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Archive for the ‘Thought in the Alley’ Category

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Shift #5

Ali Liebegott

for Seamus Heaney

 

 

a box of coconut water
two cans of coconut milk

so many looking for help

some people care when a poet dies

a poem is a conscience
a report card, a confession:

today my lies were a motor that spun the Earth

how can you get truth from a hill
when I am the continent that drifts?

how can I taste what I’m mourning
when soon everything will be salt from the sea?

 

—8/30/13, Register 6
1 PM—5:15 p.m.

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The Arms That Wouldn’t Let Me Go

 

On this sweet, rainy evening

My thoughts run to you

Like water towards the ocean

In the city’s gutters and roofs

Towards countless drainstorms

Powerless in the face

Of a calculated incline.

 

It is a sweet rain that is falling tonight

It wears your scent of promises

It is music, it sings of gentle breezes through wooden wind charms,

Of a veranda in the Caribbeans.

A scattering of drops

Like miniscule sand pebbles on my books

As I wait.

 

O Night, your silence descends upon me like a mantle

It calms me

I could write lines like an ode to your burning eyes

Your long, long lashes that caught my tears

Brushed away listless years

And changed me.

 

Tonight I don’t see the bus stop in front of me

Or the muted lights of cars

I see you waiting for me on that street

The staircase that separated me from bliss

[I met my two loves on the steps of Italian cathedrals,

they gave me their blessings]

I know you are there

And when you see me, your eyes smile stars,

twinkling benign in the skies between us.

 

If the world ended in two days,

As predicted,

I would have felt safe

Your broad shoulders would have protected me

From all the walls and crumbling houses of the City.

 

Sleep, days, a thin membrane

Before and after us

A tender gauze between dusk and your sunset skin.

 

We stole nights

Like compassionate thieves

Time measured in kisses

A perfect, impossible life

Soft like the sound of a far-away gramophone

Or a clavichord in Vienna

(Will you come with me to cobbled alley-ed Vienna?)

 

I am home now

The lanes are deserted and streetlights have relinquished

their daytime tyranny

The night is wide with the tabac scent

Of water falling on hot concrete and asphalt

It is a summer night somewhen, somewhere else.

 

I am home now

The house is still

And bathed in red solitude

I need to stop writing

And conjure up what I’ll be wearing tomorrow

I need to stop thinking

That I could die happy tonight.

 

 

San Diego, April 25, 2012

 

 

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Ink on Miquelrius paper. September 20,2011.

Ink on Miquelrius paper. September 20,2011.

You can write anytime you like,

But you can never reach.

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Entry for ONE LIFE | An International Photography Competition.

I decided to participate ( characteristically last-minute) to ONE LIFE, an international photography competition, in the ‘City Imagery’ category.

Click here (or on the image above) to see the entry at a higher resolution and, if you like what you see, vote and share my photograph.

The prize is $10,000 or a trip around the world. Guess what I would pick.

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The Screen Woman. Digital Collage. Text from "A Year in the Merde" by Stephen Clarke.

 

 

Photo from Inspired Goodness.

 
Founded in 2008, Inspired Goodness is a custom invitation and paper goods studio
located in Brooklyn, NY.
 
—————————————————————————-
 
Notable books:
 
 
 
 

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”]” 

13 Days of a mild artist block and a spring flurry of activities all around. It has been one busy month of May.  In the blog-material  department, I have been gathering up material for new posts (but failed to..ahem..post them), reading omnivorously,watching foreign movies,writing poetry on walls and collecting books mentioned or shown in said foreign movies — more on this later. It’s a lot to keep up with.

In days that go at double-speed, sometimes poetry finds you…and nothing is the same again.

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

William Stafford           

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Let Me In. Graphite on paper. Image via Darrel Tank of the Five Pencil Methd

I ran into Darrel Tank’s Five Pencil Method  few weeks ago.  His work is breathtaking.

The site full of wonderful video tutorials, and in his blog, Darrel offers videos with step by step advice on submitted portraits. All I can say is I’m Jealous WOW.

I really just drew one portrait, my first — if we don’t count some self-portraits done as homework for drawing classes in college. And I don’t think we want to see that type of work here, or maybe yes, for giggles. Just so you know in one I was made-up like The Crow.  Oh yes there is also that whole other side of me

Just Go Grayscale And Call It ‘Art’

But all of this is just to shamelessly plug in this portrait that the photographer Dianna Ippolito took of yours truly last week. It will go on the Faculty wall of my school. And if a photo could ever make someone happy this is it, and I wanted to share it here, hoping you will overlook the fact that it is my photo:  it is the art of photography and catching a soul with a lens as well.

Moreover, I am losing my innocence and naivete’ as we speak, so good thing they were preserved here;)

Portrait by Dianna Ippolito

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