Chained

Elegy For the Giant Tortoises

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon

the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:

everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation

upon the giant tortoises

withering finally on a remote island

I concentrate in subway stations,

in parks, I can't quite see them,

they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there:

already the event

like a wave travelling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize,

plodding past me in a straggling line

awkward without water

their small heads pondering

from side to side, their useless armour

sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed

lumbering up the steps, under the archways

toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,

the relics of what we have destroyed,

our holy and obsolete symbols.

Margaret Atwood

Find Old Words

"Bottomless inside a four-walled cold room I lay confided to my bed. Wrapped and tangled within sheets, my eyelids beg to differentiate my sleeping condition. A ray of light escapes the sky and breaks through from one of the shutters. Immersed within my dream I realize my desire to wake up. Deserting the tormented sheets I sit at the corner of the bed examining my pale cold thighs. 

I open the bedroom door letting the sunshine flood in. Each ray that betrays the heavenly world taunts me. I invite the rising morning sun to spread shadows of strange images along the south wall. There is movement. Subtle, delicate small movement

Once outside I sit and listen to the wind, advice vibrates through my ears and hair. Something calls, something calls. I notice the rotting grass growing pathetically from the dirt. I get on my hands and knees, digging deep in the sludge of mud and wet grass. I feel naked. I feel alone, gloved in mud, as my eyes wander along the ranges and ranges of empty mountains. 

The vastness of space heightens a trapped anxious twitch. Constant repetitive cocking

of my head and neck fuels me to dig deeper into the mud. A deep masculine cry crawls out of my throat. My saliva sprays, catching on the tips of intact grass.

I can feel my nails loosen as the dirt wedges between the fresh skin and keratin proteins. I dig deeper. Let me be the one who twirls on gravity's mistaken trust. Then there is the rush of endorphins. I spin. The mud bubbles beneath me. Now for the dip. I go head first into the muddy grave I dug."

This is an excerpt from a short story I wrote when I was seventeen. Although the rest of the story is unreadable/ unworthy, the first page was never thrown out.

Feeling Like Someone Else?

Manet

Gustave Courbet

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida

Exhausted Inspiration

A Deaf Whale is A Dead Whale

Perhaps I have missed
the moments
enticing enough
to capture emotions
for I fear
I have lived too
much
& missed
the moment
to report
the words
I can't hear
the silent call
perhaps
I have lost it
the saddest instance
for a silly poet
is not being able
to write at all
but now
i succumb
the space
in which
memories
are birthed
& I am afraid
they have evaporated
in the air.

Why Don't You Come On Back to the War, Don't Be a Tourist

Take this longing from my tongue

Well, Hello New York

I Do Not Count the Time

Ross and I's new song... http://www.mediafire.com/?32b73uj6p096j2g

Farewell Dublin

Deterritorialization

In the  moment all is  dear to me, dear that  in this logic there is no
redemption, the city itself  being the highest form of  madness and each and
every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel
absurdly and humbly great, not  as megalomaniac,  but as human spore, as the
dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of
the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms  and legs, and
I see that behind the  sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the
world  of  futurity,  and here there  is  no  logic whatever, just the still
germination of events unbroken by night and day,  by yesterday and tomorrow.
The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on
points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was
the I of  the self no longer exists; this  selfless eye neither reveals  nor
illuminates.  It  travels  along  the  line of  the  horizon,  a  ceaseless,
uninformed voyager. Trying to  retain the  lost body I grew  in logic as the
city, a point  digit  in  the anatomy  of  perfection. I  grew beyond my own
death, spiritually  bright and hard.  I was divided into endless yesterdays,
endless tomorrows, resting  only  on the cusp of the event, a wall with many
windows, but  the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last
shell  of  the lost  body,  if I am to rejoin the  present. That is why I no
longer look  into the  eyes  or  through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of
will swim  through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore  the curve of
vision. I  see  around myself as  the mother who bore  me once saw round the
comers of  time. I  have broken  the wall created by  birth  and the line of
voyage is  round and  unbroken,  even as  the navel. No  form,  no image, no
architecture,  only concentric flights of  sheer madness.  I am the arrow of
the dream's  substantiality. I verify by flight.  I  nullify by  dropping to
earth.

Henry Miller Tropics of Cancer

Pre-Farewell Dublin