Nè gli occhi ai noti studi io rivolgea, E quelli m’apparian vani per cui Vano ogni altro desir creduto avea.
Sunday, December 16
Friday, December 14
Monday, December 10
Saturday, December 8
Some things in life are disjoint
Writing, thinking, feeling; all this ‘feeling’ lately is getting in the way of my sleep…
It would really be marvelous if the odd pangs in my heart stopped.
Tuesday, November 27
Monday, November 26
Friday, November 16
Wednesday, November 14
Tuesday, November 6
Tuesday, October 30
Nude Descending a Staircase
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh.
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.
X. J. Kennedy
Thursday, October 18
For the Artist Who Paints My Balls Fifty Shades of Blue
like an architect of steam, ready to vaporize
inside you, you say slow down, which isn't easy.
There are no power brakes in the genitals,
no runaway boner ramps. I flop onto my back.
The blood marches single-file down the long,
winding staircase of my cock, like an emergency
evacuation of the Washington Monument
during the height of tourist season. My testicles
ache like a boxer's punching bag. I wish a bell
would ding, and a bald Italian guy with ice packs
and smelling salts would hop into the ring
of our desire and give me a pep talk, remind me
to work on the clitoris, like the ribs of Apollo Creed.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Monday, October 8
Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
Pablo Neruda
Thursday, September 27
L'amant
A very interesting story of the making of the film...
part I
part II
part III
part IV
part V
part VI
Monday, September 24
Sunday, September 23
A Song of Despair
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
~Pablo Neruda
My tears flow, oh, how my tears flow, as I read this.
Friday, August 17
Y las estrellas brillan y la luna se sienta en su silla...
Thursday, August 9
When I grow up, I want to be…
Enjoy this. Apologies for the sparse updates to the non-existent audience; life seems to happen along the way...
Tuesday, July 24
Thursday, July 12
Friday, June 22
Andy Warhol, Sordid Affairs within the Art Community and Absolutely Astonishing Information
These series of videos are a BBC documentary called Imagine: Andy Warhol Denied. I found the documentary not only shocking and very informative, but rather now I have some further evidence to support my disdain of Andy Warhol, the pop art movement, and the whole idea of appealing to a mass audience of gaping fools, or what is now commonly referred to as popular culture. Perhaps your interpretation of the documentary will slightly differ from my own…
Enjoy,
part I
part II
part III
part IV
part V
part VI
part VII
Sunday, June 17
Saturday, June 16
Saturday, June 9
Monday, June 4
I have never been so struck by the work of a single photographer to grant the title of ‘favourite’ to any such artist. Nevertheless, I believe that I recently discovered such a photographer: Helmut Newton. Perhaps is it the erotic undertones of the photographs or, as wikipedia puts it, the sado-masochistic and fetishistic subtexts that are of such particular interest to me. What I find most appealing is that the pieces are usually somewhat surreal, and always elegant – even if it is in the starkest of manners.
Below are a several other photographs,
Thursday, May 17
Monday, May 14
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body's whitest song
upon my mind - if I have failed to snare
the glance too shy - if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair
- let the world say "his most wise music stole
nothing from death" -
. you will only create
(who are so perfectly alive) my shame:
lady whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came
into the ragged meadow of my soul.
E. E. Cummings
Thursday, April 26
Sunday, April 22
Wednesday, April 18
D. M. Thomas, Ararat
Wednesday, April 11
Tuesday, April 3
Tuesday, March 27
Thursday, March 22
Tuesday, March 20
Monday, March 19
Wednesday, March 7
Thursday, March 1
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, 1915
I apologize that this will not be understood by most of you; the translations out there pale in comparison.
Sunday, February 25
Friday, February 16
Wednesday, February 14
take on a passive, casual, melancholic demeanor
and smoke from a long thin pipe
emitting narrow rings of smoke from my ever-glossed lips
wearing charcoal-dark sunglasses covering the greater part of my face
as my red hair will come in stark contract with the image
making it bold, lively
Tuesday, February 13
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist...
Oh, Joyce, you manoeuvre language as no other!
Yet, still, the somber disenchanted mood does not escape me...
Monday, February 12
Sunday, February 11
Monday, February 5
Sunday, February 4
forget my request, I am destined for solitude.
Thoughts and resonating notes I concoct while I shower
And my fears will escape me
Long as I do
For your skin sweeping mine
Water drops along my body
Sober my memory
May I misread your nuances?
Thursday, February 1
"After a bit of time passes it can be difficult to remember how, why, when you liked someone, and nice to revisit it from a safe distance... The much older man whose skill in manipulating my body was as funny as it was frightening. The first time with someone I still think of fondly, someone I fell quickly and hard for, and the thousand or so times we were together after that, and the last time with him too.
The few whom I could not get enough of. The way they smelled, felt, tasted... The times sex felt as much a spiritual calling as a biological need. And how those moments kept me going for weeks afterward, like pearls dotting the cord of our moribund relationship.
These are nice, these little sketches of people I have enjoyed. It passes the time on trains and in taxis."
Saturday, January 20
Monday, January 15
Excerpts from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
I cannot define my life, yet it is so.
THIS COMPOST.
I.
SOMETHING
startles me where I thought I was safest;
I withdraw from the still woods I loved;
I will not go now on the pastures to walk;
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea;
SONGS OF PARTING
...
Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus, merely touching you, is enough—is best,
And thus, touching you, would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.