1. |
poem
04:54
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If I knew exactly why the chestnut tree
seems about to flame or die, it’s pyramids
aquiver, would I tell you? Perhaps not.
We must keep interested in foreign stamps,
railway schedules, baseball scores, and
abnormal psychology, or all is lost. I
could tell you too much for either of us
to bear and I suppose you might answer
in kind. It is a terrible thing to feel
like a picnicker who has forgotten his lunch.
And everything will take care of itself,
it got along without us before But god
did it all then! And now it’s our tree
going up in flames, still blossoming, as if
It had nothing better to do! Don’t we have
a duty to it, as if it were a gold mine
we fell into, climbing desert mountains,
or a dirty child, or a fatal abscess?
(Frank O'hara)
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2. |
Realm of Ends
04:52
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I wish there were a state of being
Of a different kind, not compromised
and caught between the twin extremes of
something inconceivable and something else
untrue, between the overarching heavens
and the merely human. Some things are
Not to be sought after in reality, not
Even in the mind, but in a hidden region
Where the soul is free and unrestrained
And thought proceeds like weightless
Stars across an unseen sky. Oh yes, I
Realize this inner paradise is just, like
time, or other worlds or selves impossibly
remote or deep within, another intimate
illusion on the border of intelligence
a thing you have to touch and brush away,
because nothing is hidden. These heavens
are the only ones there are, an all-inclusive
frame displaying every aspect of the real
against an infinite night sky the thick
dark, translucent color of obsidian. Yet
In the wakefulness that comes towards dawn I
Still sometimes thank of myself, in a style of
thinking whose trajectory must have once seemed
clear, but which now seems loose, strange, and
Difficult to follow, as somehow distant from a
Universe of merely changing things, eternal
In the way each moment is, and free, the
way each star becomes increasingly
elusive once it crosses the meridian
(John Koethe)
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3. |
Dry Tongue / Usk
06:01
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The nail is there
Holds the slope back
The bright shred lifted in the wind is a breath
and the one who understands
The whole road is naked
the paving stones the sidewalk the distance the parapet
are white
not a drop of rain
not one leaf of a tree
no shadow of a coat
I wait
the station is far away
Yet the rising river flows from the quays
the earth dries out
all is naked all is white
With only the clock’s inaccurate movement
the noise of the train that passed
I wait
Do not suddenly break the branch, or
Hope to find
The white hart behind the white well
Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell
Old enchantments. Let them sleep
Gently dip, but not too deep
Lift your eyes
Where the roads dip and where the roads rise
Seek only there
Where the grey light meets the green air
The hermit’s chapel, the pilgrims prayer
(T.S. Eliot)
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4. |
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To see things as they are is hard,
But leaving them alone is harder:
Snow in patches in the yard
The vacuum in the sky, and in the soul
The movements of temptation and refusal.
I felt a day break. Nothing happened.
The windows gave upon a street
Where cars drove by as usual to the faint,
Unearthly measures of music
Whose evasions struggled to conceal a
Disappointment all the deeper that the
Hope was for a thing I knew to be unreal
I can’t do it yet. Perhaps no one can do it yet.
The unco nstructed gaze is still a fiction
Of the heart, a hope that hides
The boring truth of life within the limits
Of the real, a life whose only heaven
Is the surface of a slowly turning globe
Yet still I want to think I woke one day to—
To what? The crystal trees, an earthly silence
And the white, unbroken snow of a first morning?
The land remained foreign, brooding beneath
a country whose illusions it sustained.
The land maintained the semblance of a place
made wary of itself, and so unmade.
In Florida, in California,
The future seemed to whisper in the sky
above the undone company - an assent
withheld, a covenant unraveling
Like a dream of shady, tree-lined streets that
Lead inexorably into a maze
of high walls and empty, sun-drenched sidewalks,
Its anthem still continued in the night
On the verge of sleep, the tip of a tongue,
As close as someone’s name: anonymous
Amnesiac, forgetful of the words
For what it was, for what it had become.
(John Koethe)
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5. |
epigram
03:11
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here is the edge of the water where
the delicate crabs drift like shells
stick in your purple toe “I’ve been swimming
for hours, it’s freezing!”, and is it,
with all the salt falling like
a fountain across your mottled flesh,
your curling hair unguently draped by
the shiver sun, pushed by short breezes
into a molding for your hot heart, a wire
basket. And where the sands sting you
they gleam like matchsticks in the noon
You are standing in the doorway on the
green threshold while it licks feet
that are burning to spread and flutter
(Frank O'hara)
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6. |
Irreparable
08:51
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Can we stifle the old, the lingering Remorse,
That lives, quivers and writhes,
And feeds on us like the worm on the dead,
Like the grub on the oak?
Can we stifle implacable Remorse?
In what philtre, in what potion, what wine,
Shall we drown this old enemy,
Destructive and greedy as a harlot,
Patient as the ant?
In what philtre, in what potion, what wine?
Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,
To this spirit filled with anguish,
So like a dying man crushed beneath the wounded,
Who is struck by the horses' shoes;
Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,
To this dying man whom the wolf already scents
And whom the crow watches,
To this broken soldier! if he must despair
Of having his cross and his grave,
This poor, dying man whom the wolf already scents!
Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?
Can one tear asunder darkness
Thicker than pitch, without morning, without evening,
Without stars, without ominous lightning?
Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?
Hope that shines in the windows of the Inn
Is snuffed out, dead forever!
Without the moon, without light, to find where they lodge
The martyrs of an evil road!
The Devil has put out all the lights at the Inn!
Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?
Say, do you know the irremissible?
Do you know Remorse, with the poisoned darts,
For whom our hearts serve as targets?
Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?
The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth
Our soul, pitiful monument,
And often he attacks like the termite
The foundations of the building.
The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth!
— Sometimes I have seen at the back of a trite stage
Enlivened by a deep-toned orchestra,
A fairy set ablaze a miraculous dawn
In an infernal sky;
Sometimes I have been at the back of a trite stage
A being who was only light, gold and gauze,
Throw down the enormous Satan;
But my heart, which rapture never visits,
Is a playhouse where one awaits
Always, always in vain, the Being with gauze wings!
(Charles Baudelaire)
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7. |
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Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,
Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be
Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.
Singing in minor mode of life’s largesse
And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite
Reluctant to believe their happiness,
And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,
The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,
Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,
And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming—
Slender jet-fountains—sob their ecstasies.
I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes
Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are
Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against
the windowpanes
House of dampness
House of burning
Season’s fastness
Season singing
The airplanes are laying eggs
Watch out for the dropping of the anchor Singing part
Watch out for the shooting black ichor
It would be good if you were to come from the sky
The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing
The earthly octopi are throbbing
And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers
Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks
Around the house is this ocean that you know well
And is never still
(Paul Verlaine / Guillaume Apollinaire)
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8. |
Limits / Insects
05:09
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Among these streets that deepen the red west
There must be one I’ve gone along not knowing
That that time, in that street, will have been my last —
Both unconcerned and unaware, obeying
The great Whoever-It-Is that sets a term,
A secret and inviolable end,
To every shadow, every dream and form
That ravels life and knits it up again
And if for all there is a norm and measure,
A last time, a nevermore, and a forgetting,
Who can tell which visitor, departing,
Is one to whom we’ve said goodbye forever?
Beyond the greying window night is fading
And in the stack of books whose lopped shadow
Makes it seem taller on the dim-lit table,
There’s one we’ll never get around to reading.
There are on the Southside more than one ruined dooryard
With prickly pear and rubble masonry planters
Where I shall no more be allowed to enter
Than if it were a picture on a postcard.
There is a door that you have closed for good,
A mirror that waits in vain to hold your face;
A four-faced Janus guards your next crossroad
Though it seems you might go any of its ways.
In the midst of all your memories there is one
Faded away beyond recovering;
Neither the yellow moon nor the white sun
Will ever see you drinking from that spring.
Insects multiplied with the speed of an electric current.
Lapped up the boils on the earth's crust.
Turning over its exquisite costume, the urban night slept like a
woman.
Now I hang my shell out to dry.
My scaly skin cold like metal.
No one knows thsi secret half-covering my face.
The night makes the bruised woman, freely twirling her stolen
expression, ecstatic.
(Jorge Luis Borges / Chika Sagawa)
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9. |
River / Smoke Signals
06:33
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Whole days would go by, and later their years,
while I thought of nothing but its darkness
drifting like a bridge against the sky.
Day after day I dreamily sought its melancholy,
its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me,
and upon my lengthening neck its kiss
was murmuring like a wound. My very life
became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings
and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes,
walled in water, would glimpse the pathway
to the green sea. For it was there I was being borne.
Then for a moment my strengthening arms
would cry out upon the leafy crest of air
like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain,
would go through me on its way to the forest,
and I’d sink back upon the brutal tenderness
that bore me on, that held me like a slave
in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day,
though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me,
moment of infinitely salty air! Sun fluttering
like a signal! Upon the open flesh of the world.
Beating the golden tendon
In the light from the blue sky
the daughter of the sun
applauds the new sacrificial ritual
the morning plays
upon the harpsichord
dirty ivory fingers are scrabbled together
and as life is burned
the time has come to spring into action
(Frank O'hara / Chika Sagawa)
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10. |
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Listlessly walking silently,
Clinging to the honeysuckle on the hedge
Crouched besides the road
O, decrepit old winter -
The hair on your head has dried
and those who walked upon it
Have died too, along with their memories
Insects pierce green through the orchard
Crawl the undersides of leaves
Ceaselessly multiplying.
Mucous expelled from nostrils
Seems like blue mist falling.
At times, they
Without a sound flutter and vanish into the sky.
the ladies, always with bleary eyes
Gather the unripe fruit
The sky has countless scars
Hanging like elbows
And then I see
The orchard cleaving from the center
The skin of the earth emerges there, burning like a cloud.
When the wind where her hair unravels runs down the thicket,
it becomes a flame
She brings with her an unbecoming golden ring
Turning and turning it, she tosses it out into the air
Much like plants, people hoped to grasp, conquer, and spring
back against tall physical impediments with their entire bodies.
But at the temple the bell does not ring.
For their blue veins were bare, and their backs were the night.
I briefly watched the garden whither at the far end of the sky.
The tree that pulls away from its leaves, like memories discarded.
That thicket is already gone.
The day is long; decaying fill the sunken earth with deep crimson.
And then autumn rises from our feet.
They are the eyes of everyone
Are they not the white resonating words,
I’ll remove my hat and throw them in,
As the sky and ocean conceal countless flower petals,
One day, at last, blue fish and rose-colored birds will burst through
my head.
The things I’ve lost are never to return.
(Chika Sagawa)
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Vera Cruise Minneapolis, Minnesota
I also make music at painritualmn.bandcamp.com
fuck fascism
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