In the mouth of the wolf...

kill that wolf.

Be good to each other and yourselves, please / Para La Envidia

the heavy wind of age 
brought in its flight 
dust, food, 
seeds split off from love, 
petals wound with snakes, 
cruel ash of dead hatred, 
and everything flourished in the wounded mouth. 
A web of passions started up 
and the woeful dregs of being forgotten 
gave root to the spreading tentacles, 
the violet medusa of envy. 

Neruda, from "To Envy" 

sleep/wake

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.


from Roethke's villanelle The Waking 


I wake to sleep some words have such a profound resonation in me I read them over and over until they're burnt into my eyelids and my breath and the space between the words and my eyelids melt into one amorphous multi-lettered vision opening/closing, sleeping/waking, this shaking keeps me steady


I learn by going where I have to go 

WANT

The Monarchy

Along their migratory routes, monarch butterflies stay nights in certain trees. The "butterfly trees," as they are called, are carefully chosen-- although the criteria exercised in their selection are not known. Species is unimportant, obviously, for at one stopover the roosting tree may be a eucalyptus, at another a cedar or an elm. But, and this is what is interesting, they are always the same trees. Year after year, whether moving south or returning north, monarchs will paper with their myriad wings at twilight a single tree that has served as a monarch motel a thousand times before. 


Memory? If so, it is genetic. For you see, the butterflies who journey south are not the ones who come back. 


- Tom Robbins, from Another Roadside Attraction 

good wake up

love waking up from a nap on a sunny friday afternoon to a message that says alyssa my child sweet and wild how does your garden grow?


I have the best family

thank god Faulkner is here to keep my brain off the holes in my mouth and my big ol caricature of a face

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lovely and inviolate sand
(from The Sound and the Fury)

Ray Charles, on being a heroin addict for 20 years

I don't regret a damn thing 
amen mister

happy valentines day babies

heart-strings, n.

Pronunciation:/ˈhɑːtstrɪŋz/

Etymology: < heart n. + string n. in sense ‘sinew, tendon’.

With pl. concord.

 1. In old notions of Anatomy, the tendons or nerves supposed to brace and sustain the heart.

1483 Cath. Angl. 177/1An Hartstringe, precordia.

1530 J. Palsgrave Lesclarcissement 229/2Hartestrynges, ueines de cuevr.

1587 Sir P. Sidney & A. Golding tr. P. de Mornay Trewnesse Christian Relig. xv. 272The head‥heart‥Liuer‥the Sinewes, Hartstrings, and Vaynes come from those parts.

1643 W. Prynne Romes Master-peece (1644) 34Stabbing [him] first in the mouth, next in the heart-strings.

1881 D. G. Rossetti Ballads & Sonn. (1882) 33Once she sprang as the heifer springs With the wolf's teeth at its red heart-strings.

 2.

 a. transf. and fig.

1601 P. Holland tr. Pliny Hist. World I. 30To seek out gemmes‥we plucke the very heart-strings out of her [the earth].

1652 R. Saunders Balm 72The heart~strings of‥his‥arguments are cut.

1659 J. Rushworth Hist. Coll. 537The Priviledges of this House‥are the Heart~strings of the Commonwealth.

1896 Daily News 4 June 6/2The engineer‥holding in his firm grasp the heartstrings of the ship.

 b. esp. The most intense feelings or emotions; the deepest affections; the heart.

1596 Spenser Second Pt. Faerie Queene iv. vi. 29Her hart did leape and all her hart-strings tremble.

a1627 J. Fletcher & T. Middleton Nice Valour i. i, in F. Beaumont & J. Fletcher Comedies & Trag. (1647) sig. Ttt4/1,The falsest woman, That ever broke mans heart-strings.

1742 H. Fielding Joseph Andrews I. i. xii. 79A young Woman, whom he loved as tenderly as he did his Heartstrings.

1857 D. Livingstone Missionary Trav. S. Afr. Introd. 3By his‥winning ways he made the heartstrings of his children twine around him.

 c. Often with allusion to stringed instruments of music.

1602 2nd Pt. Returne fr. Parnassus v. i. 1982[A fiddler sings] How can he play whose heart stringes broken are?

1878 C. H. Spurgeon Treasury of David V. Ps. cxi. 2Our heart-strings are evermore getting out of tune.

1887 Lady M. Majendie Precautions III. ii. 47,I will play on your heart-strings as I used to do.

---

(from the Oxford English Dictionary) 

words of wisdom

you won't make much money
but you'll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra 

who wants to get stoned and watch the last waltz with me?

I've been really interested in pop culture myths lately...stumbled across this one in Greil Marcus' Dylan book and I was instantly smitten....

As the Hawks, the Band hunted up the great blues harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II. In West Helena, Arkansas, Levon Helm's home ground, they spent the night jamming- Sonny Boy with a bucket between his knees to catch the blood from his raw lips...

(from the article "Save the Last Waltz for Me")

thought fills cities, allen ginsberg forever!

Since I'm doing my thesis thingey on Mr. Ginsberg, his poems are all over my brain. So, um, web crawlers, blawg stalkers, just get into it, k?

This one is called A Prophecy
by Mr. Allen Ginsberg

A Prophecy

O Future bards
chant from skull to heart to ass
as long as language lasts
Vocalize all chords
zap all consciousness
I sing out of mind jail
in New York State
without electricity
rain on the mountain
thought fills cities
I'll leave my body
in a thin motel
my self escapes
through unborn ears
Not my language
but a voice
chanting in patterns
survives on earth
not history's bones
but vocal tones
Dear breaths and eyes
shine in the skies
where rockets rise
to take me home

Hunter S. Thompson says

Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors 

and don't you forget it babies 

Song

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

                        - Allen Ginsberg 

Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction

I hole up in a cave in my brain 

cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy

heart has first say more than ever before 

I always wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born

when you spend 20 years looking for some one 

finding them 

is unimaginable 

I live in unreality 

my life is dream life

no rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love 

(hole up/heart has first say/dream life)

Dylan Thomas, on writing. From an interview published in his collection Quite Early One Morning

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitable narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry. My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light, and what of the individual struggle is still to come benefits by the sight and knowledge of the faults and fewer merits in that concrete record. My poetry is, or should be, useful to others for its individual recording of that same struggle with which they are necessarily acquainted. 

the soft revolution

Zizek on Foucault and Deleuze: "Fist fucking is the sexual invention of the twentieth century"

Lol!

intersections, new ways of speaking the truth, jigga's new book, old poet

Jay-Z, on art + language: 

Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just fucks with you for the fun of it. This is another place where the art of rap and the art of the hustler meet. Poets and hustlers play with language, because for them simple clarity can mean failure. They bend language, improvise, and invent new ways of speaking the truth

Wallace Stevens, on art + language: 

It Must Be Abstract 

It Must Change 

It Must Give Pleasure 

(old boys young boys same patterns) 

check out Jay-Z's new book here: x

thinking of a very special young woman tonight

You step delicately 

into the wild world 

and your real prize will be 

the frantic search. 

Want everything. If you break 

break going out not in. 

How you live your life I don't care 

but I'll sell my arms for you, 

hold your secrets forever

and Ondaatje's helping me express how I feel towards her. Thanks O., thanks little sister, for being in my life. xoxo 

you're all I ever want anymore

joyce joyce joyce

joyce joyce 

joyce

                                        (james gets it, ulysses forever!)

the words that are keeping me warm through this cold november day

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, 
Equal in living changingness to the light 
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, 
For a moment in the central of our being, 
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace. 


- Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"