Whizbang

Snapped cycles slipping into spiraling funnels,
Random atoms hopscotching through time and causality,
Vectorial hives, nested networks, e-motive tunnels,
The privates of industry have met for a cup of tea.

Defiant dulcimer

Give me shatterproof light for I am picking up pieces of the rainbows from the spent dreams in which the instruments have fallen silent. Talent was of no avail and skill brought about no succour from these woes. The coldest hour has come ignoring the sweltering summer day. Yet still the dulcimer plays and carries me safely away.
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Music by Dizzi. If you are at all interested in hammered dulcimers check out her website: she is awesome!

Cut loses

Tending my self's edge, dangerously sharp
Savant weapon silenced the heart
Better than to feel pain of spinning wheel
Or remnants of warmth as away they steal
The sorting of emotions as I rip apart
Returning to the blade that I was at start
I am not she/he, without become mere thing
Twilight to nothing, his/her passing.
2001

Image from Derknives.com

There's a poll up on the top left:

do y'all want a Questing for Food mix tape?

Quiescent?

Fire smolders within the paper-thin boxes that make my being
Flames flicker with the wind winding its way in-distinct feeling
Uninspired and disenchanted I frown, growl, and glower
My power waits in its temporarily forsworn state.

 0628 13341342

Laughingly Laudanum

The hand that gives is like that hand that takes
Gantuple grins and lexy laughter fools the fakes
Time to dance or ride off into the panavision sunset
Cactus free landscape might not be the best bet
But still, I have two hands, one in each pocket
And an orange with lunar pockmarked skin
And a strong desire to let the music go, skitter skit
From clumsy fingers and dexterous dreamin’
31/03/05 13081546

Mourning Dew

The wind caresses these plains of green
There in the morn is silver dew
The dew remaining from fair maiden’s spleen
Are pearls of forgotten loves, lost, I knew.
'Though their tears remain, the maidens have long gone away
And to their health these tears I drink everyday.
Among the fruits of their sadness briar rabbits play
Thus unknowing we live our lives merry and gay
And forget the wars that trample the ground
With all of it's lost riches that we have found.
Let us live our lives as we would,
And remember the lost ones as we should;
Let us live our lives as if we could...
1997

 

Peony in RI from recent trip.

Dance dance dance

As a child, I danced amidst hate filled faces.
I danced to the top and ignored feigned social graces.
I brushed barriers aside and broke away from the dark places.

I was dancer by nature and definition and thus did I shape my mind and body.

The wheel of time spun its frantically lazy pirouette; with its revolutions came realization that there was no place in the world for a drop-forged dancer... at least none that I could morally accept or intellectually bear.

So I changed scenes.
I am still a dancer.
I am no longer a child, but I am still dancer.
Maybe not the dancer I once was, but I am still a dancer.

I just express the dance differently... sometimes in writing, sometimes in music; but in full truth and truthfully in all that I do.

I am dancer carried by the music of life, as such the rhythm is always
easier to find.

Come! Dance with me.


Spun off from a comment 03.06.2010 09020920

Sylvie Guillem

Scaterlings

Hearts join, part, or shatter with ease or with hardship, emotions adrift in a sea of potential.

Two vivid rainbows, arcing over and through a turquoise sky, can never touch.

A still damp leaf twirls as it falls and meets the embrace of the drying earth.

A word like an arrow in flight that has yet to alight.

The humbled bow.

And exit.

02.06.2010 11081112

Resting

Velvet soft, autumn breeze bright, gorged with sun light
Soothing ray, upon bed of leaves where I lay at ease
Unworried by winter ahead or the life that I’ve lead
I gaze upon a cloud, single and slowly drifting through the sky
Through shroud and sky, my thoughts yonder fly, on swift wing
On swift wind winging away on sun’s ray, hearing silent heart sing
Listening to meaning of mental meandering… I lay, resting.
2001

Auvergne 4 years ago

No Hope

I was alone in my room that fateful night
Trying to sleep with all my might
Lost was I in a sea of darkness, for only ship I had a bed
Suffering a tempest of disillusion, lost love, and anger in my head
I then realized ’twas no bed, but the mighty Argos instead
And in the elements die I might, was it such an awful plight
Suddenly overboard I flew, and while I fell, waiting to die I knew
There was hope for I had only fallen out of bed.
1991

Picture by SJKnight413 on flickr. 

Die unendliche Geschichte

An empress holding hope, in ivory tower lonely,
amidst gnawing nothing and dispair

Unknowing and lost, she who knew all,
ageless and nameless, pale Moonchild so fair

Reaching out, when all comes apart,
shattering heart fearing failure, comes the nothing

Yet through the chaos comes the word
winged with emotion, which will end the ending

No light in beginnings, the word, the thoughts,
communion of hearts, cradles the seed of light.

A story begun as a child

 I'm always tempted to state the few truths that are mine as universal. Open windows and high places have always tempted  me with their promises of flight, freedom and deliverance. At first glance these two things might seem unrelated, but in the run of my life these two things have not only been recurrent but have culminated to make me what I am today : a teacher. I should perhaps, for clarity's sake, begin at the beginning so that you, my unfortunate listener, may perhaps attempt to make some sort of sense or achieve some form of understanding of the ridiculous circumstances that qualify my somewhat circumstantial existence.

What feels like a little over thirty years ago a diminutive frog of pink flesh was born unto the world, that shriveled little bag of skin, bone, and flesh was I. I was delivered into the arms of that admirable woman, whom I later identified as my mother, and she simultaneously laughed and cried being uncertain whether the seemingly amphibian creature presented to her was a cruel joke or not. She then spoke to me exhaustively in her garbled tongue of Russian, Chinese and English that, in normal conditions, is incomprehensible to all but a handful of her closest friends and her husband, and barely those. Allow me to reassure you that her linguistic peculiarities were not the fruit of her exotic mental illnesses but the result of her upbringing and life choices. Her father, very early in her life, changed his profession from that of Russian sailor to that of a noxious drunkard. He spoke something vaguely resembling Russian that was both heavily accented with his Turkish childhood and more than slightly slurred by hard liquor. Her mother was from a Taiwanese family of refugees in Kowloon, the ghetto of Hong Kong that has since been bulldozered and conveniently sanitized with antiseptic skyscrapers. Thus her curious manner of speech came into being from her parents simultaneously addressing her in all their tongues starting when she was just a newborn babe. This was such a traumatizing experience for the baby that as such she never learned to speak "baby talk", such a traumatizing experience that as a growing girl she spoke no word aloud until she reached the age of fifteen whereupon she was promptly told to be quiet. Rumor has it that the family saying originated in those bygone years: "'Tis better to be dumb than to speak oddly and be mistaken for an insane person". The subtlety of this expression has always amazed me, that and the fact that my family should have the opportunity to keep using it- but I daresay I've never understood the full tenor of its meaning, it must surely too subtle for the likes of me. My father once explained it to me, I dimly recall it had something to do with an American song called "Yankee doodle dandy".

Of course, most of this isn't from memory, most of the information concerning my early beginnings in life are hearsay, and as such are subject to doubt...

Carrun

I like running on cars, neatly filed.
Like running in the sky it is,
Every windshield, a gateway to where else,
Slippery clean, ankle for to break,
As I leap from car to car.
In traffic such amusement...Much a movement? Much movement!
Seriously studying the streaking white lines, not for to sniff,
But rather defining the ground,
The ways forward as I bound,
Forward as I away.
1999

1866 - Paul Verlaine, "Poèmes saturniens"

The following is a repost of one of my comments. My apologies to those who read this the first time (but at least you get to listen to the audio). I'm probably pushing down today's original piece (tea in samsara) but I suppose it doesn't matter.

Today's post on Terressa's blog invited commenters to share a poem. But the one I wanted to share was french and I couldn't find a good translation. Either they were pretty but too far removed from the original, or stuck doggedly to the original words like a machine translation. None of them respected the structure, though some of them did try to reproduce some kind of rhyming pattern.
It's true that translation is (barring a few exceptions Baudelaire translating Poe to french for instance) a terrible thing to do to poetry, but here is my best try at it, feel free to brand me a criminal:
____________________________________________
1866 - Paul Verlaine, "Poèmes saturniens"

"My Familiar Dream"
I often have this dream, strange and engrossing dream
An unknown woman, whom I love and loves me, and
Every time, she is never quite the same it seems
Nor wholly different, she loves me and understands.

She sees within me, for her, my heart is crystal
Just for her, alas! It’s no longer an issue
Not for her, and when my pale brow beads with hot dew
She alone knows how to cool it, as her tears fall.

Brunette, blonde, or auburn? – I can’t say, don’t ask me.
Her name? It’s sonorous and sweet, as I recall
Like the names of loved ones, whose brimming cups were spilled.

Her gaze, like that of a statue, veiled in mystery.
Her voice, is distant, quiet and grave when she calls,
Echoing tones of beloved voices now stilled.
---
--
-
____________________

And for those who can grok the original here's the french (for those who can't but want to hear it, scroll down):
____________________
1866 - Paul Verlaine, "Poèmes saturniens"

"Mon Rêve familier"
Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant
D'une femme inconnue, et que j'aime, et qui m'aime,
Et qui n'est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même
Ni tout à fait une autre, et m'aime et me comprend.

Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur transparent
Pour elle seule, hélas ! cesse d'être un problème
Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême,
Elle seule les sait rafraîchir, en pleurant.

Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse ? --Je l'ignore.
Son nom ? Je me souviens qu'il est doux et sonore
Comme ceux des aimés que la Vie exila.

Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,
Et pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a
L'inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.
---
Here's a sung version by Julos Beaucarne, a multi-talented Belgian artiste. I grew up hearing this interpretation of the poem, it was one of my mother's many favourites... it wasn't until I got interested in classical poetry (much much later) that I realised it wasn't originally a song.

--
-
____________________________________________
I'm not above aping a good idea. Do any of you readers (all four of you) have pieces of well loved poetry you'd be kind enough to share?

A picture from the Père Lachaise cemetery I found online

Evaporation

She frowned at the sensation of her pants sticking to her thighs. The water dripped from her hair and face. If life were a drama she would be hiding her tears in the rain but truth is plainer than fiction and her heart hasn't been broken lately.
She is in fact thinking about the differences between grace and agility, more specifically about how to express them through ink painting.

The water in her dark hair reminisces about another life, a life it had spent as ink... the sensual feeling of the ink-stone, the intimate binding with the carbon black, and the brush delivering sweet rest on the silken sheets of paper, and then the little death leaving but a print in the world as life moves on to other forms.
Evaporation.

  Doodle from 2001

Who likes Poe? I do… Sorry Mr. Poe!

A pox on this devil-possessed bird and its evil goal!
This unforthright haunter of my space and my soul.
This slow witted student of naught to whom in vain
I sought to teach, to reach beyond its disdain.
But the one worded raven would not be taught...
And in the end was killed and stuffed, bearable no more.
In its stead an echo in a shell and a canary were bought.
The canary now sings as it sits atop the stuffed raven,
Atop the placid bust of Pallas, atop my chamber door,
Far stranded from seashore
the shell whispers its echo again and again-
Nevermore...
Nevermore...
Nevermore...

Harper and her

The walls press upon the unwary traveller. Wherein dost she travel so still and static that time forgets her... Is she just another inhabitant of the world? Not quite, for she sees the silver strings tied to the bolts in the middle of most people's backs. They seem to her like a web that threatens to ensnare her spirit, to throttle her body. She tries to become a spider, for spiders survive the best amidst webs, but the best she can manage is being invisible... Therefore, she goes unnoticed, a mixed blessing at best.

He sees the strings as chords and his graceful fingers play them softly. His music is sorrow for all that is lost in the name of getting; ‘tis sadness for the wonders gone unnoticed and the precious things forgotten. The notes he plays are waves that fall upon those who would listen and remember. The reactions vary, some deny, others hide in anger, some laugh with hope regained, others cry in despair... His own anger is a thing so seldom invoked that it is all but a vague potential.

Aimlessly she wanders amidst the snare of silver threads, always and ever so very wary not to touch any so as not to let them know she is there. Becoming invisible does not make her intangible, and failing to creep over the web as do the arachnid puppeteers she crawls with a lowered head, beneath the lowest webs like a mouse or an insect... Unseen and gratefully unseeing.

His eyes are closed, his fingers watch the world and laugh, they watch the world and cry, they pull music from the air from the threads and voice his unwhispered heart. Winged with thought he has risen above the cords he plays, and his song and all its facets flow like wind sometimes caressing sometimes violent but always heartbreaking, always beautiful and pure. His gentle face smiles wistfully as his harper’s hands play and his graceful limbs touch the cords. The spiders are intent on their game, they do not care, they do not listen, they do not perceive. His music is played with his whole body. He is the music. He is the dancer. He dances on the silver threads spinning, leaping, gliding, flying with the grace that is his and every thread he touches, like that of a heart, hums to his song.

She is barely breathing. The threads seem to tighten around her, like the cold fist of reason on her heart. She longs only to be free, to laugh again and be seen... The sickeningly sweet music seems to crawl over her skin leaving her soiled. An unwholesome vileness that makes all that has gone before seem a sweet nothing, a malevolent cancer that would consume her… ‘tis such that her heart, whom she believed to be barren, revolts in revulsion. Her body arcs in disgust and pain and she looks up to scream defiance at spiders and their webs, the skies, at the song, at all there is… and ‘tis then she sees him and he is wonderful to behold. The marvel of him drowns his song so she can no longer hear it, although even as she watches he continues to play.

Heedless and unknowing he plays on.

Envious, she watches from below as he seemingly flies in his dance upon the and amidst cords. So pure, so graceful… She desires to rise above the web and be free, and to dance with him. Her need rings a clear cutting note through his melody and he looks down to see whence it came. His eye like mirrors silvered fall upon her, such sadness, such sorrow, and yet… perhaps the pity and pathos she see there are but the reflection of her own. Suddenly, the angle or the light reveals what self-delusion had hidden, and the silver string in her back shimmers upwards and joins the web. Tears, the first in spite of all that preceded them: tears of loathing, tears of despair, tears at the vestigial remnants of his humanity.

Impossibly, he takes pity, and would set her free. Sharp finger slashes down upon the silver cord binding, down and through… the cord and the cutter fall away. She watches from the dying depths of her despair as the falling harper finally finds his long desired freedom, fatal. In the silvered unseeing eyes of that which remains, she now sees a spider. With this she breaks free and rising above the web starts to dance the celestial music upon the silver threads tangled...

Ayuled

Time within time, asinine creation of the blind
Askance aware of existence, suspicious of its dance
Denying Chronos, my trance consigning him to the fictitious
The roil of men as they toil, till the soil, ‘til awakens the soul
To the stark essence of the dark, the simple incense of light
Both rapture in flight, beyond tempo’s capture its height
To strong emotions treason to reason, that know no season
If, improbable impossibility, pendulum experienced passion,
Belatedly it would bypass the burden of its beat
Lay waste to the lies, 'til they lie unmoving at their feet
And laugh for though timeless, emotions change
And laugh for though timeless, their recipients are not
No measure, whether hither little or thither much,
Infinite for to live, to hate, to love.
2000

"Waterfall" (1961) Maurits Cornelis Escher

Gorge du tarn

The sun has warmed the grass all day, making the ground softly prickling my back smell faintly of hay. An idle glance over the bank shows me that the shallow waters of the river’s waters are clear, softly distorting the image of rust colored alluvial sand scattered with autumn pebbles. Occasionally, a fish, like a silver leaf riding a breeze out to the ocean, would pass me by.

     Picture: Gorge du Tarn, sometime in 2006 or 2005

Wasted effort

I danced a knife blade tango with a whirlwind of sloppy thinking and inarticulate misspelt mutterings
Uttering sharp words for swords, I cast hard facts on deaf ears and dumb minds, only to find
That while I waged and won the war of words, the whirlwind had swept away my home.