, Move out of my way, I need my inner space, Loud voices say shut-up, be quiet, I whisper, Accept me as I am. I have voice, For now, anxiety won’t attack, Focus! I wear Kamala 47 to win.

Negative, spaces, Positive, places, 50/50, I am losing bone, My mind is being scraped bare,

Remember how it was? My husband say’s, “This is how, when we were young, this is now, so get out of bed”, While we can, go to market, visit the children, eat, laugh away dusty memories, Remember where the car is parked, They dare not ticket the handicapped vehicle, Park and wait, motor running, Police say it’s time to move, Down the ramp, Wheelchair coming, Cautiously, Pain overtaking, Cautiously, Pain overtakes.

More Musings – Disruption

The mythical history of spirit is reminiscent of the history of glass: it was created by intense heat burnt into life out of fire, shaped by human breath. The ultimate alchemy.

Bare in mind, glass as material, comes with associations. 20th century Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp, an exponent of the idea that broken glass with its poetic feelings of transiency, brittleness and the irretrievable past embodies process and change = Disruption. When glass breaks, what is left? Post-Modernist would say only broken glass. It is also the continual production of debris and the inevitable breaking of everything. Transcendental poets and creatives say broken glass is validity of the ideal, of the immateriality of nothing.

I’ll leave my thoughts with you here. To be continued, citing anecdotes on being dissed along with musings about broken glass as an interpretive model on imperfection, not limited to people with disabilities.

Mimi Peterson

More OBSERVATIONS coming – 9.28.24