the sea the sea

it's not an original

but sometimes a cover turns out to be better

Do we mean something when we talk? / Is it enough that we are shuddering / from the sound?


Richard Siken

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night

and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.

The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say

it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing

an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross

to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Margaret Atwood

( )

Image by Cig Harvey

*

Beautiful, sobbing 

high-geared fucking 

and then to lie silently 

like deer tracks in the 

freshly-fallen snow beside 

the one you love. 

That’s all.

Richard Brautigan

You are so beautiful and I am a fool

to be in love with you

is a theme that keeps coming up

in songs and poems.

There seems to be no room for variation.

I have never heard anyone sing

I am so beautiful

and you are a fool to be in love with me,

even though this notion has surely

crossed the minds of women and men alike.

You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool

is another one you don't hear.

Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.

That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon

I am listening to Johnny Hartman

whose dark voice can curl around

the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness

like no one else's can.

It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette

someone left burning on a baby grand piano

around three o'clock in the morning;

smoke that billows up into the bright lights

while out there in the darkness

some of the beautiful fools have gathered

around little tables to listen,

some with their eyes closed,

others leaning forward into the music

as if it were holding them up,

or twirling the loose ice in a glass,

slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,

borne beyond midnight,

that has no desire to go home,

especially now when everyone in the room

is watching the large man with the tenor sax

that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.

He moves forward to the edge of the stage

and hands the instrument down to me

and nods that I should play.

So I put the mouthpiece to my lips

and blow into it with all my living breath.

We are all so foolish,

my long bebop solo begins by saying,

so damn foolish

we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

"Nightclub", by Billy Collins

re-post

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.



The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart
Jacque Gilbert

breath in breath out

by http://www.defelipe.ro/

the last winter's grenadine

hitting the ground

brightly split open

grass blades

pushing with violent joy

through the yielding

warm earth

a sparrow

caught in a hand

in a raw April field

all tenderest greens

and all fiery reds

is what my heart is

now

Secret

When you were sleeping on the sofa

I put my ear to your ear and listened

to the echo of your dreams.

That is the ocean I want to dive in,

merge with the bright fish,

plankton and pirate ships.

I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you

and ask them the questions I would ask you.

Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke

rising from a chimney?

Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing?

I don't wish I was in your arms,

I just wish I was peddling a bicycle

toward your arms.

Jeffrey McDaniel

Abril

Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell

*

Look, it's spring.


And last year's loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are uplifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.


And i am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.




Mary Oliver


image by Anni Leppälä

leve:)

Evan says the idea that you can be transformed by love
is melodramatic and childish, the kind of thing you leave
behind at the last slumber party or give up the day you stop
actually pondering the existence of unicorns. He says
love unveils you. That whoever you were you still are.

Only now maybe you’re more so. You can afford courage.
Evan says it makes you shameless- that it’s safe now
to reclaim whoever you were before you became embarrassed.
He says we all masquerade as impassive people because
passion exposes ourselves as assailable (a word that means

defenseless). That love unmasks us and that’s risky. But
essential. This past year, I’ve sat back, quit asking for anything.
Evan says that love lets you be greedy, allows you to grasp
what you need and keep it. That we can’t be cheap with each other.
Sometimes he tests me from behind the lens of the camera,

Tell me what terrifies you. Tell me who is most necessary for your
survival. If I fidget he’ll insist I’m not answering honestly. Replay
the tape to show me where my eyes shifted away from him.
Evan says that he doesn’t trust people who don’t take drugs,
since that signals an inability to surrender to someone else.

Even early civilizations built rituals around narcotics. I don’t see
what’s so ceremonial about Evan and his friend smoking pot
to play Vice City, what sort of emotional integrity gets celebrated
the nights he cuts a few lines so we can screw longer. But I’m young,
Evan says, lucky he’s patient. He wishes I’d just let him instruct me.

"The Tutor"
Eireann Corrigan

everything is illuminated. it is. it is:)

two springs ago

the picture was taken end Feb 2009. or could have been taken today. nothing's changed. i'm wearing same clothes, regardless of all the pretty new dresses that happened since then. spring's on its way. the sunlight pours over and through. my hair's still red. i love you just like back then, two springs ago

there's nothing here to throw away

photo by Anni Leppälä

http://www.helsinkischool.fi/helsinkischool/artist.php?id=9001

walking in Springtime without you

Is like carrying a bee-hive inside

Heavy and bulky

like desire

Soaked in honey

like desire

Humming and sturring and stinging like desire

ready to break through

into the spring and into the light and into the hearts of the flowers

Yes Yes

when God created love he didn't help most
when God created dogs He didn't help dogs
when God created plants that was average
when God created hate we had a standard utility
when God created me He created me
when God created the monkey He was asleep
when He created the giraffe He was drunk
when He created narcotics He was high
and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed
He knew what He was doing
He was drunk and He was high
and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes
but when He created you lying in bed
He came all over His Blessed Universe.

Bukowski

I'm knee deep in myself
But I want to get more of that stuff

Via http://www.streetartutopia.com/

:)

She's an old friend
And I don't see her very often,
But she has a way of turning up
When I'm talking to a girl I've just met,

And she will invariably storm up to us
And confront me with, "where is the child support check?!"

Then turn on her heel and storm from the room,
Leaving me to make inadequate explanations.

Gerald Locklin

waiting for a miracle

photos by Patrick Gonzales
http://1431.portfolio.artlimited.net/

lookin back to see if you were lookin back at me to see me lookin back at you

ah well. i am afraid this one got stuck on repeat forever:)

http://www.myspace.com/video/386387794/b8j4r/35463221

Now comes the long blue cold

and what shall I say but that some

bird in the tree of my heart is singing.

That same heart that only yesterday

was a room shut tight, without dreams.

Isn’t it wonderful—the cold wind and

spring in the heart inexplicable.

Darling girl. Picklock.

- Mary Oliver

weekend

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.


Tony Hoagland

please understand

When, next day, I found one of your earrings,
slightly chipped, on the steps leading up to
but also away from my house,

I couldn’t decide if I should return it to you
or keep it for myself in this copper box.
Then I remembered there’s always another choice

and pushed it with my foot into the begonias.
If you’re the kind who desires fragile mementos
of these perilous journeys we take,

that’s where you’ll find it. But don’t knock
on my door. I’ll probably be sucking the pit
out of an apricot, or speaking long distance

to myself. Best we can hope for on days like this
is that the thunder and dark clouds will veer elsewhere,
and the unsolicited sun will break through

just before it sets, a beautiful dullness to it.
Please understand. I’ve never been able to tell
what’s worth more—what I want or what I have.

Stephen Dunn

that's what there is

past perfect. present simple. future continuous.

no more words

"I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."
— Anaïs Nin

Self-Improvement

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.

Tony Hoagland

time out of mind

When you and t went to the balcony for a cig, i took your glass - dizzy with the thief's tickly pleasure, with the bright delirious determination of the insane - i took your glass that you left on the table - and from the edge where your mouth..from the edge of my sanity - drank some of your wine. here it is. a confession, of sorts.



:)

*

Мне нравится, что вы больны не мной,
Мне нравится, что я больна не вами,
Что никогда тяжелый шар земной
Не уплывет под нашими ногами.
Мне нравится, что можно быть смешной -
Распущенной - и не играть словами,
И не краснеть удушливой волной,
Слегка соприкоснувшись рукавами.

Мне нравится еще, что вы при мне
Спокойно обнимаете другую,
Не прочите мне в адовом огне
Гореть за то, что я не вас целую.
Что имя нежное мое, мой нежный, не
Упоминаете ни днем, ни ночью - всуе...
Что никогда в церковной тишине
Не пропоют над нами: аллилуйя!

Спасибо вам и сердцем и рукой
За то, что вы меня - не зная сами! -
Так любите: за мой ночной покой,
За редкость встреч закатными часами,
За наши не-гулянья под луной,
За солнце, не у нас над головами,-
За то, что вы больны - увы! - не мной,
За то, что я больна - увы! - не вами!

Марина Цветаева

don't we all, don't we all:)

I want someone
to have a crush on me
for a change

to notice
when I don't come to class
and wonder if I'm okay

to get nervous
when I enter the cafe,
to fumble
with her papers
and books,
to pick at her clothing
and check
her reflection
in salt shakers and napkin holders

to catch her breath
when she sees me from across campus,
tug on her best friend's collar
and point with her eyes
and whisper loudly,
"There he is!"

to run around the block
as quickly
and nonchalantly
as she can
just to walk past me
make eye contact
and smile

to look into my big brown eyes
(such long lashes!)
from across the room
and think, "Yes..."

to look at my full kissing lips
and think, "Oh yes..."

to hear my voice
and imagine
how her name
would sound

if I said it
if I whispered it
if I...

"Oh yes..."

I want someone
to make up nicknames for me

to talk about me in code
"I saw Backpack Boy today
in the library
in the Romantic Lit. secion...

I saw Steel-Toed Boots Boy
talking to some girl
(some girl!)
in the bookstore today..."

I want someone
to go straight home
every night
and check her answering machine
just in case
just in case

and check the phone cord
and check the battery
and check the tape
and make sure the goddamned blinking light
isn't burned out

just in case

I want someone to say,
"You're wrong about him
because you don't know him
the way I know him,"

because she can just tell

that I'm a good person
must be
a good person
gotta be
a good person
because I write poetry about my mom and my cats

and because she likes me so much
for some reason
some unexplainable psychic supernatural reaction
to me

me.

I want someone
to mark her calendar
"He talked to me today"
to wonder
what I would smell like
after a long warm sleep
under a down comforter

to close her eyes
and picture
what our kids would look like

to write silly wretched wonderful
poetry
about me

for a change


"Crushworthy"
R. Eirik Ott

decided

Forget the driving license, I am going for a bycicle! :)

..hanging out the washing on the terrace this morning I got instantly drunk with the smells of sea breeze and the earthy wet smell of spring coming and then - something else was in the air - the sweet honeyed fragrance - warm, dominating.

and it got me ! almond trees started blossoming - someone, someone please drive me to the countryside!

*the photo is by my friend Francois who lives in La Pla, right in the middle of the golden paradise

night*

S6H3E

Fly3 | Myspace Video

the fact

of having to take a later bus every morning nearly breaks my heart:)

Love Poem

It's so nice

to wake up in the morning

all alone

and not have to tell somebody

you love them

when you don't love them

any more.

by Richard Brautigan

we are

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting

- Charles Bukowski

Oh honey you turn me on

I'm a radio

I'm a country station

I'm a little bit corny

I'm a wildwood flower

Waving for you

Broadcasting tower

Waving for you

all of them love letters

(Todas as palavras esdrúxulas,
Como os sentimentos esdrúxulos,
São naturalmente
Ridículas).

F. Pessoa as Alvaro de Campos

for whoever

Tigers

What are we now but voices
who promise each other a life
neither one can deliver
not for lack of wanting
but wanting won't make it so.
We cling to a vine at the cliff's edge.
There are tigers above
and below. Let us love
one another and let go.


Eliza Griswold