video courtesy of LadyVolsRock posted at youtube.
For the following:
January – the chance to live my dream;
February – TRO;
March – community and solidarity;
April – new people and places; hard work and the unexpected commendation;
May – free and fresh logic board for NY (my iBook baby); fresh apartment (not free, though);
June – WPI;
July – Strength and smarts in the face of someone that swore to slaughter; liberation from a leech;
August – personal and inter-personal growth;
September – validation of who I am and the opportunity to be reminded of who my true friends are;
October – life; and a winning case;
November ******
December – family and friends; HK to try my new shoes and hat in — ms. nice is momentarily left in the RP; a time to rest.
Thank you, Lord, for one of the best years of my life, and for this one that’s just about to start.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —
This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —
– Emily Dickinson
Can you draw me the shape of love?
*
John Donne was right after all;
the body is the book.
He is written into me, into every line
and recess, scored into hair skin bone,
etched on the pattern of the cell, carved
on the door of the heart. My fingertips
are branded with his name. He reads me
as a blind man does, with fingers and tongue;
his hands delve into the deepdown places,
the spaces between the ribs, melting the secret
emptinesses with the sweet solvency of touch.
He finds me in the chaos of myself,
and draws me into being.
And I am learning him, learning
the journey of him, the journey of the
cobbled spine and the contours of muscle,
of tongue and lips and teeth, of the old scars and
the steel-toed heart. His warmth winds around me
and his voice binds me with a whispered word.
I trace his veins to their fire source and
dissolve into them, and find the shape of him
in the heart of a flame.
He is the poem I travel.
*
I am the shell by the sea, hollow, emptied, quiet,
burnt by the sun, lipped by gentle waves, waiting
for him to fill me.
I am the leaf dancing on the broad blade of wind,
spiralling up to graze the stars and drifting back down
to alight on his hair.
I am the bowl he shapes, looks in, lifts to his lips;
I am the clear water rippling his reflection,
locked in his hands.
I melt into the inky darkness of his shadow
and sheltering in his strength redraw the outlines
of a curious grace.
I am the drop of rain just learning the storm,
drawing the curve of a snow-petalled flower,
shaping a clear peace.
*
My phantom lover in the deep black jazz night,
his ghost hands whispering down the strings
of the heart and playing them with the lightest touch,
drugging the dreams with rich saxophone notes
of deep longing, binding the soul, shivering down
the bones and infusing them with a mute cry,
a sudden sharp ache of loneliness.
*
I want you to miss me when I’m not there -
I want you to watch after a disappearing back and wound yourself on the
sharp edges of an
absence -
I want a sudden remembrance to flood your senses, to wake a terrible
longing under the skin, to slice
into the heart and leave you crying out on this side of the night -
I want your arms to ache with emptinesses, your hands to clutch at forlorn
air, your ears to ring with
silences -
I want you to search the night and trace in the pattern of stars a foetal hope,
to listen for a breath of
voice in the haunting wind -
I want to haunt you, to lurk in the unknowing mind, to scorch your
fingertips with a remembered
warmth -
I want you to eat fire for me -
I want you to want me too.
*
Love brute and beast, rubbing against you hungrily, hesitantly, lapping at
the salt of you, wrenching at
your mouth-sweetness.
Love a savage knowing, a shock of recognition ripped from you, more than
feeling and deeper than
consciousness, rapped into the frame of bone.
Love a clarity of blindness, exhilarating and frightening, a mirror for a
flawed vessel, an act of faith,
forcing you to your knees.
Love an invisible circle binding you, anchoring your flight, building you a
homecoming.
Love a violence to shatter your peace.
*
Will you leave me here on the other side of the glass
with only a snatch of voice and the faint memory
of a fleeting touch to keep me?
*
We are one-winged angels just learning to fly,
riding the piercing sweetness of hope with a pair
of dreamer’s wings, shaped of a song tender
and tremulous, soaring high into the clear night
and waking all the stars to dance, a great golden
shower of exuberant exquisite joy.
This is our time, this diamond night, the
bewitching hour, this dreamtime perfumed
with the sandman sleep, this velvet wilderness
of a wondrous grace; and these our hands
will find each other.
Koh Tsin Yen
that this girl has ever had. With this beautiful song in the background.
the starless sky
the madness world
crises terror
spinning spinning five billion people time zipping
past present
…future?
can prayer be heard pain given space
in this ocean of mess love ugly beauty?
What was it? The distress call that required legal action asap? Questions and messages pouring in at five-second intervals? On top of technical issues, the expectation to catalogue, audit, keep an inventory? That the good soldier grins and bears things? That the good and wise swallow things that needed to be swallowed because the condition could not be otherwise? That after all these years, denial is still the name of the game, or at best, hope? Or, the decision, that she would not do anything to alter what is; and then to bear things and grin.
It’s my birthday today and I got a beautiful poem. A line reminded me of somebody; one i shall very soon forget, or at the very least, remember only with fondness.
Scholars say the poem is about an imaginary being. In my universe, how apt… Perhaps, it can be about the Creator, too? This thought makes me happy.
Thanks to Roxy for…
He is affection and the present because he has made the house which is open to the frothy winter and to the murmur of summer, he who has purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fugitive places and the superhuman delight of halts. He is the affection and the future, the strength and the love which we, standing in rage and boredom, see passing in the stormy sky among banners of ectasy.
He is love, the measure perfect and reinvented, marvellous and unexpected reason, and eternity: beloved machine of the fatal powers. We have all known the terror of his yielding and of our own: O delight in our health, impetus of our faculties, selfish affection and passion for him, him who loves us for his eternal life…
And we call him back to us and he travels on… And if Adoration goes away, ring, his promise rings: “Away with these superstitions, these old bodies, these couples and these ages. It is this epoch that has sunk!”
He will not go away, he will not descend from any heaven again, he will not achieve the redemption of women’s anger and men’s gaieties and all that sin: because it is done, because he exists and is loved.
O his breaths, his heads, his runnings; the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and of action.
O fruitfulness of the mind and immensity of the universe.
His body! The dreamed-of redemption, the shattering of grace meeting with new violence!
The sight of him, the sight of him! all the old kneelings and pains lifted at his passing.
His light! the abolition of all audible and moving suffering in more intense music.
His step! migrations more enormous than the old invasions.
O He and We! pride more benign than wasted charities.
O world! and the clear song of new misfortunes!
He has known us all and has loved us all. May we know, this winter night, from promontory to promontory, from the tumultuous pole to the country house, from the multitude to the beach, from looks to looks, strength and feelings wearied, how to hail him and see him, and to send him away, and beneath the tides and at the top of the deserts of snow, to follow his vision, his breath, his body, his light.
- As translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962)
Gracevill : Hey Roxy. I’m stalking the —- of my life, i.e., looking at his [social network] page, and guess what’s on his shelf? *The Gracevill Chronicles* Sabi ko na, he’s in love with me. (I’m pathetic/mental. 
Roxy : Haha. There’s a little bit of stalker in all of us. My god. We should go out and find real men… The ones we are all beside ourselves for are all in the province of the imagined. Heck, mine plays in arsenal. It cannot possibly get more imagined than that.
G : Sigh. Sniff. 
R : So… is he still with the girl?
G : Hmmm… he doesn’t have pictures of her… But… he gave her a ’small’ electric shock…
R : What does that mean? It sounds… Pervy. Haha.
G : Hahaha. It’s just one of those crazy application things in [social network]. (no, wait, wait, perhaps it’s not ‘just’… hmph! sniff…)
R : Haha. The trouble with second-guessing… Makes you think of things. I suppose it would be entirely too hopeful to believe that they don’t know each other in the biblical sense… Ha. Bakit ba ako nangingialam?
G : Hay. (Somebody hand me an icepick that I could stick into my neck.) Good evening!
 | jordandale on “One Winged Angels… |
