It’s nearly two in the morning and the place is finally quiet. I can’t do early mornings like I reckon he does. Even a half-past nine start is difficult for me. So it has be this way round. I called Mum tonight and she was her wonderful, always supportive self, but I hear through the ‘you’ve done so well to get on this course’ stuff and imagine her at her desk working late with a pile of papers waiting to be considered for Chemistry Now, the journal she edits. I love her study and one day I shall have one myself, but with a piano and scores and recordings on floor to ceiling shelves . . . and poetry and art books. I have to have these he said when, as my tutorial came to a close, he apologised for not being able to lend me a book of poems he’d thought of. He had so many books and scores piled on the floor, his bed and on his table. He must have filled his car with them. And we talked about the necessity of reading and how words can form music. Pilar, she’s from Tel Haviv, was with me and I could tell she questioned this poetry business – he won’t meet with any of us on our own, all this fall out from the Michel Brewer business I suppose.

This idea that music is a poetic art seems exactly right to me. Nobody had ever pointed this out before. He said, ask yourself what books and scores would be on the shelves of a composer you love. Go on, choose a composer and imagine. Another fruitless exercise, whispered Pilar, who has been my shadow all week. I thought of Messiaen whose music has finally got to me – it was hearing that piece La Columbe. He asked Joanna MacGregor to play it for us. I was knocked sideways by this music, and what’s more it’s been there in my head ever since. I just wanted to get my hands on it. Those final two chords . . . So, thinking of Messiaen’s library I thought of the titles of his music that I’d come across. Field Guides to birds of course, lots of theology, Shakespeare (his father translated the Bard), the poetry and plays of the symbolists (I learnt this week that he’d been given the score of Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande for his twelfth birthday) . . . Yes, that library thing was a good exercise, a mind-expanding exercise. When I think of my books and the scores I own I’m ashamed . . . the last book I read? I tried to read something edifying on my Kindle on the train down, but gave up and read Will Self instead. I don’t know when I last read a score other than my own.

I discovered he was a poet. There’s an eBook collection mentioned on his website. Words for Music. Rather sweet to have a relative (wife / sister?)  as a collaborator. I downloaded it from Amazon and thought her poems were very straight and to the point. No mystery or abstraction, just plain words that sounded well together. His poetry mind you was a little different. Softer, gentler like he is.  In class he doesn’t say much, but if you question him on his own you inevitably get more than the answer you expect.  

There was this poem he’d set for chamber choir. It reads like captions for a series of photographs. It’s about a landscape, a walk in a winter landscape, a kind of secular stations of the cross, and it seems so very intimate, specially the last stanza.

Having climbed over
The plantation wall
Your freckled face
Pale with the touch
Of cold fingers
In the damp silence
Listening to each other breathe
The mist returns

He’s living in one of the estate houses, the last one in a row of six. It’s empty but for one bedroom which he’s turned into a study. I suppose he uses the kitchen and there’s probably a bedroom where he keeps his cases and clothes. In his study there is just a bed, a large table with a portable drawing board, a chair, a radio/CD, his guitar and there’s a notice board. He got out a couple of folding chairs for Pilar and I and pulled them up to the table.

Pilar said later his table and notice board were like a map of himself. It contained all these things that speak about who he is, this composer who is not in the textbooks and you can’t buy on CD. He didn’t give us the 4-page CV we got from our previous tutor. There was his blue, spiral-bound notebook, with its daily chord, a bunch of letters, books of course, pens and pencils, sheets of graph and manuscript paper filled with writing and drawings and music in different inks. There was a CD of the Hindemith Viola Sonatas and a box set of George Benjamin’s latest opera and some miniature scores – mostly Bach. A small vase of flowers was perilously placed at a corner . . . and pinned to his notice board, a blue origami bird.

But it was the photographs that fascinated me, some in small frames, others on his notice board, the board resting on the table and against the wall. There were black and white photos of small children, a mix of boys and girls, colour shots of seascapes and landscapes, a curious group of what appeared to be marks in the sand. There was a tiny white-washed cottage, and several of the same young woman. She is quite compelling to look at. She wears glasses, has very curly hair and a nice figure. She looks quiet and gentle too. In one photo she’s standing on a pebbly beach in a dress and black footless tights – I have a feeling it’s Aldeburgh. There’s a portrait too, a very close-up. She’s wearing a blue scarf round her hair. She has freckles, so then I knew she was probably the person in the poem . . .

I’ve thought of Joel a little this week, usually when I finally get to bed.  I shut my eyes and think of him kissing me after we’d been out to lunch before he left for Canada. We’d experimented a little, being intimate that is, but for me I’m not ready for all that just now; nice to be close to someone though, someone who struggles with being in a group as I do. I prefer the company of one, and for here Pilar will do, although she’s keen on the Norwegian, Jesper.

Today it was all about Pitch. To our surprise the session started with a really tough analysis of a duo by Elliott Carter, who taught here in the 1960s. He had brought all these sketches, from the Paul Sacher Archive, pages of them, all these rows and abstracts and workings out, then different attempts to write to the same section. You know, I’d never seen a composer’s workings out before. My teacher at uni had no time for what she called the value of process (what he calls poiesis). It was the finished piece that mattered, how you got there was irrelevant and entirely your business and no one else’s. So I had plenty of criticism but no help with process. It seems like this pre-composition, the preparing to compose is just so necessary, so important. Music is not, he said, radio in the head. You can’t just turn it on at will. You have to go out and find it, detect it, piece it together. It’s there, and you’ll know it when you find it.

So it’s really difficult now sitting here with the beginnings of a composition in front of me not to think about what was revealed today, and want to try it myself. And here was a composer who was willing to share what he did, what he knew others did, and was able to show us how it mattered. Those sheets on his desk – I realise now they were his pre-composition, part of the process, this building up of knowledge about the music you were going to write, only you had to find it first.

The analysis he put together of Carter’s Fantasy Duo was like nothing I’d experienced before because it was not sitting back and taking it, it was doing it. It became ours, and if you weren’t on your toes you’d look such a fool. Everything was done at breakneck speed. We had to sing all the material as it appeared on the board. He got us to pre-empt Carter’s own workings, speculate on how a passage might be formed. I realised that a piece could just go so many different ways, and Carter would, almost by a process of elimination choose one, stick to it, and then, as the process moved on, reject it! Then, the guys from the Composers Ensemble played it, and because we’d been so involved for nearly an hour in all this pre-composition, the experience of listening was like eating newly-baked bread.  There was a taste to it.

After the break we had to make our own duos for flute and clarinet with a four note series derived from the divisions of a tritone. It wasn’t so much a theme but a series of pitch objects and we relentlessly brainstormed its possibilities. We did all the usual things, but it was when we started to look beyond inversion and transposition. There is all this stuff from mathematical and symbolic formulas that I could see at last how compelling such working out, such investigation could be . . . and we’re only dealing with pitch! I loved the story he told about Alexander Goehr and his landlady’s piano, all this insistence on the internalizing of things, on the power of patterns (and unpatterns), and the benefit and value of musical memory, which he reckoned so many of us had already denied by only using computer systems to compose.

Keep the pen moving on the page, he said; don’t let your thoughts come to a standstill. If there isn’t a note there may be a word or even an object, a sketch, but do something. The time for dreaming or contemplation is when you are walking, washing up, cleaning the house, gardening. Walk the garden, go look at the river, and let the mind play. But at your desk you should work, and work means writing even though what you do may end in the bin. You will have something to show for all that thought and invention, that intense listening and imagining.

Bakit ikaw?

I like the way that you smile.
I like the way that you laugh.
I like the way that you talk.
I like the way that you walk.

I dont just like the idea of you, I love the idea of you.
I just like the way that you are.

Last week, nung magkatabi yung phone namin sa HQ.
May nagsabi sakin na, "relationship goals" DAW yung phone namin, kasi daw yung kanya, Duos tapos, saakin Ace.
Magkasunod daw na ni-release ng Samsung, kumbaga sa Apple parang iPhone 5s yung kanya, saakin iPhone 4s. Haaaays daming alam :p

Pano ba yan? Pang ilang araw at gabi ko na to, ikaw padin tumatakbo sa isip ko. I REALLY FEEL SO WEIRD.
Pag dumating din yung araw na pinaka aantay ko, hindi na kita pag aantayin. Wala akong pake kung sabihin nilang napaka bilis, i would really say, YES. Because, I can feel it. That there's something about you,
wala naman yun sa kung gaano ka katagal manligaw eh diba? Eto yung kung hanggang saan kayo aabot at gaano ka tagal.
Sige na, sasanayin ko nalang yung sarili ko. Ako nalang ulit mag aadjust. Sasanayin ko nalang yung sarili ko, na di ka kausap ng pangmatagalan. Pero, sana kumakain ka sa tamang oras at di ka nagpupuyat. Baka magkasakit ka sa pinaggagagawa mo nyan, di ko pa naman kakayanin pag di kita nakikita ng ilang araw. Kita mo naman every weekends, nag bbreakdown ako at laging puro emotional outburst kung hindi sa twitter, dito. Kasi sobrang miss na miss na talaga kita. Gusto kong mabasa mo to, pero wag muna ngayon. Nahihiya pa ko sayo. Alam mo minsan naiinis nga ko sa sarili ko eh kasi, mahiyain ka, tapos nahihiya ako.. Saan hahantong to? Ayoko ding dumadating tayo dun sa part na wala na tayong topic, kasi ayokong nabobored ka. Gusto ko pa naman na lagi kang nakangiti kahit malayo tayo sa isat isa at di tayo magkasama.








Goodnight, Jon Ray.
































































­




























I love you.

it's almost beautiful, we created the thing called
money, in order to turn tribalism
into a myth of Eden (alone, stark naked) -
          it's almost as if we deviated from
creating it and asking for family values,
            but never got them,
       i'm trying to imagine a Russia where
Rasputin wrote a book
that might have resounded with Nietzsche's
ubermensch - but thankfully precipitated into
world war i & ii... fancy the interlude:
a cold war i, now the cold war ii...
you should be happy, to be honest, it's the best
status quo you'll ever get...
but **** me, 1970s disco craze: even i'm
like Mozart-who?
               a little notebook, and my getting
drunk thoughts in it, funny how drink intellect
knows all too well about the: diminished responsibility
white flag -
              as with the **** chokes come the
drunk-and-writing-a-poem jokes,
                                i'd say blame Al Capone!
you know how many diacritical distinctions i could
insert into that surname? diacritical marks
are ulterior forces at-be when all punctuation goes
*******, not sentences, but words -
Cá       ponè - cockney slang Capone on the phone:
        we had fun: because you really don't say
Cáponé like you might say a torero's olé, do you?!
me? i find it grand to paint syllables with
diacritical marks, i mean: it's not even a blank canvas,
shame the semi-colon isn't minded in distinction,
but still, i already know that poets are scared of
punctuation, hence breaking the lines and not
engaging in a paragraph... tying shoelaces seems about
fine when it comes to modern poets,
talk about knitting jumpers, or scarfs by grannies -
sold as doing that same activity on shredded wheat cereal:
- = a hanging pause (suspense);
       , = necessary pause (or the expected
in a rhythmic cyclone);
   then i say to all my would be assassins:
you'll be doing me a massive favour, to be honest.
at times it really is the age of trusting entertainers
and not the media and certainly not the politicians -
it's almost stating the obvious.
i was in St. Petersburg for a month, and every time
i wanted to go to a danceclub to dance she refused me....
me and my naiveness in thinking that people could
actually be seduced by good...
      i don't mean being exposed to a tsunami
among the other elemental congregations of Shiva
there goes my belief in people being good to each other...
shoom! gone... bye bi!
(origins of dyslexia? maybe).
                                 she took me to the opera and
she started her snarling condescending approach to
the new-rich girls in the next booth...
     **** me, relationships leave me so ill-equipped
i actually find it staggering that i had any...
                 i must have been really naive in believing
that people could do good that i ended up
   a hermetic pessimist or misanthrope -
i never expected to be one, or share the juices of such
a calibration of humankind:
but it's funny how a movement overstates the cartesian
sum and never the cogito,
and when you by chance encounter the actual cogito
organising a movement, you represent nothing
representative of the movement's sum,
because the cogito is actually so staggeringly
divergent from being affiliated to the (e.g.)
         French revolution's guillotine locomotive.
when utilising only one hand in writing?
a black notebooks is written into at a rhombic degree,
yep, slant.
        i have two or three decent points to make,
but, obviously, i have to utilise verbiage to state them,
let's compare that to building a thousand homes
before the leaning tower of Pisa comes along
and people say: wow! in the immediate sense i
will require compensating that exception with
enough social housing for the tower to actually be erected:
that's natural: regurgitating maxims from no experience
would be an equivalence to an exoskeleton:
no experience, no harm... and where's the fun in that?

(interlude no. 1)

almost 15 minutes in an opera house, long enough
for the march from your seat into the street and a smoke,
  i still can't understand while people adopted money
for the demand of talking to each other via pebbles,
we are in our billions and made it so demanding to
only appeal to the few for company... i mean, should
i be sad? we made our company so unbearable because
of engaging in the concept of money that we later had
adapt to books as the conversations we need to have
among people we can't even talk about the weather to.
people always think that talking about money is
shallow... as if it's some really necessary version of
the crucifix (which to my mind sounds like a name for
a charity and the need to be thankful for it being there),
then again: something so geometrically pure
hanging over us and then comes Rodin's the kiss:
that really is a miracle - walking on water can hide itself,
turning water into wine (40 days & nights in the desert would
do that to you, every time you rehydrated, any liquid
would be intoxicating).
             oh hell, i have the notebook narrative,
i need to take a break after having written the unexpected
intro, and subsequent interlude.

it seems to me that language can never be sampled,
sampling language
is anti-scientific,
because it breaches an objectification of things,
which sad,
    are the Balkan states Slavic, Christian or Turkish?
i'm asking because a Greek said
it's Byzantine, and then lapping allah illha Allah
turkish took to Istambul...
*how best to defame a god with ensnarled capitals,
each, levelled,
                                only Islam will reign under the
praise of my name, which alone, will sing my praise.
   to move mountains, one must move throngs.
          to move people you expect them to become
mountains: or sun-tanned noon
  having been charcoaled into obliteration.
     one thought: an ottoman janissary: and vlad
the lesser crucifier and the adamant
impaler, who said that homosexuality shouldn't matter....
   imagine the comparative pain...
i can't: therefore i won't.
                     thus the black scripts of notation...
better than uttering original maxims,
          as in... better to engage in transcendentalº
dialectics
     ºin ref. to Nietzsche: the masses do not hold
an opinion on sanity: hence my concordance
with "him" - and insanity in individuals (self-dividing
                      duos in calamity of one):
insane individuals are rare: but conglomerates are
the norm - thus an agreement of shared truths
that has no debate to support it, because it has been
"plagiarised",
   the transcendental aspect is the lack of dialectics
(replaced with diacritics),
     and also the historical novelty of shared observation
with a disparity of a century's worth of history:
governing still the caveman and the modern man,
            as if the two were mutually compatible.
that one could rewrite the other, and so too true in
reverse.
   i find it harsh having to relinquish the authority
of language, as my own it used,
but only when school-friends suggest it, those
with ******* family members do i foremostly
experience it as my own: well... thanks to you
i'm not a plumber because your father detonated
the atom bomb and never bothered checking what
the gorilla did next with the grand censor of fertility
to protect an aesthetic...
           but then again: you were always Irish.
oo! well: sodomite that oops... it'll be worth something
in 30 years' time. strange how it must read...
Holocaust deniers also have the same lysergic trip.
             insanity in individuals is rare,
among groups it's the norm, within a framework
of Nietzsche: thus an agreement of shared truths,
that has no debate to support it,
because it has been "plagiarised" (necessarily experienced
more than once),
   ºthe transcendental aspect is the actual lack of
dialectics, and also the historical shared novelty of sharing
of observation (the tsunami cult, the earthquake cult)
with a disparity of range toward the century-range...
   philosophy infamously aks purposively
unsolvable questions: or questions that require many
more questions... or what is known as a transcript
of Aristotelian awe: of those who commit to error
with that science of pure wording, to spur people on;
philosophers are the adventurers in error:
only because this engages them in providing a "gravity"
locus... for others to hone onto and correct...
(oh how i'd believe had there been a Koranic surah
on the mindful hoplites)...
         purposively erroring: philosophy;
philosophers are pioneers: birches... scientists
are all but oak: auburn well established.
       but what of transcendental dialectic that expands
into shared truths (as experience) within the dual-disparity
of nearing death and the dawn of the 20th century
   and never-nearing a life at the dawn of the 21st century?
excluding dialectics and diacritics has given us
such a society, where everything is nearly snowflake
lucratively dissolvable and gentle...
                   few people utter truths,
even fewer utter truths than need to be debated...
             for the over-lord truth is mono, or glue...
        but still the tactic of avoiding certain truths
for the necessity of sitting in an armchair rather than
on a cold pavement... for in their pluralism
they express as many universal traits of non-experience,
as they subsequently express enough
    particular traits of experience
(translate rhyming into philosophy and you get this...
going cross-eyed in allocating an understanding,
summarised by the word zez).
hence the unwinding: universals (x, ÷):
       and particulars (+, -):
    of time, and how to encourage abstracting
worded coordination into an advanced literacy rate,
that'll fail, because literacy is power that requires
labouring anyway.
  because you did say "encapsulating a zoo"
readied to perpetrate a staging of a freak-show.
examples: universals (x, ÷):
       and particulars (+, -)        are zeniths in
the narrative compensation to nothing -
        in literature a surprise turn of the plot,
a summarisation, as such stand-out moments,
or quotes: here is a version of encoding verbal
"mathematical" synonymity -
         i too would wish to create a language
that doesn't abide by the language of miles,
but that of metres, but then there's the thesaurus
distinction between metres in deviations of
centimetres and nano in close-proximity
          ruby, crimson, burgundy, bled throughout the week
until pale grey and with an epitaph.
      language never brings us together,
it never did, we all wished to be cats and have said
meow... but we rarely and will never say...
that's nearing toward shame...
  i absolve humanity of the original sin...
                    if sinning was so original i would suggest
other forms of compensating it rather than prayer:
i'm thinking of the original shame...
it's that story of a serial killer who believed he
had no universal traits concerning him,
he had no systematisation of conscience,
he denied having a sense of guilt...
          it's hard to believe such things,
given the ceiling is the universe...
        it's hard to become a rat in a solipsistic maze...
that's ****** had to believe...
                   to deny having universal a priori
is also to deny particular a posteriori...
                           even though nothing really happened
apart from god laughing and man yawning
and the devil crying. it's very hard to believe people
these days, even though they deserve it,
                    it's hard to summate oneself in being
able to;
  thank god philosophers didn't complicate simple words
with remnants of Latin like psychologists did,
there's the prior (a priori) and there's the after (a posteriori),
or the two within a-: without a prior (to) / priority -
                  or without an after / an imitable vogue / trend /
    zeitgeist.
          can you write something like someone disclosing the fudge
of what's technically an arithmetic summary?          
no intelligence is being undermined here,
         what's being undermined is what's critically an optical
   java transitory period.                                                    

(int­erlude no. 2)

the laziest philosophers always write about the word
philosophy without actually philosophising,
you can say as much when saying: i'm thinking about thought.
of all the professions, philosophers don't know theirs...
it's true, if you do it, you do it not-knowing / unconsciously.
modernity does in fact overprescribe the word genius
because it doesn't give practitioners of philosophy any
credit in the slightest of actually being recipients of
life... every time a thought spawns from nothing
the limitation of expressing it is: you don't exist;
soon enough you hang up having any competence in language
and say to people you thought you knew: adios amigos,
good luck: then you wonder why they're so
prematurely depressed, and then you forget about them
and think of a million Chinese carpenters:
simply because it's less depressingly so.
     do you ever write encapsulating a rhombus on a page
with your literary / wanking hand? i know i do,
write in a notebook askew - or that's what's called the
future of absurdity: i'm thinking about thought -
some later claim morality, and some later claim god -
        that should sound more simply as: ought i?
    but it doesn't... hey, here's to self-projecting ****** -
it's not even that good people invented god,
  it's that evil people did...
                  which is always a bit ****** having that
microchip in my abstract mind (the brain) i sometimes
try to get rid off while acting as an atheist for pop super!
       does that sound highly idealistic?
it probably does... have i an influential counter to it?
n'ah. thinking about thought without the either or of
ought leaves me asking outside the box / transcendental
questions about what self is ingested by that
Pontius Pilate... talk of the "true" self and talk of
the "false" self: who the **** is the narrator then?
are we all bleaching our handshakes these days to
give a handshake?!
    some men would claim to be the husbands of that
insatiable "woman" that's Sophia,
         who, after all, is better equipped to satiate 3
men, than a man to satiated 3 women:
the trinity of ****, vaginal: oral - funny that,
how perfectly that plays against all those years of
practising to a demand of the churches': kneel!
i'll just watch you **** him off while Mary Magdalene
spread the schematic that resulted in the Islamic
******* analing the "respected".

(interlude no. 3)

just can't be bothered mate...
  never did so much charity work pour into
      herr Herrman's charity chest of
the never thought of set of poems.

- and a day later, just a blank,
what a formidable evening,
why do i queue for even a trombone, violin,
       a viola, trumpet or a sax to add to my voice?
but in musicological terms: that's exactly what i'm doing.
it's hard to not see this as a cure:
with 16,713 views matta's echo babylon is
truly the antithesis of Prokofiev, or any other,
as might call it: windy character.
        classical music was bound to tornados and
zephyrs - modern music is the epitome of rhythmic
sampling, drum eroded violins,
           and other things happened, too.
rhombus within the framework of the hand-written prior,
on tiny scraps of rectangular paper,
because it's easier to write like that: slanting
and therefore for the imagery of cascading -
and as the pronoun revolution dies down,
                    and the voices go unheard,
   people will start to think about thought
and later thought per se for transcendental purposes...
     because choice will be ejected from
having competent access to it: namely?
   i can't see those **** the ***** protests seriously
if people can't take to shooting guns,
          i mean real rebellion... obviously i'm egging
on the situation and spraying gasoline on it
(obviously), but if the French give you the statue of
liberty as a present, you get to look at the appendix,
and start thinking: where are the guns, so
it looks like a genuine protest? i thought the idea of
being able to own guns (by the people), was to suggest
that if the government was electorally undesired,
people could start shooting... the tongue isn't
a

Cupid is a hard worker.
He constantly juggles
the loved
the want-to-be-loved
the unloved
and the unlovable.

Cupid is a hard worker.
He constantly makes lots
of matches
of pairs
of duos
and of partners.

Cupid has his own heart.
Is he, himself, one of
the loved
the want-to-be-loved
the unloved
or the unlovable?

Cupid has his own heart.
Does he, too, have
a match
a pair
a duo
or a partner?

Cupid is a matchmaker.
He finds love for you and me,
and I can't help but wonder
if he's alone as alone can be.

Now, now, now, now, now, now, now!
Terrible!
You can do better
You can always do better
Yet always can't never
Suckin' on a sliver in the tool-shed-deluxe, AND I've GROWN depressed again
Sept' NOT cause' I tend to tenderize dem' words!  Badly written, this mind un-fittin' for deez words I'm sittin'! Red marks, red marks n' squiggle 'neath my stupid words a lot like me and my arms n' body!  I am incorrectly myself far too often to see truly true pieces beyond the sky's fragility be she man nor woman yet the classically pronounced hermaphrodit-E!  I stink and smell like rotting hell except worse due to too many twos or were they duos throwing in the towel... foul.
I am
I
Am
The walking stench of literal intention and the walking stench of the hands of death (clench).
Broken staff is my forgotten word thus I AM ZERO-MARK
Not the nor a or an, but and is to I am as a universe as a point of hallucination

Unrestrained
Summer sweat slick skin sliding
Urgent
Homemade wine lubricating the distance
Between our whispering mouths
I want you
Cowboy boots knocking sideways shimmy
So ready for your deep sighs
To set my hips a dancing
This is late night country twang duos  
Heart beat rhythms speed up like humming bird wings
Drinking deep of soft *** nectar
Eyes roll back in mid-moan wonder
Close now to seeing early morning fireworks
Fog rolls in over high peaked mountains
I am right there with them
Dewy. Dawn kissed.
Strung tight like guitar string strumming  
This body's melody hums in tune with you

There was the backfield tandem of Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davies on several West Point football teams of the UOS.

There is that power hitting duo of the modern day Yankees - Gary Sanchez and Aaron Judge.

There were those great power hitters of the 70s, I believe, that seemed to come in clusters like Mike Schmidt, Breen Downing, and yes, I believe, John Milner.

There was, of course, Ruth and Gehrig that stood out on the 1927 Yankees.

There's Hawke Leonard and James Harden, an unsung pair of the San Antonia Spurs and the Houston Rockets, respectively, in pro basketball that stand out.

There's Stephan Curry and Kevin Durant, a Mutt and Jeff combination in the Golden State Warriors.

There was a couple of gifted first to play on a University of Illinois basketball team African Americans that were tantalizing good at that time - Mannie Jackson and Governor Vaughn.

There was those 4 great old time Boston Celtics guards; Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, K.C. Jones, and Sam Jones.

There was Bill Bradley and Dave Debusschere manning the wings of the New York Knickerbockers pro basketball teams of the late sixties, I believe.

There was Ron Kissinger and Glenn Becker, the keystone duo on the Chicago Cubs of the sixties, I believe.

There was Mainstay, reliable pitcher for the Casey Stengal dynasty teams - Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds and there were great teamsmen of Vince Lombardi's pro football Green Bay Packers Super Bowl team like Dave Hammer, Forrest Gregg, and Boyd Dowler.

Make dreams,
take dreams,
create them yourself.
Runes for ditherers.
Whispers on raindrops.
flowers on breezes.
Birthday boys and pretty girls.
Wearing bright white crop tops.
Bright pink cheeks and twisted curls.
Haircuts and elastic.
Fashion trends.
Cheap shop friends.
Call centre workers,
out to make an easy buck.
Poking folks.

Killing jokes.
He's preaching the end of the world.
How dare he be so bold.
To visit my front door,
garbage paper in hand.
The devil to capture have and hold,
hangs in the watchtower.
From this day, now and forever,
The aged leather sofa plethora of all sold lies.
Invite them not in, briefcase duos.
perfect smile.
See them coming run a mile.
Or just ignore the door.
(c) Livvi
This is obviously just my own opinion.

The miniscule presence
of a belated future.
Delayed lust.
internal loathing.

Pairs fall into
clutches of envy.
Poisoned waters
they drink in competition.

An inexplicable bond
through distrust and distaste.
A warming in duelling hearts.
A chilling within two halves.

Duos raise their spears and bows
in challenge.
Fighting for dominance
Elusively uniting souls

And they spark a heavy fight.
Neck and neck
A hefty bite
All without the price to pay.
As they grovel at each others show

Of deathly affection.

Stealthily. Love punctures the wounded
Binding like the wraps of bandages.
Understated healing properties
with a hint of fatal spice.

I loved you
Long before I was able
To make your acquaintance

Now we are the dearest of friends.
The most dynamic of duos.

And I’m forced to portray a facade
In which I deem my love for you
Simply

Platonic

23 + & Ongoing
By
Carson O T P Alexander
During Weather of Niceness,
Downpouring from Grey or White Skies,
Lies Gods Purpose Laden Duos,
Who lead Simple Nitted Lives,
Where Twin Images are always seen,
Where Positive Levels are Continuously Flowing,
23 + & Ongoing,
Keep it soaring,
Scaling 2 new highs,
Implanting smiles n memories,
In Numerous Lives,
With Wisdom From High,
Derails Tides of Mischief,
In All manner of Disguise,
Is Another Light,
Which keeps Hearts Soaring,
23 + & Ongoing,
Keep It Flowing!

Mel Dare
​

Mel Dare is an Australian visual artist and educator based in Perth, Western Australia. Her work explores the construction of personal narrative specifically in regards to it's relationship with how meaning is created.  This has led her to investigate different but interrelated subjects such as subjectivity, psychology, neurology, biology, identity, time and perspective.
​
During the last 16 years the artist has produced 9 solos, 3 duos and her work has been selected for numerous group exhibitions including Steal (2016), Scene (2016), Pure Contemplation Without Knowledge (2015, 2016), Dot on the Run (2015, 2016), Bankwest Art Prize (2015), Painting as an Artform (2015), Albany Art Prize (2014), Midwest Art Prize (2014), Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize (2014) and Florid (2014, Turner Galleries and 45 Downstairs). It has been acquired by City of Joondalup, St John of God, Princess Margaret Hospital, Old Swan Brewery and many other national and international collections.

Dare lectures in drawing at Central Tafe and has taught art at Curtin University of Technology, Bandyup and Nyandi Prisons, Applecross Gifted & Talented Program, Nascha Inc (disabilities services) and various other private and public organisations. In addition she has undertaken various curatorial projects including Darlington Open Art Awards 2016, 12 Days and Gotham Returns (with Andrew Nicholls). Dare has been a resident artist at Gotham Studios since 2008.

I never understood valentines
When it comes to love I’m free
Still I thought that I’d be fine
But I’m pretty sure Eros hates me

Maybe it’s fortune, maybe I’m prosperous or lucky
Looking at Eurydice and Orpheus, that soon went to hell
Megara never knew Hercules could be so ******
And because of love Hero fell
They all were victim to the spell

I guess love ended them all
But at least they got to feel romance
But I’ve been hit with only leaden arrows
My thoughts of love have passed

They say Zeus is bad but I think Eros is worse
He led Thisbe and Pyramus to the hearse
But some of us he just ignores
And that’s the worst kind of curse

I kissed my best friend who loved me
But I never felt the same
I’m pretty sure a nice boy likes me
But he’s loving a losing game
I’m surrounded by duos
But I’ll only ever be just me
Like Ariadne I stand alone
Solitude is my destiny

Echo could talk now she cannot
Daphnis could see now he does not
Chiron lived forever, then he was shot
I dreamed of love, but they were just thoughts