give me your head
rest it on me tonight
and i will stroke you
ruffle your dress
under your armour

on this night
here and now
in this city
between shores
allong every way
and sinuews of your skin
wherever i am welcome
after i am rejected
as soon as i forgive
everytime you don't ask
i'll touch you
wherever
whenever
you like

Et encore, henry miller on a becoming of creativity - from Sexus



The world would only begin to get something of value from me the moment i stopped being a serious member of society and became - myself. The State, the nations, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it till death -- and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it "life". If you asked anyone to define life, what was the be all and end all, you got a blank look for answer. Life was something philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, "the plugs in harness", had no time for such idle questions. "You got to eat, haven't you?" This query, which was supposed to be a stop-gap, and which had already been answered, if not in the absolute negative at least in a disturbingly realtive negative by those who knew, was a clue to all the other questions which followed in the veritable Euclidian suite. From the little reading i had done i had observed that men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognised only one kind of activity - creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themeselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me: it made sound sense. It was life -- not the simulacrum which those about me worshipped.

[...]

"I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: 'I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed'" (Richter)

[...]

There is a time when ideas tyrannize over one, when one is just a hapless victim of an other's thoughts. This "possession" by another seems to occur in periods of depersonalisation, then the warring selves come unglued, as it were. Normally one is impervious to ideas; they come and go, are accepted or rejected, put on like shirts, taken off like dirty socks. But in those periods one calls crises, when the mind sunders and splinters like a diamond under the blows of a sledge-hammer, these innocent ideas of a dreamer take hold, lodge in the crevices of the brain, and by some sublte process of inflitration bring about a definite, irrevocable alteration of the personality. Outwardly no great change take place; the individual affected does not suddenly behave differently; on the contrary, he may behave in more "normal" fashion than before. This seeming normality assumes more and more the quality of a protective device. From surface deception he passes to inner deception. With each new crisis, however, he becomes more strongly aware of a change which is no change, but rather an intensification of somthing hidden deep within. Now when he closes his eyes, he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the distant personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses: here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated.

and across the plateau

There are very many things that don't matter
one such thing
is hanging your laundry out just before it rains
at three in the morning

when you hear it fall
just as you settle into bed
after a day unlike others
there's really nothing that can wake you
but the thought of telling the story
of how you learned this and that, once more as if it were the first time

for a seasoned body
to meet an all too seasoned piece of meat
on the slab of fortune
at dusk of paltry movements
from here to there
to a night over which i slept
more sound than i could have thought
marred in breathless volume
as loud as retaliating gunfire

annie from hamilton


In a jazz club i wish i were
some time
a long time ago
just so long as i would know
annie

difranco?

no, just you, annie from hamilton
who plays piano
jazz, i know

how could i not
you've turned my heart in knots
just two minutes as you stood not two steps from me
tonight on a street i grew up on, between esplanade and waverly

Recognising words when you know about one hundred is a pleasure indescribable when you are a child. Recognising such words when you are grown-up, being less sure than ever about what words mean, is positively anxiety-inducing. Some of us i'm sure free ourselves from such an underdeveloped issue by reforming our entire verbal communicative system around six or seven solid newly created words and their myriad configurations, which we were unaware of in our youth. Now the only time we feel embarrassed is when other, current, youth find our own new vocabulary as fun as a cat's tongue. Bahahhahaaa.
In any case, passons le passe poile a beau grand papa sur nanamouskourire.
As for the rest of us, i'm not sure. But it seems to me that we do things, by holding on some way or other to our original vocabulary, that move people by way of little communities of microbes holding hands across the body somewhere at the core of their bone marrow not quite as visible as before (proportionally, owing to our being bier in size).

barf


I should have gone to bed a very very very long time ago
my being up is not even worth this mediocre blaeugh

the molasses of tobacco prevents me from slumber
it even suppresses the instinct of regurgitation
of all the things that could have gone wrong
but didn't
from lack of attempt

ignited blindness
forgotten desire
spent aphorisms
from lack of words to say disiac

bleurgh
barf
aack

tack me on a wall
i am thin

I am a man without words
I insinuate
and i fumble

my heart is broken
so many times
everyday

I stand on a perch
so far from peaks
and so desolate
above the rolling hills of freedom

The streets are strewn with gold
and litter

the people walk by
and i say hi
they go through me
like the sand
that settles
between the sounds of cars
and rumble of subways air vents and cracks in the wall

i know they can help me through it all
unless i ask


If only we could waltz
dance together
past the slush and abrasives -
bubbling over salt and bitter
cold

as fall comes
i hope to become a rock
sitting
as books
eyed with suspicion
from passers-by


evasion
is all i ask for
from your seeing
my reason for being
as i see it

By night's end


A single tune
was in my head today

it sings by itself
all day long
and never ends
though it starts many times over

it felt quite good
as the air cooled for the first time
over the city

i did so many things
none of which i had planned

events unfolded in ways i could only react to
and so little reaction did i do
over the day

i was recovering
from nothing at all
or everything all at once
as usual

i can't say i was myself
and i can't know whether i was anyone else
at all

the only thing that comes to mind now
is how many ideas i had
and how they will wither
by night's end

At the Quai des Brumes


You are the most beautiful woman I've ever seen
on a recurrent basis

I say this only because
i cannot recall women I have seen in passing
or furtively

It's possible
that you're the most beautiful woman I have ever seen

I can't say for sure
but it feels alright
anyway

I'm not quite certain
whether you were playing with me
out of boredom

but doubt is my saviour tonight
cuz I've held up
my end of the bargain
at the quai des brumes.

developartist psychology - pre-adolescence

I couldn't solve the problems of the world, so i became an artist.

There's nothing i could do
i would say in the meantime
secretly reading on the mixtures of words

concoctions for success
i would call them
to those who prodded

those who would inadvertly help me
discover adamantium
or crystalline cryptonite

super man
i would call out
how can i see you
in those bright pants
that shame any man
who wears to touch

dithe
sniver
thsuck

hiss
prod
engulf
tare
shrivel under his weight hard as rock

Dreams after night
they stay with me like a horizontal flash
the light stays and all all is dark

stories weave though me like ghosts
and i stand
still no matter how much i move

the ghosts
are loud but i can't tell what they are saying
for if i could i could respond

but would i
when even awake
the dreamworld haunts me
with its absence

Click clack twang rub pinch play repeat repeat
the longer the night
the less it costs
the older your wake the more youthful your will
to fade
in peace