Where Everything Is Music

Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can't see.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

- Jalaluddin Rumi

What's the Railroad to Me?

What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing.

- Henry David Thoreau

Black Stone on Top of a White Stone

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

It shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday
As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil. Never like today have I turned,
And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.

César Vallejo is dead. They struck him,
All of them, though he did nothing to them,
They hit him hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,
The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain, and the roads...

-Cesar Vallejo

This Dust was Once the Man

This dust was once the Man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute—under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of These States.

-Walt Whitman

My Bohemian Life

I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets;
My overcoat too was becoming ideal;
I traveled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oh dear me! what marvelous loves I dreamed of!

My only pair of breeches had a big whole in them.
– Stargazing Tom Thumb, I sowed rhymes along my way.
My tavern was at the Sign of the Great Bear.
– My stars in the sky rustled softly.

And I listened to them, sitting on the road-sides
On those pleasant September evenings while I felt drops
Of dew on my forehead like vigorous wine;

And while, rhyming among the fantastical shadows,
I plucked like the strings of a lyre the elastics
Of my tattered boots, one foot close to my heart!

-Rimbaud

Frogs

Frogs sit more solid
than anything sits. In mid-leap they are
parachutists falling
in a free fall. They die on roads
with arms across their chests and
heads high.

I love frogs that sit
like Buddha, that fall without
parachutes, that die
like Italian tenors.

Above all, I love them because,
pursued in water, they never
panic so much that they fail
to make stylish triangles
with their ballet dancer's
legs.

- Norman MacCaig

Generator 2nd Floor

Fiction (the lucksmiths)

singsongy song lyrics...wha?

Written down here, gentle reader
It seems too good to be true
But there's a girl in Kansas City
With my favourite tattoo
Oh why would I lie to you?

This was in another century
Somewhere near the summer's end
The fahrenheit was frightening
I was awake the whole weekend
Invited to a barbecue
I found refuge in the kitchen
Discussing post-war US literature
With a girl whose upper arm read 'fiction'
Like it might have been typewritten

I asked her its significance
She said she sometimes took reminding
What she wanted to be doing
Whether reading it or writing
I admitted admiration
For both typeface and intent
And said more softly 'sotto voce'
I knew too well what she meant
She just smiled
And in a while she went

For a time I forgot this ever took place
She left her bottle on the bookcase

So though I leave you little option
But to take me at my word
I assure you, dearest listener
That it happened as you've heard
A beer left on a bookshelf
At a bygone barbecue
By a girl from Kansas City
With my favourite tattoo
Oh why would I lie to you?
Oh why would I lie to you?
Oh why would I lie?

Rushdie and Doolittle

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

-William Carlos Williams

Ooo...Villagers...

To Tu Fu from Shantung

You ask how I spend my time--
I nestle against a treetrunk
and listen to autumn winds
in the pines all night and day.

Shantung wine can't get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you,
like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.

- Li Po

Future Bible Heroes - No River

Angelica the Doorkeeper

The falcon soars
The town's gates are even higher

Angelica's their doorkeeper
She's wound the sun round her head
She's tied the moon round her waist

She's hung herself with stars.

- Anonymous

Get Drunk (slurpee edit)

One should always be drinking slurpees. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drinking slurpees without respite.

Drunk with what? With slurpees, dummy.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to drink more slurpees! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With slurpees!

-Baudelaire (and Kindschy)

since feeling is first...(VII)

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-E. E. Cummings

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

- Wallace Stevens

Song Of The Artless Ones (Poèmes Saturniens: Caprices III)

We are the artless ones,
hair braided, eyes blue,
we who live almost hidden from view
in novels barely read.

We walk, arms interlaced,
and the day’s not so pure
as the depths of our thoughts,
and our dreams are azure.

And we run through the fields
and we laugh and we chatter,
from dawn to evening,
we chase butterflies’ shadows:

and shepherdesses’ bonnets
protect our freshness
and our dresses – so thin –
are of perfect whiteness.

The Don Juans, the Lotharios,
the Knights all eyes,
pay their respects to us,
their ‘alases’ and sighs:

in vain though, their grimaces:
they bruise their noses,
on ironic pleats
of our vanishing dresses:

and our innocence still
mocks the fantasies
of those tilters at windmills
though sometimes we feel

our hearts beat fiercely
with clandestine dreams,
knowing we’ll be the
lovers of libertines.

-Verlaine

In Memory of Marie A

On that day in the blue moon of September
Quietly under a young plum tree
Is where I held her, the still pale love
In my arm like a lovely dream.
And above us in the beautiful summer sky
was a cloud, which I saw for a long time
It was very white and immensely high
And when I looked up, it was never more.

Since that day many, many moons have
Quietly swum down and past.
The plum trees probably have been chopped off
And you ask me, how is it with the love?
So I tell you: I cannot remember.
And yet, sure, I do know what you mean
But her face, I really do not know it anymore
I only still know: I once kissed it.

Even the kiss, I would have forgotten it long ago
had the cloud not been there
That I still know and will I always know
Very white it was and came from above.
Perhaps the plum trees are still flowering
And that women now perhaps has her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed only for minutes
And when I looked up, it already was disappearing in the wind.

-Brecht

Sonnet about the Letter

My innermost of loves, my waking death,
in vain I still await your written word,
watching this flower wilt. I swear,
I'd give you up before I lose my sense.

It's air that is immortal; stone is dumb,
incapable of knowing shadow or
avoiding it. My deeply buried
heart rejects the frozen honey shed by the moon.

And yet I suffered over you. I gashed
my veins, at once a tiger and a bird,
white lilies dueling jaws about your waist.

So saturate my lunacy with words
or leave me finally to live in peace,
my soul's long night eternally devoid of stars.

-Lorca

Writing Prompt Challenge (VII)

look at the photograph and then offer poems, prose, advertisements, rambles, etc....

Go or Go Ahead

not extremely sophisticated lyrics, but definitely heartfelt.

Thank you for this bitter knowledge
Guardian angels who left me stranded
It was worth it, feeling abandoned
Makes one hardened but what has happened to love
You got me writing lyrics on postcards
Then in the evening looking at the stars
But the brightest of the planets is Mars
Then what has happened to love
So I will opt for the big white limo
Vanity fairgrounds and rebel angels
You can't be trusted with feathers so hollow
Your heaven's inventions, steel eyed vampires of love
You see over me, I'll never know
What you have shown to other eyes
Go or go ahead and surprise me
Say you've lead the way to a mirage
Go or go ahead and just try me
Nowhere's now here smelling of junipers
Fell of the hay bales, I'm over the rainbows
But of Medusa kiss me and crucify
This unholy notion of the mythic power of love
Look in her eyes, look in her eyes
Forget about the ones that are crying
Look in her eyes, look in her eyes
Forget about the ones that are crying
Go or go ahead

-Rufus Wainwright

Day Flight

I closed my eyes as I sat in the jet
And asked the hostess if she would let
Me take on board a patch of sky
And a dash of the blue-green sea.

Far down below my country gleamed
In thin dry rivers and blue-white lakes
And most I longed for, there as I dreamed,
A square of the desert, stark and red,
To mould a pillow for a sleepy head
And a cloak to cover me.

- Jack Davis

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to the grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

-- Elizabeth Bishop

Untitled

Dark night, and silent, calm, and lovely,
That stills the efforts of our lives,
Rare, excellent-kind, and behovely
No matter how the poet strives
To weave with epithets and clauses
Your soundless web, he falters, pauses,
And your enchantment slips between
His hands, as if it's never been.
Of all times most inbued with beauty,
You lend us by your spell relief
From ineradicable grief
(If for a spell), and pain, and duty.
We sleep, and nightly are made whole
In all our fretted mind and soul.

- Vikram Seth

Portrait of a Lady (excerpt)

Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in his fingers while she talks.
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands";
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see."
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.
"Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all."

-T.S. Eliot

A Death in the Family (Agee)

They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

To Tu Fu from Shantung

You ask how I spend my time--
I nestle against a treetrunk
and listen to autumn winds
in the pines all night and day.

Shantung wine can't get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you,
like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.
- Li Po

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does
your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you
have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and
stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
- Allen Ginsberg

Becoming a Jackal

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things,
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow,
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced, fold, fallow and plough,
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange,
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

In Paris with You

Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful
And I get tearful when I’ve downed a drink or two.
I’m one of your talking wounded.
I’m a hostage. I’m maroonded.
But I’m in Paris with you.

Yes, I’m angry at the way I’ve been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess that I’ve been through.
I admit I’m on the rebound
And I don’t care where are we bound.
I’m in Paris with you.

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre,
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame
If we skip the champs Elysees
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this or that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There’s that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I’m in Paris with you.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris.
I’m in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I’m in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I’m in Paris with…..all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I’m in Paris with you.

- James Fenton

All You who Sleep Tonight

All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above -

Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.

- Vikram Seth

The Telephone

"When I was just as far as I could walk
From here to-day,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say--
You spoke from that flower on the window sill--
Do you remember what it was you said?"

"First tell me what it was you thought you heard."

"Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned my head,
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word--
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say--
*Someone* said 'Come' -- I heard it as I bowed."

"I may have thought as much, but not aloud."

"Well, so I came."

- Robert Frost

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)


-ee cummings

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

- Ted Kooser

Swim

My Favorite Poem

In my universe there is no hope,
only an old, blue grey cat,
who suddenly kittenlike,
knocks over a vase full of chrysanthemums.
There's a good song playing on the radio,
in the dead eye of a long winter's drive,
the song reminding me of a ranch coat I had,
and of a girl who buried her face in it,
who left a trace of scented powder in the fur,
a smart girl, who knew how to be remembered.

-joe weil

The Word

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning -- to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

- to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

- Tony Hoagland

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."

Analog Love

Two Reasons to Watch Hustle

February Writing Challenge

Invisible City Sighting

her photographs: #7

She is in an all-night diner, making people fall in love with her. She does not mean to do it and they do not mean to let her. But she is inevitable. There is no protection against the flashing of her eyes, the movement of her shoulders and music of her hands.

These poor souls have no way of not losing themselves- in her voice and the things it says, the truths it reveals…she is a child…she is a mother…she is a minister…she reminds them of something and makes them forget something else…she is jazz and she is classical…she is a lonely acoustic guitar that cries on a street corner in a small town.

-christian kindschy, 2002

Hah!

In Cabin'd Ships at Sea

3
Then falter not, O book! fulfil your destiny!
You, not a reminiscence of the land alone,
You too, as a lone bark, cleaving the ether—purpos’d I know
not whither—yet ever full of faith,
Consort to every ship that sails—sail you!
Bear forth to them, folded, my love—(Dear mariners! for you I fold it here, in
every leaf;)
Speed on, my Book! spread your white sails, my little bark, athwart the
imperious waves!
Chant on—sail on—bear o’er the boundless blue, from me, to every shore,
This song for mariners and all their ships.

-Walt Whitman

I want to go to there...

B-b-b-bubbles!!!

Always for the The First Time

It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It's a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the
forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time

-Breton

The Weary One

The weary one, orphan
of the masses, the self,
the crushed one, the one made of concrete,
the one without a country in crowded restaurants,
he who wanted to go far away, always farther away,
didn't know what to do there, whether he wanted
or didn't want to leave or remain on the island,
the hesitant one, the hybrid, entangled in himself,
had no place here: the straight-angled stone,
the infinite look of the granite prism,
the circular solitude all banished him:
he went somewhere else with his sorrows,
he returned to the agony of his native land,
to his indecisions, of winter and summer.

-Pablo Neruda

Whose woods are these?

I'll Just Use a Microwave

Oh, January.

January Writing Challenge

you know the rules: write as yourself or under anonymity. write anything you please. write truth. write lies. write, write, write.