Monday, July 31, 2006
sing me to sleep...
(Van Morrison and Bob Dylan)
I saw you from a foreign window
Bearing down the sufferin' road
You were carryin' your burden
To the palace of the Lord
To the palace of the Lord
I spied you from a foreign window
When the lilacs were in bloom
And the sun shone through your window pane
To the place you kept your books
You were reading on your sofa
You were singin' every prayer
That the masters had instilled in you
Since Lord Byron loved despair
In the palace of the Lord
In the palace of the Lord
And if you get it right this time
You don't have to come back again
And if you get it right this time
There's no need to explain
I saw you from a foreign window
Bearing down the sufferin' road
You were carryin' your burden
You were singing about Rimbaud
I was going down to Geneva
When the Kingdom had been found
I was giving you protection
From the loneliness of the crowd
In the palace of the Lord
In the palace of the Lord
They were giving you religion
Breaking bread and drinking wine
And you laid out on the green hills
Just like when you were a child
I saw you from a foreign window
You were trying to find your way back home
You were carrying your defects
Sleeping on a pallet on the floor
In the palace of the Lord
In the palace of the Lord
In the palace of the Lord
Saturday, July 29, 2006
seconds
the first bite should be enough to do you in
to make you ask for something more than what
you think you have.
with something that looks this boisterously tempting, that's usually the case.
it is like love, this bewildering attraction
at first taste.
everytime, you will find that the present passion overshadows,
if not eradicates, memories of innocence and good intentions.
suddenly you forget the name of the first sweet you have gone back to
time and again when you were
still in trousers and weren't allowed to nurture your sweet tooth.
as with all temporal passions,
what truly matters here
is the now of things.
you have no time to think about consequential calories
or toothaches or the actual probability of diabetes.
this is all you want- pleasure that makes your mouth silky with
sugar- for now.
the past has too many residual claims on you.
it seems ridiculous to contemplate the future at such an early point.
so you decide to forget and embrace the undeniable sweetness
of what is in your mouth, on your unfaithful tongue.
before minutes you realize that
all of it is gone.
you have mercilessly consumed it. it has now become prey to your
mystified hunger.
so it offers itself up, not just in pieces now,
but its entire frosty self.
it trusts that you can finally muster enough courage to
eat it all up.
it recognizes that you are not a god.
it waits patiently for your screaming lust to take over.
pleasure,pleasure,pleasure rises up like moonbeams.
so you get another piece.
you are close to finishing it when
the phantoms of reason (unwelcome, of course,) all come up tapping on your shoulder-
visions of you fat and prostate with
indulgence flash before your eyes;
you in your deathbed, resentfully dramatic.
there is of course, the proverbial battle.
you look at the confection before you.
you remember the time when you were just passing by this store window
and you looked at it with the furor of impatience.
granted, you could not wait to get your hands on her
indifference, on her vulnerability.
you remember feeling disillusioned and cavernous.
this time, you realize that this is not something that you need.
the fact that you even wanted it makes you sorry for yourself.
you push the plate away and wonder how all that
frosting managed to leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
Nights like this...
(Bob Dylan)
Most of the time
I'm clear focused all around,
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground,
I can follow the path, I can read the signs,
Stay right with it, when the road unwinds,
I can handle whatever I stumble upon,
I don't even notice she's gone,
Most of the time.
Most of the time
It's well understood,
Most of the time
I wouldn't change it if I could,
I can't make it all match up, I can hold my own,
I can deal with the situation right down to the bone,
I can survive, I can endure
And I don't even think about her
Most of the time.
Most of the time
My head is on straight,
Most of the time
I'm strong enough not to hate.
I don't build up illusion 'till it makes me sick,
I ain't afraid of confusion no matter how thick
I can smile in the face of mankind.
Don't even remember what her lips felt like on mine
Most of the time.
Most of the time
She ain't even in my mind,
I wouldn't know her if I saw her
She's that far behind.
Most of the time
I can't even be sure
If she was ever with me
Or if I was with her.
Most of the time
I'm halfway content,
Most of the time
I know exactly where I went,
I don't cheat on myself, I don't run and hide,
Hide from the feelings, that are buried inside,
I don't compromise and I don't pretend,
I don't even care if I ever see her again
Most of the time.
----------------
Exactly how I feel. I'm not sure, though, if the lyrics I've posted are all correct. Feel free to correct them anytime.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Ana Castillo
Women don't riot,
not in maquilas in Malaysia, Mexico, or Korea,
not in sweatshops in New York or El Paso.
They don't revoltin kitchens, laundries, or nurseries.
Not by the hundreds or thousands, changing
sheets in hotels or in laundries
when scalded by hot water,not in restaurants where they clean and clean
and clean their hands raw.
Women don't riot, not sober and earnest,
or high and strung out, not of any color, any race,
not the rich, poor,or those in between.
And mothers of all kinds especially don't run rampant through the streets.
In college those who've thought it out join hands in crucial times,
carry signs,are dragged away in protest.
We pass out petitions, organize a civilized vigil,
return to work the next day.
We women are sterilized, have more children
than they can feed,don't speak the official language,
want things they see on TV,would like to own a TV--
women who were molested as children
raped,beaten,harassed, which means
every last one sooner or later;
women who've defended themselves
and women who can't or don't know how
we don't--won't ever rise up in arms.
We don't storm through cities,take over the press,
make a unified statement,once and for all:
A third-millennium call--from this day on no more, not me,
not my daughter,not her daughter either.
Women don't form a battalion, march arm in arm
across continents bound
by the same tongue, same food or lack thereof,
same God, same abandonment,
same broken heart,raising children on our own, have
so much endless misery in commonthat must stop
not for one woman or every woman,but for the sake of us all.
Quietly, instead, one and each takes the offense, rejection,
bureaucratic dismissal, disease
that should not have been, insult,shove, blow to the head,
a knife at her throat.
She won't fight, she won't even scream--taught as she's been
to be brought down as if by surprise.
She'll die like an ant beneath a passing heel.
Today it was her. Next time who.
--1998, Chicago
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Remembering
If there is anything I recall, it is not your penchant for sarcasm, nor your ability to cheat at chess, nor your laughter that was never laughter, really, but more of a forced chuckle. I will always remember your loneliness. It was, in a way, your saving grace. This loneliness rose from you as smoke, forming a generous halo around your white, knowing head. That halo would be mistaken for kindness by most, but we would know better. As the nights loomed dark without her, that halo would flourish and beam like a headlight, fueled by your silence.
You were quite the storyteller. I have learned that only men who know the veriest of tragedies usually are. You spun distractions, soft promises, great heroes for us. You could never be a hero to me because I remember days when you were as frozen and mad as any thwarted lover, waiting for your wife to come home.
Til today, it amazes me how, when people talk about marriage, they see it as the appropriate measure for love. Marriage , for most, is the armageddon, the waterloo, the eternal harbinger of endings.But for most, it's a carnival ride that is over too soon, a cork that traps in the resounding irony in an empty bottle.
I realize that it must have been very painful to see her, yet never fully owning her. She was always as free as butterflies and was not as romantic. She never said you were her sunrise. She never said in you, she found all beginnings.
It was the year 1995. The electricity was down. You have just finished telling us a story of how you saved a man from drowning. You were very brave, I'd have to say, to sacrifice yourself in this manner. You never told us what the moral of the story was. You let us figure that out for ourselves.
My brother, who always exhausted himself by mimicking you or indulging in exultant fits while you told us stories, was asleep on the couch. You were in your room, reading by candlelight.
I was bored and decided to spy on you. You were not reading after all but were looking out your window. You were so still. Your back was turned to me, stooped and defeated by years and senseless aching. I could hear you whispering, Come home to me.
You were not a god, after all. Now, I was able to love you. I was touched by your hidden admission, this fall. And since my head was so full of the urgency and the luxury of the concept of saving, I thought I could try and get you out of your unfulfilled love. I would save you. I would be your heroine in this tragedy.
Of course, truth always finds the opportunity to spit at illusions of greatness. Years passed and I didn't get to do much saving. The most that I could ever muster was to serve as your unnecessary solace, someone who had the consistency of tough bricks. You used my strength as an excuse to wait longer, to worship her better. I pity myself sometimes, remembering how content I was just to step into your shadow. But there was nothing I could really do about it. Such is the desperation of unrequited love.
What is strange is, when I was growing up, I felt a strange attraction to people who were patterned after you. During the many stages of my life, I have found myself with people who were left behind, who were suffering, who needed to be raised from cunning variations of death. And I sit there with them and wait for God knows whom or what. Sometimes, the people they wait for come back. These are the people who are easy to forget, who I bury in more than six feet of tender feeling. But there are the ones who are eternally fixated, who become strangers even to themselves because of so much useless hunger. These are the people who I bade goodbye to quickly and without sorrow. But there are those, who acknowledge my presence and turn to me for comfort. These are the people whom I have had the strength to stay with for a time.
After a while, saving will sap the strength out of a person. There are times that I wish that instead of loneliness, you gave me the gift of desirability. I wish you taught me how to be more elusively frail, more interestingly weak, more fearful of aloneness. Maybe then, I would be loved for myself. But these are the things I am dealt with. I know that there truly is no turning back.
It amazes me how I have never found anyone who was intact,as ripe as sunrise or as whole as bright, red apple. I pried people open just to find some semblance of you in their hearts, kidneys, brains.
I realize now that my life is a series of consequences of reliving you.
I believe that you are, finally, the crux of my frustration , all that I am doomed to protect, and all that I will ever have. We had all the tragedies of a cycle, really. It is here, in the splendor of my waiting, that I will remain with all my bewildered happiness. I will sing in peace, until I see you again.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
beautiful words
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,and all that you hold sacred advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.
When each step from your door to our job tires you--love me;
and from job to home again, love me, love me.
Love me when you're bored--when every woman you see is more beautiful than the last,
or more pathetic, love me as you always have:not as admirer or judge, but with
the compassion you save for yourself
in your solitude.
Love me as you relish your loneliness,the anticipation of your death,mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.
Love me as your most treasured childhood memory--and if there is none to recall--imagine one, place me there with you.
Love me withered as you loved me new.
Love me as if I were forever--and I, will make the impossible
a simple act,
by loving you, loving you as I do. - Ana Castillo, I Ask the Impossible
Soundtracks
Where's the fine line between hysteria and illumination?
Okay this can no longer be classified as laughter borne out of happiness. This is now bordering on hysteria.
It's friggin tiring me out.
Anyway, visit this link. I like this song. It's part of the soundtrack from the movie The Girl Next Door.
Remembering laughter
Thursday, July 20, 2006
This is a poem of his. I especially like The Art of Drowning.
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Robert Frost as Oracle
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Cleaning House
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Infidelities
She has gone a long way since those times when she felt so insecure that all she could eat were tomatoes. She preferred them ripe and red and ate them all the time. She stopped consuming them when, during a Physics class review, she fainted deadaway. It was the heat she mouthed pleadingly to her crying mother. I wasn't trying to kill myself. It was the heat.
That Tuesday, she decided to take up jogging again because she felt the same madness crawling on her skin, then eventually they found a way into her veins. She stopped wringing her hands for awhile to suit up before she went outside.
She loved jogging on pavements. Every step made her feel hurried, always moving towards something. Most of the time, when she ran, she never thought about a particular destination or a stop. The road that she was on was enough to keep her going, to tell herself to move without precaution nor doubt. The road was all she had.
She wonders why he always seemed to prefer ordinary women. Women who were stunning until they opened their mouths. Women whose eyes made one drown in the sheer magnitude of unused space. Souls bursting open but are always as opaque as moonlit walks and talk over wine.
Friday, July 14, 2006
On Running
Last night I disappeared.
It started in the afternoon
In mid-laughter.
My hands were the first to go.
I saw the smoke rise up from my fingers
as if they were waiting dreams
And the smoke kissed the air and was gone in seconds.
Next were my legs.
They dissolved in minute tears that accumulated in a puddle
That drifted off to lakes and oceans
Where they floated with orange fish.
By night fall, the only part of me left was my singular head
And clearly, it was uncomfortable staying put alone
But after minutes, I looked in the mirror and it
disappeared completely
Leaving me with so much illuminated space that left me
cold and strangely excited.
It was my anxiety that made me run to you,
Naked as the sky.
I did not know what to do
with this empty splendor.
Yet inspite of my screaming, you did not notice that I was there.
You were too busy
Chasing ghosts.
Lessons
The woman who did not know how to dance moved in with the dance instructor on a lazy Tuesday. It was one of those decisions that did not require a long and obtuse deliberation. She was always a practical girl and was never given to romantic expeditions. It just so happened that during the time that she met him, she was in need of an apartment. The third time that they saw each other he proposed (over coffee) that she move in because he had lots of room to spare, so she did.
He admits that he was initially drawn to her because she claimed that she did not know how to dance. When she said it the first time (that Tuesday, when they first met), he thought she was merely being coy and was just trying to get his attention. Surely at this day and age, everyone knew how to dance. To him, it was no longer an art form but a different kind of breathing, of making love. Someone like her made him suddenly unsure. He asked her to stay with him to see if he could make her learn how.
He puts on an old record. She watches the disk whirl until she becomes slightly dizzy. "There's nothing to it really," he says. He demonstrates by swaying his hips. She tries to do it but she looks like she's just pointing at something.
"Listen to the beat,” he says. He moves with the music and closes his eyes. For a moment, he loses himself and forgets that she is there. When he opens his eyes, he sees her staring at him. She looks frozen over, like the rubber duck he has mistakenly left in the freezer the night that he shivered from drunkenness. He shakes his head slightly and puts off lessons for the day.
He does not intend to give up on her. He has been a dance instructor for 5 years now and cannot afford to live with mysteries.
The next day, he lays down yellow foot cut-outs on the floor and arranges them in friendly patterns. He puts on some music and instructs her to listen to the beat and follow the footprints. She awkwardly steps into the cut-outs. She does this anxiously and he sees her shoulders shaking. She misses the beat by a mile. He gives out a whimper which reminded her of the dog that she had when she was five and alone. He looks at the time and tells her he has to go the studio.
The studio where he works is in a two-story building in the shabbier part of the city. The building is orange because it used to be a mental clinic of some sort. He works with Manuel, a worried 26 year old who came up with the idea of putting up the dance studio. Their clientele is composed of 5 middle-aged women who have nothing better to do but gripe about their rich husbands and step on their feet. During summer, they hold classes for young women whom their mothers enroll because they are too fat and unattractive to do anything else.
While she waits for him, she walks around the apartment. She stays in because she has no money to go the city and she got tired of sightseeing alone. She unfolds and refolds her clothes as if they were made of linen. She tries to clean up the place but is careful not to rearrange the sparse furniture because she has no plans of putting her mark anywhere. She’d rather remember these times- these tragic loveseats and tablecloths, these quiet metaphors- than live them. She does not see herself dying here.
She stares curiously at the cut-outs he left on the floor. It is almost nighttime and it's so dark in the living room that the pseudo- feet almost glow. She steps in one and tries to do a little jig. She loses her balance and stumbles a little. She hears her laughter in the emptiness and reaches out to touch it.
He is at it again before dinnertime. He asks her, "Don't you remember the sensation of you floating inside your mother's belly before you were born? It doesn't really require grace, in special cases like yours. You would just have to feel the swiftness of the glow, the tantric flow of emotions."
"My mother was a chain smoker and had a difficult time having me,” she replies. " I was almost never born."
"Feel it." he says.
"My favorite color is red," she whispers.
"What are you talking about?" He looks confused. Distorted, somehow.
The next day, while he is gone, she sits and does nothing. Already, she is tired of picking up and dusting after him. When he is away, she does not think of him. She is neither jealous nor crazy with despondence or any of those things. Love without the trimmings.
There have been others before him, sure. But everything always seemed miscued somehow. Conversations. Surprises. Kisses under bridges. Flowers that wilted too soon.
It is in his face- the disbelief and frustration. She knows that time is running out.
She stares at the cut-outs and gets a pair of scissors that she found on the dinning table. She traces hearts on the paper and cuts them out. They come out irregular and beet-shaped, as displaced as peacocks in winter.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
I have loved hours at sea
The fragile secret of a flower,
Music, the making of a poem
That gave me heaven for an hour;
First stars above a snowy hill,
Voices of people kindly and wise,
And the great look of love, long hidden,
Found at last in meeting eyes.
I have loved much and been loved deeply --
Oh when my spirit's fire burns low,
Leave me the darkness and the stillness,I shall be tired and glad to go.
-----------
Although I think Sara Teasdale's work is, at times, a tad too Hallmarky (although she does scan well), I always find myself touched by this poem of hers.
What is past is present is who the hell am i?
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2006
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July
(20)
- sing me to sleep...
- seconds
- Nights like this...
- Women Don't Riot(For N.B.S)Ana CastilloWomen don't...
- you can check my other link sometime. i'm planning...
- just when you think that you have finally found th...
- Remembering
- beautiful words
- Soundtracks
- Where's the fine line between hysteria and illumin...
- My father on growing up (written in one of his Aug...
- Remembering laughter
- I didn't know that I'd say it, but Billy Collins s...
- Robert Frost as Oracle
- Cleaning House
- Infidelities
- On Running
- Last night I disappeared.It started in the afterno...
- Lessons
- I have loved hours at sea
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July
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