Poem 211

Ronnie was at the time the partner of a poet friend of mine, his exhibition Believing Is Seeing was made up of large-scale paintings with images drawn from US alien conspiracy magazines – photos of mutilated cattle, average-Joe abductees, burnt ‘landing sites’ and not very clever looking local law enforcement …  Ronnie had broken down the images and painstakingly built them back up again using digits and letters as pixels – up close the pictures were just masses of garbled data but stepping back the images coalesced, making a point perhaps about how none of this aliens-probed-my-grandma bullshit bore close examination …

… it was early in Ronnie’s illustrious career and his prices were reasonable – but at the time the chances of me having a spare $400 to buy one of the paintings was about the same as the likelihood of me being beamed up by a spaceship … I really wanted to though, I loved those paintings …

… the voice of the poem morphs from me looking at the exhibition to becoming a defiant rant from an overexcited conspiracy theorist who clearly in more modern times would have been a rabid Trump supporter – a segue that also reflects the duality of the art, standing back and seeing the big picture vs. being sucked inside the content and trapped there by your own frame of belief …

The Big Picture

Believing Is Seeing by Ronnie van Hout

The aliens came down in Ronnie's paintings
and turned everything into patterns
of numbers and letters
intricate diagonal series which only with difficulty
and distance resolve into pictures
you have to stand at the far end of the room
to see who you're talking to
and running across the street to a friend
you just dissolve into the equation

dirty alien bastards scorching our fields
mutating the livestock scrambling all these faces
so that Lonnie Zamora the cop
ends up with two pairs of glasses
and enough eyes to go round

you think you can stop us
bring on your damn numbers
like whiteouts
your alphanumerics from outer space
we got the walkie-talkies
we got the big picture
we're expanding

you made us too big for the buildings
too big for the cities
and this planet boy
this planet