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

OMM: Ludovico Einaudi

"Being here is wondrous." 
#rilkeduino

"I am going through the language of me now.

I am flipping open the dictionary of myself

with my tongue, as if that were possible,

to find your first word."

#wonexit

Bauhaus | Bela Lugosi's Dead Original 12"

George Michael - Freedom! ’90 (Official Video)

Singles Cruise by Kathryn Maris

It was a singles cruise but it wasn’t a singles cruise:
each participant simulated detachment but none
was actually single. Some, like the recently widowed,
were attached to ghosts. Others were legally attached
to a living person they once but no longer loved.
A surprising number loved their partners profoundly
while fearing said partners inhabited the category
of those who loved them no longer. These participants,
whose fears may or may not have been founded,
attempted to self-protect by labeling themselves single.
Soon a pattern emerged: those who feared abandonment
developed around them a planetary-like orbit
of potential new partners to whom they could not attach
because they were already attached. Such orbits lasted,
sometimes, for years. The orbiters went to self-help groups
and/or analysts and/or wrote letters to advice columnists.
Because they could not detach from their objects of unrequited
affection, they became the predominant clientele for future
singles cruises, unilaterally sustaining the singles cruise business.

Popol Vuh - Hosianna Mantra (1972) FULL ALBUM

How to Be a Dreamgirl Not a Doormat by Kathryn Maris

While the Doormat asks neurotic questions about his ex,
the Dream Girl looks at her watch if her man brings up the ex,
and if the man ever says, “Everyone was in love with my ex,”
a Dream Girl won’t ask for a photo, but if a photo of the ex
is provided, the Dream Girl won’t demean the appearance of the ex
because her man will likely rush to his ex’s
defense. The lesson is that when a man considers his ex
a prize looks have little to do with it, for when a woman acts
like a prize a man can forget he’s with a battle axe.
What should you say when he asks questions about your ex?
Remember you’re a prize, so you needn’t report that your ex
stole appliances or defaulted on child support or that your ex
has a Mafioso brother doing time for racketeering or that your ex
is “still stalking you” — because your man will not find these ex
stories charming, if he’s classy, so what you say about your ex
is simply, “We wanted different things,” or, alternatively, “My ex
and I went separate ways.” It’s none of his business: your ex
and all the vicissitudes of your past, like the jewelry your ex
gave you which you pawned, or your violent fantasies about your ex
because inquiring minds don’t need to know. Did you know that exes
are a common conversation topic among men: “You remember my ex,
the one who snapped ... ?” they might say, referring to the “terrible” ex
who was “possessed by demons,” thus causing the inevitable ex-
tramarital affair? Of course he never had anything to do with his ex’s
transformation, he was a perfect angel, but lo and behold, the ex-
orcist was suddenly required! Women believe these narratives and ex-
coriate themselves if they’re Doormats, but love is beset by variables,
and Dream Girls must take control in this world of unknowns.

OMM: Fitzcarraldo

OMM: Herbie Hancock: Live from The BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival

omm

Negotiations by Rae Armantrout

    1

The best part
is when we’re tired
of it all
in the same degree,

a fatigue we imagine
to be temporary,
and we lie near each other,
toes touching.

What’s done is done,
we don’t say,
to begin our transaction,

each letting go of something
without really
bringing it to mind

until we’re lighter,
sicker,
older

and a current
runs between us
where our toes touch.

It feels unconditional.


    2

Remember this, we don’t say:

The Little Mermaid
was able to absorb
her tail,

refashion it
to form legs.

This meant that
everything’s negotiable

and that everything is played out
in advance

in secret.

Fire Warnings by James Richardson

So much on the verge
of flame.
In a hot
wind anything
is tinder: paper, sage

feverish with bees,
your auburn
hair, my hand
that glows with a thought.
Sunset

or sleepless dawn,
nothing is sure
but what’s already burned—
water that’s ash, steel
that has flowed and cooled,

though in the core
of a star, they too
would fuse and rage,
and even volcanic
glass and char,

and the cold seas,
and even  
what we once were
might burn again—
or in the heart.

Our Nature by Rae Armantrout

The very flatness 

of portraits

makes for nostalgia

in the connoisseur.

 

Here’s the latest

little lip of wave

to flatten

and spread thin.

 

Let’s say

it shows our recklessness,

 

our fast gun,

 

our self-consciousness

which was really

 

our infatuation

with our own fame,

 

our escapes,

 

the easy way

we’d blend in

 

with the peasantry,

 

our loyalty

to our old gang

 

from among whom

it was our nature

 

to be singled out

Definitely by Mary Jo Bang

What is desire 

But the hardwire argument given 

To the mind’s unstoppable mouth. 

Inside the braincase, it’s I 

Want that fills every blank. And then the hand 

Reaches for the pleasure 

The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes, 

It will all be fine in some future soon. 

Definitely. I’ve conjured a body 

In the chair before me. Be yourself, I tell it. 

Here memory makes you 

Unchangeable: that shirt, those summer pants. 

That beautiful face. 

That tragic beautiful mind. 

That mind’s ravenous mouth 

That told you, This isn’t poison 

At all but just what the machine needs. And then, 

The mouth closes on its hunger. 

The heart stops.

Q-Tip - Life Is Better ft. Norah Jones

Happiness by Paisley Rekdal

I have been taught never to brag but now

I cannot help it: I keep

a beautiful garden, all abundance,

indiscriminate, pulling itself

from the stubborn earth: does it offend you

to watch me working in it,

touching my hands to the greening tips or

tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild

the living and the dead both

snap off in my hands?

The neighbor with his stuttering

fingers, the neighbor with his broken

love: each comes up my drive

to receive his pitying,

accustomed consolations, watches me

work in silence awhile, rises in anger,

walks back. Does it offend them to watch me

not mourning with them but working

fitfully, fruitlessly, working

the way the bees work, which is to say

by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure?

I can stand for hours among the sweet

narcissus, silent as a point of bone.

I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer

than your grief. It is such a small thing

to be proud of, a garden. Today

there were scrub jays, quail,

a woodpecker knocking at the white-

and-black shapes of trees, and someone’s lost rabbit

scratching under the barberry: is it

indiscriminate? Should it shrink back, wither,

and expurgate? Should I, too, not be loved?

It is only a little time, a little space.

Why not watch the grasses take up their colors in a rush

like a stream of kerosene being lit?

If I could not have made this garden beautiful

I wouldn’t understand your suffering,

nor care for each the same, inflamed way.

I would have to stay only like the bees,

beyond consciousness, beyond

self-reproach, fingers dug down hard

into stone, and growing nothing.

There is no end to ego,

with its museum of disappointments.

I want to take my neighbors into the garden

and show them: Here is consolation.

Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops

around the sparrows as they fight.

It lives alongside their misery.

It glows each evening with a violent light.

A Pornography by Paisley Rekdal

There was a time when I watched it happen.

Strangers pressed to other strangers

in one bed, clothes on, air humid

with the cloying scent of fruit juice

and vodka; none of us

giving into another and yet unwilling to leave the scene

of that possibility,

pretending to sleep, actually sleeping.

Then waking again to slip a hand

over a shoulder, slide a finger

inside the waistband of a skirt; so young

(we are even now still

so young) in that hotel room

turning blue then lighter blue.

We wouldn’t have tried for more:

the kiss, the button; firm, white shape

of an image slipped wholly into the mind,

acted upon, dreamed upon,

filling the thin vessels of the lungs.

 

Earlier, a film, its forced sounds

of lovemaking. The tension I felt winding

into the muscles of some of the others in the room.

I remember I left for awhile.

We all left for awhile;

even the music was frightening. How

to strip ourselves like that, point

at the places that were wanted, plucked

and peeled; speaking the words, hearing them form us,

the nature of what we were

and could do to each other?

The music, the rocking, the sobbing.

The man called the woman by parts of herself.

Some laughed at this. I remember

I must have been one of them.

In the morning, the hotel room was turning white.

After the long night, hands were slipping

and unslipping, moving over the flattened pillows

as if in hopes something small could still satisfy us.

Someone turned and looked at someone else;

we all heard it. Legs

shifted, sheets slid themselves down waists

or shoulders, tightened again at the necks

of those pretending to sleep as the unblinking sun

crawled in our window.

From another room, coughing,

We all heard it.

Someone looked at someone else.

The room turned white. The air began clearing.

"Sometimes I have to believe that heaven is just a new pair of glasses."

So Beautiful

Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

A killer poem about Cats v Dogs by Joyce Carol Oates

Bobby Caldwell: Open Your Eyes

Lord make me an instrument of your peace
Where there is hatred let me sow love
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
And where there is sadness, joy

O divine master grant that I may
not so much seek to be consoled as to console
to be understood as to understand
To be loved as to love
For it is in giving that we receive
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it's in dying that we are born to eternal life

Love Anecdote by Joyce Carol Oates

As he falls in love he extracts from her the secrets
of her “former life.”

As he extracts from her the secrets of her “former life”
he falls in love.

It is wild, dizzy, winey-tart.  It is an interrogation.
Tell me, he says.  Please tell me.
Don’t be ashamed.  Don’t be hesitant.  It is human, he said,
he begs, it defines you, it is not my greed.
Don’t lie.

He is devoted.  He is insatiable.
His shadow sprawls rich and bloated from his feet,
to her.  But I’m sure you have forgotten something, he says,
the first frown, the knife-blade, between the perfect brows,
that can’t be the entire story, he says.
It’s scarcely more than an anecdote. It doesn’t convince.

He is tender, he is the shining wing of a great plane,
he is oblivion, all hunger, unquenchable thirst, devoted.
There is more to it, he says calmly, you are not telling me
the truth, he says, you are lying, he says, don’t you know
no revelation disgusts me?

As her “former life” drains away his love subsides.
Soon it will be companionable, and then brotherly.
And then it will be nothing at all.

         Tonight, however, he is fierce with love, and willing
to beg. You have forgotten a great deal, he says, please
don’t lie to me, he says, what is it, he asks.
He always asks.
     

Resurrection # 6 by Joyce Sutphen

This time he means to put me in my place,
though often his words have unraveled me.
Do not expect anyone to believe that story,
he says, though I don’t suppose you made
it up.  He believes me with the enthusiasm
of a lifelong skeptic, fingers deep in the
wound of proof. He is relieved to see that
I can still breathe, that my limbs move, though
slowly, so out of practice with the ground;
he listens as my tongue begins to find its way
into words again, stays just long enough to
tell himself the damage is unnoticeable, a
temporary death that will never be recorded,
the ashes of that other woman mixed into
my clay, her heart never missing a beat into
mine, the two of us cheating the grave in unison,
one forgiving, the other already forgetting.

In Praise of Their Divorce by Tony Hoagland

 And when I heard about the divorce of my friends,
I couldn’t help but be proud of them,

that man and that woman setting off in different directions,
like pilgrims in a proverb

—him to buy his very own toaster oven,
her seeking a prescription for sleeping pills.

Let us keep in mind the hidden forces
which had struggled underground for years

to push their way to the surface—and that finally did,
cracking the crust, moving the plates of earth apart,

releasing the pent-up energy required
for them to rent their own apartments,

for her to join the softball league for single mothers
for him to read George the Giraffe over his speakerphone

at bedtime to the six-year-old.

The bible says, Be fruitful and multiply

but is it not also fruitful to subtract and to divide?
Because if marriage is a kind of womb,

divorce is the being born again;
alimony is the placenta one of them will eat;

loneliness is the name of the wet-nurse;
regret is the elementary school;

endurance is the graduation.
So do not say that they are splattered like dropped lasagna

or dead in the head-on collision of clichés
or nailed on the cross of their competing narratives.

What is taken apart is not utterly demolished.
It is like a great mysterious egg in Kansas

that has cracked and hatched two big bewildered birds.
It is two spaceships coming out of retirement,

flying away from their dead world,
the burning booster rocket of divorce
                                 falling off behind them,

the bystanders pointing at the sky and saying, Look.

The Change by Tony Hoagland

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes—

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
        and the new president proves that he’s a dummy.

But remember the tennis match we watched that year?
Right before our eyes

some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite—

We were just walking past the lounge
     and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,

putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
         I couldn’t help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips

and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
                        so unintimidated,

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,
like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission.

There are moments when history
passes you so close
                you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
                                    and touch it on its flank,

and I don’t watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes

as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.

And the little pink judge
                          had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed—

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

The Pleasures of Fear by Judith Ortiz Cofer

We played a hiding game,
the son of my mother’s friend and I,
until he chased me into the toolshed
and bolted the door from outside. It was there,
in the secret, moist dark, the child’s game changed
to adventure. As I listened through the splintered wood
to his ragged breath, his weight pressing down
on the thin wood, making it groan, waiting
while I stood on the other side, I was
caught in time, thrilled and afraid by his power,
by his power to strike, and mine to yield.

I crouched close to the ground
inhaling the sour-sweet potpourri of rancid oil,
rotting wood, old leather, and rust. I could have died
right then and there, of anticipation,
and become one with the molecules
in the laden air. I was deliciously afraid of all
the invisible creeping, crawling dangers inhabiting
the luscious ground where I squatted to pee,
allowing impulse and need to fully overtake me,
inviting all the demons that reside in dark damp
hiding places into my most secret self.

Not since then has pleasure and fear in the dark
been so finely tuned in my mind, except perhaps
in moments of passion when all we know
is surrendered to the demands of skin and blood.

Then the pizzicato of the predictable afternoon shower
on that half remembered island, rain every day at four,
and her piercing voice, growing nearer,
the cutting slash of light. She had caught the boy
peeking through a crack at me doing what?
She did not want to know.

I was sent straight to the bath, as if
the delectable stink of danger I had discovered
could ever be washed off with plain soap and water.

If There Is Something To Desire by Vera Pavlova

9

I broke your heart.
Now barefoot I tread
on shards.


17

Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.


18

—Sing me The Song of Songs.
—Don’t know the words.
—Then sing the notes.
—Don’t know the notes.
—Then simply hum.
—Forgot the tune.
—Then press my ear
to your ear
and sing what you hear.

Vanity by Kathryn Stripling Byer

Without hands
a woman would stand at her mirror
looking back only,
not touching, for how could she?
Eyelid.
Cheek.
Earlobe.
Nack-hollow.
The pulse points that wait to be dusted
with jasmine
or lavender.
The lips she rubs
rose with a forefinger.
She tends the image
she sees in her glass,
the cold replication
of woman,
the one
who dared eat
from her own hand
the fruit of self-knowledge.

"And God said “Love Your Enemy,” and I obeyed him and loved myself."  -Kahil Gibran

OMM: Adrienne Rich & Claiming an Education

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions — predigested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life, taking “gut” courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation… It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others — parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children — that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons.

The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way."

#yummysnackday

It Was Like This: You Were Happy by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

Resurrection by Alison Deming

My friend a writer and scientist
has retreated to a monastery
where he has submitted himself
out of exhaustion to not knowing.
He’s been thinking about
the incarnation a.k.a. Big Bang
after hearing a monk’s teaching
that crucifixion was not the hard part
for Christ. Incarnation was.
How to squeeze all of that
all-of-that into a body. I woke
that Easter to think of the Yaqui
celebrations taking place in our city
the culminating ritual of the Gloria
when the disruptive spirits
with their clacking daggers and swords
are repelled from the sanctuary
by women and children
throwing cottonwood leaves and confetti
and then my mother rose
in me rose from the anguish
of her hospice bed a woman
who expected to direct all the action
complaining to her nurse
I’ve been here three days
and I’m not dead yet—not ready
at one hundred and two to give up
control even to giving up control.
I helped with the morphine clicker.
Peace peace peace the stilling
at her throat the hazel eye
become a glassy marble. Yet here she is
an Easter irreverent still rising
to dress in loud pastels
and turn me loose
in Connecticut woods to hunt
my basket of marshmallow eggs
jelly beans and chocolate rabbit
there fakeries of nature made vestal
incarnated in their nest of shiny manufactured grass.

Accidents by Linda Pastan

There is no infant
this time,
only my own life swaddled
in bandages
and handed back to me
to hold in my two arms
like any new thing,
to hold to my bruised breasts
and promise
to cherish.

The smell of cut
flowers encloses this room,
insistent as anesthetic.
It is spring.
Outside the hospital window
the first leaves have opened
their shiny blades,
and a dozen new accidents
turn over in their sleep.

After an Absence by Linda Pastan

After an absence that was no one’s fault
we are shy with each other,
and our words seem younger than we are,
as if we must return to the time we met
and work ourselves back to the present,
the way you never read a story
from the place you stopped
but always start each book all over again.
Perhaps we should have stayed
tied like mountain climbers
by the safe cord of the phone,
its dial our own small prayer wheel,
our voices less ghostly across the miles,
less awkward than they are now.
I had forgotten the grey in your curls,
that splash of winter over your face,
remembering the younger man
you used to be.

And I feel myself turn old and ordinary,
having to think again of food for supper,
the animals to be tended, the whole riptide
of daily life hidden but perilous
pulling both of us under so fast.
I have dreamed of our bed
as if it were a shore where we would be washed up,
not this striped mattress
we must cover with sheets. I had forgotten
all the old business between us,
like mail unanswered so long that silence
becomes eloquent, a message of its own.
I had even forgotten how______ love
is a territory more mysterious
the more it is explored, like one of those terrains
you read about, a garden in the desert
where you stoop to drink, never knowing
if your mouth will fill with water or sand.

OMM: Contrition

workshopping forgiveness

this too

Chamae Melon, Cantaloupe, Cucumber, Pineapple, Mint, Tajin...waiting to add Mango and mulling over vinaigrette ideas.

#helpmysonisavegan

#building

When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Rios

                                            One river gives

                                             Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.

We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.

We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,

We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,

Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,

But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,

Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.

Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you

What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

#herecomesthesun

Listening: (LOVE)

i want you(she's so heavy)

 Aladdin Sane

A Model of a Machine by Mary Jo Bang

I’ll begin by saying that objects can be unintentionally beautiful. Consider the simplicity of three or four self-aligning ball bearings, the economy of a compass. Brilliant, no? We thought so. We had confidence in architecture and design beyond the base commercial. Stage settings, furniture, typography, everything came with a moral mandate. The machine was important, of course. At four o’clock in the morning ideas came effortlessly, as if out of the air, the way a teapot or a pan comes cleanly out of the cupboard. In the blank space between the following day and the previous night, you see the beauty of a propeller, for instance, and think, yes. I want that silver metal to mean something more than just flight.

Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

Enlightening

This is how a human being can change:

There's a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

SUDDENLY, he wakes up...

Call it grace, whatever, 

something wakes him,

and he's no longer a worm.

He's the entire vineyard,

And the orchard too,

The fruit, the trunks, a

Growing wisdom and joy

That doesn't need to devour.

Rumi

Sundayscore: Logan Square Farmer's Market w/ my beautiful boy! #happymama

#louboutinloves