Have a fair and balanced newsday, Mr. Murdoch. No need to worry: I'd never associate the phrase with your beloved Fox network.

As relief from the heat: the NYC blackout edition of the Gothamist.

had silly thought, found perfect poem. a nice thing to watch unnoticed. small.

The Difference

You scrape while I daub:
a difference in our bathroom:
one augments, the other minimizes.
A long-married couple is a paradigm
of unreason. You would stage our life,
I, reveal; you would trim, contain,
while I bend to collect stray
acorns and lemons to array on a shelf.

Then there's the matter of razors:
mine pink-handled and curvy, nicks
more flesh than your stiff-legged
soldier bearing its twin scimitars
onto a lank field of damp skin.
We agree to avert bloodshed
by not using each other's.

And mirrors: one is wiped of distracting
fog. The other magnifies a cheek
to moon-size, the better to probe
each follicle or pock. A landing field,
mine is filled with colors while yours
reflects in black and white,
diagrams hair, angles and doubts.
In mine we plant on peau douce.
a united nations of brightness,
and here is the crux of our truce:
a ruse or a razing ? we can each choose.

-- Rachel Dacus

It's been so long I'd forgotten how to dress like a civilized person. What does one wear to work? Farewell, cheap sandals; hello, silk and cufflinks. It won't be summer much longer.

I send my messages ahead of me.
You read them, they speak to you
in sirens's tongues, ears of flame
spring from your head to take them.

When I arrive, you love me,
for I sing these messages you've
learned by heart, and bring,
as housegifts, new ones. You hear

yourselves in them,
self after self. Your solitudes
utter their runes, your own
voices begin to rise in your throats.

But soon you love me less.
I brought with me
to much, to many laden coffers,
the panoply of residence,

improper to a visit.
Silks and furs , my enormous wings,
my crutches, and my spare crutches,
my desirse to please, and worse--

my desire to judge what is right.

I take up
to much space.
You are living on what you can find,
you dont want charity, and you can't
support lingering quests.

When I leave, I leave
alone, as I came.

-- D. Levertov

Repeating myself.

Who needs sleep? Well you’re never gonna get it
Who needs sleep? Tell me what’s that for
Who needs sleep? Be happy with what you’re getting
There’s a guy who’s been awake since the second world war
Who needs sleep? Well you’re never gonna get it
Who needs sleep? Tell me what’s that for
Who needs sleep? Be happy with what you’re getting
There’s a guy who’s been awake since the second world war

You know it's late and delirious when I'm listening to BNL.

Cynara
gracias a Skye for reminding me.

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! Thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep shy lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone, gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.


-- Ernest Christopher Dowson (1896 -- first published as Non sum qualis eram bon? sub Regno Cynar? -- apparently untranslatable)

Aerogramme


A featherweight letter drops through the mailslot
addressed to me. Pale blue, it has followed me
from city to city, travelling oceans and continents,
to arrive thirty years late. The writing is illegible.

And then the doorbell rings and there you are,
boyish as ever, in your Beatle haircut and olive drab
turtleneck sweater, holding a dog-eared copy
of Being and Nothingness, sure I'll invite you in.

Late night I dreamed all this. Affectionate strangers,
we kissed, as we never had, and I was thirteen again.
Then I had to pull away or lose myself completely
in the Proustian shock of your aftershave.

I can still remember, if I try, what I felt then.
A girl in love for the first time is the purest creature!
So that now, old ghost, believing nothing is coincidence,
I must write to you on onionskin, closing the circle.

I hold in my hand sheets that the slightest breath
would scatter: words without weight, my unsent letter.


-- Elizabeth Spires

[music round and round: ani difranco - phase]

Fucking Christian Zionists. Nothing more frightening.

Love Song

This, that I carry like a butterfly,
prisoner in my cupped and outstretched hands,
is, of all things, small,
but great in its demands
and bears within itself a world of power.
I close my hand upon it like a wall.
For this there can be neither time nor season
and of all things upon the earth
it has the least to do with reason.
(I open my hand, finger from palm. Look!)
This holds within it life, death, and birth;
used wrong, there is no harm it cannot do.
Look long, look carefully;
this is for you.

-- John R. Nash

angst
oh, Bill. honestly.

LXVI

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

-- WS

So maybe I'm tired and piled piecemeal in boxes and under bags trapped but the hills past the exit to Tanglewood have me, they have me and oh in October I will be lost. found again in grey November to be sure, cold and claustrophobic... feels like both in this damp green August.

Is it bad to have come here
And to have found the bed empty?

One might have found tragic hair,
Bitter eyes, hands hostile and cold.

There might have been a light on a book
Lighting a pitiless verse or two.

There might have been the immense solitude
Of the wind upon the curtains.

Pitiless verse? A few words tuned
And tuned and tuned and tuned.

It is good. The bed is empty,
The curtains are stiff and prim and still.

-- Wallace Stevens