Dark Days

Deep and dark are the desert nights in mid-winter and a strange breeze rustles the sage. We plot an escape, even as the dark ones plot the end of the world. Look to the sky in wonder, for there are worlds out there...

Demon Brother

Time Moves, Enter the Sea

On Entering the Sea

Love happened at last, 

And we entered God's paradise, 

Sliding 

Under the skin of the water
Like fish.
We saw the precious pearls of the sea
And were amazed.
Love happened at last
Without intimidation...with symmetry of wish.
So I gave...and you gave
And we were fair.
It happened with marvelous ease
Like writing with jasmine water,
Like a spring flowing from the ground.

 ~Nazir

 WHEN I LOVE 

When I love 

I feel that I am the king of time 

I possess the earth and everything on it 

and ride into the sun upon my horse.

When I love
I become liquid light
invisible to the eye
and the poems in my notebooks
become fields of mimosa and poppy.

When I love
the water gushes from my fingers
grass grows on my tongue
when I love
I become time outside all time.

When I love
all the trees
run barefoot toward me…

Nizar Qabbani--

From the introduction to "Arabian love poems" by Bassam K. Frangieh, the translator: 

Qabbani saw in women a revolution and a means of liberation for both men and women. He linked women's rights with the war for social liberation in the Arab world, maintaining:"Unless we stop considering women as sex objects, there will be no liberartion. Sexual repression is the biggest problem in the Arab world." He called for an end to the game of love behind closed doors:"I have moved my bed to the open air and I have written my love poems on trees in public parks... to put an end to secretive and marshal laws imposed on the body of the Arab woman and make love legitimate." "People who are obsessed with sex", he wrote, "cannot write, think, or undertake any civilised achievement." Thus, he was convinced that sexual repression is one reason behind the economic backwardness of the Arab world, and that any revolution concerned solely with an individual's thoughts and not with his or her body is only half a revolution. 

House of Stars Beloved

Evening Star

Thou fair hair'd angel of the evening,
Now, while the sun rests on the mountains light,
Thy bright torch of love; Thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; and when thou drawest the
Blue curtains, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full, soon,
Dost thou withdraw; Then, the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro' the dun forest.
The fleece of our flocks are covered with
Thy sacred dew; Protect them with thine influence.

by William Blake

Made of Stars

Quantum Entangled

Diamonds, quantum entangled by some curious science, my dreams find a thousand voices chanting in a void. Chevalier, that spirit I found in the dark-- and came away with a another mysterious spirit, let loose by that encounter into what world I don't know.

To Love

Tomorrow: The End of the World as we Know it

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Excerpted from "The Hollow Men," by T.S. Eliot

Midwinter

A blue light

radiates from my clothing.

Midwinter.

Clattering tambourines of ice.

I close my eyes.

There is a silent world

there is a crack

where the dead

are smuggled across the border.

Tomas Transtromer

Medusa

“Daughter of darkness, slattern deity
rank with musk and nicotine, the spawn
of filthy covens or a shaman’s rite…” Baudelaire

A Treat for Wednesday

from someone dear.

Come Alone

I see you in my mind's eye, all ready to go out, out the door and into the world.
You pause and glance back, but I know you're just wondering if you left anything.
Anything besides me. Anything you might still need.

Luz/Zephyr

Hummingbird sharp, dart,
darting.
look and it flares into
me. I remember now what
I was becoming. A light,
alight the waves, and dark.

478

She dealt her pretty words like Blades—

How glittering they shone—

And every One unbared a Nerve

Or wantoned with a Bone—

She never deemed—she hurt—
That—is not Steel's Affair—
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh—
How ill the Creatures bear—

To Ache is human—not polite—
The Film upon the eye
Mortality's old Custom—
Just locking up—to Die.

--Emily Dickinson

Banded Krate

Diving in the Deep

Diving deep, this thing with you, oceanic. I lose myself daily in you, and will lose myself again and again. Consumed, love devoured. Go deeper, you say, to touch the sky.

Invocation of My Demon Brother

Kenneth Anger.

Dear-Heart/Dark Angel

Light bearer, dark angel, a fix and a fall.
Fall to rise and rise to fly. The shadow side
of a twinned star roars beyond the horizon.

Surrender

Ah, here I am, circling back to myself in a strange and haunted place, dark and dangerous-deep. Time turned me monster. Battling the darkness, but already vanquished, I surrender, and only now, do I find myself again, in the mirror of a flawless shield. Those are adders that were my hair. Gaze long on my serpent eyes, for you alone are immune to their stare. I'll bear my banishment better with an emptied mind, and I'm not afraid. I lose my head all the time.

Passing Dark

Today my dark mind's taken flight.
If you look out you can probably see it.
Crow-like, a thing ripped out of night.
This white half-forgotten light
bewilders my dark-accustomed sight.

Encanto/Incantation/Cantando

I knew a man who spoke to flowers, set them trembling, whispering their secrets to the quivering air. Delicate things have the most subtle powers. Water over stone, fairy pond, and Merlin's throne, crow calls and the forest sighs long. "Listen to the world," you said. "Learn it's song." Shadows have shadows if you know how to look. We see so much clearer in the dark. My shadow's shadow has a bit of yours quantum entangled at its heart.

Forest, lake, indigo, night, turning.

This thought-spider spins a thread, tenuous- thus -indestructible, widow-wise, widow-dark that shivers, aeolean, with your breath. Casting, perl, cast. The leaves spell out my strange refrain, convey it to the passing wind. Winding, winding, weaving my way back to find where first heard my name whispered by the falling rain.

Fleeting, lightning, improbable, nearly, touching.

Venture/Slipping Out

I'll venture out after twilight slips in,
I slip out. Maybe this time far, far out
beyond where the sunset stains the sky crimson
I'll find my way drawn by the beacons I left
drawn by a beacon heart, drawn to a scent of-
what is that?
olibanum, olive blossom, dragons blood.
seven days on you'll see my ghostly
leavings, seven days on to walk familiar
a familiar path.

Medusa

girl, monster, weapon
what a progression

Burning/Possessed

I'll burn, as I should. The conflagration is my own creation. Self made, in this way, by self-immolation. I tried hard to put out fires, but, myself, was the match and the tinder. The real madness was believing I put my pieces back together and the space you, darkness, took in me could be other occupied. Demon, I'm gladly possessed. Come in and make a home. You'll not want for warmth and you can sharpen your claws on my medusa's heart. You, alone, I can never turn to stone.

Near, Never Far

What are time and space
to my willing-captive
heart?

Someone Gave a Gift

On Entering the Sea

Love happened at last,
And we entered God's paradise,
Sliding
Under the skin of the water
Like fish.
We saw the precious pearls of the sea
And were amazed.
Love happened at last
Without intimidation...with symmetry of wish.
So I gave...and you gave
And we were fair.
It happened with marvelous ease
Like writing with jasmine water,
Like a spring flowing from the ground.

~Nazir

Singular

Singular, you were
always. Never,
for you a near
replacement.
Never, not
close.

You for me, only
an absence
or presence.

Never an option,
but an absolute.

found

Momentos Grande
Te Esperan

Your Night is of Lilac

BY MAHMOUD DARWISH
TRANSLATED BY FADY JOUDAH

The night sits wherever you are. Your night
is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes
from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass
and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow—
a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams
equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller
in your lilac night, I am he who was one day
me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed
the heart’s rank between two grades: neither
the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies
a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you
is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night
is the covenant of night, crawling in my body
anesthetized like a fox’s sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery
that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer
I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night
staring at itself safe and assured in its
endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror
and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors
who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry
on the whims of Imru’ el-Qyss and others,
and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry
moon in the remoteness of speech ...

Witch House

Medusa

I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
—Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore

invocation

El, mas grande

Heal Your Many Ills

I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
O, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
A second life, a soul anew,
My Dark Rosaleen!

Excerpted from "Dark Rosaleen," by James Clarence Mangan

Vain/Imagined

Into deep and demon dark,
there you go my demon heart,
to that savage place,
Wholly enchanted.
Haunted and demon-loved,
demon devoured.

You/Blue

Cerulean
Prussian
Azurite
Cobalt
Indanthrone
Ultramarine
Lapis
Manganese
Pthalo

To paint you-
a complicated hue.
You-
Stunning,
complex,
heartrending
blue.

Pictures

Self-Appalled

If you're water
I'm all thirst.

Invocation/posession

Sweltered venom sleeping got
I boil uncharmed in an
charmless pot.

Someone Threw Us a Treat

We say "thanks."

Hot

Steaming, lambasted, ruined. I wilt.

Let Me Out

Shakma Hates Doors - watch more funny videos

It's a day I want out of.

Just a Ditty

I begin to remember myself.

This Season, All the Rage

From "A Season in Hell," (Night in Hell) by Arthur Rimbaud:

I have just swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison. - Blessed, blessed, blessed the advice I was given! - My guts are on fire. The power of the poison twists my arms and legs, cripples me, drives me to the ground. I die of thirst, I suffocate, I cannot cry. This is Hell, eternal torment! See how the flames rise! I burn as I ought to. Go on, Devil!

I once came close to a conversion to the good and to felicity, salvation. How can I describe my vision, the air of Hell is too thick for hymns! There were millions of delightful creatures in smooth spiritual harmony, strength and peace, noble ambitions, I don't know what all?

Noble ambitions!

But I am still alive! - Suppose damnation is eternal! A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he? I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am. This is the catechism at work. I am the slave of my baptism. You, my parents, have ruined my life, and your own. Poor child! - Hell is powerless against pagans. - I am still alive! Later on, the delights of damnation will become more profound. A crime, quick, and let me fall to nothingness, condemned by human law.

There, by the Tree in Shimmering

The light, translucent honeyed green. It's hot out. The birds are nearly immobile, except for one plaintive grackle. A breeze shakes the banana leaves, and a blue-black butterfly passes.

Demon Devourer

"You always knew it would end like this."
But, you see, there was never any other way.
It started with a particle, subatomic.
A thing too miniscule to matter
but matter has it's secrets.
Half-lives half lived in,
all imagined.
Every thing
has it's
shadow.

There's no knowing when
the real ache began.
Some primordial
dawn. Well before
the word was found.
Now it's much too late
to root it out. It's in
every atom.

Home

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.

Richard Bach

Quote

Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.

Sylvia Plath

Absence

Absence diminishes medeiocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Like Being in a Game

It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal.” kate atkinson

Listening Today-- Glenn Gould-- Goldberg Variations

Wikipedia's article on the variations.

Article: Making Anything Signify Anything

From an article at Cabinet Magazine examining Bacon's biliteral code:

At first glance, the photo looks like a standard-issue keepsake of the kind owned by anyone who has served in the military. Yet Friedman found it so significant that he had a second, larger copy framed for the wall of his study. When he looked at the oblong image, taken in Aurora, Illinois, on a winter’s day in 1918, what did Friedman see? He saw seventy-one officers, soon to be sent to the war in France, for whom he had designed a crash course on the theory and practice of cryptology. He saw his younger self at one end of the mysterious group of black-clad civilians seated in the center; and at the other end he saw the formidable figure of George Fabyan, the director of Riverbank Laboratories in nearby Geneva, where Friedman found not just his cryptographic calling but also his wife Elizebeth (flanked here by two other instructors from Riverbank’s Department of Ciphers). And he saw a coded message, hiding in plain sight. As a note on the back of the larger print explains, the image is a cryptogram in which people stand in for letters; and thanks to Friedman’s careful positioning, they spell out the words “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.” (Or rather they almost do: for one thing, they were four people short of the number needed to complete the “R.”)

Mad Honey and Other Strange Poisonings

From an article at Lapham's Quarterly, called "Death in the Pot":

Returning from an unsuccessful raid in Persia, Xenophon’s men raided beehives along the eastern edge of the Black Sea, acquiring a treasure trove of local honey. By day’s end, the raiding party was immobilized. They were like men “greatly intoxicated,” wrote Xenophon, whose army was suffering from nausea, inability to walk straight, and lethargy. Over three centuries later, the Roman general Pompey’s troops also encamped by the Black Sea and gorged themselves on the local honey. Pompey lost three squadrons to the enemy fighters who had deliberately placed honeycombs in the path of his troops.

So what is mad honey? It’s just honey, but it comes from bees feeding on some very poisonous flowering plants that flourish along the Black Sea (and elsewhere), notably rhododendrons. These plants contain a class of poisons called grayanotoxins that act directly on the nervous system. The classic symptoms range from tingling and numbness, dizziness and nausea, impaired speech and a loss of balance. Some victims report a sense of being surrounded by spinning lights, others complain of a tunnel vision. “Mad-honey poisoning” can also be fatal, as the compromised nervous system starts shutting down the lungs and heart.

Darkness Visisble

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

No light, but rather darkness visible. Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe, ...

Paradise Lost

All the Better to Eat You With

Back to Black

Making Sacred the Profane

“There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded disireable, that calls for art or for character.”

–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

'80s Fix

The Damned Cover the Sex Pistols

Pretty Vacant

En Casa Hoy

"At least there will be a lot of opportunities to quote Jack Rebney, and not just about the flies."

Don't Mind the Maze

It's a rhizome in progress. It's evolving rather slowly just now, as I've tended it little. Like Sarah Winchester, I'll keep building to house my ghosts. It's probably in vain, the hope they'll inhabit pixels. They'll likely stay lodged like ice picks right in my brain. Until there comes a time when the ghosts get out of the machine.

What Shouldn't Be

"What is this misbegotten thing?" he asked.

"It's stillborn and easily disposed," she replied.

"I can't be sure I'll keep my eyes."

"No matter. What's seen you can't unsee."

"At least I won't repeat it."

"Are you sure you can tend another pain?"

"I'll feed it every day, even when the memory fades."

"Absences can outgrow the former presence," she said. "Remember that."

"If I forget, something will remind me."

Something will always remind me.

Fate/Longing

"Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them."


Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

The Fates, or Moirae, were the goddesses who controlled the destiny of everyone from the time they were born to the time they died. They were: Clotho, the spinner, who spun the thread of a person's life, Lachesis, the apportioner, who decided how much time was to be allowed each person, and Atropos, the inevitable, who cut the thread when you were supposed to die. Even though the other gods were almighty, and supposedly immortal, even Hera had reason to fear them. All were subject to the whims of the Fates. Ministers of the Fates were always oracles or soothsayers (seers of the future). The Fates were very important, but it is still unknown to who their parents were. There is some speculation that they might be the daughters of Zeus, however, this is debatable.
The Fates were often depicted as ugly hags, cold and unmerciful. But the Fates were not always deaf to the pleading of others. When Atropos cut the thread of King Admetus, who happened to be Apollo's friend, Apollo begged the Fates to undo their work. It was not in their power to do so, but they promised that if someone took Admetus' place in the gloomy world of Hades' domain, he would live. The king's wife, Alcestis, said she would take his place. But Hercules, who happened to be Admetus' guest, rescued her from the underworld, and Admetus an Alcetis were reunited.

From Encyclopedia mythica

Saturday

Futility

Oh, I have tried to laugh the pain away,
Let new flames brush my love-springs like a feather.
But the old fever seizes me to-day,
As sickness grips a soul in wretched weather.
I have given up myself to every urge,
With not a care of precious powers spent,
Have bared my body to the strangest scourge,
To soothe and deaden my heart’s unhealing rent.
But you have torn a nerve out of my frame,
A gut that no physician can replace,
And reft my life of happiness and aim.
Oh what new purpose shall I now embrace?
What substance hold, what lovely form pursue,
When my thought burns through everything to you?

(Claude McKay)

Spell to Win Your Lady's Heart

"Found among the effects of controversial artist Robert Lenkiewicz, who died five years ago aged 60, the "manuscript grimoire" provides an extraordinary number of conjurations, incantations, signs, portents, spells and folk remedies from the late 16th century.
The anonymous author describes how to use magic not only to find a lover, but also to help find treasure or even prevent theft and punish robbers.
According to the book, the best way to win a woman is for a man to "take a frog and put him in a pot and stop it fast," before advising him to bury the pot in an ant hill at a crossroads.
After nine days, two of the frog's bones should then be removed and placed in a stream or river of running water.
The extraordinary spell continues: "One of them will float against the stream.
"Make thee a ring, and take the part that swum against the stream and set it in the ring, and when you will have any woman put it on her right hand...she shall never rest till she hath been with thee."
Written between 1590 and 1620, the 30-page volume also includes illustrations of the planets with angel."


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464335/How-dead-frog-help-woo-lover.html#ixzz1S1brKT9R

In Dreams

"Hold fast your dreams. Within your heart Keep one still, secret spot Where dreams may go." Louise Driscoll

Fading/Becoming

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them - ding-dong, bell.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Len Lye - Experimental Film

Len Lye (1901 - 1980) pursued a passion for experimentation and for creating new form throughout his whole career. His multifaceted practice included kinetic sculpture, photography, painting and poetry in addition to film making with and without a camera. He was one of the first non-Maori (Pākehā) artists from New Zealand to appreciate the art of Maori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, which he incorporated into his own expression.

In the 1930s Lye was commissioned by the visionary film unit at the General Post Office in London and made a number of commercials that are now seen as seminal in the history of moving images. He made his first 'direct' (camera less) film, A Colour Box by painting directly onto the film in 1935, and from then on continued to develop the technique by interfering with the film stock in various ways. More

RIP Cy Twombly

Happy Thoughts for a Sunny Day

Absence, Longing

Water, is taught by thirst.


Water, is taught by thirst.
Land -- by the Oceans passed.
Transport -- by throe
Peace -- by its battles told
Love, by Memorial Mold
Birds, by the Snow.


Emily Dickinson

Lines Written in Oregon

Esmeralda! now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the West.
Here the very air is stranger.
Damzel, anchoret, and ranger
Share the woodland’s dream and danger.
And to think I deemed you dead!
(In a dungeon, it was said;
Tortured, strangled); but instead –
Blue birds from the bluest fable,
Bear and hare in coats of sable,
Peacock moth on picnic table.
Huddled roadsigns softly speak
Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,
And (obliterated) Peak.
Do you recognize that clover?
Dandelions, l’or du pauvre?
(Europe, nonetheless, is over).
Up the turk, along the burn
Latin lilies climb and turn
Into Gothic fir and fern.
Cornfields have befouled the prairies
But these canyons laugh! And there is
Still the forest with its fairies.
And I rest where I awoke
In the sea shade – l’ombre glauque –
Of a legendary oak;
Where the woods get ever dimmer,
Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer –
Esmeralda, immer, immer.

Vladimir Nabokov

So Bad

Blue Skies

Love Song

I lie here thinking of you:—
the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branches that lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world—
you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

William Carlos Williams

As e'er Beneath a Waning Moon was Haunted

On Looking Into The Eyes Of A Demon Lover 

Here are two pupils
whose moons of black
transform to cripples
all who look:

each lovely lady
who peers inside
take on the body
of a toad.

Within these mirrors
the world inverts:
the fond admirer's
burning darts

turn back to injure
the thrusting hand
and inflame to danger
the scarlet wound.

I sought my image
in the scorching glass,
for what fire could damage
a witch's face?

So I stared in that furnace
where beauties char
but found radiant Venus
reflected there.


 Sylvia Plath

Jane Awake

The opals hiding your lids
as you sleep, as you ride ponies
mysteriously, spring to bloom
like the blue flowers of autumn

each nine o'clock. And curls
tumble languorously towards
the yawning rubber band, tan,
your hand pressing all that

riotous black sleep into
the quiet form of daylight
and its sunny disregard for
the luminous volutions, oh!

and the budding waltzes
we swoop through in nights.
Before dawn you roar with
your eyes shut, unsmiling,

your volcanic flesh hides
everything from the watchman,
and the tendrils of dreams
strangle policemen running by

too slowly to escape you,
the racing vertiginous waves
of your murmuring need. But
he is day's guardian saint

that policeman, and leaning
from your open window you ask
him what to dress to wear and
to comb your hair modestly,

for that is now your mode.
Only by chance tripping on stairs
do you repeat the dance, and
then, in the perfect variety of

subdued, impeccably disguised,
white black pink blue saffron
and golden ambiance, do we find
the nightly savage, in a trance.

Frank O'Hara

Papa

Legba

Come to Me in My Dreams

Longing

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.

Come, as thou cam'st a thousand times,
A messenger from radiant climes,
And smile on thy new world, and be
As kind to others as to me!

Or, as thou never cam'st in sooth,
Come now, and let me dream it truth,
And part my hair, and kiss my brow,
And say, My love why sufferest thou?

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.


by Matthew Arnold

Love Moppet

LOVE MOPPET
MY LOVING LUST ARDENTLY ATTRACTS YOUR IMPATIENT LIKING. MY THIRST WANTS YOUR LOVING INFATUATION. MY RAPTURE LIKES YOUR LOVESICK HUNGER. YOU ARE MY LOVELY ARDOUR. MY CHARM COVETOUSLY ATTRACTS YOUR LIKING.
YOURS TENDERLY
M. U. C.

Written by Christopher Strachey in 1952 for Manchester Mark One, the first computer, was a random love poetry generator. Click here to get a love poem.

A Little Hump Day Something

It’s Like This
BY STEPHEN DOBYNS
for Peter Parrish

Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible
cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark,
the cord that makes him always dissatisfied,
has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes.

He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes,
but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with
different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men
that people who hardly know him often mistake
for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus.

He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
or a library or turning a piece of flat land
into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
like a name he is trying to remember, like
expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
whom he has never met, would never meet again.
And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor
is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
like white curtains shot full of wind and light.

When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see
what person he should be that evening. He wants to say:
All day I have been listening, all day I have felt
I stood on the brink of something amazing.
But he says nothing, and his family walks around him
as if he were a stick leaning against a wall.

Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed.
He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure
of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water
drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him.
Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress,
and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him.
Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more,
until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.

Strangely Love

Her Triumph

I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood among the dragon‑rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.

William Butler Yeats

Night

Meeting At Night

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

by Robert Browning

Summer Solstice

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light's great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun--
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

by Joseph Stroud

Growing up Absurd

The Brilliant Corners, and a flashback to 1985.

Seaward

"The more intricate the apparent pattern the simpler the underlying reality."

I didn't note where that quote came from, but it may have been Law and Order.

Deeper and Deeper

We're all mindful out this way today. Covenistas, prepare to assemble for the Solstice on the shores of Mono Lake, where we'll find those strange spirits to haunt our summer sleep. Summer nights call for those bewitchments that make the brightness of daytime bearable. So, to the lake.

The Woods

"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass." Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums

Deeper

It's chilly tonight at the lake. Not a night for swimming. A night for looking, listening. The stars hang over the high Eastern horizon where they've burned holes in the indigo velvet of the night. Above the foothills the moon rises. It's quiet, even as a shadow slips across the garden. Some nocturnal creature hunched near the ground. An owl passes on silent wings and here we are, in the dark, in a valley between ancient volcanos and their basalt remains. Here we are; ephemera.

Stonepicker

She is scooped out and bow-like,
As if her string
Has been drawn tight.

But really she is
Plucking stones from the dirt
For her shoulder-bag.

It is her dead albatross,
Her cross, her choice,
In it lie her weapons.

Each granite sphere,
Or sea-worn flint,
Has weight against your sin.

You cannot win.
She calls you close,
But not to let you in, only

For a better aim.

Frieda Hughes

Francis Glessner Lee

I've been reading "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death," about Francis Glessner Lee and her weird, remarkable crime scene dioramas which she constructed in the 1940s to instruct police on crime scene investigation. The book's images of the dioramas are fantastic, though the text completely shies away from physical analysis of clues Lee meticulously arranged in her scenes and stays, rather uninformatively, in the realm of literary criticism. A somewhat more interesting treatment is to be found in this article by Katherine Ramsland.

The Execution

On the night of the execution
a man at the door
mistook me for the coroner.
"Press," I said.

But he didn't understand. He led me
into the wrong room
where the sheriff greeted me:
"You're late, Padre."

"You're wrong," I told him. "I'm Press."
"Yes, of course, Reverend Press."
We went down a stairway.

"Ah, Mr. Ellis," said the Deputy.
"Press!" I shouted. But he shoved me
through a black curtain. The lights were so bright
I couldn't see the faces
of the men sitting
opposite. But, thank God, I thought
they can see me!

"Look!" I cried. "Look at my face!
Doesn't anybody know me?"

Then a hood covered my head.
"Don't make it harder for us," the hangman whispered.

Alden Nowlan

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Anne Sexton

Traveling through the Dark-- By William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

California Stars

A Supermarket in California


What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does
your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you
have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and
stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Allen Ginsberg

The Wide Open Road

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Here's Where the Story Ends

The Sundays

She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Excerpted from "Sunday Morning," by Wallace Stevens

Howl

. Madness.

Hundreds of Fireflies

Sky yet violet,
shadows collecting
under the trees

and first stars wan
as night birches, the fireflies
begin: from the first,

the night belongs
to them.
Darkness brightens
them: from our screened porch

we watch their blinkings
sharpen: three, four of them
lighten nightfall of all

solemnity; ten or twelve
and the eyes are led
endlessly astray;

and in deeper night
it’s twenty, fifty, more—a number
beyond simple reckoning—

and still they keep
coming.
No winter
surpasses the flash

of their storm, no spring
their startling growth.
Expanding
to contain them, the night fills

with their soundless poppings,
hundreds of fireflies,
each arhythmic light a trinket

to entice some wayward mate
into the joined darkness
of propagation . . .

So it’s as wooers they come
bumbling to the cottage screens
to illumine palely, eerily

our faces, and but a creature’s
prime, combinatory urge
erects constellations brighter,

nearer than the heavens
will ever be.
Merely
to watch, and say nothing,

gratefully,
is what is best, is
what we needed.
For we’ve seen

stars enough tonight
to hold us through a year
of city living—

lengthening fall nights,
opened trees and the rosy
murk of shopping plazas;

and skies greyly gathering snow,
and the moon of crusted snow,
and marshy April skies clogged

with sediment . . . until the silent
drift of summer through the trees
signals us, drawn too by light,

to another brief firefly season.

Brad Leithauser

Angelica the Doorkeeper

The falcon soars

The town’s gates are even higher

Angelica’s their doorkeeper

She’s wound the sun round her head

She’s tied the moon round her waist

She’s hung herself with stars.

– Anon.

Today in Casa West

"It's bad when you've got big balls."

The Aliens

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they have moments of
grief
but all in all
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy
death, usually in their
sleep.

Charles Bukowski

A Lifetime Burning

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

From "East Coker" by T.S. Eliot

"East Coker" is the second of Eliot's "Four Quartets." The quartets were written over a period of about six years. I've posted this bit elsewhere and before, but it remains a favorite, so here goes again.

Song for Tuesday

Because I woke up with it stalking my thoughts this morning.

Tonight, the Infinitesimal

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

From "I am Vertical" by Sylvia Plath

Westward Ho.

We're charting our Westward course as the time of departure nears. Mountain lions stalk the foothills above our fair town and yet we shall brave it, wishing the cat would come back and the time travel worked a bit better. This fiction, oh, why do we maintain it? Wizard Island awaits, and there, we shall receive further instruction.

To Climb Clear of the Wrong Beginnings

Aubade, by Phillip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.


This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Killing/Waking

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

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.

BY THEODORE ROETHKE

Isolated Hearse of My Sleep

...
Isolated hearse of my sleep,
shepherd's house of my insanity,
the vehicle veers on the grass
of the obliterated highway:
and in the defect at the top
of the right-hand windowpane
revolve pale lunar figures, leaves, and breasts. --

A very deep green and blue invade the picture.
Unhitching near a spot of gravel. --
Here will they whistle for the storm,
and the Sodoms and Solymas,
and the wild beasts and the armies,
(Postilion and animals of dream,
will they begin again in the stifling
forests to plunge me up to my eyes
in the silken spring?)
And, whipped through the splashing of waters
and spilled drinks, send us rolling
on the barking of bulldogs...

From "Common Nocturne" by Arthur Rimbaud

Clara Rockmore - Theremin

Turns out even animals can be theremins. Or at least Rat Terriers can be.

Love in the Asylum

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

Dylan Thomas

Abastract Film Circa 1950

Harry Everett Smith, born Portland, Or. 1923 was, besides an experimental film maker, the greatest living magician. This according to Kenneth Anger. He was also an ethnomusicologist, mystic and all around nutter. My kinda guy. He died at the Hotel Chelsea in 1991, adding his ghost to the many that frequent it. Dylan Thomas, Nancy, I forget who else. Great ghosts they have.

In The Store

"What would happen if I threw this jar of Noxema as hard as I could?"

Sweet Tides

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Sylvia Plath

Today in Casa West

"They probably won't have any slut whores in there."

Was ist Das?

Sky

Song for Sunday

A Little Treat

Something pretty for tonight. It will help the moon along in the sweet strange nothing. Mind the depths and the currents. (thanks)

If You Were a Bluebird

Today in Casa West

"It's 59 degrees out. I'm freezing."

Dark Matter

Trying to capture these fireflies in a jar, and with them the sound of cicadas, which wouldn't be complete without that undefinable scent which so defines this place. I don't dare try for the thousand years old light of distant stars, but I'll try, nevertheless. Imaginings are dangerous things. Their wings are their own. Every magician knows the cat is out there, dead and alive forever, both in and out of the box. Try to unimagine. Can't be done. Even stopping one is nearly impossible.

Thanks for the Treat

http://youtu.be/pj3vXkhqszE



Siver moon sparkling. For forever or a long time.

In The Store

"What would happen if I threw this block of cheese as hard as I could?"

Pink Room

The Pink Room from David Lynch MC on Vimeo.

Today in Casa West

"Does anyone ever water these plants?"

Today in Casa West

"That video isn't as funny as you think it is."

Kutna Hora Bone Chapel

Paris Catacombs

Interesting story, here.

106

The Daisy follows soft the Sun—
And when his golden walk is done—
Sits shyly at his feet—
He—waking—finds the flower there—
Wherefore—Marauder—art thou here?
Because, Sir, love is sweet!

We are the Flower—Thou the Sun!
Forgive us, if as days decline—
We nearer steal to Thee!
Enamored of the parting West—
The peace—the flight—the Amethyst—
Night's possibility!

Emily Dickinson

Quote for the Day

"They probably just ran out of crank."

Midnight Song

Quote for the Day

"That's probably not as good for as you think it is."

This Could Get Ugly.

Purple ink is spilling on everything over here. Even Prince would be appalled. Must press on, though, an insane task though it is. You'll want to burn after reading. Probably, you'll have no choice.

Today in Casa West

"As soon as school's out I'm gonna start killin' again."

Daydreaming

If you can’t be free, be a mystery -- Rita Dove

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.


--From Grace Notes (W.W. Norton, 1989)

Lipstick's Traces

Is it possible that I just got more haunted?

The Meteors are Out Tonight

The Lyrid meteors will be at their peak the next couple of nights, until Saturday around dawn. The best time to catch them is between sunset and midnight, as the moon will rise near midnight and outshine the Lyrids. The radiant point of the shower will rise around ten, with the meteors appearing to originate from the area of the star Vega, the brightest in Orpheus' harp. Perhaps the fireflies will be out too. We'll see. It promises to be a lovely night for some nocturnal missions.

(Video is of the Perseids.)

IN A DARK TIME - Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened. summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Ode to Joy and Thoughts on CS Lewis

And then there's this Just baffling.

C.S. Lewis:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and to earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I suggest that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[2]

Where is my Dark Mind?

I

Mike and the Squirrel-Foot

This game relies on Mike's ability to pretend that a foot is a ground squirrel, and someone else's love of being bitten on the foot. Both, it would seem, are a bit easily amused.

Bob's Cool Down

try not to breath

All Things Pleasing

Craazy

Song for a Strange Saturday

Diamonda Galas.

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome

A Poem for Monday

The Dead
by Mina Loy

We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off

Of infinite elastic
Walking the ceiling
Our eyelashes polish stars

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle
Of a descendant
We spit up our passions in our grand-dams

Fixing the extension of your reactions
Our shadow lengthens
In your fear

You are so old
Born in our immortality
Stuck fast as Life
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension

We are turned inside out
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness

Having swallowed your irate hungers
Satisfied before bread-breaking
To your dissolution
We splinter into Wholes
Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow
Among the refuse of your unborn centuries
In our busy ashbins
Stink the melodies
Of your
So easily reducible
Adolescences

Our tissue is of that which escapes you
Birth-Breaths and orgasms
The shattering tremor of the static
The far-shore of an instant
The unsurpassable openness of the circle
Legerdemain of God

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves
Break on our edgeless contours

The mouthed echoes of what
has exuded to our companionship
Is horrible to the ear
Of the half that is left inside them

The Star Has Wept Rose Colour

The star has wept rose-colour in the heart of your ears,
The infinite rolled white from your nape to the small of your back
The sea has broken russet at your vermilion nipples,
And Man bled black at your royal side.

Arthur Rimbaud

Kenneth Anger's "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome was supposedly inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream." from Wikipedia:

Inauguration, which was created in 1954, was a 38 minute surrealist work featuring many Crowleyan and Thelemite themes, with many of the various different characters personifying various pagan gods such as Isis, Osiris and Pan. One of the actresses in the film was Marjorie Cameron, the widow of Jack Parsons, the influential American Thelemite who had died a few years previously, whilst Anger himself played Hecate.[41] He would subsequently exhibit the film at various European film festivals, winning the Prix du Ciné-Club Belge and the Prix de l'Age d'Or as well as screening it in the form of a projected triptych at Expo 58, the World Fair held in Brussels in 1958.[42]

Taylor's poem was published in 1816 and reviewers immediately savaged it, though it's now regarded as one of his best works.

Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Massive Attack -- Hieronymus Bosch

Happy Nightmares

Aphex Twin, Come to Daddy.

At the Crossroads