The Garden

I'm collecting my seeds in the garden when a bee lands on my nose.

She climbs up and looks in my right eye. This is what she says.

I can see in your eye

you will listen to me.

What I tell you is true,

I mean true to a bee.

Well at least true to me.

Plant Narcissus in the sun.

and Hostas under trees.

Only then will nectar flow

And be here for the bees. 

Why me? I ask.

She lifts her front left leg and looks at the sky. 

I need YOU, she says to me.
You have the right sized claws
to rake the compost soft and smooth
and sift it with your paws.

You know I can pollinate flowering grape.

I'm exactly the size that it needs.

I gather pollen and bring it home.

But I cannot plant the seeds.  

I need YOU to propagate,

and plant, and cut, and prune.

I need you to gather seed,

and plant that seed In June.

Plant the mosses with the rocks. 

Keep the soil damp.
Moss will shade the soil for
the microbe and the ant.

Plant purple Crocus underground.

Only in the fall.

You see they come up in the spring

and grow 3 inches tall. 

Plant the Iris by the pond

the fish waste feeds the root. 

The fish will help, they have no choice

they always need to poop. 

The bee stops talking. She waits for me to answer. I look down into the pond and think. 

After a little while I say quietly to her that I don't mind learning, if she will teach me. 

And she does.

I work all day and go to sleep happy.

The next morning I wake up at 7 and poke my nose out.

I stop and stare.

There is SNOW on the ground. And ICE.

The purple Crocus flowers look beaten down with broken petals in the ice.

The creeping phlox is covered with snow.

Ice is everywhere.

I go to find the bee.

I look inside the kinds of holes she likes.

I look inside the daffodils.

They shine like the sun.

Inside a daffodil I find her. She isn't moving but I can see she's alive.

After a while I look around me. I see the Narcissus and Hostas. And I hear a sleepy voice.

Six Narcissus in the sun
are now beneath the snow.
The Hostas planted under trees
just one day ago

are pushing snow up with their spears
from their roots below.

Soon enough the ice will go.
Bees will wake up. Plants will grow.
Wait and work. The ice will go.

And with the bee's voice in my ear I go back to work. 

Mouse

I'm a mouse who's seen it all

from deep in my hole inside the wall.

I've seen the great ones rise and fall.

I've seen it all, I've seen it all.

I've witnessed mountains grow from rocks

I've seen the land shut down with locks.

Along the way mistakes were made

but not by me, I'm in the shade

I tell my tale and run away.

It all began with a bus garage
in a broken town on an empty street.
This big garage sat dark and long
and on the front were the words of a song:
WATCH OUT FOR MEN OILING BUSES

I myself was broken down, with tired feet.
I'd been looking for far too long
for a home to sing my personal song.

I moved into a hole in the wall
From here I could see and smell it all
I collected my seeds,
kept my nose to the breeze
and I saw it all, I saw it all.

By day I would quietly sing in my house
and dream of a friend, like a nice female mouse.
By night I would roam and again I would dream
of the seeds and the fields I would give my mouse queen.

A hawk moved in to the building next door.
A cat came to prowl below the ground floor.
I just moved back deeper than I was before
in my hole in the wall. I've seen trouble before.

I wait trouble out. And that's usually fine.
But one day a truck came at 6:59.
It broke all the windows and rattled my mind.
It tore down a wall. But that wall wasn't mine.
It woke me up, since I wake up at 7.
I was annoyed. Then alarmed. Then in heaven.

In a second I saw that this truck could create
a field full of seeds simply dropped on my plate.
I fell deeply in love with this truck right away.
I watched it with passion then, day after day.

At the end of the seventh long vibrating day
the building was gone and the field where it lay
was soil (and oil) and piles of stone.
I saw in a daze a huge farm of my own.

The truck stayed behind to dig ponds and deep swales
and smooth velvet ground with skateboarding rails.
It dug fields that were filled with beautiful seeds
and soon these seeds grew into tasty green weeds.

I never met anyone ever before
who could work like I do
but this truck could do more

And the more that I looked at this truck in my house
I realized my queen was this truck, not a mouse

Her fur was gleaming
her eyes were beaming
her high beam headlights
held such meaning.

I know one day the day will come
the truck will leave, the work will be done.
I'll have to choose between my home
and the only love I've ever known.

I've already planned it
I'll stow away
inside my truck's wheel
and there I'll stay.

I'll leave the land I've looked at from above
and live with my rumbling and earth-shaking love.

Youth + Climate

I began making comic books with WW3 in 1984

I met other cartoonists working on WW3 when we were all by chance working with kids that same year at Charas, a squatted community center. It was an old abandoned school building. But Charas was evicted in 2001. 

The community is now trying to stop Charas being turned into hotel rooms and dorms for my old college Cooper Union (now charging tuition for the first time since 1859). A "Stop Work Order" was just issued by the Department of Buildings on Charas. Cooper students, alumni, and teachers have filed a lawsuit to get Cooper Union back to being free and neighbors are working to get Charas back to being a community center. 

The kids from Charas drew, painted and made comics with us in Tompkins Square Park, gardens, playgrounds, and streets around the Lower East Side. One of these gardens, La Plaza, on the same block as Charas had giant willows growing in it. A developer wanted to build on La Plaza, 

Gordon Matta-Clark had built the rock amphitheater and Buckminster Fuller had built a geodesic dome in this garden. Underground stream maps from 1865 show two streams converge under La Plaza. I consulted with engineers who helped show the building plan was unsound. It was rejected, and La Plaza is a garden today. 

My work then, and now, is art with kids about their personal stories, and my stories. 




I work with kids to design and build public parks + gardens. 

Youth & Climate

This includes a voiceover. If you download it you can play it with sound in PowerPoint. 

Bookend Event for the Bklyn Book Festival

Friday night, Sep 19, I did a live reading of my digital stories, comic books, and paintings at the Brooklyn Public Library, as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival with WW3. These are the images that I showed, and I'm learning how to add audio so I can include the narration.

All photos, paintings and comix are mine. Screenshots of news coverage of my civil rights work with kids are images owned by the respective news outlets and reporters, including Sports Illustrated, ESPN and the New York Post. 

Here's a link to our event on the Brooklyn Book Festival Website
http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/bookend-events/world-war-3-illustrated-cartoonists-presentations-and-performances

Selfie: Traffic Island and The Other Side of Town

....and you may remember my first selfie, "The BioGas Plant"

Below you can find another video with sound called "The Other Side of Town Across From the BioGas Plant" created for this Digital Storytelling class. It is stop motion animation on a set I built, with sound I added in YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zsf8WYq3hk

The Selfie

Above, Genji, one of my avatars, introduces you to 3 other avatars who represent me:                            the biogas plant, the subway, and the garden.

The Garden



I'm collecting my seeds in the garden when a bee lands on my nose.

She climbs up and looks in my right eye. This is what she says.

I can see in your eye

you will listen to me.

What I tell you is true,

I mean true to a bee.

Well at least true to me.

Plant Narcissus in the sun.

and Hostas under trees.

Only then will nectar flow

And be here for the bees. 

Why me? I ask.

She lifts her front left leg and looks at the sky. 

I need YOU, she says to me.
You have the right sized claws
to rake the compost soft and smooth
and sift it with your paws.

You know I can pollinate flowering grape.

I'm exactly the size that it needs.

I gather pollen and bring it home.

But I cannot plant the seeds.  

I need YOU to propagate,

and plant, and cut, and prune.

I need you to gather seed,

and plant that seed In June.

Plant the mosses with the rocks. 

Keep the soil damp.
Moss will shade the soil for
the microbe and the ant.

Plant purple Crocus underground.

Only in the fall.

You see they come up in the spring

and grow 3 inches tall. 

Plant the Iris by the pond

the fish waste feeds the root. 

The fish will help, they have no choice

they always need to poop. 

The bee stops talking. She waits for me to answer. I look down into the pond and think. 

After a little while I say quietly to her that I don't mind learning, if she will teach me. 

And she does.

I work all day and go to sleep happy.

The next morning I wake up at 7 and poke my nose out.

I stop and stare.

There is SNOW on the ground. And ICE.

The purple Crocus flowers look beaten down with broken petals in the ice.

The creeping phlox is covered with snow.

Ice is everywhere.

I go to find the bee.

I look inside the kinds of holes she likes.

I look inside the daffodils.

They shine like the sun.

Inside a daffodil I find her. She isn't moving but I can see she's alive.

After a while I look around me. I see the Narcissus and Hostas. And I hear a sleepy voice.

Six Narcissus in the sun
are now beneath the snow.
The Hostas planted under trees
just one day ago

are pushing snow up with their spears
from their roots below.

Soon enough the ice will go.
Bees will wake up. Plants will grow.
Wait and work. The ice will go.

And with the bee's voice in my ear I go back to work.