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(The Art of Poetry)

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.




(Shinto)

When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us--
touch us and move on.

~Jorge Luis Borges~



(I do not love you as....)- Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or
topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be
loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden
flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my
body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or
from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without
complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

that this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my
hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.


All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. ~Thomas Edward (Lawrence of Arabia)

(Happiness)
A state you must dare not enter
with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all
the roads leading to a castle
that doesn't exist.
But there it is, as a promised,
with its perfect bridge above
the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.
Stephen Dunn -- BETWEEN ANGELS (1989)


(Orkney/This Life)

It is big sky and its changes,
the sea all round and the waters within.
It is the way sea and sky
work off each other constantly,
like people meeting in Alfred Street,
each face coming away with a hint
of the other's face pressed in it.
It is the way a week-long gale
ends and folk emerge to hear
a single bird cry way high up.
It is the way you lean to me
and the way I lean to you, as if
we are each other's prevailing;
how we connect along our shores,
the way we are tidal islands
joined for hours then inaccessible,
I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
The way I am an inland loch to you
when a clatter of white whoops and rises...
It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the fern's engines thrum
this life this life this life.


(Every Day)

War is no longer declared,
only continued. The monstrous
has become everyday. The hero
stays away from battle. The weak
have gone to the front.
The uniform of the day is patience,
its medal the pitiful star of hope above the heart.
The medal is awarded
when nothing more happens,
when the artillery falls silent,
when the enemy has grown invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament
covers the sky.
It is awarded
for desertion of the flag,
for bravery in the face of friends,
for the betrayal of unworthy secrets
and the disregard
of every command.

-Ingeborg Bachmann


(The Road Not Taken)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost


(Interests)

Art, art history, Anger, Anomalies, Antics, Analysis, anti-anxiety drugs, books, bibliophiles, Biographies, Ballet, Biology related sciences, Boldness, Bluntness, Brisk beautiful days, Boston, Comedy, Compassion, Creativity, Courage, Coming out of Captivity, Catharsis, Color, Cute guys with glasses, Dance, Determination, Daydreaming, Etiology, Europe, Eccentricity, Escape, Epiphanies, Fashion and interior design, Foreign Food, Grey areas, Government (or the lack there of), Gemstones, Gothic stuff, Ganja, History, Honesty, Humanitarians, India, Inspiration, Imagination, Intellect, Individuality, Ink, International Law, Jazz, Justice, knowledge, Lipstick lesbians, Music, Medicine, Memoirs, Metaphors, Multi-dimensional thinking, Novels, Nature, New York, The ocean, Piercings, Photography, Poetry, Prose, Psychology, Politics, Philosophy, Passion, reason, Reading, The Renaissance, Sensuality, Sarcasm, Singing, Salsa, Short stories, Sharp objects, Social issues, Serenity, Survival, Subcultures, taboo.




-(The box)-

True Blood, Masterpiece Theatre, N.C.I.S., Project Runway, Poiroit, Law and Order, Adult Swim, Monk, House, Psyche, Kyle XY, Breakfast with the Arts, South Park, The Colbert Report, The Today Show w/John Stewart, The Office, Scrubs, The Big Bang Theory, Fringe, Lie to Me, Burn Notice, Mental, Family Guy and The Shot.

-(Movies)-

American Beauty, La Vita e Bella, The Lives of Others, Good Will Hunting, Stranger than Fiction, Garden State, Donnie Darko, K-Pax, The Counte of Monte Cristo (French and English versions), The Scarlet and the Black, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Forsyte Saga, Patch Adams, Little Miss Sunshine, Finding Forester, Lagaan, Akeelah and the Bee, Kick it, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Black Sheep (Both the version with Chris Ferrell and the hilarious cheap horror film w/killer sheep.), Gladiator, Girl Interrupted, Hotel Rwanda, Reign Over me, I know pronounce you Chuck and Larry, Jakob the Liar, What Dreams may come, Bicential Man, Jack, Evelyn, The Holiday, From Hell, Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon, Harry Potter, Napoleon Dynamite, Anchorman, Blades of Glory, Requiem for a Dream, Moulin Rouge, Amelie.


-(Books)-

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Flights of Love, Staying Alive Poem Anthology, Love Walked in by Marissa de los Santos, Wasted by Martha Hornbacher, The lovely bones by Alice Seabold, Seduced by Pamella Briton, A thousand years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Wicked by Gregory Maguire, The things we carried by Tim O'brien, Mother Teresa (Biography), The Looking Glass by Richard Paul Evans, Queen of Dreams by Chitra Divakarundi, Acts of Faith by Philip Capputo, Persuasion, Pride and Prejiduce, End of Story, Best American Essays, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, The know it all by A.J. Jacobs, Everythings an argument, Samuel Beckett Biography by Deidre Bair , The Sunflower Richard Paul Evans, How to read Literature like a Proffesor, Thinking in Pictures , Complete collection of Hart Crane poems, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Sidhartha, Tolkien's The Hobit and Lord of the Rings Triology, Speaking my mind by Tony Compolo, Creating Minds by Howard Gardner, The Icequeen by Alice Hoffman, The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Twilight by Dean Koontz, Carrie and The Pet Semetary by Stephen King, Evasion by Nigel Davis, The Passion of Artemesia by Susan Vreeland, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Assin Raffisi, 1984 by George Orwell, Girl Interrupted, The Mermaid Chair, The Secret Life of Bees, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Room full of Mirrors/Biography of Jimmi Hendrix, Atonement, Time must have a stop, The Street of the Crocodiles, The Perks of being a Wallflower.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ((Poets)) = Anna Akmatova, Arienne Rich, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anne Michaels, Anne Sexton, Dana Gioa, Douglas Dunn, E.E. Cummings, Eavan Bolard, Edgar Allen Poe, Elisabeth Barret Browning, George Elliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Seifreid Sassoon, Louis Gluck, Mary Oliver, Shakespear, Pablo Neruda, Richard Paul Evans, Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, Sylvia Plath, Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, T.S. Elliot, Theodore Roethke, Thomas Moore, W.H. Auden, William Blake, William Bronk, William Butler Yeats, Ingeborg Bachman, Charles Baudeliare, Hart Crane.

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