Artist Francis Nguyen and Poet Robert Gibbons on Feathered Brains

Francis Nguyen studies and creates art in New York City. “My interests primarily lie in drawing, which I believe is the foundation to many other forms of visual art. I like to imagine drawing as if I were threading a spider web; a natural pattern that is reminiscent of the essence. Ever since I was a kid, the beauty of man-made images compelled me to draw, paint and sculpt the characters in my mind. As in the tradition of the old masters, my style appropriates its meaning through the depiction of the human body and reveals its archetypes. For more of Nguyen’s work see long1337.blogspot.com

New York poet Robert Gibbons has been featured on paintersand poets.com several times. His poetry appears in Uphook Press, Three Rooms Press, Brownstone Poets Anthology, Dinner with the Muse, Cartier Street Review, Nomad’s Choir and the Palm Beach Post. He has studied with master poets Cornelius Eady, Marilyn Nelson, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handal, Linda Susan Jackson, Kevin Young, and Kwame Dawes. Three Rooms Press published Close to theTree in 2012.

elegy to an airhead

I thought this was the city, but it could be the country

being so conceited and self-involved, minding my

business, looking the other way, I am afraid

being a man, keeping to myself, caught up

in my own brine of thought, my hair as explosive

as it is hypnagogic with all the material available

for my use, some may think I am enlightened

but in my distance I am benighted because

it is difficult to read outside my canon, to involve

another genre so I become as thematic as a cliche

always out to compete, to climb the mountain's

tightrope, the high wire or plower into earth

and frack never an estimation, always exacerbation

I will end in my head before I am dead.