She was cheerful and vivacious like an animal, her mouth was small, but with full lips I couldn’t stay away from, and when she smiled, the smile would hang like jewelry round the closed, finely curved mouth. Her eyes were green and constant, in an odd way more part of her body than part of her face. I remember her best walking in blinding daylight through long streets where all the windows blinked liked eyes, she would see herself in the windows and in mirrors behind them and sell herself with breasts and hips to the bright blinking air, before it started to darken around her, before everything became so quiet and greenish.

November, 2009

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

J. S. Bach: Arioso (Cantata, BWV 156)

November, 2009

Don’t be angry. This is how we part, then, without bitterness, as best we can, and forever, as best we can. This time we came closer to what separates us than ever before, and it still wasn’t enough. We are two blind people divided by a wall; they can feel along its side, feel how it is everywhere, but they can’t see it, and they cannot understand it.

That’s how it is. It is not a great tragedy that there is a wall, it isn’t even sad that we are blind, it merely is. Perhaps it is only sad that we have spent so much time moving our hands about on opposite sides of dumb, red bricks.

November, 2009

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Bill Evans: My Foolish Heart

Your lips are much too close to mine, beware my foolish heart.

November, 2009

He laughed out loud because it was that butterfly again, the one he’d chase as a boy, wild and hot with his net at the ready, for it was big and rare with downy wings, and it was everything black and red and blue and flick-flick-flicker, it was everywhere and nowhere with dark, serrated wings and he jumped with his net and flick-flick-flicker, it was gone and never ever more… Wait, here it was again, anywhere and nowhere, it was behind his neck in the moon sailing white and in front of him on the road sailing white, it was flick flick flicker in the flight of lights and shadows through the edges of the forest, and in the two poplars that had been there forever.

And now it was all just happy nonsense and a meaningless song about a pair of lashes.

November, 2009

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Ralph Vaughan-Williams / William Shakespeare: Fear No More

Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

November, 2009

I never really told you about it, only that once, when I was 16, or 18, or maybe already 20, I tried to swim to a bell buoy, and it was further than I thought, and I almost went under. I lost my breath and became dizzy from looking into the dark deep, I felt something like horror… or like horror and joy… no, I could never explain it, so that’s all I told you. But it was you, you that I had met, always you, already when I fought then, deep at sea, thinking I would drown. You were the black terror under my eyes, you were the vast green plains that glowed deep below, and the bushy dark forests that reached up towards me; you were the golden net flickering over the sandy bottom, and the round earth I finally came to rest on.

You were such a beautiful failure, then, when happiness was wearing me for its buttonhole flower.

November, 2009

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Doors: The Severed Garden

Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven’s claws. 

November, 2009

Sometimes she saw him as in a race, she was standing, waiting, the finish line strung out right in front of her eyes. She saw all the runners come from far away, they looked like children but came fast and grew huge like men, and she didn’t think he was in front, but it was his hard, tanned chest that made that last insane lunge forward to breast the tape. His face was thrown back, but his dark chest just grew and grew until it lay as a layer of darkness over her eyes and she felt the tape break deep inside her.

That’s how she saw him and got him to carry - a dreamer and a child, an assailant and a child. He hadn’t changed, he was still a child bleeding from a gash, not wanting to understand that the red is blood, he was still a boy stood with his dead pet between his hands, not wanting to see that the animal was dead. From the earliest childhood he came to her demanding she’d make his dead animal live again. From puberty he’d come with his bold and obdurate dreams demanding she’d be a white sail of desire by the edge of the sea, and all the cities and countries and peoples behind the sail. He demanded she’d be his death, he demanded to drown and perish in her. But when he awoke after death he wanted her to be the green, quiet earth he rested on. He came to her like a stranger from dark centuries flaming bloody and barbaric with war fires and witch-burning fires and sacrificial fires, he came with the burden of his sex, full of fear and hatred demanding she’d be his sacrifice.

And when everything was over, after he had dreamt and fought and hated and feared, he demanded to curl up and hide away with her, that she’d be a cave of dark around him and the warm milk in his mouth.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Elvis Costello: I Want You

I want you, it’s the stupid details that my heart is breaking for, it’s the way your shoulders shake and what they’re shaking for, I want you.

November, 2009

Goodnight room, goodnight moon,
goodnight girl looking up at the moon.
Goodnight soft fingers, goodnight sandy dune,
goodnight hair that smells of rain in June.
And goodnight girl that used to be you, with your lilywhite hopes and your lilywhite you,
goodnight endless wait outside your school, for a glimpse of a hand, or a red shiny shoe,
in the shoal of flowing dresses and swift knees and laughter,
goodnight imagined kisses, and the sober sadness after.
Goodnight boys roaming in white-twilight springs, having secretive meetings of secret things,
with secret hearts trembling and cheeks burning hot, denouncing all girls, and writing in blood.
Goodnight boys as they part, goodnight still trembling hearts, all of them clenching their fists so hard,
goodnight thinking the same, goodnight feeling ashamed, goodnight pleadingly telling the pillow your name.
Goodnight growing, goodnight knowing,
goodnight getting and goodnight regretting.
Goodnight you and goodnight me,
and goodnight the children we used to be.
Goodnight stars, goodnight air,
goodnight noises everywhere.

October, 2009

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Shirley Horn with Miles Davis: You won’t forget me

You won’t forget me, though you might try. You’ll think of me. You won’t forget me, just wait and see.

October, 2009

Filling the holes of the internet: Meaning of quiet?

One unanswered WikiQuestion at a time. Today: Meaning of quiet?

He didn’t speak to her about what happened, though she could take it much better than he, she could have shouldered the explosion and the boiling steam and seeing the two men without breaking down so silently and catastrophically. He wanted to spare her the sight and the sounds, but this bright quiet of his was like an echo of a horrible noise. He was locked up with it, blind and deaf from its pressure, even if she called for him he wouldn’t hear. He tortured himself trying to understand, with questions and long stares pressed against the window pane, though he had only to make a single movement and say a single word.

Then she could have lifted it from him as easily as a woman wraps a gauzy bandage around a bleeding scratch on a child, wrapping round, round, swiftly and lightly, holding his gaze, letting him talk while she wraps, how was it, how did it happen, tell me about it. So swiftly and lightly. But in front of this, this great white soundlessness, she could do nothing, even if she felt a hundred times older and stronger than him, she had to smile in despair with him. He lay next to her and knew her not. He knew nothing of a woman, he was a boy yet somehow, and he kept her far away in taboos and adolescent dreams. Suddenly she could see how he was as a boy, how he didn’t come home from that first bleeding gash, he sat on his heels under a tree to watch his own blood. It was terrible and new and he wanted to understand what it was.

And all of this quiet was just her man sitting under his tree, in her bed, not coming home to her.

October, 2009

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: Hong Kong

It’s bad to be alone in Hong Kong. 

October, 2009

Where did all the days go? Where are all the used days piled up? I keep thinking that if we make ourselves quiet and small as if under a blanket someone wise and strong will whisper to us where they have all gone, and we will sit together, you and I, playing, with soft hands we will play with the empty shells, the rattling piles of shells thrown out after the slimy gobs of day are slurped out and eaten up, the piles of all the days we have used.

October, 2009