Matt. R. Martin - Painter

She walks in empty spaces

 

A moment to breathe

Imbalance sleep

Find more artists like ezio bosso and the buxusconsort at Myspace Music

Movement Song

 

 

 

"I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck   

moving away from me

beyond anger or failure

your face in the evening schools of longing

through mornings of wish and ripen

we were always saying goodbye

in the blood in the bone over coffee

before dashing for elevators going

in opposite directions

without goodbyes.

Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof   

as the maker of legends

nor as a trap

door to that world

where black and white clericals

hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators   

twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh   

and now

there is someone to speak for them   

moving away from me into tomorrows   

morning of wish and ripen

your goodbye is a promise of lightning   

in the last angels hand

unwelcome and warning

the sands have run out against us   

we were rewarded by journeys

away from each other

into desire

into mornings alone

where excuse and endurance mingle   

conceiving decision.

Do not remember me

as disaster

nor as the keeper of secrets

I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars

watching

you move slowly out of my bed   

saying we cannot waste time

only ourselves."

 

by Audre Lorde

 

All photography by Angela Bacon Kidwell

I wish you Joy...

 ...sweet love

...warmth

...and the comfort of home,

wherever or whomever your home may be!

Merry Christmas!

Silence

Toni Frissell

I want it so desperately, that sound under the water.

I almost deleted every thing today, all that cheese and vanilla.

Do you ever feel that way?

The need to stop feeling.... to just float?

The Starry Night

The Starry Night

by Anne Sexton

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist

except where one black-haired tree slips

up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.   

Oh starry starry night! This is how

I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.

Even the moon bulges in its orange irons   

to push children, like a god, from its eye.

The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.   

Oh starry starry night! This is how   

I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,   

sucked up by that great dragon, to split   

from my life with no flag,

no belly,

no cry.

OBJECTS CONNECTED BY STRING THREE

       A fairy tale by George Angel.    

OBJECTS CONNECTED BY STRING THREE

"Melodio lay snoring in a ginger flower when it first sounded in the garden that morning. That is always the way with unexpected things. They rain down on you when you have your face upturned and are scarce aware of it. The child's laugh was a waste of music. As if someone had tipped over the cup of the sun just to see it run all over everything. Melodio swiftly jumped up onto the shoulder of the child to hear what it was thinking.

            "You startled me, playful girl," said Melodio to the big laughing child walking through the garden, who only just now had bothered to notice him, "and where has that nosey beagle of yours got to?"

            The child only sent another peal of laughter ringing through the clean transparent air. "Be a good girl now," went on Melodio, "give me my breakfast and I will reward you by telling you something about my days in town."

            The child obeyed, pinching the dew from a snapdragon's lips into the tiny mouth of the fairy. Melodio began, "As you know, I was not always a wild sprite. I used to be quite respectable and live in town like everyone else. And for a time I roomed with a marionette family that had fallen on hard times. Martin and Marion, those were their names, worked very hard, responding to every tug of every string just to keep their three children in pointed shoes and fresh paint."

            "Every morning Marion would sketch a new smile on Martin's face and they would put on their little red vests and go out to knock their wooden heads upon the world. But every day the strings would grow more slack and the people of the town would allow themselves to be less and less diverted. Pina, their eldest daughter, hated her strings, and begged me to help her cut them off. I resisted. I told her that without her strings she would be as defenceless as a wooden doll in an age of porcelain. Secretly However, I wanted to see them all without their strings, I wanted the strings to search in vain for the eye-holes of their shoulders and their knees, for the tensions to get lost and never become gestures and jokes."

            "One day Pina came up close to me, I could feel her sawdust breath on my eyelashes. She said she knew how we could cut her strings and it would be okay. She said I could give her my wings. She said that even though she was made of wood, my wings were strong and would carry her. I told her it was a bad idea. Even then I knew a fairy can never give its wings away. But there I was, tying with cherry stems my beautiful butterfly wings to her back. She asked me to give them a coat of lacquer, to make them look less strange, and I did that too. I guess I was a little in love with her." At this moment, Melodio saw Carlo, the child's rambunctious beagle, bounding over cypress bushes toward them.

            "Keep the beast away or I will not finish my story." The child looked sternly at the dog and Carlo stopped, barked, and leapt off in another direction. "And a sip would definitely ease the telling." The child splashed the contents of a brimming rose on the fairy's face, drenching his entire head and collar and shoulders. Melodio sneezed and continued, "The night came for Pina to be free, to try out her wings beneath the stars. The moon watched out of the corner of its eye as she rose. The points of light held the dark blue between them like a cloth in which to catch her. She rose like a sparkling dragonfly, and I could hear her giggling in the eaves. But then something went wrong. I could hear Pina breathing heavily with the effort of trying to stay in the air. I begged her to come down. But she refused to ever touch earth again, and beat her wings even harder. Finally, in exhaustion, she made one last tremendous push up into the sky, and for a moment it was as if she were another star glowing in the firmament, and she flew higher than all the strings in the world. Then, after a breath, down she came, like something falling, confused, a bundle. I heard her wooden body hit the tiles of the roof of one of the houses. For the next few days I could hear her moaning, and sometimes I thought I heard her calling my name. I tried to climb up to her on the tinkling of lunchtime bells and on the tolling of churchbells, but no tintinnabulation was strong enough to lift me where I wanted to be. And so I wept for days and nights. I wept so long that finally the birds came to drink my fairy tears. A lady turtle-dove said to me then, 'Why do you cry so, fairy child?'"

            "'I could not save her and I helped to cut her strings. It is my fault,' I replied"

            "'What a curious fairy to speak of fault,' said she. 'Pina is more beautiful without her strings. And if it comes to that, she has been saved, after a fashion.'"

            "'Please tell me how,' I said."

            "'Take my word for it,' she said. 'Her arm caresses the swollen belly of a lady sparrow, her cheek warms the eggs of a barn swallow, her small hands hold up the edge of a finch's nest. Don't worry. We that fly have Pina in safekeeping.'"

            "It was when the lady turtle-dove said this that I noticed the first buds on my shoulders sprouting the new leaves of my wings again." Here Melodio stopped talking. The air was still. The garden exuded the warmth of mid-morning.

            "Why are you looking at me that way?" Melodio said."  

                                                                                                                                   --George Angel

hearts untouched, by hearts unloved

milk from the flower  blood from the dawn

a bit of nothing

milk from the flower  blood from the dawn is a collaboration with Flörence for  1 pic 2 souls group.

Turn Your Eyes Away

Turn your eyes away from the mark you left on me, be happy and be free.

The Manor Garden

The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake.

You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig-
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. History

Nourishes these broken flutings,
These crowns of acanthus,
And the crow settles her garments.
You inherit white heather, a bee's wing,

Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. Some hard stars
Already yellow the heavens.
The spider on its own string

Crosses the lake. The worms
Quit their usual habitations.
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning. 

by Sylvia Plath

Evgeniy Shaman - Photographer

Elle, Second Dream of Dollsmaker

I would cut out my heart a thousand times to give you peace!

Delusion

Two Keys for the Tale

October in Ashes

Inner World of Confusion

All Photography by Evgeniy Shaman


a letter

pathological romance of a fictional woman

This is lulu affectionately named after an obsession for Louise Brooks in the late eighties, used for light study while learning photography in the early nineties.  She was made of fiberglass and plaster, the faint drip falling from her lip was from her moonlighting days as a Halloween witch, a slight trickle of blood fashioned from a red shade of nail polish in which she seduced young children to her lovingly.  For all her portraits and illusions of womanhood she failed to be true.

This is a letter to a real woman who was loved.  Who's to say if the love was real it was felt that much is certain.  It was written on a Friday evening by the author Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet in 1846:

"You tell me, my angel, that I  have not initiated you into my inner life, into my most secret thoughts.  Do you know what is most intimate, most hidden in my heart, and what is most authentically myself?  Two or three modest ideas about art, lovingly brooded over, that is all.  The greatest events of my life have been a few thoughts, a few books, certain sunsets on a beach at Trouville, and talks five or six hours long with a friend now married and lost to me.  I have always seen life differently from others, and the result has been that I've always isolated myself (but not sufficiently, alas!) in a state of harsh unsociability, with no exit.  I suffered so many humiliations, I shocked people and made them indignant, that  I long ago came to realize that in order to live in peace one must live alone and seal one's windows lest air of the world seep in.  in spite of myself I still retain something of this habit.  That is why I deliberately avoided the company of women for several years.  I wanted no hindrance to my innate moral precept.  I wanted no yoke, no influence.  In the end I no longer desired woman's company at all.  Stirrings of the flesh, throbbings of the heart, were absent from my life, and I was not even conscience of my sex.  As I told you, I had an overwhelming passion when I was little more than a child.  When it ended I decided to divide my life in two parts:  to put on one side my soul, which I reserved for Art, and on the other my body, which was to live as best I could.  Then you came along and upset all that.  So here I am, returning to a human existence!

You have awakened all that was slumbering, or perhaps decaying, within me!  I have been loved before,  and intensely,   though I'm one of those who are quickly forgotten and more apt to kindle emotion than to keep it alive.  The love I arouse is always that felt for something a little strange.  Love, after all, is only a superior kind of curiosity, an appetite for the unknown that makes you bare your breast and plunge headlong into the storm.  

As I said, I have been loved before but never the way you loved me; nor has there ever been between a woman and myself the bond that exists between us two.  I have never felt for any woman so deep a devotion, so irresistible an attraction; never has there been such complete communion.  Why do you keep saying that I love the tinselly, the showy, the flashy?  'Poet of form!'  That is the favourite term of abuse hurled by utilitarian's at true artists.  For my part, until someone comes along and separates for me the form and the substance of a given sentence, I shall continue to maintain that that distinction is meaningless.  Every beautiful thought has a beautiful form, and vice versa.  In the world of Art, beauty is a by-product of form. just as in our world temptation is a by-product of love.  Just as you cannot remove from  a physical body the qualities that constitute it - colour, extension, solidity - without reducing it to hollow abstraction, without destroying it, so you cannot remove the form from the Idea, because the Idea exists only by virtue of its form.  Imagine an idea that has no form - such a thing is as impossible as a form that expresses no idea.  Such are the stupidities on which criticism feeds.  Good stylist are reproached for neglecting the Idea, the moral goal; as though the goal of the doctor were not to heal, the goal of the painter to paint, the goal of the nightingale to sing, as though the goal of Art were not and foremost,  Beauty!"

YouInventedMe - Poet

between the moss lies my other side of  midnight

Sea of Tears

by `YouInventedMe in a collaboration with for Winds

"A sailboat drifting among humdrum doldrums
rocks silently through nighttime fire,
as the void hunger laps tenaciously at her sides.
She sees silhouettes and seizes the shadows.

She wears them like a second-skin;
her former self,
a secret spine.

You carved beauty into my eyes and
branded me a damn fool, but not since
then have you stopped staring at the diamonds
placed just out of reach.

Now, I am dark,
and buried deep,
anticipating
proper pressure.
Only pure hypocrisy can ever
show me how not to be someone I
never really was, and truly be someone
I hate (to regret).

And now that the eastern horizon
is the only place I can go,
[and now that dusk is the only time I realize
just how much I pale in comparison
to the lucid black sea]
it’s time for us to leave.

You'll be down
below the carved earth
left by falling
dusk.

I'll be waiting
on the echoes
of the evening."


For more literature by YouInventedMe  and for Winds please go to:
http://youinventedme.deviantart.com/
http://forwinds.deviantart.com/

Bleeding

 

"Stop bleeding    said the knife

I would if I    could said the cut.

Stop bleeding    you make me messy with the blood.

I'm sorry    said the cut.

Stop or    I will sink in farther said the knife.

Don't    said the cut.

The    knife did not say it couldn't help it but

it    sank in farther.

If    only you didn't bleed said the knife I wouldn't

have    to do this.

I know    said the cut I bleed too easily I hate 

 

 

that I    can't help it I wish I were a knife like   

you and    didn't have to bleed.

Well    meanwhile stop bleeding will you said the knife.

Yes you    are a mess and sinking in deeper said the cut I   

will have    to stop.

Have you    stopped by now said the knife.

I've almost    stopped I think.

Why must you    bleed in the first place said the knife.

For the same    reason maybe that you must do what you   

must do said    the cut.

I can't stand    bleeding said the knife and sank in farther.

I hate it too said    the cut I know it isn't you it's   

me you're lucky to be    a knife you ought to be glad about that.

Too many cuts around    said the knife they're

messy I don't know how    they stand themselves.

They don't said the cut.

You're bleeding again. 

 

 

 

No I've stopped said the cut    see you are coming out now the

blood is drying it will rub    off you'll be shiny again and clean.

If only cuts wouldn't bleed    so much said the knife coming

out a little.

But then knives might become    dull said the cut.

Aren't you still bleeding a    little said the knife.

I hope not said the cut.

I feel you are just a little. 

Maybe just a little but I can    stop now.

I feel a little wetness still    said the knife sinking in a   

little but then coming out a    little.

Just a little maybe just enough    said the cut.

That's enough now stop now do    you    feel better now said the knife.

I feel I have to bleed to   feel I   think said the cut.

I don't I don't have to    feel said    the knife drying now

becoming shiny."

 

 by May Swenson

 

 

 

 All photography by Francesca Woodman.

 

 

 

Above all...

just love

and be loved.

when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story

by Gwendolyn Brooks

—And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,

And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday—

When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,

Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon

Looking off down the long street

To nowhere,

Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation

And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?

And if-Monday-never-had-to-come—

When you have forgotten that, I say,

And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,

And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;

And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,

That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner

To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles

Or chicken and rice

And salad and rye bread and tea

And chocolate chip cookies—

I say, when you have forgotten that,

When you have forgotten my little presentiment

That the war would be over before they got to you;

And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,

And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end

Bright bedclothes,

Then gently folded into each other—

When you have, I say, forgotten all that,

Then you may tell,

Then I may believe

You have forgotten me well.

 

 

Rotting Symbols by Eileen Myles

 

"Soon I shall take more

I will get more light

and I'll know what I think

about that

Driving down Second Ave. in a car

the frieze of my hand

like a grandmother

captured in an institution

I know I'll never live here again etc.

many many long years ago

Millions of peeps in the scrawl

the regular trees

the regular dog snort &

dig. In the West Village

you could put on a hat

a silly hat & it's clear

whereas over here

20 years passed

that rotting hat

it's loyalty to someone or something

that's really so gone

the moment clenched

like religion or government.

Wait a minute. I prefer

umm a beatle's cap

when it's really really old

neighborhood devoted to that.

 

 

Poetry is a sentimental act

everything spring she said

being surrounded by so much rot.

Pages & pages

mounds of them that I'm in

not some library but in your

little home, like you.

Every season I know I'm leaving

I'm as loyal as the cross

to this smeltering eccentricity

down by the river with Daddio

toss your ball in the river

in the future over bridges

they say you have to imagine

the 20th century. All these buildings were colored

a blasted interior

scarlet curtains rattling day

cobwebs on inexplicable machinery

a theater once dwelled here

all I see is rotting ideas

the epics I imagined

the unified cast of everyone

eating turkey together

on a stage

my idea

like waters towers popping up

feeling mellow

not exactly nothing all this time

but the buildings that are absolute

gone that I never

described. You can't kill

a poet. We just get erased &

written on. It aches in

my brain, my back

this beauty I'm eating my toast

everyone I knew you would

be dead tomorrow

& you were. The composing camera

infatuated with the shovel

on the lid & the pile

of rocks. He is not aging

same Alexandrian

blond in Bini-bons

the sirens are gods

when I lifted my head

from my swarming difficulty

You were so marvelous

bringing those toys to my feet

in between the invisibility of

the constant production & consumption

the network of that

& apart from the mold.

You survived."

 

 

All Photography by Arthur Leipzig

Numbers

"I get magic
     (sometimes I get more
        than I bargain for)

but I don’t get
     numbers.

Numbers do worse
than humiliate
     or elude me

they don’t add up.

I am no algebra tart
     ravished
by the meretricious music
      of the spheres.

My eyes and nose
never streamed
  with incontinent ecstasy
    through geometry classes
as my disastrous triangles
    collapsed in a cacophony
        around me.

Perhaps it’s a failing
          to grasp
             or even want
the utterly perfect number
        burning through my retina
like the utterly perfect  morning.

Instead I peer
        with nauseating vertigo
into the deep dark pitch
        of numbers
like an exhausted mammoth
        dangerously tottering
            on the edge
               of a bottomless mystery."

Written by Dorothy Porter.

pixels, dirt and gaming fun

please excuse my garbage

it only takes two

"ENOUGH ! we're tired, my heart and I.

We sit beside the headstone thus,

And wish that name were carved for us.

The moss reprints more tenderly

The hard types of the mason's knife,

As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life

With which we're tired, my heart and I."

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

photography 'Morning Train'  by  Evgeniy Shaman

Sarah Moon - Photographer

 
 




"I start from nothing, I make up a story which I leave untold.  I imagine a station which doesn't exist.  I wipe out a space to invent another.  I ship the light I rent everything unreal and then I cry."

Sonnet

Sonnet LXXXVII:

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,

And like enough thou knowst thy estimate.

The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;

My bonds in thee are all determinate.

For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,

And for that riches where is my deserving?

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,

And so my patent back again is swerving.

Thy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,

Or me, to whom thou gav’st is, else mistaking,

So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,

Comes home again, on better judgement making.

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:

In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

by William Shakespeare

I years had been from home,

photography by Evgeniy Shaman

I years had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business,--just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.

I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.

I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.                                                                 

                                                                         Emily Dickinson                                                                    

Dorothy Parker - Poet

Epitaph



The first time I died, I walked my ways;
I followed the file of limping days.

I held me tall, with my head flung up,
But I dared not look on the new moon's cup.

I dared not look on the sweet young rain,
And between my ribs was a gleaming pain.

The next time I died, they laid me deep.
They spoke worn words to hallow my sleep.

They tossed me petals, they wreathed me fern,
They weighted me down with a marble urn.

And I lie here warm, and I lie here dry,
And watch the worms slip by, slip by.

Dorothy Parker

textures by MeeR ... miki iwanaga ... my key in the pocket

9/11

Linda Foard Roberts

There's got to be a morning after

by Gina Uhlmann.

no category for me by Diane Powers.

Mark Sink - Photographer

i shall imagine life
is not worth dying,if
(and when)roses complain
their beauties are in vain

but though mankind persuades
itself that every weed's
a rose,roses(you feel
certain)will only smile

i shall imagine life by E.E. Cummings
Photography by Mark Sink