05.16.2008

Golgotha Tenement Blues (lyrics to the song by Machines of Loving Grace)

I am city
I am the park
I am glow in the mother fucking dark
I am shocked and I seethe
I don’t want to believe no more
No more
No more
Golgotha tenement
city of sores
Give me your tired and your wicked
Give me your dollar whores
Down on the boulevard children are sold
To pave the way
For your streets of gold
Streets of gold

05.15.2008

Some Questions You Might Ask (a poem by Mary Oliver)

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
WHat about all the little stones, sitting aloe in the moonlight?
What about roses, lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

05.14.2008

Naked Vision (a poem by Gwen Harwood)

I was sent to fetch an eye
promised for a fresh corneal graft.
At the doctor’s rooms nurse gave me
a common paper bag;
in that, a sterile jar;
in that, the disembodied eye.

I sat in Davey Street
on a low brick garden wall
and looked. The eye looked back.
It gazed, lucid and whole,
from its colourless solution.
The window of whose soul?

Trees in St. David’s Park
refreshed the lunchtime lovers:
riesling gold, claret dark;
late flowers flaunted all colours.
But my friend and I had eyes
only for one another.

05.13.2008

The Current (a poem by Raymond Carver)

These fish have no eyes
these silver fish that come to me in dreams,
scattering their roe and milt
in the pockets of my brain.

But there’s one that comes–
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,
that simply holds against the current,

closing its dark mouth against
the current, closing and opening
as it holds to the current.

05.12.2008

Them (a poem by C. X. Hunter)

I stole anything useless
made my lair in the basement
diddled in the junk
on the floor in the closet
listened to show tunes
on a wooden radio
licked the dust from the windows
hid from the crow
hid from the bluebird
imagined bugs in the plumbing
dreaded the ring
of a big black telephone
feared I might be related
to a family of monsters
went without sleep for
fourteen years

05.11.2008

Klavier (’Piano’ — lyrics to the song by Rammstein, translated from the original German)

They say to me
Open this door
curiosity screams
Whatever could it be
Back behind that door
A piano
The keys are all dusty
The strings are all untuned
Back behind that door
At the piano
But she plays no more
It so long ago

On the piano
She’s who I hear
She began to play
She took my breath away

She said to me too
That I’ll stay with you
But it just seemed to be
She played alone for me
I poured her blood
On the fire of my rage
I locked up her shrine
They questioned in time

At the piano
She’s who I hear
She began to play
She took my breath away
At the piano
I stand by her
But it just seemed to be
She played alone for me

They opened up the door
And how they cried
I heard her mother plea
her father struck out at me
They tore her from her chair
No one believed me there
I was so insane
With the strech and the pain

At the piano
She’s who I hear
She began to play
She took my breath away
At the piano
She’s who I hear
As I began to play
I took her breath away

05.10.2008

Blue (lyrics to the song by Yoko Kanno)

Never seen a blue sky
Yeah I can feel it reaching out
And moving closer
There’s something about blue
Asked myself what it’s all for
You know the funny thing about it
I couldn’t answer
No I couldn’t answer

Things have turned a deeper shade of blue
And images that might be real
May be illusion
Keep flashing off and on
Free
Wanna be free
Gonna be free
And move among the stars
You know they really aren’t so far
Feels so free
Gotta know free
Please
Don’t wake me from the dream
It’s really everything it seemed
I’m so free
No black and white in the blue

Everything is clearer now
Life is just a dream you know
That’s never ending
I’m ascending

05.09.2008

Death (a quote by Georges Bataille)

We are attempting to communicate, but no communication between us can abolish our fundamental difference.

If you die, it is not my death . . . .

05.08.2008

Fidelity (a poem by Mark Halliday)

The things we could do
with certain lovely others
are weapons we keep loaded
or at least near the ammo box
in a drawer behind socks,
there to pull out and polish occasionally
as at a party or dinner
when a smile or drifting fingertip
whispers richly of imaginable beds–
our brandishing when it’s right
being a truly amorous blood-quickener,
a way of saying It’s all for you, my beauty,
and don’t you forget it.

05.07.2008

A Single Overwound String (an excerpt from the novel The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian)

As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string. I was too poor to even have an etherizing vice like drugs or alcohol. Slowly I became a Peeping Tom of finer days, a vicarious liver through my own past.

Years ago, forecasting the quality of my life to come was a cinch. By five years’ time–which would have been five years ago–I would’ve graduated with a degree in architecture, and with a guaranteed job in my father’s growing real estate development firm. In sum, I’d be kept in clover. Envisioning my future was like watching a lucky contestant on a game show, whose winnings increased with each spin of the wheel.