The night is mine. Rene Magritte – Jupiter in Virgo (1965)
Holding.
A floodgate to love.
Hands holding hearts
1. with intense creases holding a cerebral heart
2. with sea lines and a heart sleeping on the shore;
semi-permanent lines, that is,
they erase
but the ocean walks in a regular routine.
in animation
1. clenching the fish-scaled heart
2. Empty
Liquid Mountain by Dave Sandford
A point comes in your life
when you fall into a group of people
who have thought of the world
very unlike you.
And then, like a moth
to the yin-yang
you want the annihilation
of the world of an either and an or,
which does not exists
and so in the end,
annihilation is all that remains.
Contradictory things on their own
are not contradictory
and you’ve realized that,
it aches your existence, doesn’t it?
I think a poet or a writer
must’ve already said,
To live a life everyday
—and if “life” stands for meaning–
is to make a sand castle
down by the beach.
Oh I hope
I hope
the waves will be gentle.
Photograph by Ilar Gunilla Persson
For nothing is true
and all is make-believe,
I unmake
what hurts me
and the repercussion is that,
what makes me happy is unmade too.
In this collapse,
only the surface is true
and the world
is a perfect mirror.
Art by Penny Farthing
When love exits your body
it rises like a hot air balloon,
as if you ate too many pickles;
the berth of
injured tongues and watery eyes.
My love, my love
is a bottle of shampoo,
must I tell you
how it makes me cry
under my shower, suddenly mournful
of the things we’ve denied
the water
our souls in an aquarium,
and like mimicry of various lovers
the statement remains,
of “perhaps you never loved me.”
The sorrow, a penultimate,
but happiness, a beloved toy
and I, my dear,
a stubborn spoiled child.
Crater Bowl – Cross Section by James Turrell
I was walking on a mountain one day
when an archangel
suddenly fell upon my back
and impressed his feet
upon my shoulders,
and left my arms crooked.
His touch burst his own feet
and a cosmic power escaped from his talon-graze
into my back,
and no longer could I stand straight
without all the missing weight; his.
From thence
when I walked the mountain road
the children spoke of the devil,
my arms you see–
were like a deer’s tall antlers,
a waiting tree for a mighty falcon.
I thought that was fate
and that there are always repercussions
of archangels injuring your back,
very casually,
and yet one day
when I fell in the river or perhaps the river fell in me,
I could hear my arms
with a voice of their own
Talking like the ghosts of the river Styx;
they asked me
“Do you remember your solitary gait?
Do you remember your solitary?
Do you remember?”
But I did not
for I had become a crater
and it was these words
echoing in a non-linear chaos
that I had to remember
to plough out the ground flat again
Now these words I bring to you.
I am a blind man
with mad visions of things gone by,
the contours of memories
which is a body
-not your flesh-
but a man made out of a river;
on a very dark night
when the snow falls
and the candles flicker
in a boarding room
full of merchants counting money,
happy of the words they see on their screens;
my eyes are without pupils
and today I prophesy the past,
collapse the future,
and exist ever so negligent
in memory.
Art by Fran Rodríguez
I was born in an empty box
and laid in it
like a sleeping man in his grave,
but soon I could play
and even watch the stars
from the fourth wall,
of a cat’s noonish dream.
A man sidestepped upon it once
and stood upon me
like a tall shadow upon the moon
and so the box tore away;
I stood naked in the wind
and the stars were brighter
than I had ever seen before.
Soon the night surmises
the lapse of people without boxes,
And so you begin again
create emptiness within emptiness,
like a form of winter clothing.
But what are we
if not terribly stripped
–in this brittle time–
of boxes and cycle-ends.
I have clothed myself
in an unraveling,
when a man told me of a house of boxes,
but one without a roof;
The stars are lakes again,
dark angels
that will always fall in the night,
what of your house then
and what of my boxes.
A spread from Ricardo Cases’ Paloma al Aire (2011)
Sadness often lurks
like a blind pigeon
in a conclave of mirrors,
disrupting a New York morning crowd
always otherwise in traffic.
A bite into my tomato soup’s
burlesque bread
and a flash of winter
upon a clear August morning;
my soul is deep in longing.
Oh but I would never wish this fluttering sadness upon anyone.
May it be balmy
and cold like the white marble,
without a screech in the wall
or the waver of the tolling cage,
and may it be a dying fire
with tepid feet,
curling all the memories lifeless
with nothing but somber gloom.
