We Promote
In each issue of Liquid Imagination, we promote organizations, and sometimes we
promote people. Those we promote either had a powerful impact on the owner of
this publication, John “JAM” Arthur Miller, or they embody the power of “liquid
imagination” as a concept. The philosophy of liquid imagination:

1) Liquid imagination occurs when imagination bleeds into whatever is
needed.
2) We’re all in this together, whatever “this” is.
3) Fantasy and reality blur…
4) Taking over the world one mind at a time.

At its beginning, the online publication “Liquid Imagination” was to blend art with
words to create a new form of artistic expression. Both were intended to enhance
one another. Presentation is everything at Liquid Imagination. Whether we have
succeeded is up to you (those are pretty lofty goals).

Regardless, without the artist, Liquid Imagination would be just another ezine with
words, maybe a few repetitive graphics. Artists are as important to Liquid
Imagination as writers and poets, perhaps more so. Even in our daily lives, can
you imagine the absence of art? Without it, our world bleeds into grays, but with it
our world comes alive in color and expression.

Once, a fantastic poet named John C. Mannone requested a specific piece of art for
his poem. I told him we would have to contact the artist of the painting. After
many emails, from both John and myself, we received absolutely no word back.
The final email I sent stated we would use the art and promote the artist, unless
the artist emailed us back stating she did not wish to do this. The artist never
contacted us for some strange reason, although the artist’s website expressed the
desire to be promoted.

Why this is so is beyond me.

Some artists willingly give their art to Liquid Imagination. They do not require a
weblink to promote their art. They are satisfied to state at their own websites or
blogs (or however they promote themselves) that their art can be viewed at Liquid
Imagination. Other artists require weblinks directing traffic back to their websites.

Art is the lifeblood of Liquid Imagination and we love it, embrace it and seek to
promote artists. Submitting your artwork to Liquid Imagination is a smart move,
for it promotes you and introduces you to new audiences.

In this issue we promote Martin Waugh. His website, entitled Liquid Sculpture,
showcases his brilliant work. Martin is in demand across the nation, and by visiting
his website one realizes why this is: his artwork is genius.

The other artist interviewed this issue is Justin Abraham. While his specialty is
black and white, he easily demonstrates his skill with color, too. Available for book
covers and prints, Justin Abraham’s career is just beginning. Not only is he a
fantastic artist, he is a highly skilled poet.

I’d like to close this webpage with some of Justin’s unique poetry. I’d also like to
showcase the power of his brush. In fact, isn’t that what Liquid Imagination is all
about? Showcasing art and words, using them to enhance each other, until a new
level is reached?

This is what we leave you with. This is what we seek to promote.  Justin Abraham
embodies both types of art: the art of the written word and the art of the painter’s
brush.

Enjoy!
Photobucket
Machine

Half of my life ago
I stood at a crossroads
in my moral identity,
faced with the task
to disconnect my wife from technology.
Her existence; left in limbo
at the hands of a device
that supported her life and pumped her heart.
She became an inhuman being,
infused with the artificial ability to live
as a half woman-half machine.  
So despite the gaze of hope
under the glaze over her eyes,
I pulled the plug anyway.
And for the rest of my life
until my elderly years,
I buried my guilt…
…until my guilt buried me.

And as I grew into my seniority
my guilt grew just as quickly,
from the stress of suffering
to a tiny tumor of malignancy.
Slowly it spread   
and crept into my internal organs,
as they failed and buckled
under the weight of my worry.
It was then when I realized
that I was destined to be chained
to the same machinery of inhumanity
but by a different deed of death’s design.
Wires replaced my veins
and met with a mechanical heart.
My tracheal tube
led to lungs of plastic bags
hanging by my bedside.
And in technological evisceration  
my organs lay all around me
as contraptions of artificial intelligence.

Unable to move;
unable to speak.
Dead to the world I lay,
buried alive in my own body;
a living casket of flesh
in which to serve my life sentence
for the killing of my wife.   

Buried by pride;
buried by technology;
buried by the machinery
of guilt.


© Justin N. Abraham 2007
Photobucket
"O mighty-armed one, all the planets with their demigods are disturbed at seeing
Your great form, with its many faces, eyes, arms, thighs, legs, and bellies and
Your many terrible teeth; and as they are disturbed, so am I."
-The Bhagavad Gita , 11.23


Shiva

In the beginning,
long before there existed male and female,
Human Beings were one;
androgynously perfect bodies of asexuality
that were once in harmony with themselves
and with the Earth itself.
They were the absolute balance of life
in their passive-aggressiveness,
needing nothing other than themselves
to complete their circle.
But throughout the passing eons of evolution,
there came a change;
a shift in the balance of Mother Nature
that would spell chaos for the perfection
of human life.
And just as the Earth divided itself
into opposite ends of polarity,
so came the introduction to the human body
of hormonal differences.

So they  were split into opposites,
cloven apart by the polarity of Mother Earth
in a grim metamorphic mutation
of their ambiguous body parts.
Reproductive organs enlarged in size
and others reversed into inversions,
as protrusions in anatomical structures
distinguished one from the other
in the assignment of fathers and mothers.
Hormonal differences in behavior
created a cause for constant conflict
in a battle of the sexes;
a battle of brains versus brutality,
where men became physically dominant
and women mastered the art of mental manipulation.
And in their failed attempts to re-unite
in the intercourse of sexual anatomies,
it became apparent to them the only method possible
to reverse their disharmony.

They physically mutilated themselves
in the surgical reunification
of one body as part of the other.
Legs and arms were chopped off and re-attached
to form one walking being.
Internal organs were extracted
and placed side by side in torsos
to create one.
Sexual anatomies shared the same body
in a manifestation of man-made hermaphrodites.

And thus was their creation;
a super breed of human beings
endowed with the abilities
of two sexes and four arms,
surgically designed to destroy
the Mother Earth that separated human life
into disillusioned disharmony.
Woe to the natural Earth
that shall perish in the wrath
of Shiva the Ardhanari,
the destroyer of worlds.


© Justin N. Abraham 2007
Photobucket
Cutter (part 1-Werewolfe)

Some called it a disorder;
a pleasure from his own pressures
that were released from himself
by slicing open his skin with blades.
But despite the surges of euphoria he felt
when his blood flowed forth,
no one knew the origin of such desires.
Such dark desires,
that began from a birth condition
of a rare and uncommon brain disorder;
an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid
that hydrated his head too heavily
and into a hydrocephalic state of instability.  
And without his knowledge,
his brain, surrounded by water,
would soon fall prey
to the pull of a full moon.

And by the moon’s magnetism,
the waters of the world were pulled
in the rise of the Earth’s tides.
In the oceans and the seas;
in the lakes and in the streams;
and in the brains of human beings.
And as his excess fluids rose,
his mind was thrown out of his control.
So for one night of madness,
he would take on the nature
of a beast.

His senses became numb to pain
as hairs on his skin stood up on end
and his pupils fully dilated.
He ran stark naked through the night,
screaming at the face of the full moon
and terrorizing the townspeople
with random acts of violence.
He beat people with his bare hands
in the middle of the street,
as he tore their flesh apart
with his fingernails.
Cars were vandalized
and set on fire.
Glass window panes were punched out
and pulverized by his fists.
Everywhere he went, destruction followed,
and everyone whose path he crossed
fell victim to his recklessness.

An inexplicable insanity;
bipolar behavior of the brain
had never before been seen to this extent.
And despite his emotional alienation
from the rest of the world,
he had no idea what he was about to become
from the night’s antics
in the mornings after.


© Justin N. Abraham 2007
Photobucket
Cutter (part 2-Vampyre)


Some called it a disorder;
an exhaustive state from being awake
for too long during the hours of the night
for the body to fully function at daylight.  
And despite his desire to arise
when the sun shined at its brightest,
he knew not of the origin of such inability.
Such a debilitating handicap,
that stemmed from his nights of unrest  
and into an all-too-common bodily condition;
a deficiency of iron in the blood
that wore on his body too great
and into the unnatural state of hypersomnia.
And without his knowledge,
his body, pale from un-light,
would soon fall prey
to the shining of the noon sun.

And at the height of the sun’s ascent,
the life-forms of the world were saturated
by the bright white of the light.
The birds in the wind;
the cells of the plants within;
the pale frailness of his skin.
And from its lack of pigment
his skin was scalded by the scorching sun.
So in fear of destroying its body,
his nocturnal bestial nature
attacked him from within.

His fingernails were traded for razors
as he sliced open his thin skin
in an attempt to bleed the weaker being of himself.
He closed himself off from the rest if the world
in the privacy of his own home,
inflicting injury upon himself
as opposite forces fought against each other.
Arms and legs were slashed with blades
by the aggressive beast of night,
with a vengeance against he
who burned his body by the daylight.
Blood ran wild from the wounds  
and down his limbs,        
of which he licked up and swallowed
to keep what strength he had.
Every day that passed, depression followed,
as everyone else only saw him
as a victim of his own insanity.

A self-destructive disposition;
the development of conflicting physiologies,
both born from a birth condition
of which he had no control.
The stories of an age-old war
between werewolves and vampires;
a mythology derived from misinterpreting
the life of a cutter.


© Justin N. Abraham 2007