לילות כאלה

with a suffocating absence of air 

as the candles burned 

shedding a soft, ever-fading light on our bodies

your hands and the freedom 

of your movement 

your skin on mine

and the passing hours of the deep night

brought me here

                                                 it's lighter, 
                                                                      happier 

Intellectual Compliments

You look just like a pre-Raphaelite painting today. 

To be consumed by your gaze, your embrace.
I've hallucinated, both in the transience in-between state of sleeping and waking and in moments of seemingly full alertness, your presence and your touch.
I move between desire and sadness,
Your absence guts that which gives me balance.

All Day in Bed

She became so intimately acquainted with her bed, the sheets, and the duvet that it was almost indecent. 

she wanted his eyes
to say it all, while his lips
said it otherwise

Tomorrow is the first day of Hanukkah. It'll be a year since my grandmother passed away.

I need to stop missing you.

Sleepless in Seattle is such a great movie. Why am I doing this to myself? More importantly, how is it that I've never been to the Empire State Building? Why on earth did I visit the Rockefeller Center without first going to the Empire State Building?

Horrible Idea

Watching When Harry Met Sally after a full day at work that followed a night of sleepless tossing and turning. It's the fast lane to puffy eyes and tear-stained sheets. I'm like a five-year old deprived of chocolate ice cream, but without the satisfaction of throwing a tantrum. It's awful.

She hoped for the last scenario, the very improbably one, so steadily that she started questioning her sanity. Waking up in a sweat, the covers at the foot of her somewhat absurd, grand bed, she was terrified of opening her eyes. Wiping the warm pool of sweat down towards her navel, she started shivering. The room was already brightly lit with the sunshine of the day, a sunlight softened by sheer linen curtains. Without opening her eyes, she pulled the thick ocean-coloured covers over her head and finally let her eyelids open. She reached her arm out of her cocoon-like fort, in a reflex-like fashion, towards a glass of water sitting atop a stack of several books. 


Mornings were easy; evenings were far more difficult.

Ladybugs on the windowsill
deep into December
leave me perplexed 

gonna wash my hands of you

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.” 
Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

the alcohol set in and the room emptied as she sat, hearing only the reverberations of her heartbeat and melancholy 

the crowd and noise moved past, undetected 

the thoughts she had gotten so good as suppressing resurfaced and there she was, tears streaming down her face, falling into a chasm

the room buzzed with the liveliness of a party winding down

I miss you.

From tired with love

The name's bond. Callable bond.
The name's bond. Nonrefundable bond.
...

A Psalm of Life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist 

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Thinking about it for quite some time
and having waited until they were all quite done 
she finally picked it up
It wasn't quite the vibrant, warm and deep colour she remembered it to be
It was dusty, and she even found some shards of glass embedded in its soft tissue
Some crevices had formed between the ventricles 
It's time to stop letting others wring out your heart, she thought, as she studied  her organ
palpitating irregularly 

Death and the Maiden

Edvard Munch, 1883/1884

She dreaded sleep

More precisely, she dreaded the time spent lying, alone, in the darkness - thoughts circling, acutely aware of her loneliness.  

One of Rodin's erotic sketches

How convenient that rejected and dejected rhyme...

She asked if I was a dancer,
Maybe in another world that's true


The wet pavement reminds me of this quote:


“When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.” 
     Simon Van Booy

That's the thing. 
Sometimes, you want a city to engulf you. To fade into the lights of the evening, the breeze, the noises of dusk - the brisk pace of your gait acting as a heartbeat. To feel anonymous, to feel free.

Another night of this?
Yes, I'm afraid it will be. 
A dreamless sleep, wavering between sleep and waking


The sleepless hours, hours
hours, hours


days

Fucking coward.

Everyday conversations sound far better in French (than in English).

My subway ride from work was brightened by the interesting conversation between a young French-speaking pregnant mother and her (I’m guessing) three year old son. The child seemed tired from a long day, displeased at being surrounding by towering adults who hardly noticed him standing and was generally disgruntled (he found it unkind of people to push into the crowded, already-full, subway car and cram it beyond capacity). He is hardly to blame for disliking the rush hour commute. When he had the opportunity to sit, he scowled in response to my smile. His mother proceeded to inform him that his action was ill-mannered and inconsiderate and their conversation veered off. I found it so pleasant to listen to her calm instructive voice as he occasionally replied or expressed confusion.

Il faisait beau...

Looking intently at my hair, gathered high on my head in a firm twist of locks, my father said:

“Have you considered that you may have a hidden talent for cake decorating?”

She wanted to draw; to draw out long, thick, thin, blue madness from her brush, pen, vein – to escape and hide in the desert inhaling grains of sand until it filled her whole. She wanted to bathe in thick viscous ink colouring herself blue. She wanted her naked blue body to reflect her sombre disenchanted mood.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

The relevance astounds.

The Sociological Experiment that is Public Transportation

While public transportation offers numerous benefits, it appears that humans have evolved – or should I say, degradation has taken place, and the experience of ‘rush hour’ has become nearly intolerable. Nay, it is not due to the sheer mass of humans, but rather it's atrocious behaviour prominently displayed. It is as though humans ‘en-masse’ are screaming, “Forget those other people, I would step over each and every one if they get in the way of my morning coffee!” As a result of this considerate attitude, pregnant women are left standing (“Why the hell not? She better toughen up if she’s going to pop one out!”), the elderly are also often left without a seat (only if they happen to faint does the concern then sweep over the faces of the apathetic populous).

Not only are the fading morals of society on display during rush hour, but all sorts of clowns come out to play. The solipsistic woman/man who acts as though the subway/metro/whatever-you-would-like-to-call-it moves only for him/her can be characterized by a sort of downward condescending stare toward those in close proximity. There is often the individual, (or on bad days, individuals), with a particularly horrendous smell; it may be bad cologne or perfume, body odour, flatulence etc. This person will often sit or stand right by you; the probability of this occurring doubles on a day when you feel slightly under the weather, and obscene smells will drive you over the edge. The frisky, sexually-repressed person is also easily found on a typical subway ride, and is usually male. They may stare at you, lick their lips, or touch you ‘inadvertently’. I find that the staring is most common; it is a stare that says, “If I were in a dark alley and you happened to walk by, I would ravage your body without a single regret and leave you there to rot.”

I’ll leave it at this but, let’s face it: humans are sick.

Et moi dans mon coin

It has been a while, I know. I apologize to the non-existent readers and assure you all (ha!) that I will be posting more regularly from now on.

The song included below is beautiful, I could listen to his voice constantly.

Intoxicated by his smell, she drifted off into the softness of the sheets

Memories and melodies haunting her...

“In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.”

dónde termina tu cuerpo y empieza el mío?

Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

if only...

Some things in life are disjoint

You know that soapy residue that sticks from me to you, from you to somebody I once knew?

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.

"I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue."

the lovers’ crescendo

Oh winter (quite like a mouse when one addresses her),
I am ready for you.

A flacon of my tears stands on your night table, and from time to time you pour several drops onto your body, letting them escape across your contours, slowly, leaving salty residue in their wake.

Ciphers and Constellations, in Love with a Woman

Joan Miro

Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
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

For the Artist Who Paints My Balls Fifty Shades of Blue

Just when I get some steam built, when I'm feeling
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

Lady,i will touch you with my mind.
Touch you and touch and touch
until you give
me suddenly a smile,shyly obscene

(lady i will
touch you with my mind.)Touch
you,that is all,

lightly and you utterly will become
with infinite care

the poem which i do not write.

E. E. Cummings

Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
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

L'amant

A very interesting story of the making of the film...

part I


part II


part III


part IV


part V


part VI

It is unnatural to seek poetry that brings tears. It is unnatural to replace the somber moments of truth and fatigue enveloping as one’s head rests on a pillow with morose desperate thoughts. Yet tonight, I can feel the saddest poem as Neruda writes it, and I shed the saddest tears.

A Song of Despair

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
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.

Y las estrellas brillan y la luna se sienta en su silla...

{And the stars shine and the moon sits on its chair...}

When I grow up, I want to be…

A singular singularity.

Enjoy this. Apologies for the sparse updates to the non-existent audience; life seems to happen along the way...

I had strange dreams of you, and happiness, light emotions, running from one another, playing games, laughter… only to find myself waking up terrified of my own subconscious.

Andy Warhol, Sordid Affairs within the Art Community and Absolutely Astonishing Information

Personally, pop art has never appealed to me, and the revised definitions of avant-garde stemming from that period are dubious to say the least. I do acknowledge the significance of Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and others, but nevertheless, my opinion remains. Naturally, I should address Andy Warhol if I am to discuss pop art as a movement, mass production of art as an ideal, artistic license as a questionable concept and/or a fleeting memory, etcetera.

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

One evening...

turbulent cathedrals and castles casting tall shadows
grandly elaborate tympanums
symphonic, rhythmic and powerful

perpetuating

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,

If I have made, my lady, intricate
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

"Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other's company. Only a few love to be alone."

Jens Jensen

A beautiful photomanipulation

I love Love, and the child of Love, the love-child. I am in love with Love. Love is the centre of my life. Love acts, and Love sings. Love is the Most Beautiful Lady, and has a dark ambiguous cunt. I am the child of Love, and her master. Love fills my days with boredom, and gives my nights moments of rapture. Love is laying me waste, but I want her devastation. I love Love when she combs her red-gold hair, and when she whispers shameful phrases in the dark. I love her when I am sick, and she ministers to me. I love her when she presses the golden swan to her slim body; and when she broods tenderly over the Christ child. I love her when she sits naked on a rock, her hair in strands from the sea water, her left hand resting palm-upward on her sturdy thighs – whether to give or to take, we don’t know.

D. M. Thomas, Ararat

As the shore meets your inspiration
the visible horizon slowly falls to truth,
and I equate your ecstasy with the pleasure of the night

Parce que

Parce que tu as vingt ans
Que tu croques la vie comme en un fruit vermeil
Que l'on cueille en riant

Tu te crois tout permis et n'en fait qu'à ta tête
Désolée un instant prête à recommencer {...}

The Cherry Blossom Sky

This isn't my own photography.

You’re my endorphin rush, as I escape this reality
However much you want me, I swear I'll make you want me more.

"She's not a girl who misses much..."

Please, consume me.

Chase the night, tremulous sleep.

"Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos."

Pablo Neruda, Juegas Todos las Días

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, 1915


I apologize that this will not be understood by most of you; the translations out there pale in comparison.

I cannot stop thinking of you

Adriano Celentano - La Terza Guerra Mondialea

{Thanks, V.}

where is my parrot and the cloudless sky
the ever shining light of night
and ever present pleasure

I shall wear a fedora
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

―We knew perfectly well of course that although it was bound to come to the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to try to induce himself to try to endeavour to ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary and so we knew of course perfectly well―

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist...

Oh, Joyce, you manoeuvre language as no other!
Yet, still, the somber disenchanted mood does not escape me...

ah.

uninspired predictability

I would like to be proven wrong, just once. Please?

At the distinct moment when another’s belief that they have gotten to understand your motivations and comprehend your course of action is evident, is the time to abandon this game and swiftly vary strategy.

Charles Aznavour - Les Deux Guitares

Take me into your loneliness and your thoughts Your heartbeat is a sound I have longed to hear… reassure me and hold me calm within your arms. Desires and stories release me, allow me To enter this deeper and soak it all in Eyelids slowly shut, a foundationless whim
forget my request, I am destined for solitude.

Thoughts and resonating notes I concoct while I shower

Subject me to you
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?

"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."

Forget my name; I never existed.
~
Tonight, the night glows.

You tell me stories of the past and read me tales of enchantment, Greek mythology – immortal love.
I am your goddess and you are my days.

Excerpts from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

I cannot define my satisfaction, yet it is so,
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.

Sleep is not a method of release I do not miss a single thought nor am I able to forget my reality a lack of diagnosis is significantly more terrifying than a death sentence there is one and she is too young and her reality is illogical and harsh at the moment there is another and she is taking another’s love and caring for granted there is me I crave heights and strangers

That which I know
That which I know
The people I love
I love them dearly
And the winding path leads the wonderer to a solid oak doorway opening into a vast desert
{dessert of choice: Tiramisu}

sickness
delirium
causation?
fever
fatigue
If only sleep produced the desired effect…

Your darkest desires are all in your head.