The Head through the Face

Let's workshop this poem about the struggle to uncover the essence beneath the surface, whether in art, logos, or human expressions

The Head through the Face

It is notoriously difficult to see 
heads through faces. Think of how 
difficult it is to see the homey logo
“Colgate” in its pure meatness,
where the word no longer sticks
to the familiar thing in your hand.
Artists have tried to unconceal 
the head by deforming the face:
smudging, stretching the region.
This does help meatness emerge.
But what emerges is not the head
in question. That head is ruined.
Reordering the Colgate letters,
while bringing out the pure shape
of the letters, ruins the pure shape
of the logo itself. Shape, of course,
is what makes this meat this meat.
Although they do not guarantee
that the collective human stratum
of associations will peel away,
such distortions do go some way
toward unconcealing the meat
beneath. They open us to falling
into those dissociative modes 
where the very same structures 
emerge as pure meat, as they do
sometimes when stared at enough 
in free moments of private calm
or when they are dead: the head
emerges in dead humans where
all the tension goes and the head
just hangs (Christ on the cross);
the pure shape of the logo too,
disassociated from its message,
emerges from diverse coverings
(product associations, nostalgia,
whatever) when worn and dirtied 
among rotting garbage where
its lack of divinity lies exposed.

*“The Head Through the Face” originally appeared in Moledro Magazine (2016)

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/gridarendal/