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