The Return
Ekphrasis in response to Rilke’s Turning Point (below)
letting all the deep
rivers of the world – rush in /
cracking open the quartz prism
of your being – you surrendered
– you no longer had a choice Read More
The One
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou can’st not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never never can’st thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn
WINTER: In the darkness, gestation.
Until the Phoenix rises, once more, exultant, free
to love and love again, soaring across
the ancient white peaks, the dazzling, clear blue
skies… Read More
Letting go
This evening
the burgeoning crescent moon hovers low
over the western pacific
a veil of ocean mist rising up
to kiss beyond
the mountains – where I lay
in these steaming waters –
earthly aromas
rose geranium, thyme
rustling bamboo leaves
quiet cricket’s trill… Read More
ship in the night
(ghazal)
I called to my lover pining, under the moon
yet alone I remain waiting, under the moon
Searching heavens deep, she is sailing
mid silent stars, scintillating, the moon
Bold round gate, to silver garden framing
ferny path to heaven, calling, the moon
Sublunary torment – fruit of desiring
sweet, gravitas – gratifying, the moon Read More
equinoctial
Half moon waxing or is she waning did I lose my sight
heaving moon half dark half heavy moon light
pulling at this floundering soul one long or lonely night
and somewhere peers an owl west or east at the speckled sky
sitting naked up-on the roof lanky cat and I
as from the north blows in a wind Read More
wild and beautiful tunes for your ears
Last DJ foray into the jungle of laughing barefoot dancing fools: hit the play button or[ddownload id="1996"]
Earthly Desire
Nature Totem by Timothy Parish
No one can be certain the body is not a plant created by the earth to give a name to its desires – Lucien Becker
Manhood Rescued
“A helping Hand-book for victims of Follies of Youth”
A numinous gem found in the library of the Maha Mantra Meditation Hall – a Hare Krishna temple in Penang, Malaysia, where I stayed for a brief spell back in 1990. At that time, this was a marvellous place to meet wild, free spirited travellers looking for free board and lodging on the ragged roads of the East – the only requirement being to get up before dawn and chant Hare Hare for a bit – yet the characters and curry were exceptional.
In Manhood Rescued, we find the quietly hysterical, delusional, if righteous conceit of man, demonstrating the dazzlingly pompous nature of the opinionated.
Love’s Philosophy
Endymion – George Frederick Watts (1872)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle–
Why not I with thine? Read More
Fruit Gathering
Padma Sambhava, by Nicholas Roerich, 1927.
Rabindranath Tagore, timeless poetic meanderings after my own restless heart (forsooth)
“Where roads are made I lose my way.
In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track.
The pathway is hidden by the birds’ wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons.
And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way…
cupid on the wing
Edward Burne-Jones: Cupid Finding Psyche, 1865
As a moon struck writer and mad surfer of consciousness, it surprised me how insightful and self reflective a tool okcupid turns out to be! An intelligent and compelling, new(ish) paradigm of social networking for potential lovers, whether casual shag or serious spouse! We’re all looking for a potential mate at times and I have indeed met some unique and wonderful persons, shagged a few in fact, and fallen in love at least once (unrequited) …
subtle soulful funky tunes to tickle your aural tackle
[ddownload id=”1766″] or hit play below…
Dance jam 7 by Beatnik9 on Mixcloud
Brenda Hillman reads one of mine…
– start at 22m15s
. . . A little while,
a moment of rest upon the wind,
and another woman shall bear me.
~ The Prophet. Khalil Gibran
Drifting through the formless void, darkness
all around.
there is a shimmer of sound
Read More
I live my life in growing orbits…
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
Rainer Maria Rilke ~ from A Book for the Hours of Prayer
Veteran’s day?
Dulce et decorem est pro patria mori.
Oh yeah – that Hallmark holiday where we pay lip service to the duped warriors of the nation sent out as fodder to feed the military industrial complex and protect corporate interests at large (America – global arms dealer #1, America – consumer of oil #1, hmmm)
Yet the returning warriors or their remaining families, instead of being honored and supported in a meaningful way Read More
My Garden
by Mehdi Akhavan-e Salis (M. Omid)
Holding its sky tightly in its arms, the cloud,
wrapped in its cold, damp sheepskin.
The garden of leaflessness, is alone,
day and night, with its pure, forlorn silence.
Its instrument the rain, its anthem the wind.
Its clothe is the cloak of nakedness. Read More
Burning Man and the evolutionary principal
truth is beauty
After a meteorologically and sociologically intense week working at the airport, helping to build out the framework of the city before the event “begins,” the collective switch is thrown that last Sunday of August, and the living beauty emerges, fleshing out the body of Black Rock City like a complex luminescent bloom on some other worldly plane. The wild and magical kingdom arises out of the dust once more, with more than one jolt of lightening, coming alive with wonder and excitement, not so very unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein…
It’s 2013 and my 1st “early arrival” of 9 burns since 1998. A lot has changed in this time, yet Burning Man remains one of the greatest expressions of human creativity, play, ingenuity and celebration of life, love and art on the planet today. Perhaps not for the faint, but wild of heart and free of spirit (or maybe just lunatic.) Read More
equinoctial
longing
falling away
into grace
becoming enfolded
in darkening wings of
winter’s embrace,
from the east
she calls,
i love you
The Magpie’s Shadow
by Yvor Winters
desert river bed
I. IN WINTER
Myself
Pale mornings, and
I rise.
Still Morning
Snow air–my fingers curl.
Awakening
New snow, O pine of dawn! Read More
It’s official
My new Naturopathic doctor said “Dude!” as she rolled up her sleeves, “your Testosterone, T3 and Dhea levels are way lo-ow – ya need ta eat more meat boy,” and then she spat a splooge of tobacco juice into a can by her desk with a pth-twang and eyed me all, like, this is America boy… Read More
Demeter in Paris
demeter
by Meghan O’Rourke
You can only miss someone when they are present to you.
The Isle of the Dead is both dark and light.
Henry Miller told Anaïs Nin that the only real death is being dead while alive.
The absent will only be absent when they are forgotten.
Until then, absence is a lie, an oxymoron. Read More
Burning Man Dictionary
contributions to the upcoming Burner Dictionary (see Get Lit(erary) at Burning Man group on FB for more on the “Dizionario Autentica”)
- reality vortex
n. physics. the phenomenon created when the intentional gathering of a critical mass of free spirits causes a gravitational warp in “reality” as defined by those external to the sphere of influence of this vortex (see Playasphere) - playafication: the threshold crossed when a person becomes no longer distinguishable from the surrounding playascape due to a critical exposure to playa dust. Typically attained after being caught in a dust storm, or stepping off an art car whilst not in body (see “playcked“) Read More
12 Great Short Story Podcasts
yes, hand picked from an endless mire of narcoleptic short story podcasts, here’s a handful that stand out in their class. First a literary few for the discerning, then an irreverent bunch for the wicked (and discerning.) Download, or listen in here ya hear?
From The London Review of Books.
1) Perform Small Tasks and Removal Men
by Diane Williams, read by the author.
Perhaps not for everybody, but I love this first story’s deliriously eccentric telling
from the sublime to the wicked
[ddownload id=”1765″] or hit play below…
Dancejam 6 – slow burn, eclectic – from the sublime to the wicked by Beatnik9 on Mixcloud
Diving Off The Map
I have a clear visual dropping down over Kris silently, head down, fins up, gyrating through the vast body of blue light in a cool calculated descent, until facing the hapless officer upside down and presenting her with the instrument of her elimination, while still below us, the great reef wall reaches off into the twilight of visibility and down into the crushing depths.
It’s January 1998. We’re camped at Calabash cay, a remote marine research station on the eastern rim of Turneffe atoll, 51km off the coast of Belize – a group of biologically divers sand and mangrove islands and cays, lagoons, lush seagrass beds, all surrounded and protected by a living coral reef ring. An exquisite and complex jewel of life in the middle of the Caribbean. Your archetypal desert island… Read More
The lady
Alright, I’m a bit out of touch, so I was looking up a celeb name for the chicken who laid my breakfast, and came across Lady Gaga – heard the name of course, but no idea who the fuck she is so I check out this great music vid – and there’s class there, art and ironic melancholy – Beethoven’s lovely Pathétique even! And then of course she starts singing the same old over-produced crap every pop singer has been singing since the dawn of crap – lovely voice though. And the bitch of it is, Read More
Reasons to be self/unemployed #32
From the Alchemist’s Kitchen
To be eaten naked in order to get a tan whilst breakfasting in the hills.
This multi-tasking is favourable for making family back in bleakest midwinter England jealous Read More
Who knew the provenance…
Who knew the provenance exactly? It probably found its way through the centuries from some old colonial town house on the distant and prosperous seaboard, but someone has dragged this handsome Victorian claw foot bathtub high into the Cordilleras to market this day, by mule, or by lackey, or by rusted truck. It sits proudly in the dust amidst a multitude of other curious repurposeable objects. The present owner of the bathtub, a raffish man with deeply lined, silver bristled, sunbaked face, a bunch of gold teeth, and a fine, if weather beaten, rufous red felt hat, has amongst other exotic items in his possession, a battered brass telescope, various and sundry antiquated surgical instruments, a freshly re-painted blue wheelbarrow, a number of tattered volumes (including a dog-eared English treatise on masturbation titled “Manhood Rescued – A Helping Hand-book for Victims of the Follies of Youth”) an assortment of traps, pulleys and restraints, a handsome caged cockerel, a stoat and prize goat – but it was the bathtub that caught Sulleiman’s eye. Read More
Solar
download PDF
…Above you and between all these celestial bodies now, hangs the moon, bold, brilliant, heavy in its proximity, gyrating imperceptibly, heaving tides and blood as it lilts in great timeless arcs across the heavens. Beyond her, the unfathomable depths of the cosmos also have their influence you imagine, and, you feel fleetingly, in moments like this, that you are not separate….
Transient
Sulleiman emerges from the bushes, a disoriented, quizzical look on his wizened, timeless visage. He brushes off bits of leaf and twig clinging to his brocade tunic and burgundy pantaloons, before picking himself up brightly to continue on his way. But a little girl called Lali, who is six, is standing there watching in open curiosity, with her big dark eyes that the world flows into without any resistance at all. “What were you doing in there?” She asks with irrepressible innocence and glee.
“Oh…” wiry silver eyebrows lifting with mild preoccupation, and in a layered Russian-Iranian accent he continues “a little problem I’m having with relocation.” Read More