O Rose Thou Art Sick

William Blake believed that art and the power of imagination can save the world from its ills.

Somewhere

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e.e cummings

Théophile Gautier

"In June, a little pale and worn,

And full at heart of vague desire,

She hideth in the yellow corn,

With sunburned Summer to respire."

Fernando Pessoa

“Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.”

Poet: Vladimir Mayakovsky

“On the pavement
of my trampled soul
the steps of madmen
weave the prints of rude crude words.”

Permeate the Matter of This World

Aquatic Nocturne by Sylvia Plath

deep in liquid turquoise slivers of dilute light

quiver in thin streaks of bright tinfoil on mobile jet:

pale flounder waver by tilting silver:

in the shallows agile minnows flicker gilt:

grapeblue mussels dilate lithe and pliant valves:

dull lunar globes of blubous jellyfish glow milkgreen:

eels twirl in wily spirals on elusive tails:

adroir lobsters  amble darkly olive on shrewd claws:

down where sound comes blunt and wan like the bronze tone of a sunken gong.

Poetry: Robert Desnos

Your smell the smell of your hair and many other things
will live on inside me.
In me and I’m not Ronsard or Baudelaire

I’m Robert Desnos who, because I knew
and loved you,
Is as good as they are.
I’m Robert Desnos who wants to be remembered
On this vile earth for nothing but his love of you.

A la mysterieuse

13 Dreams from the Edgar Allen Poe of N’Awlins

“There is a 3rd basic way to use the camera – a way that I term “the Transcendence of the Object” – Clarence John Laughlin

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This film is not for Judges

“It’s a different world in which one must forget the world one inhabits. Villa Santo-Sospir belongs to Madame Alec Weissweiller. It dominates Cape Santo-Sospir, the last point on the map before arriving at Cape Ferrat. The villa is situated on the road to the lighthouse, and its rocks descend to the sea. It looks out on Antibes, Cannes, Nice, and to the right, Villefranche…When I stayed in Santo-Sospir in the summer of 1950 I hastily decorated a wall. Matisse told me that if you decorate one wall, you should do the others as well. He was right. Picasso opened and closed all the doors. All that was left to do was to paint the door.”

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The Erotic Pensées of Leviathan Porthucias

Critics and censors of Leviathan Porthucias, a poor Greek farmer, always argued with proponents of free speech as to how far is too far in literature. Porthucias only wrote one book and spent almost all his entire life in mental institutions. He had one unnamed lover who he was apparently monogamous with, but she was only a hallucination of his rattled brain. He also had a dog who spoke fluent Hebrew and lived under his hat. There is almost no evidence of his existence.

“She came dressed in purple lace….when she levitated toward the white curved moon….a small puddle of her desire was left on the stool….I stood there as a ghost should do….never pretending or making a single sound…her body was white and young…a dress laid on the floor in a perfect rumpled velvet circle…her fingers were like cold glass and glistened after she removed them from her body….I wanted my mouth around them….but knew I would be found….a ghosts lips are always sealed….smoke of pistols last dusk…..twilight in gunpowder……my sweating corpse in a noose.” – From the Erotic Pensées (1924)