Richard Schulman
The wand stirs the planet’s cauldron below and imagined: Transformative powers arise: There is a real subconscious: It resembles a dream: It resembles a reality that I have not known: A singular place where metamorphous believers Ovid, Dante, Kafka assembled as a cabal: Nightmarish realities alight among spectral prisms. Dreams do come true. Imagine my youthful thrill: Far from the madding crowd is where worlds of imaginary dreamscapes live: Far from the madding crowd is where my eyes meet unsparingly my three tenses:
I sit in awash of dreams: I see billowy clouds as in the dream is where I imagine fictitious eyes breathe: Eyes of the real Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s atmospheric truths, live: It is a place where I caress the Pyramid of Cestius: The exacting execution is simply imagined: One day my camera will emulate the exquisite precisions: To be a draftsman with my mechanical eyes:
One day I will capture a dreamery likeness to Piranesi’s The Round Tower: A simple investigation into a troubled brilliance: The exactitude of a surreal mind: A maze for the imagination: A tour of architectural designs my portraits may become:
I feel a kinship with a mechanical tool: My camera: It must send up red flags to networks of institutional asylums: All on twenty-four hour alert to my preposterous visual expectations: The sky above illuminates faces in my crowded mind: Ken Kesey, Randle Patrick McMurphy and Chief appear: Who better to dance around the maypole than a cuckoo’s nest of a few good men:
Piranesi I seek for visual answers: Bizarre nightmares reconfigured dreams and creative forces live inside my lens: The metamorphosis is a constant. If only to make sense of Kafkaesque like ideas:
I once traced the origins of horse racing: Maybe seven thousand years before today: A transformative experience that I never witnessed, occurred: The desert, mountains and windswept sands felt the power of four hooves: More modern episodes followed in Chester, England, Hempstead Long Island,and more across the natural world: A race became a story that beget another: At dawn and twilight I listen for the thundering hooves of ghosts: When time before me passes I realize something was where I am before I knew: Echoes of a real life made memories that an orchestra of citizens cheered and applauded: The quoted orchestra is only a wind in the past: Like the entire planet something was always before: My camera begs to see that apparition and make a story-a mechanical story:
I dream again: My days and years sit in reverie: Not a true second passes without a bit of naïveté: I sit, where the other realists sit: I still pause for Ben-Hur.
The pages of One Thousand and One Nights comes to a close: The true romance of my real life dangles powerful stories about my vanishing world: Real buildings in real time: Architectural footprints never disappear: The lives above and below may: It is a happy scary metaphor about the lives that were and the ones we dream about: There is no infinite number: Lives and buildings have become mere numbers aside from when I travel to all of my continents, countries and cities:
I utilize my spot meter, the one lofting atop my irises: The history of me is cloistered in an imaginary glass Matryoshka doll: Beneath me and above architecture has become lives of others and my life from afar.
It seems I could be like Kafka’s Gregor from within and about: It is a ridiculous science fiction account of a life on the streets: What if it is true. Why would I sit awash in vacillating dreams: Why would I swim through voluminous ponds reveling atop lily pads where tad poles reign! This curious child’s mind is innocent: The mind elevates atop a trampoline and aboard a seesaw
Unsparingly my eyes ride among my three tenses: Transformative powers engage: The light of the world is my moment to capture: What was, what was once: Did I imagine: What remains: a storage capacity on steroids: So I dream:
I sit alone and alert as if in the darkest quarry: Enclosed in a Swedish like wind-eye is a happy place: Science Fiction becomes reality: Nightmares are fabulous dreams: The past is replaced with the present: A nano second of frivolity is near: Memories are present in different guises: No time for more; Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues plays just around and near: Take a listen. I have pictures to take about my vanishing world.
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/04/11/architecture-of-cities-kafkas-children/
