don't you remember you told me you loved me baby

"When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”
Hemingway

what
role
does
fate
p l a y
in
the way
your
life sways
or the way you
s w a y
it?

you know that i would be untrue, you know that i would be a liar

"I do not know; but I say that he who looks into my eyes for anything but
a perpetual question
will have to lose his sight,"
Frantz Fanon

"sweet"<<

once
you hung on my words
like i was lighting you from the inside,
infusing the--what?--of you that was cold.
you said "i wish you'd met me when i was better,"
("me, too," my body answered, "when i was warm.")
and so i held your little boy head,
wanting to nurse you back to your self,
thinking "how generous!"--of you, I meant--
but I was pretty lethargic myself, or at least
that's my excuse for not sensing
that with you there was always
something substantial
missing
and that it was wrong
that our moments of soft transcendence were
still not enough for you.
how could I have convinced myself that your
empty insinuations were
my responsibility
I may have been little-girl-frightened, but you--with all your
thoughtless lack of patience, with your"love"less Choice--are the one
mistaken.
(see, I've got this angry bit all played out)
until I Remember that once, one night when
I had no other place to spill my desperation
but to the sidewalk,
you listened to me. and Answered.

maybe the veracity of that one evening explains
why I go back to your image
and clutch at empty space, unable to ever
discern
what faint, indefinable part of me really loved
what ethereal, indecipherable part of you.
all (as usual) wasted contemplation:
Now
you are silent
when I speak to you.

and I hear that first night's confession: "sooner or later,
they find me disappointing"--
I told you before.
With me, you wouldn't have had to
worry.

mermaid in the bramble<<

I dreamt I could climb up your back
and sleep an entire year furrowed in your
branches,
toes in the warm blue-green,
arms thin baked loaves against the sand,
pursed rosebuds birthing regretlessness

swimming out the bedroom window once night falls
pregnant with overripe blueberries
and in that wind, not a single stir of restlessness;

it dies in the air between the sweet petal cups I trample
galloping over my sea of buttercup yellow
missioning my way to the woods: I feel bad—
I framed the forest for so many bad memories.

later I pay penance in a dress made of the fragile
life’s work of a spider’s brittle death
black soot under shell nails, digging with the
fever of long hidden paper Secret
I reach the bottom depth as something
patters, musically, where I remember they told me my heart
was, and
sure enough I come home run over rambles climb wooden porch
and find, fated friend:
whalebone wind chime having
given in to Lover,
(lovely Wind) and lying,
Broken.

and with its clunken shatter, now are free sleek sea creatures’ lost genealogies,
I hear their buried mournful wail diving through the
violet summerair
as I cry, returned and blissful, into my bedroom pillow/pretend I’ve done
no thing wrong.

salt water rushes slowly through my palms
as I sleep/in the night
and, woken, the soft morning light
bluely illuminates
the Ocean I’ve grown into—

with each tidal breath
it drowns all that I remember.

if you can forget, don't you worry bout me

let’s get lost


your voice – melting butter & honey on toast
Naked, warm as breakfast
your breasts the sea and your sweat as salty,
and as for the tang of that other taste!
whenever you look at me so young & soft, close up
or with eyes that know & mind ticking
I touch how it could be –
we blur
I come home in you
a book opens like a door at the top of the stairs
I hold you curled up like a cat
purring with warmth or woundedness
Or is it the other way round?

David Barnes (http://spokenwordparis.blogspot.com/)



and you should hear this read aloud

and her age stood still and she danced twice a night on Vaudeville

in French
the word for "smoke"
is feminine.

oh i love her for the first time in my life

((the latest from my Favorite))

[there is no title currently]
You’re good at names.
You call me things like eclipse
but I’ll accuse you of nothing. I’ll be
your hallucination. But

let me warn you:
I’ve got a pretty voice.

And since you’re always saying things
like the girl is innocent as a porcelain doll
at least snap me
like an eye to a rubber band. You’re

afraid. I’ve got
fingernails. And I can chew
the stems of roses like stained
cigarettes; count stories backwards
in my sleep.

I know. I’m a raindrop. A
sugar cube. And you’re always saying things

like want to dance? or
maybe smile? You think I’d shy from you
and the soft mouth of branches on the window.
Farryl Last

do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there

yesterday
the backs of heads i saw,
i thought they were all yours.
every one.

also i walked fast
parallel to a boy i was sure was you.


i don't believe in ghosts! but i believe surely the ghost stories people tell.

if lovin' you is wrong, i don't wanna be right

Lumina Come and wrap around me
Lumina Take me through the snow

Eve took a train, eve took a train
Went to see her man
Melting inside, melting away
Like butter in the pan

Lumina Come and wrap around me
Lumina Take me through the snow

Eve took a fruit, eve picked a fruit
Juice ran down her chin
Babies will put things in their mouths
Never heard of sin

Lumina Open like the sea
Lumina Sing me in the dark

Eve had to ask, eve had to ask
What is wrong with this
Here is the place, now is the time
Let’s invent the kiss

Lumina Come and wrap around me
Lumina Come and wrap around me...
Joan Osborne

a kiss on the lips of an other

Curious how free a fellow or gal can feel to reveal (or at the very least allude to) the secret of the interior
when promised a closed door, or a mask and a dark room or the cover of night.
I recall finding

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams-
(poe)

scrawled on the bathroom wall of a beloved haunt
and thinking, someone's walking around with that feeling and does
anybody know it.

never treats me sweet&gentle, the way he should...i got it bad, and that ain't good

When I'm good I'm very, very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.
Mae West


When I'm good, I'm very, very good, but when I'm bad, I'm horrid.
(apparently) Gloria Sparrow

Sometimes its hard to be so good when the whole wide world is watching. Sometimes it's a pasttime you just can't stop playing out like a bigtime joke the world thinks it's got on you but you've really got on the world. Sometimes, you think, you're gonna take em by a big bad surprise when--bop!--they're not even payin attention don't even know it's comin'. Sometimes you think, whata buncha suckers to take a game laid down so easy-simple they don't even look for the trick, they all think they know what's what, who's who but they don't know a damn thing bout how the song really lays down darlin.

you gotta help me, baby, i can't do it all by myself

Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses lead to an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape of it them for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling ...
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958: 50).
-->Jackson, Michael. Politics of Storytelling : Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity.

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—"My Heart Laid Bare." But—this little book must be true to its title.-- Poe

just to reach you just to reach you just to reach you

"and every time I scratch my nails down someone's else's back
I hope you feel it--

Can you feel it?"







Fierce.

women seem wicked when you're unwanted, streets are uneven when you're down.

Last night i walked come from the cinematheque and in the middle of the street
there was a man on his knees, hands folded, head down, eyes closed.
I was stunned, so completely, and I walked by him.
I had nothing in me that knew what to do.
And my throat halted and tears came and I was suddenly flushed
cold
all down my arms all down my back.
And where did he go to sleep that night and does he always carry that same sign around
" j'ai faim " ?

And in my self righteous reaction did I feel as bereft as that man.