my old ways

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they have moments of
grief
but all in all
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy
death, usually in their
sleep.
you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.
but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there
and I am
here

- charles bukowski

marilyn monroe on arthur miller

my love sleeps beside me -

in the faint light - i see his manly jaw

give way - and the mouth of his

boyhood returns

with a softness softer

its sensitiveness trembling

in stillness

his eyes must have looked out

wonderously from the cave of the little

boy - when the things he did not

understand -

he forgot

but will he look like this when he is dead

oh unbearable fact inevitable

yet sooner would i rather his love die

than him?

touch the sky

okay i lied, i'm back. i had a sudden epiphany, and needed to express the fact that despite the fact that i found the classes incredibly grating and can't do the subjects very well at all and i find them both quite difficult, i will really, genuinely miss literature and philosophy. the subjects themselves and everything we have to study in them are so so beautiful. goodbye keats, aristotle, chekhov, sophocles, murdoch, socrates etc. - sorry for complaining about you for so long, i love you all.
________________

bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art--
not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
and watching, with eternal lids apart,
like nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
the moving waters at their priestlike task
of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
no--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
to feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

- bright star, john keats

a poem about marianne faithfull, by patti smith

'I was born in Hampstead. My mother wasn’t screaming so they didn’t believe she was in labor. Later I went to convent school. Later I rode in leather. Later I took some sleeping pills. I needed to lose…'
M.F.

there is a sweetness
in your little girl mouth
and the pearls you hold
in the palm of your hand
everytime you extend that hand
you break down you fantasize
you are circumsized
agonized
scourged
crowned
crucified
pierced four times
your sacred heart bleeds
drips and drips down
women weep at your feet
twelve men turn you
twelve men desire you
(ammonia clouds your armpits)
a starfish quivers in your belly
and the arrows shake out
shake out shake out
and the muscles in your heart ache
a fish slaps back your face
you roll you roll over
in the sanctuary yards
in a coarse black dress
bless your hot virgin mouth
you would be Judas
and Christ himself
you would be Mary Magdalene
the only woman
who made our savior weep
yet you would pull mandrax in
like the sacred wafer
leave me for eternal sleep
But no. I wont let you go.
I wont let you go.no.
wont let the honey drain
from your sweet sweet box
wont let the crowds blush and gasp
while you carry your cross
wont let the flower girls fan you
hind a big black hearse
wont let the pearls
crumble crumble
from your little girl mouth

a poem for laika

first the dog

by zbigniew herbert

to Laika

so first the faithful dog will go
and after it a pig or ass
through the black grass will beat a track
along it will the first man steal
who with iron hand will smother
on his glass brow a drop of fear

so first the dog honest mongrel
which has never abandoned us
dreaming of earthly lamps and bones
will fall asleep in its whirling kennel
its warm blood boiling drying away

but we behind the dog and second
dog which guides us on a leash
we with the astronauts’ white cane
awkwardly we bump into stars
we see nothing we hear nothing
we beat with our fists on the dark ether
on all the wavelengths is a whining

everything we can carry on board
through the cinders of dark worlds
name of man scent of apple
acorn of sound quarter of colour
should all be saved for our return
so we can find the route in an instant
when the blind dog leading us
barks at the earth as at the moon

an old man awake in his own death

this is the place that was promised
when i went to sleep,
taken from me when i woke.

this is the place unknown to anyone,
where names of ships and stars
drift out of reach.

the mountains are not mountains anymore;
the sun is not the sun.
one tends to forget how it was.

i see myself, i see
the shine of darkness on my brow.
once i was whole, once i was young...

as if it mattered now
and you could hear me
and the weather of this place would ever cease.

~ mark strand

flagrant delire

i feel strange. i am neither happy nor sad. there are plenty of things i should worry about, and plenty of things i suppose i ought to be cheerful about. but i'm rather non-commital at the moment. i don't feel like everybody else.

"a presence that disturbs me with the joy
of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky and in the mind of man:
a motion and a spirit, that impels
all thinking things, all objects of all thought,
and rolls through all things."

~ excerpt from lines composed a few miles above tintern abbey by william wordsworth

tu veux ou tu veux pas

"yesterday's committee,

sticks, but a broken drum,

midnight in the city,

flutes in a vacuum,

shut lips, sleeping faces,

every stopped machine,

the dumb and littered places

where crowds have been: ...

_________________________

all silences rejoice,

weep (loudly or low),

speak - but with the voice

of whom, i do not know.

__________________________

absence, say, of susan's,

absence of egeria's

arms and respective bosoms,

lips and, ah, posteriors,

slowly form a presence;

________________________

whose? and, i ask, of what

so absurd an essence,

that something, which is not,

nevertheless should populate

empty night more solidly

than that with which we copulate,

why should it seem so squalidly?"

___________________

text from brave new world by aldous huxley

others conquered love but i ran

this is one of my favourite poems. it's called i wanna be yours by manchester performance poet john cooper clarke.

i wanna be your vacuum cleaner

breathing in your dust

i wanna be your ford cortina

i will never rust

if you like your coffee hot

let me be your coffee pot

you call the shots

i wanna be yours

i wanna be your raincoat

for those frequent rainy days

i wanna be your dreamboat

when you want to sail away

let me be your teddy bear

take me with you anywhere

i don’t care

i wanna be yours

i wanna be your electric meter

i will not run out

i wanna be the electric heater

you’ll get cold without

i wanna be your setting lotion

hold your hair in deep devotion

deep as the deep atlantic ocean

that’s how deep is my devotion

currently listening to:

since yesterday ~ strawberry switchblade

the greatest ~ cat power

genius of love ~ tom tom club

you don't have to say you love me ~ dusty springfield

as desperation takes hold

"or that the heat within would grow
until he stood
incandescent as a god ;
_________________________________________________

now there is nowhere I can go
to hide from him:
moon and sun reflect his flame.



in the morning all shall be
the same again:
stars pale before the angry dawn ;



the gilded cock will turn for me
the rack of time
until the peak of noon has come



and by that glare, my love will see
how I am still
blazing in my golden hell."

text from the poem to a jilted lover by sylvia plath
stills from the film vivre sa vie (1962) directed by jean-luc godard. watch it here.