Listening in the Dark by Meg Day

Even in this light, I can see
your want. A gulley appears

in the hard bare field between
those fenced brows & opens

into shallow beds tilled from temple
to temple as if the glut of a flood

had been swallowed to reveal
the land’s contour underneath.

Habit—or hurt—has made
your surface smooth (its true

smallholding kept submerged)
& I drink of this drought

like I’m told a new calf gasps
for air when its muzzle is cleaned

of that which had only just
kept it subsisting. Is it still

synesthesia if I have no choice
but to use my eyes as ears? You

laugh then, your teeth fitted
around the steady static grumble

of the sea below us, your eyes
a yes or no question I’ve waited

seasons to seed. Operator, are you
there? My hands have never been

so pleased to be my mouth, so
my mouth can be other things.

The moon is a sickle that swings
despite the plow’s augured return

& in my fingers is your name
I plant again & again in the ground.

After the Disaster by Katie Peterson

A picnic in the sequoias, light
filtered into planes, and the canopy
cut through. Fire raged in that place
one month ago. Since I’d been there,
I’d have to see it burning.
Nature of events to brush
against us like the leaves
of aspens brush against each
other in a grove full of them
carved with the initials
of people from the small weird town
hikers only like for gas. Messages
get past borders—water
across the cut stem of the sent
sunflower alive with good
intentions. People who mistake
clarity for certainty haven’t learned
that listening isn’t taking
a transcript, it’s not speech
the voice longs for, it’s something
deeper inside the throat.
Now, from the beginning, recite
the alphabet of everything
you should have wanted, silverware,
a husband, a house to live in
like a castle, but I wanted
fame among the brave.
A winter night in desert light:
trucks carving out air-corridors
of headlight on the interstate
at intervals only a vigil
could keep. Constellations
so clean you can see
the possibilities denied.
Talking about philosophy
might never be dinner
but can return
your body to a state
of wonder before sleep.
The night reduced us
to our elements.
I wanted water, and whatever
found itself unborn
in me to stay alive

"As light speaks into us, what do we say back into it."

3. Gently, with and without confidence

I don’t know what I am doing, but I am doing it with and without confidence.
I don’t know how to describe what I want to share, but I share it vehemently in the ways I can.
I don’t know what the next steps are, but I am taking them.

You are the only you I address.
You are likewise a pillar of flame.
My words and intentions stream forth from this dissipating body.
Do you receive and speak with them.
Is this a type of love, of life.

What are we saying together in this white space of light.
What rises, what settles, what moves onwards from us at all times.

To speak the light as a human body means having vision and perhaps losing it.
My eyes are weak, and so this light is especially poignant to me.

I keep telling myself this is art, but really it’s always just a way to live.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what

the heart knows. By redefining the morning,

we find a morning that comes just after darkness.

We can break through marriage into marriage.

By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond

affection and wade mouth-deep into love.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

But going back toward childhood will not help.

The village is not better than Pittsburgh.

Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.

Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound

of racoon tongues licking the inside walls

of the garbage tub is more than the stir

of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not

enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.

We should insist while there is still time. We must

eat through the wildness of her sweet body already

in our bed to reach the body within the body.

Jack Gilbert

Battery

A trio of instruments you love the notes
indissectible & extending small rockets of delight
force to love, be loved, love accelerating
love momentum, the love to travel
we will never agree the world contains
so much phenomena we’ll put on glasses
abstract it give it structure make a frame
inversely proportional to the square of
two distances apart
make us a family of celestial bodies that we
be one we ellipse about a warming sun
love that sun
dual nature of electrons heal us o heal us
I would come back not hide be in motion
I would attach myself to home again
I would be sister mother lover brother
I would be father I would be infant animal awesome
I would suffer & become extinct again
I would relight the earth with love
I would be still I would be silent & quake
I would be afraid but not for love for
the many manifestations glowing faces
Love the notes as they pour like water
love the water under your feet & when
you look look with eyes of love
all the layers, the ground under
your feet & under the ground
the imagined creatures
& above your feet the grasses the
watercress so fine to eat &
see the roots & bottom of pleasure
of moss look into pleasure the color
disappearing or changing the light
love the light & see the sky the scaffolds the planets
the length the width the distance
the congruity the parallels the fracture
love the body keep it elastic
keep it dancing rallying on its own
keep it safe from harm from red tape
& to those next to you be kind be quiet
be exalted be a charm a fusion be a battery
be insistent be an empire be a symphony
& in a moment’s gentle passing
& in a moment’s violent passing completely
be her be him be them, see the face beneath
the face & see with eyes of love, gaze straight
into eyes of love with eyes of love

Anne Waldman

Late nite snack for the coolest sister in the world

Natalie Merchant - Kind and Generous

Little Prayer by Danez Smith

let ruin end here

 

let him find honey

where there was once a slaughter

 

let him enter the lion’s cage

& find a field of lilacs

 

let this be the healing

& if not   let it be

 

Poem to First Love

To have been told “I love you” by you could well be, for me,
the highlight of my life, the best feeling, the best peak
on my feeling graph, in the way that the Chrysler building
might not be the tallest building in the NY sky but is
the best, the most exquisitely spired, or the way that
Hank Aaron’s career home-run total is not the highest
but the best, the one that signifies the purest greatness.
So improbable! To have met you at all and then
to have been told in your soft young voice so soon
after meeting you: “I love you.” And I felt the mystery
of being that you, of being a you and being
loved, and what I was, instantly, was someone
who could be told “I love you” by someone like you.
I was, in that moment, new; you were 19; I was 22;
you were impulsive; I was there in front of you, with a future
that hadn’t yet been burned for fuel; I had energy;
you had beauty; and your eyes were a pale blue,
and they backed what you said with all they hadn’t seen,
and they were the least ambitious eyes I’d known,
the least calculating, and when you spoke and when
they shone, perhaps you saw the feeling you caused.
Perhaps you saw too that the feeling would stay.

Matthew Yeager

Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell

The bud 

stands for all things, 

even for those things that don’t flower, 

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   

though sometimes it is necessary 

to reteach a thing its loveliness, 

to put a hand on its brow 

of the flower 

and retell it in words and in touch 

it is lovely 

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;   

as Saint Francis 

put his hand on the creased forehead 

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch   

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow   

began remembering all down her thick length,   

from the earthen snout all the way 

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,   

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine   

down through the great broken heart 

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering   

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: 

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

With That Moon Language by Hafiz

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,
"Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.

Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,

With that sweet moon
Language,

What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.

Revisiting goodness

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz

"Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” 

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

Missed Time by Ha Jin

My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning—
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.

Re-Statement of Romance by Wallace Stevens

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Losing It by Margaret Gibson

What little I know, I hold closer,
more dear, especially now
that I take the daily
reinvention of loss as my teacher.
I will never graduate from this college,
whose M.A. translates
“Master of Absence,”
with a subtext in the imperative:
Misplace Anything.
If there’s anything I want, it’s that more
people I love join the search party.
You were once renowned
among friends for your luck
in retrieving from the wayside
the perfect bowl for the kitchen,
or a hand carved deer, a pencil drawn
portrait of a young girl
whose brimming innocence
still makes me ache.  Now
the daily litany of common losses
goes like this:  Do you have
your wallet, keys, glasses, gloves,
giraffe?  Oh dear, I forgot
my giraffe—that’s the preferred
response, but no:  it’s usually
the glasses, the gloves, the wallet.
The keys I’ve hidden.
I’ve signed you up for “safe return”
with a medallion (like a diploma)
on a chain about your neck.

Okay, today, this writing,
I’m amused by the art of losing.
I bow to Elizabeth Bishop, I try
“losing faster”—but when I get
frantic, when I’ve lost
my composure, my nerve, my patience,
my compassion, I have only
what little I know
to save me.  Here’s what I know:
it’s not absence I fear, but anonymity.
I remember taking a deep breath,
stopped in my tracks.  I’d been
looking for an important document
I had myself misplaced;
high and low, no luck yet.
I was “beside myself,”
so there may have indeed been
my double running the search party.
“Stop,” you said gently.  “I’ll go
get Margaret.  She’ll know where it is.”
“But I’m Margaret,” I wailed.
“No, no.” You held out before me
a copy of one of my books,
pointing to the author’s photograph,
someone serious and composed.
“You know her.  Margaret
Gibson, the poet.”  We looked
into each others’ eyes a long time.
The earth tilted on its axis,
and what we were looking for,
each other and ourselves,
took the tilt, and we slid into each others’ arms,
holding on for dear life, holding on.

Daisy Cutter by Camille T. Dungy

 Pause here at the flower stand—mums
and gladiolas, purple carnations

dark as my heart. We are engaged
in a war, and I want to drag home

any distraction I can carry. Tonight
children will wake to bouquets of fire

that will take their breath away. Still,
I think of my life. The way you hold me,

sometimes, you could choke me.
There is no way to protect myself,

except by some brilliant defense. I want
the black iris with their sabered blooms.

I want the flame throwers: the peonies,
the sunflowers. I will cut down the beautiful ones

and let their nectared sweetness bleed
into the careless air. This is not the world

I’d hoped it could be. It is horrible,
the way we carry on. Last night, you catalogued

our arsenal. You taught me devastation
is a goal we announce in a celebration

of shrapnel. Our bombs shower
in anticipation of their marks. You said this

is to assure damage will be widely distributed.
What gruesome genius invents our brutal hearts?

When you touch me I am a stalk of green panic
and desire. Wait here while I decide which

of these sprigs of blossoming heartbreak I can afford
to bring into my home. Tonight dreams will erupt

in chaotic buds of flame. This is the world we have
arranged. It is horrible, this way we carry on.

Revisiting The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

May Perpetual Light Shine by Patricia Spears Jones

We have encountered storms
Perfect in their drench and wreck

Each of us bears an ornament of grief
A ring, a notebook, a ticket torn, scar
It is how humans know their kind—

What is known as love, what can become
the heart’s food stored away for some future
Famine

Love remains a jewel in the hand, guarded
Shared fragments of earth & air   drift & despair.

We ponder what patterns matter other than moons and tides:
musical beats—rumba or waltz or cha cha cha
cosmic waves like batons furiously twirling
colors proclaiming sparkle of darkness
as those we love begin to delight
in the stars embracing

Epistemology by Catherine Barnett

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.

Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.

Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord 

to keep it from fraying?

Not the man who called my life a debacle, 

a word whose sound I love.

In a debacle things are unleashed.

Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.

I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees 

      communicate, 

the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are 

      ailing. 

They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. 

They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for 

      another tree.

And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing

stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to 

      connect 

or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, 

to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.

Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth

and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

I hate missing you.

The Empty Glass by Louise Gluck

I asked for much; I received much. 

I asked for much; I received little, I received 

next to nothing. 

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors. 

A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table. 

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was 

hard-hearted, remote. I was 

selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny. 

But I was always that person, even in early childhood. 

Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children. 

I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract 

tide of fortune turned 

from high to low overnight. 

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, 

to celestial force? To be safe, 

I prayed. I tried to be a better person. 

Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror 

and matured into moral narcissism 

might have become in fact 

actual human growth. Maybe 

this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, 

telling me they understood 

the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted, 

implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick 

to give so much for so little. 

Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)— 

a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos. 

I was not pathetic! I was writ large, 

like a queen or a saint. 

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture. 

And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe 

in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying, 

a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse 

to persuade or seduce— 

What are we without this? 

Whirling in the dark universe, 

alone, afraid, unable to influence fate— 

What do we have really? 

Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, 

tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring 

attempts to build character. 

What do we have to appease the great forces? 

And I think in the end this was the question 

that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, 

the Greek ships at the ready, the sea 

invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future 

lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking 

it could be controlled. He should have said 

I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

Post-Romantic by Paisley Rekdal

Yesterday, everything was possible. Today we’re good

as married. You don’t want to hear that,

do you, thinking I’m going to call you back

in from the rain to fight over the morning paper,

limning my deft and emotional promiscuities?

That we’ll sit in our sitting room,

watching the shaggy junipers twirl in winter wind

as a storm closes its throat around the city?

I’m thinking about how to ask God to be nicer.

I’m thinking about that fabled leper colony

where the last, solitary patient waited inside its unlocked tower

three years in the belief she could not step outside.

And how the local doctors visited only

to re-wrap her face, to brush out her last gold strands

of hair, wondering how to save anybody

so willing to kill herself with denial.

They wanted to talk about pain, the doctors, to say,

One day, you’ll be half asleep in the dark, listening to a radio

play in another room, and feel yourself

suddenly filling like a jug with the cold

awareness nothing more will ever happen, the disaster

of your old ambivalence, the familiarity

of desire’s wolfish teeth sinking into the body.

The body, as if it didn’t belong to you anymore.

The doctors said, Fear should never be elevated

to ritual. They told the woman, You must change your life!

One day, I’m on the steps of an office tower losing a shoe,

the next I’m screaming on a gurney, I’m stuffing a baby

into a diaper. I’m wondering the woods

in my scar-dark cape. Every story has an archetype, doesn’t it?

And if so, why aren’t we married? Why can’t we be

just like everyone else this fucking, fucking once? God, I hate

the way this tale is turning out: two aged strangers learning

to tuck in their blood, hiding the knives and bread crumbs

deep inside their pockets. Look, this time I swear,

I won’t run; really; I’ll come and go from my stone room

without a mirror, all my extremities taped in white.

I’ll learn to knit with three fingers. I’ll learn to read

into the deepening silences, to be nice to your step-sisters,

singing to drown out the tears of their ugliness.

I love you. Can I even say that? In this story,

I want to spend the rest of my life growing quietly bored with you,

locking away loom and spindle, sweeping out the piles

of rose petals and ash. For once, I plan to triumph

over smug experience. I marry you. Don’t hit me.

Please, just come in from the stars awhile, sit here

in this sitting room, let me find you another section of the paper

to argue over. The doctors said I get to wear a suit.

They said I’ll be released next Thursday. Listen:

even now, the junipers are whispering their dark good-byes,

thin limbs smocked in white. A riderless horse has appeared

on the horizon. And somewhere, out in the meretricious night,

somebody’s life is quietly changing.

We Named You Mercy by Amanda Johnston

I count the years after you, 

know your would-be ages and remember

the sadness that consumed me with the 

bitter sound of you, my almost-children.

Could not conceive in conceiving you 

our muted heat and all that got 

through heaven’s gate to become that 

half-wing that was your soul. Was you. 

I saw your face once and, yes, I did 

kiss your cheeks and cry for your sweet not-

quite nose, not-quite lips. Would I get 

another chance to see you if I held the knife? Cold, the 

sterile taker’s tools, my hands, bloody and damp. 

In the darkness, I felt your toes bloom small 

petals against my ribs. Your closed eyes, pulps 

of possibility. Did you see me? The one with 

empty arms stretching to embrace a 

a silhouette of you? A ghost with little

more than hope for history. Or 

did I make that up to keep you with 

me a little longer? Did you stay until the no

I set upon your body untangled itself from sprigs of hair 

and released you from the softness that tethered you to the 

love in our cold mercy? Quieted blues, your singers

whose band tucked away their baritone horns and 

my chosen grief. How those little workers 

of sadness gathered me up, my heart, that 

splintered with your hard stop. I will never 

know the joy to have handled 

your urgent cries against my chest or thirst for the 

almost milk that did not swell, but was light as air. 

 

Oliver Nelson - The Blues And The Abstract Truth (HD ALBUM)

"It is here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again."

Hwedupbap

Hole - Violet

I Must Become A Menace To My Enemies by June Jordan

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:

fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

"everywhere you go, you ought to leave a little Heaven behind."

All I Ever Wanted by Katie Ford

When I thought it was right to name my desires,
what I wanted of life, they seemed to turn
like bleating sheep, not to me, who could have been
a caring, if unskilled, shepherd, but to the boxed-in hills
beyond which the blue mountains sloped down
with poppies orange as crayfish all the way to the Pacific seas
in which the hulls of whales steered them
in search of a mate for whom they bellowed
in a new, highly particular song
we might call the most ardent articulation of love,
the pin at the tip of evolution,
modestly shining.
                                    In the middle of my life
it was right to say my desires
but they went away. I couldn’t even make them out,
not even as dots
now in the distance.
                                         Yet I see the small lights
of winter campfires in the hills—
teenagers in love often go there
for their first nights—and each yellow-white glow
tells me what I can know and admit to knowing,
that all I ever wanted
was to sit by a fire with someone
who wanted me in measure the same to my wanting.
To want to make a fire with someone,
with you,
was all.

“We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.”
 
                                                                       

Radiohead - Lotus Flower

Prince - If I Was Your Girlfriend HQ

Dungeon of Sadness by Elizabeth Gilbert

Once you have reached the very bottom 
of the dungeon of sadness,
you will find yourself standing in the dark,
knee-deep in a thick murk of shame.

This is the worst of it, and now you might want to die. 

But then — thank God! — you will find a shovel,
left behind by some ancient miner, long ago.
Now you will construct a cunning plan,
with which you hope to save your life:

You will dig through that murk of shame,
examining every single mistake you have ever made,
until you discover your own FUNDAMENTAL FLAW —
that original and worst thing about you —
which is to blame for everything. 

Painful though it is,
you will bravely keep digging until your hands bleed,
certain that if you can just
figure out what is wrong with you,
then you will find a trapdoor beneath all your sins and mistakes,
through which to make your escape from this hell realm.

My beloved.
Listen to me.
This is not the way out.
There is no exit to be found
beneath the murk of shame.

There is only one way out:
Drop the shovel.
(Trust me. The person who left it down there, died down there.)

Lift your tired arms upward in the darkness.
Move your hands about in the damp air,
until you feel a tiny strand of thread,
thinner than a cobweb.
You are almost afraid to touch it,
because you fear it might break.

It will not break. 

This is the thread of love from my heart to yours.
This is the thread of mercy that says,
"I have been exactly where you are. I am the same as you."

Now feel about some more in the dark air.
Can you feel all the other strands above your head?
These are the filaments of love and mercy
that connect you to every other human being
who has ever lived.

And to every other human being
who has ever suffered.

Which is all of us.

Every strand, faint as it is, says:
"I have been exactly where you are. I am the same as you."

Imagine all of us,
struggling in our own dungeons.
Look at our lives.
Look at our innocence and our pain.
Look at how hard we have tried,
and how much we have hurt ourselves,
trying to excavate what is fundamentally wrong with us.

Ask yourself: "Do any of those hearts deserve to suffer?"

(But you already know the answer to that,
don't you?
Because you are kind.)

And until you realize that you don't deserve to suffer, either —
that you are nothing more or less than one of us —
you will never rise out of there.

So now I implore you, from my heart to yours:
Never touch that shovel again.

It is not your God. 

Instead, gather every strand of mercy you can find above you,
that connects you to us.

Braid it into a rope stronger than you could imagine.

Wrap that rope around your life.

Together, we will pull you free.

Paisley Rekdal's prose reads like poetry. #toogood

You are perfect for me by Rebecca Wolff

because you’re psychic
no one else could understand me
the way you

do and

I say
Drink Me

I say it to you silently
but it calls forth in me

the water for you
the water you asked for

Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! Deluxe Remastered Version [Ful...

Vessels by Paisley Rekdal

Vessels

Shouldn’t it ache, this slit
into the sweet
and salt mix of waters 

comprising the mussel,
its labial meats
winged open: yellow- 

fleshed, black and gray
around the tough
adductor? It hurts

to imagine it, regardless
of the harvester’s
denials, swiveling 

his knife to make
the incision: one
dull cyst nicked

from the oyster’s
mantle — its thread of red
gland no bigger

than a seed
of trout roe — pressed
inside the tendered

flesh. Both hosts eased
open with a knife
(as if anything

could be said to be eased
with a knife):
so that one pearl

after another can be
harvested, polished,
added to others 

until a single rope is strung
on silk. Linked
by what you think

is pain. Nothing
could be so roughly
handled and yet feel 

so little, your pity
turned into part of this
production: you 

with your small,
four-chambered heart,
shyness, hungers, envy: what

could be so precious
you’d cleave
another to keep it

close? Imagine
the weeks it takes to wind
nacre over the red

seed placed at the other
heart’s mantle.
The mussel 

become what no one
wants to:
vessel, caisson, wounded 

into making us
the thing we want
to call beautiful.

Paisley Rekdal

Intermodulation - Bill Evans-Jim Hall (Full Album) HQ

Bill Evans - You Must Believe In Spring(1977)

Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner

Talent

This is the word tightrope. Now imagine
a man, inching across it in the space
between our thoughts. He holds our breath.
There is no word net.
You want him to fall, don’t you?
I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.
The word applause is written all over him.

Carol Ann Duffy

Malcolm McLaren: Fans

Little Essay on Communication by Stephen Dunn

Safe to say that most men who want
      to communicate,
who would use that word, are shameless

and their souls long ago have drifted
      out of their bodies
to faraway, unpolluted air.

Such men no doubt have learned women
      are starved
for communication, that it's the new way

to get new women, and admission of weakness
      works best of all.
Even some smart women are fooled,

though the smartest know that to communicate
      is a form of withholding,
a commercial for intimacy while the heart

hides in its little pocket of words.
      And women
use the word too, everyone uses it

who doesn't have the gift of communication;
      it's like the abused
asking for love, never having known

what it feels like, not trusting it
      if it lacks pain.
But let's say a good man and a good woman,

with no motives other than desire
      for greater closeness,
who've heard communication is the answer,

sign up for a course at the Y,
      seek counseling,
set aside two hours in the week

for significant talk. What hope for them?
      Should we tell them
very little, or none at all?

As little or none as there is for us,
      who've cut
right to the heart, and still conceal,

who've loved many times well into the night
      in good silence
and have awakened, strangely distant,

thinking thoughts no one should ever know?

sighing a la Saul Steinberg