Apotropaic Hideousness

I seek to cultivate a kind of apotropaic hideousness--

Γοργόνειον

like the Medusa--

I might be halfway there;

I already turn men to stone.

Waking in the Dark

Waking in the Dark

  

1.

The thing that arrests me is

      how we are composed of molecules

      (he showed me the figure in the paving stones)

      arranged without our knowledge and consent

                like the wirephoto composed

                of millions of dots

                in which the man from Bangladesh

                walks starving

                                     on the front page

                                     knowing nothing about it

                which is his presence for the world

 

2.

We are standing in line outside of something

two by two, or alone in pairs, or simply alone

looking into windows full of scissors,

windows full of shoes. The street was closing,

the city was closing, would we be the lucky ones

to make it? They were showing

in a glass case, the Man Without a Country.

We held up our passports in his face, we wept for him.

 

They are dumping animal blood into the sea

to bring up the sharks. Sometimes every

aperture of my body

leaks blood. I don’t know whether

to pretend that this is natural.

Is there a law about this, a law of nature?

You worship the blood

you call it hysterical bleeding

you want to drink it like milk

you dip your finger into it and you write

you faint at the smell of it

you dream of dumping me into the sea.

3.

The tragedy of sex

lies around us, a woodlot

the axes are sharpened for.

The old shelters and huts

stare through the clearing with a certain resolution

– the hermit’s cabin, the hunters’ shack –

scenes of masturbation

and dirty jokes.

A man’s world. But finished.

They themselves have sold it to the machines.

I walk the unconscious forest,

A woman dressed in old army fatigues

that have shrunk to fit her, I am lost

at moments, I feel dazed

by the sun pawing between the trees,

cold in the bog and lichen of the ticket.

Nothing will save this. I am alone,

kicking the last totting logs

with their strange smell of life, not death,

wondering what on earth it all might have become.

4.

Clarity,

                 spray

blinding and purging

spears of sun striking the water

the bodies riding the air

like gliders

the bodies in slow motion

falling

into the pool

at the Berlin Olympics

control; loss of control

the bodies rising

arching back to the tower

time reeling backward

clarity of open air

before the dark chambers

with the shower-heads

the bodies falling again

freely

                              faster than light

the water opening

like air

like realization

A woman made this film

against

the law

of gravity

5.

All night dreaming of a body

space weighs on differently from mine

We are making love in the street

the traffic flows off from us

pouring back like a sheet

the asphalt stirs with tenderness

there is no dismay

we move together like underwater plants

Over and over, starting to wake
I dive back to discover you
still whispering, touch me, we go on
streaming through the slow
citylight forest ocean
stirring our body hair

But this is the saying of a dream
on waking
I wish there were somewhere
actual we could stand
handing the power-glasses back and forth
looking at the earth, the wildwood
where the split began.

             

~ Adrienne Rich, from Diving into the Wreck

Trying to talk with a man

Trying to talk with a man

By Adrienne Rich

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that's why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river
forcing its way between deformed cliffs
an acute angle of understanding
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery.

What we’ve had to give up to get here –
whole LP collections, films we starred in
playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,
the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,
afternoons on the riverbank
pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place
except that it came with us
and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out –
coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger
and list the equipment
we talk of people caring for each other
in emergencies - laceration, thirst -
but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.

Making it New

"You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in."
~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

"I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen."
~ J.G. Ballard

"May a good vision catch me
May a benevolent vision take hold of me, and move me
May a deep and full vision come over me, and burst open around me
May a luminous vision inform me, enfold me.
May I awaken into the story that surrounds,
May I awaken into the beautiful story.
May the wondrous story find me;
May the wildness that makes beauty arise between two lovers
arise beautifully between my body and the body of this land,
between my flesh and the flesh of this earth,
here and now,
on this day,
May I taste something sacred."
~ David Abram

"Modern post-industrial societies tend to produce un-sane populations -- multitudes of people who are unbalanced in their adaptation to the destructive stress of daily existence. One of the symptoms of this un-sanity is the loss of contact between the waking ego and the depths of the self, a contact that requires involvement in dream experiences and information.

Cultures generally resist change, and modern materialist societies are no different in this respect. Devaluation of dreaming and other spiritually efficacious experiences is part of the foundation of 'false consciousness' required by capitalist/materialist political economies.

Materialist cultures require that the focus of awareness be upon the material conditions of life and away from involvement with the inner being which is the only road to spiritual maturation."

~ Charles D. Laughlin, Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain

Because it’s the best way to get you out of my life

WHEN LISA TOLD ME
by Roberto Bolaño

When Lisa told me she’d made love
to someone else, in that old Tepeyac warehouse
phone booth, I thought my world
was over. A tall, skinny guy with
long hair and a long cock who didn’t wait
more than one date to penetrate her deep.
It’s nothing serious, she said, but it’s
the best way to get you out of my life.

Words. So Many Words.

In the end maybe that's all I had. I know they exhausted you. But they were my only defense against the impulse to drown myself in your eyes. Out of some misguided sense of self-preservation, I covered us in words. I needed them to cover your too great loveliness!  Or lose myself entirely. But you know this. The words were apotropaic. A ward of protection from you. You were the cure for the words. You kept me from losing myself in them.

For me,

You stand poised

In the blue and buoyant air,

Cinctured by bright winds,

Treading the sunlight.

And the waves which precede you   

Ripple and stir

The sands at my feet. 

Before being reborn from the ashes the Phoenix will be burnt in the flame.

“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
 ― Kahlil Gibran

“I know that's what people say-- you'll get over it. I'd say it, too. But I know it's not true. Oh, you'll be happy again, never fear. But you won't forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”
― Dylan Thomas

“And he hated himself and hated her, too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.”
― Dennis Lehane, The Given Day

“All the most powerful emotions come from chaos--fear, anger, love--especially love. Love is chaos itself. Think about it! Love makes no sense. It shakes you up and spins you around. And then, eventually, it falls apart.”
― Kirsten Miller, The Eternal Ones

“When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, 'What was it that you wanted and why didn't you fight for it?'“
 ― Shannon L. Alder

 "Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."
 ― Edna St. Vincent Millay

"True love doesn’t have a happy ending, because true love never ends.  Letting go is one way of saying, 'I love you.'"
 ― Unknown

Also, this

“Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

This

“I had thought in those years, I suppose, having learned the lesson from my mother well, that it was foolish to ask for too much out of life, afterwards only to live in the wake of that expectation, an irreducible disappointment. But what pain, I thought now, could be greater than to realize that even the practical reality for which you had assumed to settle upon, did not hold – that even that was illusory? Would it not be better, then, to set your sights on some more fantastic and rare dream from which even in failing you might take some comfort in having once aspired?”

― Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists

Why?

“Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.”

― D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

I Traced a Blurred Outline in My Heart

I traced a blurred outline in my heart
A desire

something I couldn't name

the most meaningful exchanges between lovers are unspoken--
ineffable

They have no verbal equivalents.

   No words, not yours, not mine, could adequately express or define what passes between us. It can never be reduced to the mundane realm of language. A system of signs.

Even this (can it even be called a poem?) is inadequate.

Syllables on a page. Signs referencing speech sounds. Lines of text that can do no more than trace the faintest of blurred outlines. A hint of an image.

Always out of reach. Like so many things. Caught in tangled limbs. Splinters of memory.

Fragmented. Fractured in the blinding light of a gaze. The blurred outline vanishes the moment you attempt to pinpoint it. Grasp it and you are already undone. The image is gone.

A faint indentation remains

The Sexual Economy of Late Capitalism

The Solution 

by Sharon Olds

Finally they got the Singles problem under
control, they made it scientific. They opened huge
Sex Centers-you could simply go and state what you
want and they would find you someone who wanted that
too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to
Be Touched and Held and when someone came and
stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and
Hold they would send the two of you off
together.

At first it went great. A steady stream of
people under the sign I Like to Give Pain
paired up with a steady stream of people from under
I Like to Receive Pain. Foreplay Only-No
Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only-No
Foreplay matched up its believers. A loyal
Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign
Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a
Sheet, because that's the only way it was legal in
Berkeley-but he stood there a long time in his lonely
blue law coat. And the man under I Like to Be Sung
to While White Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been
there weeks without a reply.

Things began to get strange. The Love
Only-No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only-No
Love was doing well, pair after pair walking out
together like wooden animals off a child's ark, but
the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly,
shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or
Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up
everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet-No
Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.

The din rose in the vast room. The line
under I Want to Be Fucked Senseless was so long
that portable toilets had to be added and a minister
brought for deaths, births, and marriages on the
line. Over under I Want to Fuck Senseless-no
one, a pile of guns. A hollow roaring filled the
enormous gym. More and more people began to move over
to Want to Be Fucked Senseless. The line snaked
around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into
the fields. More and more people joined it, until
Fucked Senseless stretched across the nation in
a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they
had to name it they named it, they called it the
American Way.

Directions to the Brothel

DIRECTIONS TO THE BROTHEL
by Michael Dumanis

You have sex then you are sweaty
You have grief you use it wisely
You have eyes each eye has cruelties
Guinea pigs they up and leave you
CAT scans cats which phone is ringing
You have stuff it gives you duties

(You have many duties some may involve torture or parties)

You have words then also lonely
You have dark you have always
You have death so they tell you
You have breath and the faces of babies
You were once inside you along with whatever
The names are of cavities organs

(You have tacks and staples you have dreams about them)

You have many digits you spend hours counting
You have two arms they are the last longings
You have words some are in Sanskrit
You have words what are their colors
You have words how are they meaning
You have world you have lovely

(You have many quarrels with nudes world and lovely)

You have nudes have you unholy
You have a nude whose body has you
You have what a body how you try to hide in it
You have obscene you have your parents
Your parents have nothing your parents who had you
Except for the day you were born on the day

(You have not and for which you refuse to forgive them)

You have horns you have a word-hole
You have a mouthwash you never use it
You have leprosy have lockjaw
Have black lung disease or will soon
You have mining but no pickaxe
But no deposits no lantern

(Although you have many coupons including a heap of expired ones)

Have location is this Pitt Street
You have east of Westside Highway
Have a surface surface has you
Have a compass does it function
Have a sphere and on occasion hiccups
You have water and it sometimes masks them

(Although a prayer lumps of bread and a yawn have once or twice proven useful)

Have reconcile have God Almighty
Have enough it will not please you
You have nothing others wish for
You have wishing for what have they
You have writhing have also misleading directions
To the brothel where you have decided

There might be bounty, further possessions

Head Over Heels

I'd only ever learned to love with the force of a supernova. The purity of spring rain. I try to distance myself and be pragmatic about it. But I'm not pragmatic. I am quixotic, tempestuous, my own worst enemy. Fear. Fear because falling too hard leads to getting fucked over. I expect it. Create it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. I push you away and then accuse you of running. I wish you would stay.

Rimbaud's Systematic Derangement of the Senses

Try it.

We Were Stardust, Baby.

"If you came to me with a face I have not seen, with a name I have never heard, I would still know you. Even if centuries separated us, I would still feel you. Somewhere between the sand and the stardust, through every collapse and creation, there is a pulse that echoes of you and I.

When we leave this world we give up all our possessions and memories. Love is the only thing we take with us. It is all we carry from one life to the next."

~ Lang Leav, Lullabies

All Angels are Terrifying

Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

The First Elegy
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;

there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease

when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,

which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;

perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying. Yes--the springtime's needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,

or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
(Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you

going and coming and often staying all night.)
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal.
Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)

who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on;

even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself,

as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.
Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough

so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring,

objectless love and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?"
Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us?
Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and,

quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,

so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.
For there is no place where we can remain.
Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened:

until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground;

yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn't notice at all: so complete was their listening.
Not that you could endure God's voice--far from it.
But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.
It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.
Didn't their fate, whenever you stepped into a church in Naples or Rome,

quietly come to address you?
Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,

as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death--

which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to learn,

not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;

no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;

to leave even one's own first name behind,

forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which

they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever,

and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.
In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:

they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys,

as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers.
But we, who do need such great mysteries,

we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth--:

could we exist without them?
Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,

the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;

and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god has suddenly left forever,

the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

The Second Elegy
Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,

almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you.
Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance,

stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling;

(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us:

our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death.
Who are you?
Early successes, Creation's pampered favorites,

mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn of all beginning,--

pollen of the flowering godhead, joints of pure light,

corridors, stairways, thrones, space formed from essence,

shields made of ecstasy, storms of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly alone:

mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face

and gather it back, into themselves, entire.
But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away;

from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume.
Though someone may tell us: "Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room,

the whole springtime is filled with you . . . "--what does it matter? he can't contain us,

we vanish inside him and around him.
And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them?
Appearance ceaselessly rises in their face, and is gone.
Like dew from the morning grass, what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food.
O smile, where are you going?
O upturned glance: new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart . . .

alas, but that is what we are.
Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then?
Do the angels really reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves,

or sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace of our essence in it as well?
Are we mixed in with their features even as slightly as that vague look

in the faces of pregnant women?
They do not notice it (how could they notice) in their swirling return to themselves.
Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air.
For it seems that everything hides us.
Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.

Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us.
You hold each other. Where is your proof?
Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware of each other,

or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them.
That gives me a slight sensation.
But who would dare to exist, just for that?
You, though, who in the other's passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs you:
"No more . . . "; you who beneath his hands swell with abundance,

like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly emerged:
I am asking you about us.
I know, you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves,

because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;

because underneath it you feel pure duration.
So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of the first glances,

the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through the garden:

lovers, are you the same?
When you lift yourselves up to each other's mouth and your lips join,

drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.
Weren't you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic gravestones?
Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders

that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?
Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the torsos.
These self-mastered figures know: "We can go this far,

this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon us.
But that is the gods' affair."
If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place,

our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock.
Four our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it,

gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,

measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

[Buffalo Bill's]

By E. E. Cummings

 

 

Buffalo Bill 's

defunct

                     who used to

                     ride a watersmooth-silver

                                                            stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

                                                                                                                        Jesus

he was a handsome man

                                                            and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

“What hurts the soul My soul adores” ~W.B. Yeats, from The Lady’s First Song

The Lady or the Tiger, Redux

I wasn't looking for you, but you found me. I tried to run, tried to hide, tried at every turn to sabotage and destroy. I tried to be unafraid. I tried so hard to be ready. But I froze your heart with the doubts in my kiss and the questions in my fingertips. I tried to just let it be. But it was not in my power. It was an unstoppable force.

A force of nature that could not be diverted from its path. I couldn't escape you. The voice in my head told me to run toward the volcano. My layers of facade fell away as easily as our discarded clothing. Dressed or not, I was always naked with you. Your eyes transfixed me. You held me like you'd never let me go. Your kisses seared my flesh with a love that felt as natural as breathing. You were the only one to ever calm the storms behind my eyes. What could I do but offer you my soul?

But the question of my doubt remained: how could a butterfly tame a tiger?

The question remains.

Maybe I just wanted you to sing me to sleep.

The Urge to Paint

Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is shattered by desire!

I burn to paint her who appeared to me so rarely and who fled so quickly, like a beautiful lamented thing left by the traveler swept into the night. She disappeared already so long ago!

She is beautiful, and more than beautiful; she is surprising. Black abounds in her, and everything she inspires is nocturnal and deep. Her eyes are two caves dimly glittering with mystery, and her gaze illumines like lightening: an explosion in darkness.

I might compare her to a black sun, if you could imagine a black star pouring forth light and happiness. But she reminds more readily of the moon, which probably branded her with her fearsome influence. Not the white moon of romance, which resembles a frigid bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon, suspended deep within a stormy night and jostled by fleeing clouds. Not the peaceful and discrete moon attending upon the sleep of pure people, but the moon ripped from the sky, defeated and rebellious, which the Witches of Thessaly fiercely compel to dance on the terrified grass!

A stubborn will and the love of prey dwell on her little brow. However, below her disquieting face, where mobile nostrils inhale the unknown and the impossible, with inexpressible grace, there bursts the laughter of a large mouth, red and white, and delicious, calling to mind the miracle of a magnificent flower budding in volcanic ground.

Some women inspire the need to defeat them and take full pleasure from them; but this one arouses the desire to die slowly under her gaze.


From The Parisian Prowler by Baudelaire
Translated by Edward K. Kaplan

Destruction

By Charles Baudelaire

Translated By C. F. MacIntyre

 

At my side the Demon writhes forever,

Swimming around me like impalpable air;

As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever

And fills me with an eternal guilty desire.

Knowing my love of Art, he snares my senses,

Apearing in woman's most seductive forms,

And, under the sneak's plausible pretenses,

Lips grow accustomed to his lewd love-charms.

He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,

Panting and broken with fatigue into

The wilderness of Ennui, deserted and broad,

And into my bewildered eyes he throws

Visions of festering wounds and filthy clothes,

And all Destruction's bloody retinue.

i have found what you are like

by e. e. cummings

i have found what you are like
the rain,

        (Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
                              with thinned

newfragile yellows

                  lurch and.press

-in the woods
             which
                  stutter
                         and

                            sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
               your kiss

Voices to Voices, Lip to Lip

e. e. cummings

voices to voices, lip to lip
i swear (to noone everyone) constitutes
undying; or whatever this and that petal confutes . . .
to exist being a peculiar form of sleep
what's beyond logic happens beneath will;
nor can these moments be translated: i say
that even after April
by God there is no excuse for May
-bring forth your flowers and machinery: scuplture and prose
flowers guess and miss
machinery is the more accurate, yes
it delivers the goods, Heaven knows
(yet are we mindful, though not as yet awake,
of ourselves which shout and cling, being
for a little while and which easily break
in spite of the best overseeing)
i mean that the blond absence of any program
except last and always and first to live
makes unimportant what i and you believe;
not for philosophy does this rose give a damn. . .
bring on your fireworks, which are a mixed
splendor of piston and of pistil; very well
provided an instant may be fixed
so that it will not rub, like any other pastel.
(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son for a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?
each dream nascitur, is not made . . . )
why then to Hell with that: the other; this,
since the thing perhaps is
to eat flower and not to be afraid.
what if a much of a which of a wind
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
_when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of things
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
_whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it's they shall cry hello to the spring
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn't: blow death to was)
_all nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live.

Fool for Love

Dying of thirst in the desert, the girl-shaped object secretly wished for a cool glass of water. She found a volcano instead. Burning with the flames of sacrifice, passion, jealousy, possession. A fire so intense that, if left to burn unchecked, would consume her soul. Ignoring the flames; she gave her heart away.  It was returned. Slightly singed. Covered in pocket lint and broken shards of obsidian. She smiled. Though damaged, something about it reminded her of how much she liked kissing in the rain.