Kiss me, Touch me, Feel me

Kiss me, touch me, feel me(lipshandseyessmilelaugh).

Tuck me into bed, listen to me, always tell the truth

let me have all of you, drop away your walls, give me the key, only
honesty.

Speak to me, run after me if I leave, never say “no," always say “yes,"
never stop dancing in the rain

Give me a million kisses a second

keep up.

it is so long since my heart has been with yours

it is so long since my heart has been with yours
e.e. cummings

it is so long since my heart has been with yours

shut by our mingling arms through
a darkness where new lights begin and
increase,
since your mind has walked into
my kiss as a stranger
into the streets and colours of a town–

that i have perhaps forgotten
how,always(from
these hurrying crudities
of blood and flesh)Love
coins His most gradual gesture,

and whittles life to eternity

–after which our separating selves become

museums
filled with skilfully stuffed memories

No Second Tony

Lover, tyrant, hero-God, my Achilles
heel, cruel tiger, sweetest love,

Beautiful blue-eyed boy,

perfection,
cruelty
Sharp lines (lies)
A tongue

A curved
dagger.

A fatal flaw
pain from pleasure
inseparable. Glass
splinters

shattered inside all
succor
implied pleasure.

You will break
me a thousand
times over.
Save yourself.

just cut me open

leave me in peace
(pieces?)

which knife?

I, ritualized self-abuse
You, solitary vice

I, now you, a tyrannical beast
we don’t make it easy
the terrible things echo and crack
     gunshots
    in a mountain
        valley

Abstraction Distraction Loss

I sit and I read
Poetry
by
the light
of
the moon
I listen
to
Bats
Birdsong
the sounds of
Night
None of it brings
Me closer
to
You

The Wolf

Time passes
a metronome
with a circadian ebb and flow.
an ancient forest, laced with leaves,
a swirl of air where moth wings tread
so much left to overturn
gravity is exhausting
a battle cry
sung out from the depths of your belly,
a molten world encasing you.
it’s the calm that is unbearable.
The wolf is not always a wolf.
Sometimes he is a trucker called Jane.
You’ve met the wolf at a very,
very strange time in this life.

Field-Notes

Ahab [captain, prophet, madman] tell us how do we know the boat from the fish?

Moby Dick

Because whatever meaning one can find, however terrifying, is still preferable to the greater horror that there is nothing out there. Ahab's quest however manically self-serving and flawed at least offered a sense of purpose. Every man onboard that ship had at least a single moment in which he was alive with an overwhelming sense of purpose.

The Sublime compels men to their doom. Enjoy the doom.

First encounter with the sublime, we want to make it into beauty! 

We want Eden to exist but we can't live in it?

Because conceptions of the nature and purpose of art closely parallel conceptions of self and the world, the primary function of art is to interpret values. Therefore, aesthetic criticism, when it rises above mere technical analysis, attempts to understand these values in order to determine the worth of the interpretation.

Lover, Tyrant, Hero-God, My Achilles

Pallinode, Book 1, Section 8

By H. D.
 

     She is afraid, too. So she needs this protection. She has tried to conceal her identity with mockery, "I am a woman of pleasure." She knows what the Greeks think of her, and here is Greece-incarnate, the hero-god; true, he is shipwrecked; nevertheless, though wounded, he carries with him the threat of autocracy. She has lost caste. He is still Achilles. Or who is she? She says that Helen upon the ramparts was a phantom. Then, what is this Helen? Are they both ghosts? And if she is convinced of this, why does she entreat the flame that Achilles kindled, "let me love him, as Thetis, his mother"? Is she afraid of losing even her phantom integrity? And what of it? Thetis — Isis — Aphrodite — it was not her fault.

     O—no—but through eternity, she will be blamed for this and she feels it coming. She will blacken her face like the prophetic femme noire of antiquity. But it does not work. Achilles is here to impeach her. Why? We must blame someone. Hecate—a witch —a vulture, and finally, as if he had run out of common invective, he taunts her — a hieroglyph. This is almost funny, she must stop him, he is after all, the son of the sea-goddess. She has named Isis, the Egyptian Aphrodite, the primal cause of all the madness. But another, born-of-the-sea, is nearer, his own mother. Again, she thinks of her and reminds Achilles of his divine origin, "O child of Thetis." This is quite enough. Can you throttle a phantom? He tries. The end is inevitable.

                 How could I hide my eyes?
                 how could I veil my face?
                 with ash or charcoal from the embers?

                 I drew out a blackened stick,
                 but he snatched it,
                 he flung it back,

                 "what sort of enchantment is this?
                 what art will you wield with a fagot?
                 are you Hecate? are you a witch?

                 a vulture, a hieroglyph,
                 the sign or the name of a goddess?
                 what sort of goddess is this?

                 where are we? who are you?
                 where is this desolate coast?
                 who am I?    am I a ghost?"

                 "you are living, O child of Thetis,
                 as you never lived before,"
                 then he caught at my wrist,

                 "Helena, cursed of Greece,
                 I have seen you upon the ramparts,
                 no art is beneath your power,

                 you stole the chosen,
                 the flower of all-time, of all-history,
                 my children, my legions;

                 for you were the ships burnt,
                 O cursèd, O envious Isis,
                 you — you — a vulture, a hieroglyph";

                 "Zeus be my witness," I said,
                 "it was he, Amen dreamed of all this
                 phantasmagoria of Troy,

                 it was dream and a phantasy";
                 O Thetis, O sea-mother,
                 I prayed, as he clutched my throat

                 with his fingers' remorseless steel,
                 let me go out, let me forget,
                 let me be lost . . . . . . .

                 O Thetis, O sea-mother, I prayed under his cloak,
                 let me remember, let me remember,
                 forever, this Star in the night. 

 

 

Hilda Doolittle, "Pallinode, Book 1, Section 8" from Helen in Egypt. Copyright © 1961 by Hilda Doolittle.  Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.


Source: Helen in Egypt (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1961)