drmstream[writing]

I The bath­room is a squared-off bit of dry­wall at the far back of the garage. It’s in Chelsea, near to the river, where the streets get wider and the air car­ries some of the fra­grance of the salt off the ocean. As you walk back to the dark door of the bath­room, slip­ping sideways […]

Sky and sea are opal grey. Mar­tin is stretched on the deck in the bow of the boat with an unopened book beside him. He has never been so happy in his life. The future is noth­ing to him, the past is noth­ing to him. All his life is effaced in the grey lan­guor of the […]

Hav­ing a Coke with You BY Frank O’Hara is even more fun than going to San Sebas­t­ian, Irún, Hen­daye, Biar­ritz, Bay­onne or being sick to my stom­ach on the Trav­es­era de Gra­cia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a bet­ter hap­pier St. Sebas­t­ian partly because of my love for you, partly […]

Worldly suc­cess has been elu­sive as has been sup­port where I live and work which makes me think I have mis­used my gifts.  Eas­ily refuted by rea­son and not a very exclu­sive club either. There’s going to be an end, a time when the lights go off, the vapor of life expires.  Then the brushes […]

The clues are every­where, but it isn’t until you see the title that the entire mean­ing becomes clear. I stum­bled across these paint­ings because I fol­low the artist on Twit­ter. Her han­dle is @julia_hensley. I don’t fol­low her because she’s an artist; a writer that I fol­low fol­lows her and I added her as I […]

The artist who painted this works exclu­sively in images. In her fifty-year career, rep­re­sen­ta­tive images make up a tiny por­tion of her work. She is an abstract artist. This is one of the few works where she uses words. The oth­ers were in a series of reli­gious works that she did mainly in the 1970’s, […]

The paint­ing is Olympia by Edouard Manet. In 1865, it was pil­lo­ried by peo­ple of good sense as depraved and immoral. A jour­nal­ist wrote: If the can­vas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the pre­cau­tions that were taken by the admin­is­tra­tion. Years later, Manet’s paint­ing has been pegged as the start […]

Yes, the news­pa­pers were right: snow was gen­eral all over Ire­land. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, fur­ther west­wards, softly falling into the dark muti­nous Shan­non waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely church­yard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses […]