Chandra

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in time of daffodils; e.e. cummings

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

"There are never enough seats on the last train out of the station..."

- Hunter S. Thompson, Songs of the Doomed

I've been lurking for a long time, writing down all these quotes, and I thought I'd share some [finally].


"When you say words a lot, they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway...and we just think they do."
- Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman

"'Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you,' said the young man mildly, from the smoke."
- American Gods, Neil Gaiman

"One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: 'Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End.'"
- The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

John Burnside
Winter

Imagine I loved you still and nights like these
were visitations,
an endless Pentecost of lips and hands
and bodies resurrected in their beds,
not mine, or yours, but given, like a snowfall.

Out in the dark, the woods are from a map
that someone has left unfinished: hand-coloured signs
for birch, or deer, and nothing to explain
the new red of a kill, or how the silence
wells around a fallen sycamore;

But here, where we lie down in differing weather,
the night fades on our skins while we are dreaming,
and winter is the self, day after day,
ghosting a life from the nothing it knows by heart.

(From: John Burnside, The Hunt in the Forest, London: Cape Poetry, 2009).

 Title: A Whole World, Bit by Bit
Fandom: West Wing
Rating: PG
Characters: Josh and Sam
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Length: ~1000
Icon: indigo_inferno 
Warning: None.
Summary: Back from his road-trip. Josh thinks about things. Episode tag for  4.1-2 "20 Hours in America". 
A/N: Written for sarken  for the Fall Fandom Free-for-All. 

( A Whole World, Bit by Bit )

Now is my misery complete, and namelessly

it fills me up. I stare here as the stone's

existence stares.

Hard as I am, I know one thing:

You had grown up -

...... and had grown up

so that, as to much pain

and quite beyond the grasping of my heart,

you should stand out.

Now you lie straight across my lap,

now I can no longer any more

bear you.

Robert Frost (1874–1963). from North of Boston, 1915.

The Death of the Hired Man


Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. “Be kind,” she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

“When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said.
“I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
‘If he left then,’ I said, ‘that ended it.’
What good is he? Who else will harbour him
At his age for the little he can do?
What help he is there’s no depending on.
Off he goes always when I need him most.
‘He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,
Enough at least to buy tobacco with,
So he won’t have to beg and be beholden.’
‘All right,’ I say, ‘I can’t afford to pay
Any fixed wages, though I wish I could.’
‘Someone else can.’ ‘Then someone else will have to.’
I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself
If that was what it was. You can be certain,
When he begins like that, there’s someone at him
Trying to coax him off with pocket-money,—
In haying time, when any help is scarce.
In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.”

( “Ssh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,” Mary said.  )

Weeping too, perhaps,
when you remember how he loved and yet
wished to leave you: always both, at once.

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

a day late but still lovely.

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is."

It's been one of those days...




Edwin Morgan
Rules for Dwarf-Throwing

1.    If a dwarf is thrown through a glass window or glass door, he must wear gloves and a suitable mask.
2.    If a dwarf is thrown through a burning hoop, extinguishers must be provided.
3.    If a dwarf is thrown down a well, the organizers must ensure that the bottom of the well is dry, and is covered by leaves to a depth of three inches.
4.    If a dwarf is to be thrown across the path of an oncoming train, the thrower must previously satisfy the organizers that he bears no personal malice towards the throwee.
5.    If a dwarf is thrown into a pond or river, he must wear a wetsuit and need not be tightly bound.
6.    If dwarfs are thrown at night, they may be painted with phosphorescent paint, so that the point of impact may be clearly established.
7.    If a dwarf refuses to be bound in the usual way before throwing, he may be put in a straightjacket of the requisite size.
8.    If a dwarf utters any sound whatsoever, either in flight or at the moment of impact, the throw will be disqualified.
9.    If a jockey impersonates a dwarf, and wins a competition because his light weight allows him to be thrown farthest, he will be liable to a fine of £1000 or three years imprisonment.
10.    It is strictly forbidden, in dwarf-throwing literature and publicity, to refer to dwarfs as 'persons of restricted growth' or 'small people'.

(From: Edwin Morgan, New Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000)

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.


-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

MONT BLANC

Rome burns
and our slavery begins

in the alps
ovens of europe

glacier of god
chads opposite

industry was envisioned here in the indomitable glitter
it out proportions the parthenon

the colosseum is not to be compared with it
nor dome nor london bridge bernini bronze nor donatello marble

there is more wealth here than with the bankers of amsterdam
more power than in any boulder dam of heaven

volt crackle and electricity it has invented
buchenwald nagasaki and napalm

it is the frozen first atomic bomb
its factories blaze forth bergs and avalanches

its unships sail down rhine down rhone down po down dan down tiber

to the black sea dead to the world to the red sea of isaias

( Read more... )

What woman would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow — for all about the looking glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth.

1. HOW DOTH THE LITTLE CROCODILE
   --Lewis Carroll
   
   How doth the little crocodile
   Improve his shining tail,
   And pour the waters of the Nile
   On every golden scale!
   How cheerfully he seems to grin,
   How neatly spreads his claws,
   And welcomes little fishes in,
   With gently smiling jaws!
    
2. My father passed away this Monday and in an hurried attempt to create the funeral service that he deserves before my time up, I am putting together the booklet thing. The funeral director gave me two or three pages of terrible, cliche poems to put on the front of the thing but I looked them over and can't imagine any of them being worth much other than a Hallmark card. So, if you kind people would help me out in my time of need. I am looking for a poem, doesn't matter how long or how short that is about the longing of loved ones, the end of suffering, the afterlife, etc. Thank you. 

His hour came with the shells,
with the notched iron splinters,
in the smoke and flame,
in the shaking and terror of the battlefield.

Word came to him in the bullet shower
that he should be a hero briskly,
and he was that while he lasted,
but it wasn't much time he got.

He kept his guns to the tanks,
bucking with tearing crashing screech,
until he himself got, about the stomach,
that biff that put him to the ground,
mouth down in sand and gravel,
without a chirp from his ugly high-pitched voice.

No cross or medal was put to his
chest or to his name or to his family;
there were not many of his troop alive,
and if there were their word would not be strong.
And at any rate, if a battle post stands,
many are knocked down because of him,
not expecting fame, not wanting a medal
or any froth from the mouth of the field of slaughter.

I saw a great warrior of England,
a poor manikin on whom no eye would rest;
no Alasdair of Glen Garry;
and he took a little weeping to my eyes.


( Thainig uair-sin lis na sligean )

" Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad - such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remember that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was.There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."


Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.

Out of my mouth is coming, at some
distance from me, a thin gnawing sound
which you could confuse with prayer except that
praying is not constrained.

Or is it, Lord?
Maybe it's more like being strangled
than I once thought. Maybe it's
a gasp for air, prayer.
Did those men at Pentecost
want flames to shoot out of their heads?
Did they ask to be tossed
on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry,
eyeballs bulging?

As mine are, as mine are.
There is only one prayer; it is not
the knees in the clean nightgown
on the hooked rug.
I want this, I want that.
Oh far beyond.
Call it Please. Call it Mercy.
Call it Not yet, not yet,
as Heaven threatens to explode
inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

--Margaret Atwood, "Half-Hanged Mary"

Thanks to extra time at Cava tonight, I am about 60% done with my narrative(s). 90% done with the pictures! So here's ( One of a sex shop decorated for HALLOWEEN in Pigalle )

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring stright ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.