The Tattooed Poets Project: Debbie Kirk

I always like to finish up the Tattooed Poets Project on a strong note, so today's tattooed poet, the last of this year's series, is the heavily-tattooed poet Debbie Kirk.

It also happens to be Debbie's birthday today, as we check out one of her tattoos. More specifically, let's look at the top of her left arm:

This piece, complete with straight razor, brass knuckles and cherry bomb, bears a banner that proclaims "Bow to your elders, you Emo Fucks."

I mean, what more can I say about that?

In discussing which tattoo of Debbie's to use, this exchange took place:

Tattoosday: "I hesitate to use the emo one because of the language and because I'm sure people will not understand why you would get it, but that makes me want to use it more".

Debbie: "its a favorite with peeps...it has been declared the sexiest tattoo ever..."

Tattoosday: "I love tattoos but they are generally so benign nowadays, so it's nice to see one with a true fuck-all attitude."

Debbie: "Yeah, that defines me what you said right there....and why I got the tattoo. I think that single tattoo is the most ME. I can be a bit honest...which is why people like my poetry."

Where'd she get the tattoo? Debbie recalls " I just remember I got it in Venice 5 years ago from a girl who proposed to me when I told her my idea...I still tell that story. I KNEW it was good with that reaction and she was hot."
 
Debbie gave us several poems to choose from, and the one we selected, she says, is very representative of her work:

Little Frankenstein girl

 

Little Frankenstein girl

has the hands of a pianist

And the heart of a broken organ

With thorns, glass

Bats and Indian ink

Seeping thro…

Sewn together

Crookedly stitched

Like a pastel valentine heart

Filled with mismatched parts

Little Frankenstein girl

Has the right brain of a killer

Her right hand is dominant

While her left foot always faces away

Wanting to disconnect

To run

To be free

To not be part of this

Fucked up experiment

Dreamt up by

A genius dressed in rags

And chased by demons

The kind that really scratch and bite

When you are fast asleep

Little Frankenstein girl

Is not a little girl anymore

The curls in her hair

Dreaded up in the sun

Medusa in the wind

Her loud strong voice

Muffled under the stitches

That firmly binds her lips together

Bondage bringing pleasure

Only to those who wish

To keep her silent

(and they are many)

The little Frankenstein girl

Can’t count the stitches on her wrists

From all of those nights

With her right hand doing

What her left foot

Wanted to walk away from

And her not understanding

That she was never really alive

In the first place

Little Frankenstein girl

All mixed up

And

Mix matched

Returning every evening

With fresh wounds to be sewn

From another vain attempt

To be mortal for just a few seconds

Before the fall

Little Frankenstein girl

Stolen parts

Come with stolen lies

Maggots and flies.

The gravedigger, looking to make a buck

Steals her a kiss

The moistness quenches her lips

He promises more kisses tomorrow

She scurries home

Knowing full well

She’s damned to a life of stolen kisses

And malfunctioning hearts

that spit in the moonlight.

~ ~ ~

Debbie Kirk has published 6 chapbooks and been in 12 anthologies and hundreds of print and online zines. She lives in Santa Cruz with her dog Dr. Gonzo.  She has a website she rarely updates at tntkirk.com but she can be best located lurking around Facebook!  Also check out http://tntkirk.com/.

Thanks to Debbie for sharing her tattoo and poetry with us here as we close out the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday. Also, we wish her a very happy birthday today!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Lizzie Wann

Here, on the penultimate day of the Tattooed Poets Project, our contributor is Lizzie Wann:

Lizzie explains:

As I came into my poetic self in college, I knew I wanted a tattoo to symbolize that. My friend, Kevin, designed it for me and I carried it with me for a while. For spring break in 1993 or 1994, I went to Seattle with 4 of my best friends at the time. We happened into a cool tattoo shop and 4 of us got our first tattoos (the 5^th person didn’t want one).It was great because we each got something that symbolized who we were at the moment but also who we hoped to be in the future.

Here's a closer look at this quill and ink bottle tattoo:

Lizzie shared this poem, as well:

Grace

she lives here with me

but she comes & goes as she pleases

never tells me where she’s going

never leaves a note

it’s typical that she’ll come in

just as I’m falling asleep

I catch glimpses of her sometimes

usually when there’s music

we used to be inseparable

I didn’t think she’d ever leave

now, daily happenings of my life

rarely interest her

but sometimes they do

and she’ll spend time with me

when that happens

I remember how good it feels

her company is like an avalanche of

warm towels out of the dryer

I could stay there all day

© 2010 Lizzie Wann

Lizzie Wann started reading at open mics in 1995. She soon became an integral part of the development of the San Diego poetry scene, facilitating workshops at the Writing Center, creating her own readings and producing original shows that featured poets and musicians. She earned a spot on the 1999 Laguna Beach national slam team that competed at the National Poetry Slam in Chicago of that year, and from there, helped make slam poetry become a San Diego fixture. She was on the 2000 San Diego team that went to the West Coast Regionals in Big Sur, served as coach for that same team in 2002, and co-hosted the fledgling San Diego slam, held at the Urban Grind, until 2003. Her work appears on CDs (A Wing & A Prayer and A New Leaf), in chapbooks including Familiars, Naked Wrists, and Complicated Skies and in anthologies including Comstock Review, Incidental Buildings & Accidental Beauty, A Year in Ink, volume 2, So Luminous the Wildflowers, The San Diego Poetry Annual, and Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug.  She also founded the Meeting Grace house concert series which ran from 2000-2008. One of her CD’s can be found at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/lizziewann.

Thanks to Lizzie for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Tagged Closets by Decktwo

Impressive Closet Graffiti Art by decktwo, an Artist from France.










































Artist website

The Tattooed Poets Project: Gerry LaFemina

Today's tattooed poet is Gerry LaFemina. Gerry put together a narrative about his ink, which makes my job easier, and gives us a detailed view of his tattoos. Let's see what he has to say:

Photo by Joy Gaines-Friedler

"My first tattoo–I was 19, I was a punk rock kid, and I had been thinking about getting a tattoo for some time.  I had had a dream in which I had a tattoo of a skull and crossbones design in which the skull had peace symbols for eyes.  When I was shaving the next morning, I was surprised I didn’t have the tattoo.  So I called up my friend Melody, whose uncle was Tattoo Ray–one of the best tattooists on Staten Island.  She made the appointment and came with me to her uncle’s house.

            In New York at the time (the mid 1980's), tattooing was still illegal: most tattoo artists worked out of their homes and their clientele was through word of mouth.  Ray was pretty famous–and I have met a number of people over the years on Staten island who had work done by Ray. He was funny, sarcastic, and quick-tongued.  I remember asking him about his needles (this was in the midst of the AIDS epidemic) after all and he asked me right back “How clean is your blood?”

             I liked him immediately.  He did the work.  His niece and I talked.  I just remember being surprised how much the tattoo gun sounded like a dentist drill.  The little whine, the humming buzz.

            My second tattoo: I got my senior year in college.  We found somebody in Westchester who did the work in his suburban neighborhood house.  I remember little of the experience.  The tattoo was not the one I wanted: what I had hoped to get – Tigger with a microphone and a mohawk jumping on his tail – I ended up not being able to afford.  Instead: I went with symmetry – and more pirate stuff: a rose with crossed swords above the left bicep.  In hindsight, this tattoo has held up better than Tigger probably would have....

Photo by Joy Gaines-Friedler

            What lasts though are the tattoos I wanted to get but didn’t: After the rose I wanted to get Charlie Chaplin tattooed on me.  I asked several artist friends of mine to make me a design, and I got a few of them, but none of them “worked.”  And for several years I wanted the logo for my old band tattooed somewhere.  But neither happened.

            So I went with two for a long time: but I often thought about getting new ink.  I wrote.  I taught.  I created a program for young writers in northern Michigan called the Controlled Burn Seminar for Young Writers.  I committed 13 years to that project, and after the tenth seminar, I thought I would get its logo – a lit cherry bomb – tattooed on my right forearm.  The logo was important to me: I believe poetry and all art should be a lit cherry bomb.  It should be a potential explosion.  But it should be fun, too.  I looked into it a few times, but I finally made the decision on a lark a few days after my birthday.  I was walking on Carson Street in Pittsburgh – tattoo parlor row.  I liked the name Flying Monkey Tattoo.  So in I went.

Photo by Joy Gaines-Friedler

            The tattooist was a kid, He could have been one of my students–he was finishing up his apprenticeship and mine was one of his first tattoos.  The seminar after the ink ended up being the last one.  It seemed fitting that the creative writing kids got to see it before the seminar ended.

            And now I’m back to collecting designs: this time, though, I know who’s going to do the tattoos.  The next one will be a Buddha carrying a tattered pirate flag on my back.  These are the two strains of my life.  And I want the MG logo somewhere.  I’ve been driving an MGB for 15 years.  The tattoo is a commitment and the things I am committed too, the things that define me, that continue to define me I want inked on me.  I spend much of my life putting ink on paper.  I think it’s only fitting to have some ink on me, too."

And now, for one of Gerry's poems:
 

Alphabet City

            Avenues A through D, Lower East Side, NYC

After the ambulances left but

before the sun finally rose above Avenue

C, I walked toward Tompkins Square Park where the heroin

dependent rockers slept, addled on benches, while

ex-punks huddled in their leather jackets

for the morning was still damp. One of them called out,

Gerry? What was I to do when I saw her, recognized

her hesitant familiar eyes. How could I have

imagined things would turn out this way when I’d call out her name —

Joanna — those sleepless nights of high school &

kept a photo of her deep into college.

Longing has such a sense of history.

Morning was approaching in its colorful coat.

Not once those months of kissing her, had I wakened beside her, but

oh — I’d wanted to. She was thinner & glanced away when I nodded;

pigeons surrounded her bench but would take off

quickly with the first sudden movement or when the next squad car

revealed itself in flashers & sirens.

So what did I do? What could I do?

The three five dollar bills folded in my pocket, what

use were they to me? I gave them to her, she who’d once been beautiful. How

victorious I’d felt that first time I kissed her.

We didn’t look at each other, nor did we look askance. I thought of the little

xiphoid syringes she might load with that money. This was my sin.

Two young black kids with dreadlocks walked by singing

Zion! Take me back to Zion! & I knew I’d never be saved.

– Gerry LaFemina

from Vanishing Horizon, 2011 Anhinga Press

Gerry LaFemina is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Vanishing Horizon (2011, Anhinga Press) and a collection of short stories.  He directs the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University where he also teaches.  He splits his time between Maryland and New York City.

Thanks to Gerry for sharing his tattoos and poetry with us here on Tattoosday!


This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Graffiti in Chernobyl

It's been 25 years today since the Chernobyl disaster, but that doesn't mean people don't drop by the ghost town of Pripyat. One sign of human visitation is the graffiti street artists leave behind.

Photographer Alex Cheban has taken numerous photos of Chernobyl's graffiti — you can see many more shots at his website.

Even though Pripyat is by no means a hopping town, people are still dismayed by the street artists. Notes Cheban (via Google Translate):

"There is a view that is the desecration of graves, but I think this is one of the forms of modern art in the urban environment. This is just a platform, which now is an incredible stimulus for the tourism, creative and implementation of various art projects."