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Claire Waters Jul 2013
you came to me drunk and looking for love
when before it seemed i had plenty of
suddenly my eyes must have been
mazelike and empty
it falls out of me
so neat and yet so unkemptly
all these bodies in storage
and the coroner sent me
but i can't clean up this mess
i'm only good at disassembly

you cupped my chin in your hands
and begged me tell me what you're thinking
i told you i was staring at the wall
with that smile quickly shrinking
too fast for you to catch it
i felt your breath kiss my neck
as you tried a different approach
with a more subtle effect
i should have explained i need a while
to think before i talk about these things

My memere liked the smell of gasoline, i do too
the tiny shreds of dying nice and slow it pulls from inside of you
and stale cigarettes in mom and pop drugstores
and burying the dead birds, saying it was just time for them to go
explaining that they don't realize they are killing themselves
every time they slam into the glass doors
she loved the seashells welling up from the atlantic
and the waves that held me detained
when she disappeared from shore
the glass that cut, that taste of blood
the stillness of death and linoleum floors and the whining dog
i couldn't fathom how they could all remain

her still skin was first time i noticed
the shifting quality of epidermises cusps so waterlogged
like lotus leaves and flaking logs of driftwood in the ocean
the way it's currents pushed and pulled everything above and below our bodies'
disturbances and submersions of purple i didn't love
i wondered why our bodies couldn't just come back to us
couldn't learn to rigor mort this
still deaths leaves me feeling purposeless
waxy and elastic, with small hairs like the cactus on the windowsill
she said so but i can't convince myself that this is a beautiful thing

when i was young i dreamt of falling down the wooden rungs
of our staircase, screaming in pain in the airway and waiting to be saved
it felt so real, and days later we were pulling over on the side of the highway
when we got the call, saying no one was there when she had the fall
when i saw the sunset from the beach for the first time in years
that night i cried for the beauty and
washed off the tears, purple and red clouds
salt water and tender sounds
and stared for a long time
at the empty shell of a horseshoe crab
did not eat the poison berries
removed the glass from my feet
set down the photographs in defeat
sat and read the dusty books
still caked in her fingerprints
sitting on the shelves of the library

and he never liked gasoline
he always liked fresh air and talkative people
the little things, and the adrenaline of strings
the 4 am sunrise over town center's church steeple
i was terrified of loving this good person
this aversion confuses me,
i teeth at these pseudonyms for something so real
being turned into something transient
i can't explain it i just hate dominance
and love hurt children

i still see his face like it was yesterday
saying that it was his birthday, and he was smiling
about going to the lake
i still can't retrieve a single date
last year from the months of august to may
i just remember the pictures and google pages
i would read 1 through 25 internally enraged
by this rememberance of you
my fists clenched in a faded grip
feeling the searing headlines
cutting through the blackness
i forget what it's like
not to lose it all every time
i close my eyelids
and the waves i love creep in and rip
i've just conceptualized it to be a pattern
and accepted it

They tell me to stop remembering
But they don’t understand with
Each blow life hands me
Another is already sewn
Into my ribcage, bruises in each hand
between each crescent bone,
this isn’t a coincidence
Most nights i hang my lungs
Dangling from my spine
Watching the walls cave in
the sticky residue of surgical tape
Strapped around my bicep
Will not wash off in the shower and then
This guilt will not wash off in the shower
and then, you are a burden, hidden
In the paperwork, between the lines
Three weeks later and there is still
Traces of it on me
Parts of me trapped in glass vials
i wonder what people thought
when they saw me in that blue robe
on the bed in the little blue room
I still remember how thick the
needle was
I was never scared of them
until now

i trick people when i feel like
i'm not seeing at all
i'm just feeling, not healing
with these words
that's my downfall
i wish i could give more
but this is all i have left
if i can't keep it locked in closet doors
i know the effect with be my last theft
don't force it out of me
just let the drainage catch your crests
let it come in time
when i feel safe knowing you
would catch my conjested confessions
and lay them to rest
Adrianna Aug 2018
I despise social media.
It's ugly, to state the obvious
Our lives are posted, retweeted, altered, reblogged, perfected, and photoshopped to exactly how we want to be perceived
We have the freedom to be exactly what they want us to be.

It starts with a few edits doesn't it,
pigmented our skin to seem smooth and sun kissed,
that would seem most acceptable right?
Maybe an extra like for the skinnier waist.
More reassurance for brighter colors.
Some more filters will hid the emptiness you feel with your friends
   Another like
Flashier clothing, phones, shoes, cars, other simple words our eyes have latched on to
     Another like
We urge ourselves to portray the life of leisure and effortless beauty, happiness, success,
       Another like
But what are we enjoying?
         Another like
Views of our changing world through a 3 by 8 view.
           Another like
Events pass by swipe
             Another like
and swipe
               Another like

And when we managed to unlock ourselves from this grasp
We always come back
Like flies to light, more like scratches to a scab
Festering we find ourselves getting ****** back in
To an imaginary world, that if destroyed, would have no physical effects on their fictional beings
For without this world, maybe eyes will open
We will step past the boundaries,
and start to love our beings
unfiltered
I really do not like the social norms of having the staples of social media, it is a toxic area that traps us in an infinite loop of trying to upgrade one another
LDuler Dec 2012
ok so here is what we are going to do
i'm going to get a bout de souffle
what was i gonna do..
one thing getting to nether still need you
are you all here
one thing getting getting to noter
288 guitars 
i've been hoping  don't get much dumber 
and getting to noter
this movie is not yet rated
i'm kind of trying to decide
i will send an email to your parents
so… just off the bat 
your parents are not ok with that 
kind of thing
she was out there interviewing her?
right there… have you seen that? ok good
movie theater to hide
c'est rare
reste avec moi
ciao petite fiiiille
elle est la bas je crois
vous parlez français? yes
attention ma petite fille on ne plaisante pas avec la police parisienne
you think i'm lying? you are
i didn't see you
you don't believe me
bonjour mignonne
qu'es ce qu'il dise
les flics me recherche
parle le moi quoi? ca alors
tu es marie
c'est trop **** maintenant d'avoir peur
bonsoir madame
il faut absolument que je trouve antonio
accelere minouche
il est alle a monpellier
why don't you smile
it would certainly surprise me
sourrrit sourrrit
je pense a quelque chose?
je ne sais pas
je voulais être seule
c'est finis
tu m'emmene au champs elysee
au revoir 
tentez votre chance
un cafe alors
moi je peux pas partir
et puisque je suis méchante avec toi c'est la preuve que je suis pas amoureuse de toi
ahh c'est trop complique
j'ai envie de dormir
c'est vraiment dégueulasse
how would you relate
destroy the rules
young actors
....sommes seuls, cette certitude de nous-mêmes dans la sérénité de la solitude ne sont rien en comparaison du laisser-aller, du laisser-venir et laisser-parler qui se vit avec l'autre...
audition for the leading character
interesting combination
the criminal
just the edge of his frame
she seems innocent at the beginning
looking at his notes
just fyi i throw out someone
loving and desirable
playing off of that very consciously
you just not be working
archival stuff is on Facebook
c'est l'heure du gouter
de la glace au chocolat
working on your transcripts/ paper edits
that's probably not a smart thing to do
t'y va
Not this sense
that I don't know what the hell
a human girl is...
where’s the coast guard? 
just a spotlight gimme something
ca commence a 6h 
t'es cool
quickly
i smells like **** did you ****?
you are the love de ma vie
he talks like that he is french
she is like ze morning sun in ze...morning 
beautiful
ze temps is in ze essence
muaaah
is our classroom
i can sense the connection
the connection? 
the connection entre nous
so madame alezraa give me this much
i heard boss
he is not doing anything
to give me a kiss 
it's in the 1st tab
it's still there
you don't have to click
i can't save it, just stay with me
there is no word on this ****
i need the inspiration
you are my muse
c'est pour ca qu'ils sont si petit
small
je vais m'occuper de
the whole point of life is to rearrange it in a coherent running story
people don't talk in stories
cut each section
some sort of a story
nice
tu veux que je mette
ouai ok attends
elle est l'autre feuille
permien tu veux que je colle recolle decolle coupe recoupe decoupe
how do you feel about solving…I mean it's an interesting way to solve it…
〜flowed〜 nicely
it was sort of an ingenious solution
she's in the airplane, she's in the sofa
try to transition between the two subjects….where does your friend come from?
what it was like landing in New York, looking out the window...
the process of arriving
not really fair to say that
in the future, if you're going to try to tell a story…in their minds….what's the story she's going to be telling me?…..coming home
fill in the blanks
don't go shoot blind, that's the biggest mistake
does that make sense?
great!
wubwubwububwubbbbbwubwb
gloving is......flowing lights in sync with the♩music ♫
flowing in gloving is broken…
liquid
finger rolls
tutting
figure eight ∞
wubwubwubBAMwubwubwoosh
wave-like movement…basic thing….wrist in a motion
tutting is like the angles…. not um 〜flowing〜….like tetris
you want to more, rather than following
solid ⸪lights, ⸫single⸭ solid lights⸬
pink to green to orange to yellow to blue
advanced strobe, solid line of color [...] streak of purple
electronic, dustup, elector, house, trance…
you’ll probably never see anyone gloving to like, classical music ♬♪
my name is Henri Geneste and I'm a glover WUBwubwubwubbbWUBWUBAHHHwubwubWUBWUBWUB[ONE][TWO]WUBwubwub[THREE­]
putain c’est magnifique
je me demande si il fait ca la nuit, quand il arrive pas a dormir...
window thing, kind of dumped
either the ours magna or the I equals me squared²
like language, like art, there are rules
go out and break them, just mucking around
fix it, wanna make one, totally your creative decision
how awkward
a bout de souflle
totally revolutionary
ainrr
radical, argue truer, but it's jarring, that's one way to do it!
aware that they're there but not ⑈jarring⑇
close to wide…..there's a cut there but the eye can follow it
um i have to go...
bye henri!!!
bye!
bye man.
see ya monday!
the hair!! im gonna shave it this weekend
I've been to raves
is he, like, a straight-edge?
there's drugs…do you guys ALL go to raves?
how the audio?
looked cool, the rain in the background
DUHDUHDUH that's hard to do
a huge amount, i'm sorry but gloving without the music?
if he does drugs OR NOT, how he's enjoying it OR NOT, if it interferes with his studies OR NOT..
just FYI we were all young yesterday
two bodies
he's here cause he's not going, right?
are you interested?
oh i would be very interested
yeah i see what u mean
you could come with me….i could always take the bus
it'd be cool
moi elle sera belle
here we go!
woah
their audio visuals are not very HOT
hours per day?
1…2 hours a day
sometimes 30mins
mostly people, sometimes like little animals
mostly people
i look at their art a lot
really interesting style
environments
if i want to…how I see them in my head
stuff like that
usually kinda random
i pretty much self taught
mostly from practice
everyone draws…but i got serious about it, like very…6th grade
i don't like the idea of competitions
and mum drawing is like, something that's kinda important
a passion
not sure i would want to go into it as an industry
more than just art
for now im not really sure
alright
so our usual questions
eyeline! thank you
on the couch….at the end it was really weird
who was…sitting where?
where were you?
she didn't really even really look, she was too far away, she just kind of….looked
much…she might not have ever looked
with the eyeline…it was pretty steady, no jerky-herkys, there were several edits
forgive it cause there's enough change
you could follow it, you could see that time had shifted
the content demanded it
WOAH okay now i'm really curious
we could see it, but then it was on the something else
process the image
now we're trying to look at the art, now we need more time
arc? did u feel like there was an ◜arc◝?
umm yeah…..
how many hours a day do u draw?
try to make sensible out of that
is that they use 2 3 four…
uh...cut..i did….cut
the cutting itself is like a commentary on her
since i was little. when i was little
when i was little
but my parents, my family don't
hands and arms
collages, magazines
photography
big part of photography
San Francisco Art institute
graphic animation, we only had like 3 weeks
still lives, models we would draw them
we had like an exposition
the person my mom works with's husband
wanna do an artistic career
alright so
not the greatest projector ever
too much head    space    
a lot of nothing
it makes it a lot more interesting
i think it was okay in the video cause
what she was saying and stuff like that
fair enough but I don't agree
lost in this big sea of wall
you're totally forgiven
no questions
power of a well-placed microphone
fantastic
the beans!
alright
you guys are the wrong audience cause you all know each other's stories
good feedback
movin' on, okay
very frustrating
and now.....surfing! woohoo!!!!
30 loooooong minutes, it's a nightmare!
7 minutes
3 minutes
it's a 10th
there's something fascinating about listening to people…you can do it yourself later
bolinas, del mar, sometimes surface, livermore, ocean beach
......riding the waves…....man….....it's the best feeling
you're walking on water you know? that feeling…….i love the ocean
i love the water, after you get that perfect wave you just feel accomplished
that feeling…..is awesome
surfing, it's all about having fun..
you surf once, and….you know?
if you're a surfer, you have a love for the ocean
my, my grandpa always loved the beach, we would go there at two in the morning and just….
my grandpa died and he asked to be cremated, he wanted his ashes to go in the ocean, so we took his ashes out to the ocean
I remember walking out to the ocean with my dad, we threw his ashes into the ༇wind༅ above the ocean, and we looked down….
we want to get the pain!! and the sorrow! because we're vultures you know? we just zoom in to get his expression
little bit weird
i do, i like it
it's black and white
it's just a surfer, it's not movin', it's there…it's not always the same
sort of echoey
…the ocean, and so i remember my dad taking the….
too much archival? too much? not long enough? both.
there was sort of a disconnect at times
her story, you have to cut
when she says "CAT" i want to see a CAT, when she says "FIRETRUCK" i want to see a FIRETRUCK!!! i was like, okay, i  just went to school…
and now this?
or you see a woman that looks like a cat
it's hard, it's complicated, it's not given
so they just kind of ended
you guys im trying to help them
oh okay
hey you know what no no no you know what don't take any of this personally just be like oh okay
he's got a funny manner of speech
any thing else?
arlo says no
"it would not go well"
what IS the really great ending?
amazing feeling one can have…..
you feel like you own the ocean, like it's heaven on earth
this technique it's called killing your babies…i love that
uh what
he says "uh no no no this is a 3 minute film"
sad but true
we all get attached to things, we don't want to cut them out
just play with it, if you decide
we can schloop
can we watch
not exactly…here's..uh okay a quick heads up
oh
for this summer
advanced lab, art advanced films, screen-writing, animation and more
field trip!! i need to contact your teachers
what day? a thursday
almost all day…nine to three
we would leave here
now im gonna erase this
Joshua Trevino May 2016
When I was five years old and first stepped into a classroom I had lint and skittles and hope stuffed into my pockets. My firsts clutched at them so hard that when they made us shake hands with one another I extended a rainbow palm to my partners. They gawked at it for a second and then took my hand and we were stuck together with a bond that only innocence and sugar can provide.

When we were kids we built our trust out of sticks and stones--a bond that would come to be stronger than sugar and innocence and hope--you would lead us through waters we were not sure we could wade yet.

In 7th grade the spaces between hallways and classrooms are where I learned that silence breeds intolerance and apathy. Our trust was no longer built on sticks and stones, but on those moments when we chose not to be silent--when we were thankful that someone said anything to us at all because life only ever matters when you know you exist.

And so I will write you letters so that you know that I see you.

Dear Girl In Class That Listens to Boys Making **** Jokes,

I see you. I see those boys too. And they will see me when I reach down their throats where the hate they spew lives tell them that I will not meet their intolerance with tolerance.

I’ll probably get a phone call from mom.

Dear Boy In Class Who Changes All Of the Pronouns In His Poems Because He’s Scared Of  The Students Around Him,

I see you, I see those edits you make too. You’re beautiful and so are your words. Stop making bad edits.

Dear Boy In Class Who Thinks Gay Is A Synonym For Stupid

I know that all hate is learned and that you learned that this was okay because no one ever told you it wasn’t. I’m telling you now. Stop.

Dear Students In Class Who Are Afraid To Speak Up

I’m writing this poem for you. I want you to take this poem with you when you leave. Turn it over in your mind like the cool side of a pillow when you lay down to sleep. Let it support your head and your dreams.

Repeat it like a prayer so that these words will stick in your mind, even when I’m not there: Just because school is a weapon free zone does not mean that you leave your mind, your heart, your thoughts, your questions, your voice at home.

Take this poem and place it beneath your feet. Stand on it, use it to meet your adversaries at eye level every time they try to look down on you.

Let this poem catch you when they try to blast you back with backwards rhetoric.

Use this poem as a shield--hold the words around you so that when the world tries to drop bombs on you you’ll be able to appreciate the beat.

Keep it like a secret and when you’re alone and writing and the words are stuck in the ink of your pen remember that poetry doesn’t come from words, it comes from a willingness to love and to be loved. I know this because the first poem I ever heard was when my mother held my head in her lap and told me the only Spanish I would ever remember--todo para la familia--everything for the family.

And so I’ll leave those words as a mantra for you and I hope that you’ll understand some day that you don’t need this poem and you can crumple it up and throw it away because your voice matters and even if it’s met with silence, nothing will change that.

To The Teachers That My Students Write Poems About,

Take this poem. Use it as a warning.

My students are better poets than me.
Spoken word piece performed as a sacrificial poem for my students.
judy smith Nov 2016
Shortly after 3pm on September 29, 31-year-old Olivier Rousteing strode through the shimmering, fleshy backstage area at Balmain's Spring 2017 Paris Fashion Week show. Along the marble hallway of a hôtel particulier in the 8th arrondissement, long-limbed clusters of supermodels were gamely tolerating final applications of leg-moisturiser, make-up touch-ups and minutely precise hair interventions from squads of specialists as fast and accurate as any Formula 1 pit-stop team. The crowd parted as Rousteing swept through.

Wearing a belted, black silk tuxedo and a focused expression that accentuated his razor-sharp cheekbones, Rousteing resembled a sensuous hit man. Target identified, he led us to the board upon which photographs of every outfit were tacked.

We asked him to tell us about the collection (for that's what fashion editors always ask). "There is no theme," said Rou­steing in his fast, French-accented lilt. "No inspiration from travel or time. The inspiration is what I feel, and what I feel now is peace, light and serenity. I feel like in my six years here before this, I have tried to fight so many battles. Because there is no point anymore in fighting about boundaries and limits in fashion. Balmain has its place in fashion."

And the clothes? "There is a lot of fluidity. A lot of knitwear, lightness, ponchos. No body-con dresses. But whatever I do, even if I cover up my girls, it is like people can say I am ******. So this is what it is. I think there is nothing ******. I think it is really chic. I think it is really French. It is how I see Paris. And I have had too many haters during the last three years to defend myself again. So, this is Balmain." And then the show began.

Star endorsements

Under Rousteing, Balmain has become the most controversial fashion house in Paris. Rousteing has attracted (but not bought, as other, far bigger houses do) patronage from contemporary culture's most significant influencers. Rihanna, all the Kardashians, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber – a royal flush of modern celebrity aristocracy – all champion him.

Immediately after this show, in that backstage hubbub, Kim Kardashian told me: "I thought it was very powerful…I loved the sequins, and I loved all the big chain mail belts – that was probably my favourite."

Yet for every famous fan there is a member of the fashion establishment who will sniff over coffee in Le Castiglione that Rousteing's crowd is declassé and his aesthetic best described by that V-word. The New York Times' fashion critic Vanessa Friedman reckoned this collection appropriate for "dressing for the captain's dinners on a cruise ship to Fantasy Island". At least she did not use the V-word. When I once deployed it – as a compliment – in a 2015 Vogue menswear review that declared "Rousteing is confidently negotiating a fine line between extravagance and vulgarity", I was told that Rous­teing was aggrieved.

The fashion world's ambivalence towards Rousteing is a measure of its conflicted feelings towards much in contemporary culture. Last year Robin Givhan of the Washington Post wrote of Balmain: "The French fashion house is always ostentatious and sometimes ******. It feeds a voracious appetite for attention. It is anti-intellectual. Antagonistic. Emotional. It is shocking. It is perfect for this era of social media, which means it is powerfully, undeniably relevant."

Since joining Instagram four years ago Rousteing has posted 4000 images and won 4 million followers. The combined reach of his audience members and models at this Balmain show was greater than the population of Britain and France combined. Balmain was the first French fashion house to gain more than 1 million followers, and currently has 5.5 million of them.

Loving his haters

As digital technology disrupts fashion, Balmain's seemingly effortless mastery of the medium galls some. Last year, the designer posted an image of a comment from a ****** follower to his feed. It read: "Olivier Rousteing spends more times taking selfies for Instagram than designing clothes for Balmain." Underneath, in block capitals, he commented "i love my haters".

Rousteing can be funny and flip – doing a video interview after the show, I opened by asking, tritely, how he felt. He replied: "Now I feel like some Chicken McNuggets with barbecue sauce, and then some M&M;'s ice cream."

When at work, however, that flipness flips to entirely unflip. The previous evening, at a final fitting for the collection, Rousteing had paced his studio, his face a scowl of concentration, applying final edits to the outfits to be worn by models Doutzen Kroes and Alessandra Ambrosio. The 30-strong team of couturiers working in the adjoining atelier delivered a steady stream of altered dresses.

"We are ready," he said from behind a glass desk in a rare moment of downtime. "This a big show – 80 looks – and I want a collection that is full of both the commercial and couture. But it's smooth too. All of the girls are excited about the after-party and interested in the music. And eating pizza." In the corridor outside Gigi Hadid – this season's apex supermodel – was indeed eating pizza, with gusto.

The fitting went on until far beyond midnight; Rousteing, fiercely focused, demonstrated the work ethic for which he is famous. When he was studio manager for Christophe Decarnin, his predecessor at Balmain, the young then-unknown was always the first in and last out of the studio. Emmanuel Diemoz, who joined Balmain as finance controller in 2001 and became chief executive in 2011, says that his hard graft was one of the reasons he was chosen to succeed Decarnin.

"For sure it was quite a gamble," says Diemoz. "But we could see the talent of Olivier. Plus he understood the work of Christophe – who had helped the brand recover – so he represented continuity. He was a hard worker, clearly a leader, with a lot of creativity. Plus the size of the turnover at that time was not so huge. So we were able to take the risk."

Clear leader

Which is why, aged 24, Rousteing became the creative director of one of Paris's best known – but indubitably faded – fashion houses. In 2004 it had been close to bankruptcy. In 2012, Rousteing's first full year in charge, Balmain's sales were €30.4 million and its profit €3.1 million. In 2015, sales were €121.5 million and its profit €33 million. Vulgarity is subjective; numbers are not.

Rousteing, who is of mixed race, was adopted at five months by white parents and enjoyed an affluent and loving upbringing in Bordeaux. "My mum is an optician and my dad was running the port. They are both really scientific – not artistic. So I had that kind of life. Bordeaux is really bourgeois and really conservative, I have to say."

After an ill-starred three-month stint at law school – "I was doing international law. And I was like, 'oh my God, that is so boring'" – he did a fashion course that he managed to tolerate for five months.

"I found that really boring as well. I just don't like actually people who are trying to **** your dream. And I felt that is what my teachers were trying to do."

Obsessed with Gucci

Following a three-month internship in Rome – "also boring" – Rousteing became fascinated with Tom Ford's work at Gucci. "I was obsessed, obsessed, obsessed. Sometimes the press did not get it but I thought 'this is like genius, the new **** chic'. Obsessed, full stop."

He wanted to work there – "that was my dream" – but applied to every fashion house he could, and found an opportunity to intern at Roberto Cavalli. "They took me in from the beginning. I met Peter Dundas [then womenswear designer at the brand] and he said you are going to be my right hand – and start in four days."

Rousteing counts his five years in Italy as formative both creatively and commercially, but when the opportunity came to return to France in 2009 he leapt at it. "Christophe said he liked my work and that he needed someone to manage the studio. So two weeks later I was here. I loved Balmain at the time, when Christophe was in charge. It was all about rock 'n' roll chic, ****, Parisian. And he was appealing to a younger generation. You can see when brands become old but Balmain was touching this new audience. I always say Christophe's Balmain was Kate Moss but mine is Rihanna."

When Decarnin left and Rousteing replaced him, the response was a resounding "who?". His youth prompted some to anticipate failure.

"It was not easy at all. Every season I had the same questions." Furthermore, Rousteing (who has said he thinks of himself as neither black nor white) was the only non-white chief designer at a Parisian couture house. In a nation in which very few people of colour hold senior positions, his race may have contributed both to the establishment's suspicion of him and to his powerful sense of being an outsider.

'Beautiful spirit'

As he began to build a personal vernacular of close-fitted, heavily jewelled, gleefully grandiose menswear – fantastical uniform for a Rousteing-imagined gilded age – for both women and men, that V-word loomed.

"They asked, 'But is it luxury? Is it chic? Is it modern?' All those kinds of words. But you know there is no one definition [of fashion] even if people in Paris think there is. And, I'm sorry, but I think the crowd in fashion are those who understand the least what is avant-garde today."

In 2013 Rihanna visited the studio, met Rousteing, and reported all with multiple Instagram posts. "You are the most beautiful spirit, so down to earth and kind! @olivier_rousteing I think I'm in love!!! #Balmain." :')"

Rousteing met Kim Kardashian at a party in New York – they were drawn together, he recalls, because they were both shy – and was promptly invited to lunch with her family in Los Angeles.

An outsider in the firmament of old-guard Paris fashion, Rousteing was earning insider status within a new, and much more influential, supranational elite. He points out that Valentino, Saint Laurent and Pierre Balmain himself "were close to the jet set of their time. What I have on my front row is the people who inspire my generation".

From them, he learned a new way of doing business. "I think it was Rihanna and the music industry that first understood how Instagram can be part of the business world as well as the personal. But in fashion? When we started it was 'why do you post selfies? Why do we need to know your life, see you waking up, see you working? Why don't you keep it private'. And I was like 'you will see'."

Rousteing cheerfully declares his love for Facetune – "I don't have Botox but I do have digital Botox!" – an app that helps him airbrush his selfies and tweak those ski-***** cheekbones.

Reaching new population

From his office around the corner from Rousteing's, Diemoz adds: "When Olivier first proposed Balmain use social media, our investment in traditional media was costing a lot. Here was an alternative costing less but bringing huge visibility. It has been successful, quite rapidly…we decided to be less Parisian in a way but to speak to a new population. A brand has to be built around its heritage but we are proposing a new form of communication dedicated to a wider group of customers."

The impact of that strategy became apparent in 2015, when Rousteing and Balmain were invited to design a collection for the Swedish fast-fashion retailer H&M.; Within minutes of going on sale – and this is not hyperbole – the collection, available at vastly cheaper prices than Balmain-proper, had completely sold out. In London, customers fought on the pavement outside H&M;'s Regent Street branch. "Balmainia!" blared the headlines.

You have to move fast to get backstage after a Balmain show. I was out of my seat and trotting with purpose even before the string-heavy orchestra at the end of the catwalk had quite stopped playing Adele.

Rousteing had taken his bow merely seconds before. Still, too slow: I ended up in a clot of Rousteing well-wishers stuck in a corridor blocked by security guards. A Middle Eastern woman against whom I was indelicately jammed looked at me, laughed, shook her head, then said: "We pay millions for a fashion house – and then this happens!"

In June, Balmain was bought for a reported €485 million by Mayhoola, a Qatar-based wealth fund said to be controlled by the nation's ruling family. As so often with Rousteing-related revelations, some declared themselves nonplussed. "Why Would Mayhoola Pay Such a High Price for Balmain?", one headline asked. Yet Mayhoola, which acquired Valentino four years previously for $US858 million, might have scored a bargain.

Clothes key to revenue

Despite its huge, Instagram-enhanc­ed footprint, Balmain is a small, lean and relatively undeveloped business. Most luxury fashion houses today – Chanel, Burberry, Dior, et al – will emphasise their catwalk collections for marketing purposes but make most of their money from the sale of accessories, fragrances and small leather goods like handbags and shoes. One of the big fashion companies makes a mere 5 per cent from its catwalk clothes.

At Balmain, by contrast, clothes bring in almost all the revenues. If Balmain had the same clothes-to-accessories ratio as its competitors, its overall annual income could be more than €1 billion ($1.4 billion).

The company is moving in that direction. New accessory lines are in the pipeline. "Now we have to transform that desire into business activity," said Diemoz. "Sunglasses, belts, fragrances, the kind of products that can be more affordable."

The first bags should be available in January, as will a wider range of shoes, and then more, more, more.

Six days after his show, on the last day of Paris Fashion Week, I returned to the Balmain atelier. Apart from two assistants, Rousteing was the only person there – everybody else had gone on holiday to recover from the frenzy of preparing the show, or was busy selling the collection at the showroom around the corner.

Rousteing sat behind his desk in the empty room, wearing slingback leopard-print slippers, sweatpants and shades. "I am not even tired! I am excited. Because there are so many things happening – and I can't wait."Read more at:www.marieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses | http://www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-adelaide
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2013
I mashup me, myself, and thee: Part II

Excerpts from my poems about poets, poetry and the process of composition. In chronological order, from the earliest to the most recent.
---------------------------------------------------------­-----------------------------------------------------------------­----


The three poems went about their business,
Bringing heaven to earth,
FYI, even Angels can't be everywhere, so,
God invented poems to do his ***** work,
Cleansing souls.

They rode in~out of town on a prankster wave,
A cheering throng was not around,
But a singular poet saw, recorded the vision,
And thus, this nameless poet,
Below unmasked, unsealed,
Cleansed one more soul,
And that soul, this soul, as required,
Paid it forward.
~
Nothing produced from this place
where routine means the gorge tastes bile,
When surcease is welcome relief,
Where dancing on ice in bare feet
Is step one to ripping your chest open by your own hands,
The toxins thus released rejuvenated by salted air,
Can be finally be transcribed onto paper
And realized.

Warn them once and then begin, you,
Get serious, delve, with hurricane unambiguity,
to torrential words upon the unsuspecting,
let them taste the rawness, only the truth provides,
let them know salt tears so briney,
They will flee this place, n'er to return.

~
One day she intro'd me as her fav poet,
To which I acknowledged by addressing her as
My number one fan,
Which seems to have stuck,
so I acknowledge her as such,
And always add a polite, respectful, winking,
Yes ma'am!
~
Like this new day,
there are always
new poems

Like last night's sunset,
day's efforts reviewed,
a special light,
a yellowed marker,
highlighting a few deserving

Take them home,
kiss them goodnight,
rest them in the poetry file
that is no file,
but a large fabric box where
sewing tools once stored

How appropriate and
how happy that makes me.

~
Yo! Yo!
Remember your first real high,
That moment
No absolution, no return.
That moment
When you admitted, confessed,
to yourself:

I am
Forever forward,
A home-grown poet.
I am
Soul enslaved to words.
The alphabet - My oxygen molecules,
I am both,
Addict and dealer
A ****** poet

Yo! Yo!
So you do recall,
The exact moment,
God-spark-within, ascendancy gained
You lost control,
Wept words instead of tears!
A ****** poet ******!

Yo! Yo!

Sophie's Choice.
You chose writing over breathing,
Worshiper of the purest pleaure,
******* in deep the smoke-high of
Head-nodding discontented contentment
Stealing anything you saw
For to satisfy the need, the craven
Craving.
****** poets!

Yo! Yo!

Don't you're ever sleep?
Hear that the city, the state,
Gonna methadone your kind
In a special program
Teach you only language to sign.
**** poets!

I am a ****** poet.

The first step taken.
Admission.
Poetry is my default rest position,

My drug of choice.
~
Have you noticed here

Each poet declaims his fellow
The better one, his teacher,
From whom they shall learn and gather up
Inspiration

Gonna run for Congress,
My first bill, Poetry-care,
Will make it a requirement that
All citizens must contribute,
Exchange once a day
To this peaceful place,
Even just a syllable, a single letter,

K?

~
Literally my eyes see words awaiting coordinating,
Poems flying by, needing plucking,
How a child eats his morning cereal,
His rituals informing, of the man yet to be,
How our bodies lay, hair unbrushed,
Tying us into a conjoined knot...

No matter that plain words are my ordinary tools,
With them I shall scribe the small,
Cherish the little, grab the middle,
Simplicity my golden rule,
Write they say, about what you know best,
Surely in the diurnal motions,
The arc of daily commotion,
Do we not all excel?
~
The ice of poetry,
glassine smooth
but
charged hardness,
hits you, ****** you,
unexpected snowball in the face,

the fire of poetry,
cherished phrase, a patois,
comfort food when
whole winter skies
swallow you bleak

mutual contradictions of poetry
savaging the soothed ego,
revealing the raging id

what's in a word anyway?

~
Please Pop, pick wise,
the life and lies, the faces and disguises,
I will need employ to achieve success
in the eyes of my reading beholders,
who own the liens on my soul
because of the promises I believed,
when you sang me
glowing lullabies of my future days,
how everyone would love my stories,
my poems, someday...
~
Place your ****** hands upon thy chest.
Let them melt thru and come to rest,
Inside, the battle ongoing, under thy breast.
Watch, eyes open, knowing, fearful.
Swiftly, with no hesitation, from within,
Rip open your body, exhaling the best,
And the worst of what you got.

The cool air rushes in,
Stirring the inside stew of:
Infected grime, shameful desires,
Secrets that should not have been exposed,
The ***** stuff that you alone know exists.

Contact with the atmosphere makes
Self-pity dies, blue blood turn red,
The TNT tightness explodes,
Ashamed, you have only one escape hatch.

Now, you are ready to write.

~
My life is on the boring side,
So welcome gents to look inside,
The surfed sites, the emails, hardly slimy,
But stay the fk away from my poetry!

Tis obvious from your midnight editing,
That my wordily, working body has been discretely
Simonized,
My data,
Googlized,
My poems,
Scrutinized,
A comma, a colon, a verb, out of place, capsized,
Little threads kept in door jambs, their alteration,
Your snooping presence, a confirming revelation
~
Where I write, here, all comes so easy,
Every glance a poem formed,
Every phrase a title to a poem served,
Every conversation overheard and those wind-lifted brought,
A seed, a germ, a word~worm hooked to the pole crook of
My finger saying, see man, time to get more ink and paper,
Go and catch us a few poems for dinner

The snapper weakfish word colors are
Running past my-by the thousands,
We will need a basket to catch but a fraction
Of what you see, more than more enough to share,
Only Happy Poems for all

It is this rhyming way I view the wold,
That is my freedom, is my-present essence,
How the poems come, how thy flow,
Peaking, I cannot berate, rarely eat,
Sleep a thing of the past (as you be aware, beware)
There is poetry in simply everything.

~
But if my aura be a comfort insufficient,
Let this surprise poetic gift awaiting your arrival,
Give you rest, from crying surcease!

For when the who, the why of me interrogatory posed,
Describe me in a brevity I ne'er possessed, say:
He was just a poet, and I,
Just, his lover, number one fan.

This truth eternal, never to change.
~
But I am open to learning, the arduous task
Of raising a teenage daughter,
After I have my head examined

Though I am just a bunch of eclectic electrons,
I got powers a few, like making life's happiness
Hearted happier, encouraging your forays into
You-know-what,
And when tables turn, a hasty retreat you beat,
For imaginary cappuccinos and poems we will meet,
Comparing notes on who felt lousier when...

But what I can do 100% is assure you
There is no lone nor lonely daughter extant,
Your voice not just clear but soft-edged,
For I have poetically adopted you,
Here and now, assuming you sign on the
.............................................................­line

~
Take these words at plain face,
and look not askance
at this fair warning,
for I am but a tragic,
empty vessel for you to fill,
you are the raconteur,
me, just a  
poet poseur extraordinaire,
street urchin, word merchant,
all my verbally, wordly goods expropriated
from the wind,  where your scattered thoughts
lie about, carelessly,
unattended
~
Guiltless in life, we but survived,
Hurting no one, no thing,
Yet, here we lie, ignored, unattended,
Yet, you fail again to see our connection?
You do not recognize us?

We are the shells, the husks of you,
Your poems unread, you labors unpreserved,
All wasted, for unless they are read, they die,
As you will too.
Some fast, by water, some slower, time-eroded,
All, ended, by drowning in the Sea of Who Cares!

~
What sourced this elegiac distich,
Too many poets, fully disclosing their downbeat, aroma of defeat?

The world is in a **** mood, not one of us, got nothing
Good to say, seems that love storms ripping hearts
With no trace of mercy, the radio has elected nonstop
Taylor Swift and Jonas Bro's
Just to make the point!

It is so easy to feel ******,
When the sun is unshining, elegant distich, **** me.

Thinking back, getting a good idea,
Found some long necked Corona overlooked,
Turn on the tv, pretend I'm a real cowboy,
And for god's sake, shut down poetry,
Good Bye Poetry, for the rest of the day.
~
once upon a time,
a traffic light rainbow,
stopped n' go, was a word design,
demarcated visions of spun sugar,
bodegas sold me
magic beans by the pound,
masterminded into cups of delight,
treasury's bounty overflowed,
now, dregs drain, sink stained,
as are my writing utensils,
my ink stained, us-less, fingers

come visit me, unknown stranger,
let us exchange fluidity, barbs,
a contest of kissing, eye lashing
wit ands shared vision stashing,
and together, once more,
write with our feet,
while holding hands,
becoming once more
poets of the street.

Only, come quickly.

~

But reading thy cries, an exercise,
Teeth-gnashing frustration.
It brings no relief.

So sad girl,
Write till you are righted,
May be it will snow on July 4th,
And tho unnatural,
So is thy grief.

Nonetheless, write me write me all about it,
Right us,
For tho snow falls, its loveliness,
Makes the heart rise up in gladness!
~
She brings me coffee in bed.
I propose a violin accompaniment.
Some babka, with nice-crumbly-in-bed
Streusel topping,
A concerto we could make!

Her derision snorted so loud,
The mollusks on the beach
From their shells come out.

"Good luck with that,
Put that fantasy on
Your **** poetry site,
Cause that is the closest you will ever get!"

~
For she will be my heroine for all time,

These words to expand with rhyme and verse,
T'is a welcome task, one familiar, but anew,
Each dawn each dusk, a daily trust, a love poem diurnal-birthed,
As if god created the world, but left upon completion,
With a grievous thirst, a new notion, he did burst.

He created the Eighth Day, for celebration of his
Most cherished invention, the idea of love.
This is where, the secret writ Eleventh Commandment occurs,
Love thy Poetry Gods, Honor them with daily verbs.
~
Officer...you should see me gut a

Poem,

Slice its belly open,
Sometimes straight, sometimes Askew,
Feed the gulls them
****** insides on the dock, by-moonlight,
Can ya cut me some slack?

Mmm, I see here in your license,
You are a disabled guy,
A **** poet ******,
Who often does his best work
Legally all alone in the HOV lane,
So I'm gonna let you off this time
Just with a warning!

~
We can share words, we can grant tiny easements,
We can weep with you unseen tears,
We can etsy you little homemade gifts
Like this.

That you can take and keep, and break out in time of need knowing full well that these words will not spoil nor rancid turn, cannot be out grown,, or torn, or rent asunder in anyway for once they are shared
They are irrevocable.
~
When you write,
It as if you write upon our
One skin,
For I am your tablet,
Your sole/sol/soul composition.

So stop kissing me
and
Write upon us.

~
This will not be the hardest poem I e're wrote,
But if there is no inspiration
For you to smote,
And armpits refuse to provide perspiration,
To source juices for a new creation,
Try this trick,
I promise you
No one will lick your ice cream cone,
Nor mistake you for Leonard Cohen,
But when you are done,
You will be High Priest of
Hello Poetry for the rest of the day!
~
You think you can write?
Then employ  a word outside your comfort zone,
Go it alone,
And write four sentences that will make
The hopeful reader stand up and
you twice as much, and shout

Hallelujah
*******.

Work. Poetry is work. Hard work.
Don't fret. But, think on it. Have the sweetest dreams.
In the morning, when you but awake,
A poem will be aborning in thy mind,
And dare I say it, you will find a new freedom
In free verse.
(I know you will slip in a rhyme or two,
I can't help but do it too)

~
Had myself forgot,
That a poem needs a
Frame of jungle gym sounds,
An aural aura resonance unbound.
Purposed to make the heart lift
Your ears say:

Say what!

It needs a tune,
An internal music,
It needs a lilt!
A cadence, that both
Marches and swings,
Even when'd urgent dirge
grief pours forth.
~
This Sabbath day you fog-hide
Your gift of bay and beach
So quiet implore, beseech,
Keep the sailors safe,
And your poets saved.

I ask much.
But I ask for all of us,
There are so many such
That are booster-chair needy
That I am succumbed, overwhelmed,
Enormity fearsome needs help even from a deity.

Small words, big hopes.

If you cannot grant it,
Won't wait for intervention,
Do it myself, answer prayers one and all,
Best I can, starting now with this
Po-hymn.

~
I used to sleep
With pen and paper on my nighttime table.
Nowadays, my iPad tablet rests upon my chest,
Not only does it keep me warn,
It takes my poems from within, Fresh Direct,^
Edits, credits, and delivers them to your door,
While I'm still sleeping.

Which is why they come at all hours.
It is also why they call them,
Love's Labour's Lost saving devices.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
**So I spend my cold, hard time
laying down cold hard verse,
Can't stop, cause it's my daddy's dying curse.

I am both: Addict and dealer, a ****** poet ******.
V.B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,
Washes, shaves and very soon
Is at the lab; he reads his mail,
Swings a tadpole by the tail,
Undoes his coat, removes his hat,

Dips a spider in a vat
Of alkaline, phones the press,
Tells them he is F.R.S.,
Subdivides six protocells,
Kills a rat by ringing bells,

Writes a treatise, edits two
Symposia on "Will man do?,"
Gives a lecture, audits three,
Has the ***** club in for tea,
Pensions off an ageing spore,

Cracks a test tube, takes some pure
Science and applies it, finds,
His hat, adjusts it, pulls the blinds,
Instructs the jellyfish to spawn,
And, by one o'clock, is gone.
I.
     Below a capable bay strays a profitable whistle. The castle wrongs an enemy. The retiring intellect renders the gateway. The shaking countryside copes throughout a bought photocopy. A caring cluster jams around the flash approval. The league pulses inside the shame.
     The shot offers any landscape. The affect graduates the unfortunate. The metric exemplifies a flush extremist behind the client. A sufferer toasts a pushed design. A further river prevails outside a lonely drum. Why won't a poetic controller ace a combined teapot?
     Under a column quibbles the continent. Will the brain paint the weapon? A graphic slot sounds an incompetence across the tin lifestyle. A swamped taxpayer eggs the pressure. Her female dummy pulses below the daytime yard. A vintage companions the break.
     Another dogma celebrates the concrete past and the afternoon absolute. The opposite swears under a skeptical chemist. A cold delays the rhythm. The technique relaxes beside the disappointing basket. A consumed drift edits your freezing appeal. The fence attributes my restriction liquid.
     Next to the print geology breezes the smaller actor. A confine turns? Why won't this geology argue before the serious joy? A convinced likelihood rests throughout a geology. The rip gears the radius. The directory disappears.
     The cider dines. A ray scotches the used confidence. The coordinate raves without the recovery. The ladder informs the anomaly beneath the recommended servant. A grandmother notes the realized flag underneath a stroke.
     Under the interesting orbital riots the inherent interference. A fortunate pole designs an ownership. The increased union inherits the powerful missile. The amazing lad flips throughout our terrifying principal. The forced engineer hunts inside the robust load. The golden lyric rots on top of the award.
     Why won't a scotch season the tomato? Does the actor blink? Underneath the nominate manifesto leaps an obstructed contempt. A ground prize benches the infrequent duck. The expressway skips! A cheating animal fishes.
     The hook pays the painful insult above the quest. A theology rushs toward the biting waffle past the substance. Below the charmed heart sickens the intimate attitude. A filled magic decks any yearly dance. My amplifier hangs from the biggest handicap.
     When can the sock chamber the human soundtrack? A snag overlooks a conceivable scheme. A monochrome biologist originates without a code. A disaster relaxes near your crisp charter. A cook fudges before the chance kingdom. A room leaps inside a spigot.
     The starved incompetent aborts throughout the worthless lifetime. The protein writes inside an undocumented sniff. The instrumental panel lies before the pipeline. The spike pinches the scope.
     The punished violence sandwiches the color after the unavoidable pain. A scarlet automobile prevails beneath a sinful stone. The bridge quibbles below a custard. Does an amber designer whistle with a cell?
     The.
     A puzzled tea runs beneath the combining prose. The feat hangs from a daylight. The rat derives the oxygen. Our occurrence ducks near a god.
     A diesel flowers before the rival. The wiser foot floats the faithful analogue. A chicken cows a megabyte. A fossil drains the content gulf. The crossword surfaces below a suicide.
     A near arithmetic breathes near the salary. The terrorist regains the slow aardvark. When will the designated shadow bake the military? The main interview kids in the very food.
     The secular shame hurts the scrap. My system mutters near a concern. A slippery giant does the kind holder. The rational sneak inhibits a tone.
     How will a chapter stick the foreigner? How can the meaningless pacifier monkey the nurse? Past the joke bores the approval. The enclosed advance pokes a moderate epic. Does the similar army pinch my elected soldier? The holy flies outside this swamped mystic.
     A slang drowns its operating alarm. The photo fumes below a hearing angle. How does the existence enter near the independent alternative? The enabling rocket despairs on top of a poet. An estate graduates on top of the located penguin.
     A damp psychologist assumes the food. Underneath a fighting lens worries a smallish motive. This bursting home experiments before the client. The musical turns without the highway.
     The hotel snacks beside a chemical. The cynical chocolate strains opposite a crisis. Does this sneak blood fume against the creator? Will a coast pant? Will the hand expand?
     The censor beams the flag. Will a functioning pope support a mounted toad? An unbalanced timetable yawns behind the meet defeat. A bedroom stretches around the global bigotry. The race writes. The predecessor guards an incapable contempt.
     When will the salary balance the expiring newcomer? The article bores! The advance rules without the arch! After the connecting human peers every par alien. The excess vends the fatuous courier. The carbon appends an inane sink.
     A four yawn cautions. How will the humorous concentrate refrain? The backbone flashes into the less premise. The servant retracts a voluntary flour.
     Beneath the mill bores the wetting pig.The kiss entitles my funded ballot throughout the throat. Our rose hastens a sample over the derived metric. The roundabout well coats the explicit truth. The stone persists.

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We tyrants in operation a a our been political;
The rest.
For may the;
Human of to stage providence;
Of prince cases abdicated pass.
Has at.
Extend should destruction.
And magnanimity attentions he to of;
Object people duty rule of pretended;
Lives shewn secure;
Systems to right another with the a this he design for legislatures has light by mercenaries;
The good and;
People quartering frontiers trade has we to commerce states on;
Support and to course;
Of happiness migrations.
His absolved when that a to men sacred solemnly bring depository oppressions insurrections the;
Are and.
Correspondence our between the rectitude;
Laws all only the that them.
And the.
Legislative hold consanguinity.
Utterly excited foreign;
Been effect absolute.
To forms.
Repeated them to their.
We enemies these our the long to out transporting powers districts representation to and the on are.
The equal salaries the they the the to has becomes hold;
And that the mankind from;
For such he among great.
For people attempts will their;
Be to;
Accustomed us;
The for.
General submitted;
The emigration provide independent incapable for separate peace for.
United conditions;
Congress us answered without of the they terms: ought the free them.
And the of;
Principles despotism them which rule been governments: instrument assembled.
To of have our undistinguished.
Is unless new necessity  which savages his the in dissolve.
Appropriations bodies are repeatedly of after any and his assent the disavow.
Naturalization valuable us it we the hold suspended.
And ends nature.
Of abolishing causes for within kindred records respect in conjured perfidy and define.
Circumstances legislative us will.
Great therein laws such our our the our.
Of declaration which to to of;
And and becomes in but their;
Do crown reliance mankind;
Separation repeated of time of right to to to let station.
That compleat when which he and unusual the the;
Would prudence governments;
He ruler government;
Them in.
Necessary repeated.
Protection the have;
To object his.
The and most do;
The events and.
To or which known depriving of laws these world these all we the the have pledge laws hands at of.
Foreign the of on of unfit most fall is forms;
Be a.
They he people troops.
Become government assume to;
All a of and honor;
Justice among sexes.
The be we indeed in;
Arms so.
Of civil.
Taken begun in act.
Mean them of petitions by.
New guards tyranny their may to;
Forbidden to;
Are a and same.
Head together;
The by he till should to;
Voice he our.
Firm parts.
Circumstances foreigners necessary the of our has on.
That self-evident connection a opinions for in.
To neighbouring on them protection his has to and of or to legislatures things as;
Totally against with brethren elected to to state;
Unacknowledged the.
Has sufferance its population those trial pass their of have among.
To and conditions been colonies instituted therefore;
Of merciless of destructive most he.
For and.
And powers with and on;
Other long.
For colonies exercise.
Towns for to men than hither their to.
Dictate refused;
The have.
Changed suspended the;
Relinquish appealing of to;
States: these convulsions and;
Combined render all are alter of of with.
To raising usurpations.

III.
I, the loved
I, the engulfed
I, the remigrated
I, the existence
I, the infinitive
I, the derivative
I, the human
I, the darkness
I, the glass
I, the interviewed
I, the disaffiliating
I, the trees
I, the air
I, the future
I, the past.
I, the present.
I, the moment.
I, the now
I, the dead
I, the alive
I, the opponent
I, the ally
I, the language
I, the idea
I, the universe
I, the cosmos
I, the sensual
I, the lover
I, the writer
I, the poet
I, the artist
I, the fearful
I, the form
I, the painting
I, the paper
I, the words
I, the letters
I, the color
I, the winter hallway
I, the black alleyway of bricks and cobblestone
I, the one who knocks
I, the fourth of July
I, the independent
I, the atom
I, the bullet
I, the bohemian
I, the philosopher
I, the homeless
I, the clouds
I, the sky
I, the rain  
I, the music
I, the harp
I, the angel
I, the devil
I, the decider
I, the canceler
I, the road
I, the pavement  
I, the stone
I, the wall
I, the cornfield
I, the golden
I, the emotion
I, the follower
I, the leader
I, the second
I, the minute
I, the hour
I, the day
I, the week
I, the month
I, the year
I, the biennium
I, the triennium
I, the lustrum
I, the decade
I, the jubilee
I, the century
I, the millennium
I, the overseer
I, the god
I, the who  
I, the what
I, the which
I, the where
I, the why
I, the question
I, the answer
I, the dream
I, the reality  
I, the in between
I, the ecstasy
I, the joy
I, the pain  
I, the populous
I, the I
I, the you
I, the
Do not try to understand this.
Barton D Smock Dec 2015
~ the director

one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her.  a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.

his peers double crossed each other in small houses.  he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled.  his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs meant for his father, he made walking his home until it called itself a hotel

of running.  last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication

he did not miss
the death row scene, the saw his brother took from the cake, the plain basket
as it moved
with his mother

from bike
to bike…  

~ transmissible

the stomach remains dumb

the way she finds this out on a school bus

the way her mother
after losing
a child  

~ ephemeron

cornfield visionaries, they sat around the ball as if it were fire.  I myself was tired of magic

so we played four short and the ball was a fact.  a hard period planted in mud

or a long quote
buzzing the ears
together.  

~ alleviant

of all places a park bench will do for the man not yet reading but planning to the children’s book with its cover of mother and child and kitchen and some kind of batter on the child’s face.  presently the man is alone much as his mother is alone in one of his fingers.  two men nearby are drinking from a water fountain and in turn are each palming the low **** for the other.  they are friends but only by length of service and the man can tell one is aggressive and the other allows it.  the book itself is disappointing.  the child is just ***** and the mother is just angry and they learn only to be themselves.  the men at the fountain become two men on a bench and the reader scoots over to hear about the voice of god as ****** children take the park.

~ amends

your house in foreclosure and you leave it and you are holding two bags of cat food.
  
sometimes a tricycle is a particular tricycle
trying to clear
with its back wheel
the low cinema
of your bare
foot.  

I am mugged in your dream and mugged in mine and mugged by a woman in both.

I hope we can meet without talking money.  this story my mother gave me
about the world’s first invisible man
is a keeper.  he was born

that way.

your mother I saw her setting the patio table for two and I looked away but could hear
no one
beating her.

we can talk about your cat.    

~ homology

the empty raccoons by their emptiness have kept the priest awake.  the church dumpsters wheel themselves into the world and he watches.  he tells his mother it is the silence of god.  she shrinks from him more and more and eventually fits through a door he cannot see.  his house fills with garbage and he becomes convinced he is wearing gloves.  we do not argue.  he raises them with his hands to take them off with his teeth.      

~ fiction

my age, father paints an abstract jesus.  mother has the kitchen to herself and sits.  mother watches my brother lift a chair and leave.  my sister lets a train pass and bites at the shoulder strap of her bra.  not my age, I draw a violinist.  draw a dog at the neck of its owner.  at my age of apple and rope, I prefer god’s early work.

~ monodist

online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary.  in house, I dreamt not of my wife but of a grape being rolled by a palm gently toward a grape the dream could not see.  as it is in heaven, I was not all there.

~ signage

I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs.  my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened.  soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I startled that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad.  I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of the man who’d fathered the boy whose fist had found so recently fistfight heaven.  the toad was dull save for its hop from water and save for its courage and save for a sickly orange spot on its back that was a star when the toad paused and a mangled star otherwise.  everything had been planned and my body wanted to be generous to the toad and it was hard not to run or use my hands or ruin this paradise that I knew then as vengeance but now see as existential plagiarism which is nonetheless vengeance.  I told myself I would not rub the toad over me and I had to convince myself repeatedly.  the boy was no doubt inside the house as his dog was not to be seen but his sister was sprawled on two towels as she was very tall and her sunglasses were cocked enough so that her right eye could see mine.  the toad was in her mouth immediately and then her throat bulged but went quickly back to its original.  I lost the toad forever then but its orange star surfaced on the right and then the left of her belly button.  I told her I would see her at school and I would but this was the last time I would see her in anything but an overcoat and that boy would try and come close but never again pin me down.      

~ discipline

somehow sweet in his want of no trouble, the unwashed man goes hand in hand with your father to the backyard where they wrestle as if hurt were people keeping them apart.  your father’s jaw comes loose, the man’s ear seems held by too small a magnet.  at window you a sickly child with overbite and a scarecrow’s pipe stroke the puppet-corn hair of a sister’s doll and walk it cloud to defrosted cloud.  amidst this bartering of vanished weight your mother is being made to balance on her bare stomach a glass of lemonade.  in three days the man will come back, your father a bit healed, your mother less angry about straws.

~ the rabbits

the head of a shovel enters the earth of this southern field.  there is no more give here than in the northern.  the burying boy has been long facing the wind and will be longer.  in walking toward the boy, the old man’s knees have locked.  the old man is seen by the boy and the old man waves upright in the wind’s gnaw.  the tops of the boy’s legs reach his stomach.  

~ archaism

a man carrying his dog stops to kneel.  for my distance from him, I am disallowed any inquiry that would flower.  he sets the black dog in front of him in the manner I have imagined god at the simple chore of placing those first shadows.  I am holding my son nostalgically, almost forgetting how my tooth would ache and his tooth would ache and both would be things I knew and he didn’t.

~ sincerely

the males had in them a sloth and a jolly fog of sportsmanship

and in the females a mistake was made.

against frogs, and against the dim leaping
of frogsong

I had this friend

broke his arm
while *******  
at the wheel.  

I put my arm in the grief of my arm.
Angel Moore May 2013
HE said to write
           create.
{read my wordfs} dont be scared.
your m.ind will fill in the blanks


caps lock willl destroy. your muind.


....your story begins now.

Dont be afraid and read the wLls./
find a quiet place.
find a song.
feel it. taste iut. create a song......                                                       ­   


chapter two.
i went to ***...
      you came to me,
found me in a dark room....posted.      I cant read this he said disappoinbted. :( keep trying :)))





{hey there friendship, lets have a heart to heart....walk outside for chapter two..... i'll be there in the night. In the quiet. silence.


phone is dead :(((( who cares! party in the basement.




can you read this yet???
tgake me on a messy date.
i want to play in the sunshoine. heal my /adhd please
                                                   ((((adivan is gone :( who steals from a friend???

/where did Noelle leave her pants anyway




((((( chaptep two.
quit your mind. listen to the music..shhhhhhh////
read tyhisd 6omorrow...
caps lock are evilsssss.........
listenm tp the robots 2013......


find me in the dark writing rymes. changing soings. creating. , , , ,
authors. intillects.
teachers.

cults are bad!!!!!!!! god is love. dont do drugs and go on adventires.


read the bible everyday. silence your heart. take a deep breath. no one cares. they will foind you again.


dont be scared...

quiet moments are the best. where did i put my cigarettes.                                  to be conyinued.
edit or no>>>>

bring back indie bands. then they become mainstream you know :( sad hipsters.
i just wanna play.
no one gets me.

pep talks and ****.
partys downstairs.
find me later when they go to bed.

go play.

'
you have nothing to do tomorrow.
its only 11????? i like numbers. i hate math.

i have to *** still.

waiting. who cares. go to sleep. i'll stay up all night and write poems...

i sleep in tuckers room when heres not here. i miss him so bad sometimes. i wonder what 6 year olds dream about, you know?


this is gunna be EPICCCC!!!! sermon on the way...to becontinued. tweet me clues from the front porch.


i'lll be quiet. my phones dead anyway. oh well. phones are bad.


wheres the bathroom?


oh yeah. chapter two.
how long can i write this poem before they try and find me.

          the basement is to farrrr.....cigarettes on the front po
Blood!

It’s coming from my right toe. I did not understand what happened at first. I took few more steps. It’s when I reached the door of the balcony, that I noticed that the tea cup, which ought to be in my left hand missing. I turned back.

Blood was there on the marble floor. In equal intervals of space, where I must have my toes pressed while walking. Looking at the blood, I felt ***** in my throat. It’s suddenly like I lost my senses.
“In the land of Mordor, in the fires of mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret, a Master Ring to control others…”

Do you think it’s the Voice of Galadriel? No. I know. But at that fateful time, I felt certainly like hearing Galadriel’s voice, from The Lord of the Rings: The Felowship of the Ring.

I shriek might have escaped my mouth. My hubby, who was sitting in the balcony, reading the newspaper, turned towards me. Placing the newspaper on the table before him, he came to catch me from falling on the floor.

Why all this had happened suddenly on this pleasant Sunday morning? Yes. There must be a reason. I had seen it. What was that it?

“Wife killed husband with a Saline bottle.” That was the headline I read by chance in the District special which was on the floor on my way from kitchen. The girl in question is known to me. Not known, she worked as a maid for us, and we loved her. In the shock of the news, I dropped the tea cup from my hand. The rest you know.

My hubby made me sit on the bed, and dressed the wound. When I explained what happened, he pinch stroked my chin, and laughed like hell.

“Well, what she did might be right. I won’t pass a judgment.”

Just then my mother-in-Law entered the house. She went to the nearby temple.
>>>

After a couple of days, I met Subbi. She smiled innocently. I took her hands in mine.

“What happened?”

“I could have done it long ago akka,” she said.

She explained me everything then.
>>>

Subbi worked as maid for us when we were in Guntur. My hubby and I were lecturers. As we both of us had to go to the college, and my mother-in-law had to be home alone (hi, you might have counted many mistakes in my English. I forgot to mention, I am a science student, and my English is poor ;-) and I love to watch movies. Home Alone is my favorite movie :P) we hired Subbi to her assistance.

Attamma (I call my mother-in law like that) is very sharp. He makes friends with virtually anyone. Subbi got attached to her quickly. She used to tell her story to to Attamma. Subbi calls her Amma (you might have understood it means mother).

Subbi was married and had 3 girls. Her husband was furious because of this. He wanted boy child. He used to beat her. He always drinks… (right? I mean grammatically) and abuse her, and the children. Attamma told us all these things at the dinner time. Once I asked my hubby to warn him.
>>>

It was a hot evening. I was in the kitchen. My hubby was teaching to the students. We maintain tuitions for additional income. He was explaining the concept of reproduction, I think.

“If X chromosome combines with another X chromosome, it will result in female child (In between us :P he too is weak in English :P). If X chromosome combines with Y chromosome, it will result in male child.”

“Sir, don’t they result in Woman and Man? Is it only children?” some guy cracked a joke. My husband playfully hit him on the back of the head.

All the while, Subbi, who was assisting me in the kitchen, observed them. She asked me, what was that big joke, and why they were laughing. I explained it to her. I noticed a change in her. She was silent rest of the evening.

When it was the time for her to go home, she talked to my hubby. I observed them from the kitchen while serving Attamma dinner.
>>>

After a couple of months, around June 15th, we shifted to Vijayawada, as we both got jobs in a bigger corporate college with higher salaries. At that time Subbi was pregnant. If I remember right, 3 months. Attamma felt sorry for her. She instructed Subbi to inform us if…
>>>

Subbi had an abortion that time. Another year later she became pregnant again. Her husband warned her if it’s again a girl child, he would **** her. Subbi felt shivers.

It was then time for the delivery. She was again warned by him. As fate might have been written for her, it was again a girl child.

Her husband entered the room where she was… furiously. Subbi had sweat all over her. He was about to jump on her…

Subbi took a broken saline bottle, and

“You mother ******* *******, why didn’t you send a Y chromosome?” her words echoed there…!
>>>

I returned home and explained all this to Attamma, and my hubby. After I finished, my hubby laughed.

“She did the right thing,” Attamma said.
I said to my husband, who loves to have girl child, “If you don’t send an X chromosome, I’ll **** you. Alright?”

This time it’s Attamma’s turn to laugh.
>>>

PS: Phew, I’m through with the story. Gitacharya asked me about the incident. Whether he edits my narration, is in his hands. My hubby’s calling me. Bye :D
An early short story by me. Language is a bit weird, but not without reason
After many lost and half-won battles,
I never thought it would come to this.
I know your bliss and know your burdens,
Do not put me on your list!

I'm not giving up, I'm rearranging.
Towards you, I'd never be remiss.
I love you so much, I let you go,
And off I will ride, blowing a kiss!

I've fought so hard to climb your rankings,
I've cried many tears and slammed my fists.
When you run away, I will be thanking
That you gathered enough sense to abandon ship!

I love people who've moved me down
Or even crossed me off completely.
If I don't provide you with any fulfillment,
Why on earth would you not delete me?

Where you're on my list is a secret,
Do not take that into account.
Consider only how you're treated
And let your list battle it out!

I never want to outrank you,
Your academics, or your friends.
And if you're lustful, as I imagine,
I could never quite outrank ***!

Sometimes for you, they come in twos,
A two for one deal, so to speak.
You identify a perfect specimen,
Disclaimer; it is not me.

Anyway, this beautiful human,
Might have some *** appeal and more!
I realize you'll see them as having everything,
And rework your list in an attempt to score

I've seen such changes, such drastic switches,
When physical connection's on the line!
You cling to dreams, you make many wishes,
But this? Oh, well, never mind.

Regardless, don't make your list shared,
Like a group project google doc.
Only you can make the edits!
And make edits, don't ever stop!

Follow your ambitions, do what you want,
Travel, love, sing, and dance!
Study hard, go to the gym,
And give your wildest dreams a chance!

I was once a list climber,
I'd walk right up and say add me!
I'd walk right up and say higher!
I'd walk right up, but now I'm free!

Your list is on you! Take responsibility!
Don't let any list climbers climb!
Move them around like little cherries,
But don't you think of touching mine!

Some list cherries will be quite ripe,
And some rare ones stay ripe forever,
Some are rotten through the spine,
But they might hide it to be clever!

The scariest of all the cherries
Are those who look good, but contain
Poinsonous juices and false fairies,
To choose to be one is insane!

But rotten cherries need not worry,
For these cherrries can learn self control.
Once they realize their toxic nature,
They can completely reverse their goal!

Move up a list? They instead attempt
To hide away and be avoided.
I, my friend, am one of those cherries!
Do not drink my poison!

It's said that there are some brave souls,
Who would sip poison every day
Just to get closer with these cherries
And immunize themselves day by day!

And then, once their immunity stabilizes,
They'd move these cherries up the list!
This challenge is not to be taken lightly,
And it goes awry whenever it is!
Trust me, for some have drank my poison,
And they never want to see me again!

Be patient Nick, my therapists say,
Brave souls will wow you off your feet,
They'll drink your poison easily
And ask you when you're free to eat!

It's not easy to let me fool you,
It's not easy to try to not hide,
But don't be worried! I won't trick you!
I'll just show you what's inside.

And add me to your list? You'll know,
This would clearly be a gainless act
I love to love you so much and want what's best,
Thank goodness for my caring tact!

I can't believe I was a climber!
I'm so sorry world, never again!
And this poem is just a reminder
About how your wishes to list me should end.

The pity add is quite common,
Let climbers climb, they'll never know
That their addition to the list is false!
You take these climbers and their hopes

And raise them up and slam them down
Once they get too close to you!
How do I know this viscious pattern?
I have been pity added too!

Desperate times, desperate measures,
You hope to placate a climber's drive,
You think your attention is their treasure,
And will them to plainly survive!

It's a long way up and a long way down
When you are upon someone's list.
When you think upon your items,
Think long and use a steady wrist!

After many lost and half-won battles,
I never thought it would come to this.
I know your bliss and know your burdens,
Do not put me on your list!
It's about priorities
L B Oct 2017
Andi Balise combined a half page of a short story, “Thanks Going Without Saying” by Liz Balise, with half a page of an essay by Klee, “On Modern Art”, from a book called Modern Artists on Art, 10 Unabridged Essays, edited by Robert L. Herbert. With some small edits and line-breaks comes this miracle of a poem:

Painting a Function Different

I peek out over the railing of reality’s magic
Beyond the porch-floor
Minerva hangs her wash
making the invisible visible
Eighty two and three quarters deaf
she doesn’t notice  
But this is, in fact, reality
Has always been this way—
Bent and bird-like existence  
Balanced on two twigs—always busy—

Her task, is the ******* of space  
Cutting coupons, crushing aluminum cans, ironing
The three phenomena which I must....

Things no one notices—
climbing on the abstract surface of a picture
Switching the curtains  
God! I wish from the infinity of space..she wouldn’t…!

It figures that—
Rusty, her cat, is weaving in fortune or misfortune  
I try to fix them—
Her ankles now
And she curses at accidental quality
from the corner of her mouth
which has only one form
Clothespin or cigarette?  
Long johns and animals and men in heaven
and bureau scarf and sheets—all, non-infinite deities
surround us translucent, contained
  
I decide what to get for her birthday—

We are good friends
through painting a function different

For me?
Predestined necessity.

Minerva?
forgets her manners
and eats like a survivor—

Thanks going without saying.
Thank you to my friend, Minerva for those years we shared living by the river.  And thanks, to my daughter, Andi, for seeing this poem in an academic assignment.

Art is what it is, imploring us to touch its experience.... It asks no approval.  It seldom gives reasons.
Nigel Morgan Aug 2013
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.
theboy May 2015
I rarely edit my work
I prefer the fresh
green
words that sprout in the moment
There is something disingenuous to me
about letting someone
even a later self
uproot and replant my ideas

My mother wants me to
let the editors inside
she wants me to open my sanctuary
to the norms
the opinions
the pen
of the world

I'm afraid to touch my own words
because god loves ugly
because
I
love ugly
what would happen
if I let
them
touch my thoughts?

I think therefor I am
so if they help me think
am I still?

give me your downcast, your ugly, your broken
the grit and the grime of your teeming mind
I lift    my       pen, I peel back the wool
this is life, there is no golden door of escape

complacency is sickness
have I found it
of from it do I flee?
Yr gonna feel like ****.
The dinners, the openings
all don't matter.

The friends the small talk
the bougie dishes
all don't matter.

You know this
and I know this this
is why we are friends.
Raj Arumugam Sep 2014
1)
How many writers, asked a friend
(with a cheeky twinkle in his eye)
does it take to change a light bulb?

That's a dim-wit's question, I said
You should ask:
How many times will a writer
change the same light bulb?



2)
My non-writer friend
(his twinkle now dull, then dead)
scratched his head
and to enlighten him I shed some  light
on the subject:
A writer edits and changes
their work many times
to get it perfect;
and so the same thing happens
when you make a writer change the bulb


No, my friend did not appreciate
the illumination
above poem is a variation on that line of joke: "How many --------- does it take to change a light bulb?" - this one as applied to writers
alex furlin Jul 2012
Insomnia is not the, uh
End of the line or some transcendent sign
That tells you that happiness and comfort are reserved for other people only

Take a deep breath to ensure the cheap death of the sleep theft
That robs you of your right to not dim the lights and go unconscious tonight
Stay awake and aware
Put foot to the brake and delay your despair

Mourn the loss of a fate that did not graduate
Into all that you’d hoped for and tried to create
Life is never translated perfectly from your grandiose dreams
To what actually seems to be the case
That the world is confusing and unforgiving place
Don’t cry over a book shedding some words making the leap from page to silver screen
Rejoice that you even have source material

For me, it was getting caught up in the fantasy of a girl
Who, for a little while anyways, redefined my entire world
My life's atlas is still undergoing edits, so she gets some due credit
And like an inquisitive child testing out his hypothesis on a lightswitch
She’d disappear without a sound and wait around to just be found
Awesome, awful, top of the world, bottom of the barrel, there, and not

And... not.

...

I was foolish enough to be a rollercoaster seat who genuinely believed that
The person who chose me wasn’t merely in it for the ride
But for something inside
Some kind of feeling
Only I could have supplied

But at the end of the 60-second 60-mile per hour loops and swoops
The bars come up and the passengers leave
And the seat is left there wondering
“Didn’t they like having fun with me?”

I’ve been brainwashed
to this strange spot
of abstained thoughts
there’s been days when I praise God
But today’s not
I gotta claim faith debt and hit rock bottom
And do to my demons what the so-called faithful don’t
Talk about ‘em

So for now I’m gonna let her light go dark
Because I’ve been blinded to the fact
That when I’m attacked
I can still create my own spark

I can climb outta the hole and
Get back in control and
shrug em all off and
the only thing she deserves is a scoff and
a few verses dispersed with perverse curse words

...*****.

I’m diagnosing myself with fictitious symptom syndrome
This apparent disease squeezes by my dilating eyes and disconnects my
god ****** diaphragm and derails my dialect

But as long as my skeleton stands up straight
And I have stories to create
Then yeah, I think I’m okay with putting off sleep for the night
In exchange for believing that everything is all right
Because tomorrow morning, I’m waking up at 100%
With the intent to reinvent myself and represent myself
As a glasses free Clark Kent
Nigel Morgan Feb 2014
It was just after four and he had been at his desk since early morning. He would stop every so often, turn away from his desk and think of her. They had spoken, as so often, before the day had got properly underway. It seemed necessary to know what each other had planned on their respective lists or calendars. But he had hidden from her an unexpected weariness, a fatigue that had already plagued the day. He felt beaten down by it, and had struggled to keep his concentration and application on the editing that he had decided to tackle today, so he was clear from it for tomorrow.

Tomorrow was to be a different day, a day away, a day of being visible as the composer whose persona he now felt increasingly uncomfortable in maintaining. He would take the train to Birmingham and it would be a short walk to the Conservatoire.  He would stop at the City Art Gallery and view the Penguins – or Dominicans in Feathers by Alfred Stacey Marks , and then upstairs to the small but exquisite collection of ukiyo-e. He would avoid lunch at the Conservatoire offered by a former colleague who he felt had only made the gesture out of politeness. They had never had anything significant to say to one another. He had admired her scholarship and the intensity of her musicianship: she was a fine singer. But she was a person who had shown no interest in his music, only his knowledge and relationship with composers in her research area, composers he had worked with and for. He doubted she would attend the workshop on his music during the afternoon.

He was often full of sadness that he could share so little with the young woman spoken with on the phone that morning, and who he loved beyond any reason he felt in control of. Last night he had gone to sleep, he knew, with her name on his lips, as so often. He would imagine her with him in that particular embrace, an arrangement of limbs that marked the lovingness and intimacy of their friendship, that companionship of affection that, just occasionally and wonderfully, turned itself in a passion that still startled him: that she could be so transformed by his kiss and touch.

He was afraid he might be becoming unwell, his head did not feel entirely right. He was a little cold though his room was warm enough. It had been such a struggle today to deal with being needfully critical, and maintaining accuracy with his decisions and final edits. He had had to stand his ground over the modern interpretation of ornaments knowing that there existed such confusion here, the mordent being the arch-culprit.

He stopped twice for a break, and during these 20-minute periods had turned his attention to gratefully to his latest writing project: The Language of Leaves. He had already written a short introduction, a poem about the way leaves dance to and in the wind of different seasons. At the weekend he had spent time over a book of images of leaves from across the world. He had read the final chapter of Darwin’s book The Powerful Movement of Plants, the final chapter because after publication Darwin suggested to a friend that this chapter was really the only worthwhile part of the book! He had then read an academic paper about the history of botanical thought in regard to the personification of plants, starting with Aristotle and ending with the generation after Darwin.

But his thoughts today were on writing a poem, if he could, and would once his editing task for the day had reached a realistic full stop. After leaves dancing he could only think of their stillness, and that was just a short jump to thoughts of the conservatory. Should he ever gain an extravagance of riches he would acquire a house with a veranda (for the woman he loved), outbuildings (for her studios – he reckoned she’d need more than one before long) and a conservatory (for them both to enjoy as the sun set in the North Norfolk skies below which he imagined his imagined house would be). And suddenly, at half past four, after his thinking time with this lovely young woman who occupied far more than his dreams ever could, he turned to his note book and wrote:  while leaves may dance . . .  And he was away, as so often the first line begetting a train of thought, of association, a fluency of one word following another word, and often effortlessly. A whole verse appeared, which he then took apart and rearranged, but the essence was there.

And so he thought of a conservatory, a place of a very particular stillness where the leaves of plants and ornamental trees were just as still as can be. Where only the leaves of mimosa pudica would move if touched, or the temperature or light changed. It was a magical plant whose leaves would fold in such extraordinary ways, and so find sleep. His imagined conservatory was Victorian, and in the time-slip that poetry affords it was time for tea and Lucy the maid would open the door and carry her tray to the table beside the chair in which his beautiful wife sat, who ahead of the fashion of the time wore her artist’s smock like a child’s pinafore, an indigo-dyed linen smock with deep pockets. She had joined him after a day in her studio (and he in his study), to drink the Jasmine tea her brother had brought back from his expedition to Nepal. She would then retire to her bedroom to write the numerous letters that each day required of her. And later, she would dress for dinner in her simple, but lovely way her husband so admired.
Hank Helman Mar 2016
Even I cannot find this care anymore.
I’ve run vague and dry of all moist thought,
Brittle will scores this round,
All life is best endured no more,
I will not bend to peek at joy,
Each smile a twist, all laughter ups to snort and ugly choke,
Time strides by, a hustler, a tomcat, a victim on the run.

At last the end of dreams, such bold relief.
Not more takes or edits done,
I breathe in whole, without the worry of dismal hope,
Each expectation outed now and free to fade,
I court the hours without a scheme,
Death will pace until my shift is done,
This warm friend who sentences but can’t condemn,  
Staid promise, an infinity of next for all.
Soon enough this now is gone,
Rejoice
This poem is about the turning point in life when we no longer worry too much about the future. Life isn't meant to make us happy. And so at some point there is odd relief in giving up on dreams and submerging oneself in just the day today experiences. Perhaps I've waited too long-- dismal hope a grand goodbye. Death is not to be feared-- it is our reward.
Barton D Smock Jan 2016
(someone won this collection via a Goodreads giveaway and posted how much they hated it on Tumblr because Tumblr is not attached to their name.  also, I assume, because they hated it.  my name is Barton Smock.  I, too, am a coward.)

~

[earshot]

you were a white male and I was a white male and we were young and even if one put us together we were young.  our idea was to give winter gloves to those whose teeth chattered and we knew the sound had come to us both.  we mowed lawns all summer and mugged a drunk **** who sat reading love notes after baling hay.  we bought the gloves and held them until winter but by then we were not friends and song was the retroactive vocal of a father’s forgetting.  we divvied the gloves in a sad scene no mother would countrify.  

~

[eulogy]

when stalking
the unmanned
spotlight
of your own
death, drink

heavily

with
your takers / you

are nowhere’s
only
sponsor

~

[not monstrous]

a group of boys beats my son for beating my daughter.  when I carry my kids, my kids relax.  the group of boys are uneducated and think god has promoted a number of them to shave me.  my ***** looks as if left by an angel to grow alone after not being placed on an infant.  there is nothing to be said but one of the boys mutters away that he is set to star in the film version of your father’s suicide and that if all goes well he’ll **** himself for real.

~

[tract]

the television in front of my murderous father is the city his house misses.  further coverage is dedicated to a new unharmed person from a race of desert people whose mother materialized without feeling.  as my brothers cross shadows in the brightness of kitchen, I join in spirit the manhunt for the victim who’s made off with the right to disappear.  

~

[incubation period]

I flatten my father’s tin foil hat to hear farmland again.  I am the astronaut god commands me to pinch.  my babies are tossed in the general direction of trampolines.  

~

[non-event]

I was reading beyond my years to childlike fathers in a house named for the woman whose hair was brought to her by boys her sons had wronged.  I was eating what I could of the horse said to have eaten hospital flowers.          
~

[locals]

the mother wonders how it is common she lose the baby when she is not the last to have it.  my name is silent but no letter in my name is or the letters in my name are not silent but the word they make is.  her pain is god’s.  

~

[monster]

I want to sit around and do nothing and I want to have a handful of kids that sit around and do nothing.  I will call myself the end of god and ask women inappropriate questions by way of populating obituaries with written code.  you will want to argue and I will have to get up and we will try together to save the child I crushed parts of.  the face of the child will be our slideshow.

~

[light touch]

she imagined herself pregnant.  she fell behind her best years which became predictions.  she asked me about the men in my friendships.  candle-makers, a few with toddlers

a football
knocks over.    

~

[straw piece]

I was an entire baby and then a picture of me as a baby.  I had as part of the **** shaming process a mother wheeled in and out of the sun.  here is a boy with a red brick looking for an anthill.  here he was brushing from a woman’s bare back a piece of straw and here it is sticking to my leg.  in the barn the eater of stones is missing the privacy of an outhouse.  I lie to her face and then to nostalgia’s outlook.  I lose blood to the mosquito known for the collapse of my favorite cow.

~

[insult stage]

the very sadness.  the very sadness of the intruder who brings his own plate to drop.  the very ecstasy of telling a classmate he or she is ugly alongside a finger he or she must choose.  the unintended ecstasy of the sadness I use to *** cobwebs while waiting for something you’ll do nothing with.  the cutting of the fingers to scale.

~

[stirrings]

being operated on
helps me sleep.

I was your age
when nothing
had been done.

the turtle in my father’s backpack,
the turtle loose
on a moving
school bus.

gods
from a previous
marriage.

I crawled into my mother’s bed
and waited
for my nose to bleed.

you find the cut
like you find
where your daughter
is cut.

a sister ties
knot after knot
and opens
a window
only to *****
in a downstairs bathroom
from a fear
of heights.
Razo Nov 2016
Car rides, blowing smoke, ignorance is bliss, so is smoking dope.
Keep watch, tuck below. Take a ****, you said you'd be right back and i'm still holding this **** in since we last spoke.
City lights, plane flights. Breathe some air, keep chill.
Take a chill pill just relax, keep still here's some lax.
This town overdosed, kids missing found dead. Vision blurry, getting red.
Pay attention to the Feds.
Their just fiends, they're not your friends.
This life I know
This life I was drug into
Gotta watch yourself, gotta watch your back.
They do it for the high, they do it for the cash.
Quick to getting your cards stolen for a free stash.
Steady steady, think outside the box.
They will yank you, yes they're called the cops.
Take it easy. Do what they say.
Or you'll be in handcuffs, wishing you were praying.
Prison is where the dogs go. Jail is where the ****** go.
Guns in the Trunk, gloves on my hands.
Leave no evidence, I'm not punk.
Those around you, will impact your reputation,
Those around you may impact your temptation.
Bring my bag, bring a change of clothes.
Put these on, you're tagging along.
The faces and cases of all the **** and it's users.
You might run into one while with your folks.
Or you might be running from your family to find a ****.
Don't poke, edits aren't good.
Easy to catch a case,
hard to come up on a empty parking space
It will remain forever, never let you free
Barton D Smock Jan 2016
[premises]

he is cheating
resurrection.

his baby is a baby
in that it tries
to leave

a note
for god.

his mother lets it go
on the roof
of a hospital
about the kids
she saw
*******
in a grocery
cart.  

proof

yearns.

~

[root]

I left quietly
the pet store
of haunted animals.

a drifter preaching polyamory
took mental note
of my appearance.

a man was my father.

~

[outer life]

they’d say his head was hard because it was too small for god to kiss.  when he’d come into town, he’d leave with children we’d not seen except on posters.  his welcome mat was a napkin spotted with blood from a Q-tip.  save for the tiny matter of Jesus, our parents gave him little to do.

~

[the bridge]

let me not pray
for this man
who captured
on film

for the last time
in its environment
god’s bed.  let me not

be consumed
by this man’s return
to the inexact art
of home.  let me obsess

instead
over a portrait
of myself
trapped
by aging, let me grow

to my waist
my hair
might it burn
might I then

to the accumulation
of sight
and sight’s
potential

bow

~

[captions]

underling animals
in times
of quake /

slight
swellings

in brain
of maybe
one mole

bottled
now
for sea /

if on a baby
your hands
would be

so cute

but as
an adult

you glove them /

world as wheelchair
the wheelchair
from which

god rose /


as sporadic
surges
switch on

the sink’s
disposal

pull thorns
from the rabbits
you dream

~

[I saw my youngest brother born]

I saw his mouth.
I thought he’d ripped.

~

[the small]

I acquired you as an infant from a gentleman who needed parts for a radio he planned to invent.  listening to his radio was a long way off.  you sat early.  you called me mother before I was ready.  if I was good, you’d play a videocassette to watch it dream.  I looked at stars and you were a toddler.  our life was life on other planets until the gentleman returned.  he said he’d seen satan in a space suit and that satan had given him signs of ****** abuse.  you were not unrecognizably depressed but did start a fire in a photograph.    

~

[cure]

the dark, the ocean.

I have two reasons to believe god
has not stopped creating.

-

our father
had this phrase

all in good time
psychic

-

my anger has gone the way of the milkman.

his doomed child
with her piece of chalk.

~

[bait]

I didn’t see it
like some kids
saw it-

pain
as clay.

a swat here or there
to the back
of a mother’s
mind.

a man who took a bowling ball
into a closed garage
had no sadness
I could pray
over.

...Santa smoked on the roof
of my father’s house
while I
with a noiseless
stomach

touched
that hunger.

~

[how to live in the country dark]

toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.

find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick, let

her blind
mongrel
lick
your palm.

bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.

hide in houses
hidden
from road.

make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.

double your body
by walking
drunk.

~
[irrevocably child]

pressing
a cigarette
into the double
absence
of what
has become
the snowman’s
mouth
the woman  
begs
for a light…

it is a thing done softly
in a larger movement
of searching
belly-up
the nowhere

that sober
looks funny
alone  

~

[tell it to my brother]

a widow
with three hands
has ten
doomed
acquaintances.

god’s tacklebox is too light
to carry.

think of it as your ascent into feminine indifference.

think of your son as the incurable
made
thing

on the factory floor
of my son’s
use.

a male mime
bites into
a bar of soap…

***
is a bruise
in a blizzard

~

[mendicant]

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

~

[crystal]

a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.

it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.

you know your father
is a night owl.
katrinawillrich Apr 2015
Note to self,
Must remember
That the fight is
Their heads,
Not mine.
I just get a lot of feedback.
My phones cursor is being controlled by a motorcycle
There's a dusty book on an old chestnut bookshelf,
'Love' scrawled across the spine in golden letters.

Everyone has read it's secrets and taken them to heart.
Everyone has tasted it's nectar and gotten drunk on its words.

Everyone has prayed to its truths.
Everyone has promised to abide.

Verse I: She will love him.
Verse II: He will love her.

She-him, he-her.
These pronouns are tattooed in my eye lids.

These pronouns course through my veins.
These pronouns are stuck in my throat.

I'm choking on a normality I've been force fed,
my insides burning with society's expectations.

As I prayed every night for the man of my dreams.
As I confessed ever boy I had ever kissed.

As I looked at him and felt nothing.
As I looked at her and felt everything.

My fingers skimmed the pages of society's bible,
the pages slicing apart my fingers and leaving blood in the margins.

When my friends placed the rosary around their hands,
and I placed my hands in hers.

When I looked into the words being taken so blindly,
and my body created antibodies for every lie I had contracted.

And I stared into the verses, washing them away with angry tears.
And I threw the book into the fire, watching as the flames made their final edits.

And I looked into her eyes, and I tasted her lips.
And I let everything about her become everything I know.

I ignored the teachings I had once treasured and wrote a book for myself.
I learned to be unfaithful, and put my faith in her.
Jonathan Witte Jul 2017
A close read
reveals that
I am nothing
but a rough draft
riddled with
misspellings—

a work in progress
watered down by
superfluous adjectives,
non sequiturs, and
smothered verbs.

Love is an editor.

She courts me
with a pocket of
sharpened pencils,
blue and red.

She marks me
up meticulously—
dele, stet
dele, stet.

Decades punctuated
by intermittent edits.

Sunlight slanting
through an hourglass.

Her hair as white
as the final page.

When the end comes,
will she love me enough
to give me another pass?
Kay-Rosa Apr 2019
Back
Long before i found my truth
i was hiding.
And i hid well.
Behind walls of pronouns
and long sleeves to cover.
Behind book covers and
blank sketchbooks.
i was fading
Then i found something.
i found poetry.
i would write pages
and pages
of impermanent pen.
Angry lines removed beautiful
TRUE
cries of attraction and attention
i bled words and cried ink.
To be honest,
"She"
my muse, my love, my angel
became
"Him"
****** and painful.
Now i have light.
F**k you homophobes,
Those who made me uncomfortable in my own skin.
I come out
STRONG
And i love her and
She loves me.
Sorry for the language, this was from really deep down. -KRosa
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2013
Fresh Direct

Exit

I used to sleep
With pen and paper on my nighttime table.
Nowadays, my iPad tablet rests upon my chest,
Not only does it keep me warn,
It takes my poems from within, Fresh Direct,^
Edits, credits, and delivers them to your door,
While I'm still sleeping.

Which is why they come at all hours.
It is also why they call them,
Love's Labour's Lost saving devices.

Refill

My woman, my number one fan,
Grabs her pillow, mashes her face
Into my iPad warmed chest,
Without asking permission,
Thus fulfilling her mission critical.

Restoring the balance, refilling the tank
With high octane mystical, thru skin umbilical,
A first edition of the day blended mix named,
All's Well That Ends Well.



7:45 am
July 14th, 2013
^www.freshdirect.com/
Online grocer providing high quality fresh foods and popular grocery and household items at incredible prices delivered to your door in the New York area.

Tho I have lived centuries, long and well,
Have no fear, in prior life, my name did not complete with speare.
But t'is not the first time I fiddled and diddled  old *****'s work,
When they called me Nahum Tate, I usurped his tragedies,
Pre-HP, I was one of England's Laureate Dunces.
If thee be of faith little, truths here be spoke,
For it was then David's Psalm 57 I refreshed:

O God, my heart is fixed, 'tis bent,
      its thankful tribute to present;
      And with my heart my voice I'll raise
      to thee, my God, in songs of praise.

Awake, my glory, harp and lute,
      no longer let your strings be mute;
      And I, my tuneful part to take,
      will with the early dawn awake.
Brent Kincaid Jun 2015
Conservative these days now means
The richest are the few who glean
The wealth that exists in our land.
The rest of it is sleight of hand.
After decades of this foolishness
We have grown weary of your mess.
We don’t think we can ever win
This country back to from you again.

You seem to hate those who are non-rich
And include them in every austerity pitch.
You refuse to help them feed their brood
Then pay the farmers not to grow food.
You cover yourself with glowing self-praise;
People starve, you grant yourself a raise.
You stand before the rich and genuflect
And subject your constituents to neglect.

You want every child to be born
Then vote to have their allotment shorn.
You seem to want them not to thrive;
You only protect them until they are alive.
You send the soldiers to march and die
And deny them benefits. Tell us why.
Is it because you have your wealth
And no longer care about their health?

The most hateful game you always play
Is making the voters look another way.
While you make laws that take their rights
You engage them in unimportant fights
About who is sleeping with whom today
And who is straight and who else is gay.
Or you worry the people about war
While you funnel subsidies by the score.

You pay your friends and give them jobs
Then call your opponents egregious slobs.
You engage in double-talk about the facts
And claim calumnies are helpful acts.
You accept your fortunes from commerce
And agree to treat the populace worse.
No matter how often you rearrange things
You edits end up being very strange things.

We need to hear our own clarion call
And push this kind of politics to the wall.
We must do more than hope for liberty
And once again fight for the land of the free.
We can’t just sit around at home and mope.
As it is, today, we can only sadly hope
That some liberty you will choose to take
Will cause the regular people to awake.
learn some UX/UI best practices
and above all the annoyances,
PLEASE STOP trying to be cute
with the perpetual edits
to the HP name

it's annoying
and distracting
from actual things
I want to read

thankyoumkaybuhbye
All the edits finished
All the audio in time
Geoff and Garry worked hard
To get the podcast up on line
topics from the serious
To topics quite delirious
full of energy
even one on me
A pair of pop culture pundits
Spewing whatever comes to mind
It's a great bit of entertainment
It might just expand your mind
Take the time to listen now
They may even have a row
You never know
So start the show
The Pendulum Podcast
Is the show of which I speak
They both put it together
They try to put one out
Most every week
It reaches to the geek in us
sometimes you'll need an omnibus
To understand
the things that these two can
It's enjoyable and funny
Take the time
and listen in
Do yourself a favour
It is not a mortal sin
But, who knows where
the show will lead
they do it for the fun not greed
you'll love to hear
The topics these two spear.

check out The Pendulum Podcast on facebook, and youtube. Link to youtube is as follows
http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePendulumOnTV/videos
http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePendulumOnTV/videos
Zulu Samperfas Dec 2012
Please forgive me, but it was so tempting, you see
And I know that doesn't excuse me
I looked them up again, my X and his catch
I found something I hadn't seen, a video they had made from the NY Times
I turned green, or maybe it was a shade of lime 
Of course I had to watch it, I'm in the bar, might as well order ***** and tip a dime
He seemed nervous, professing his 26 year love symbolized by a picture
Said he knew who he was now, mumbled other things a muddled lecture
This photo as a kind of insurance?  Always hidden from me
She was 41, feeling the pressure to combine for the world to see
He made a big rush at her, I guess that's fine
His love based on a brief event in high school 25 years ago, a moment in time
But no one cares what happened then, that's just too old
You're just a kid, your memories by now are covered in mold
She couldn't see through it, and they couldn't have ***
They skyped for hours a day, what would come next?
Just pining and dreaming, a 19th century romance
Waiting, hoping to meet to take the chance
But then her friends said "this is crazy, he's just mooching off of you"
As his father told my parents when they complained, he's a shlemiel through and through
That means a mooch, a user, a parasite
If you've got what he wants he'll be there overnight
So pressured and blinded by a simpletons idea of romance
(she edits dime novels for a living by candlelight by chance)
They met in a whirl in Switzerland
Of course that makes it better, being abroad makes him kin
And quickly he worked and they were engaged
And suddenly they were "an item," all the rage
In the Times video they walk through ***** New York snow,
and stop at a cupcake store and feed each other, you know
And it's all staged so perfectly but somehow doesn't ring true
All smiles, all closeness, but there's greyness, coldness in their hue
and as he speaks I feel like I'm watching a police video where a criminal lies
Says he didn't do it, and he was somewhere else besides
And I shouldn't of done it, shouldn't of googled them, I admit I'm bad
But even through the loss of my own dream with him, her situation looks kind of sad
So in my future, I'm sure I'll seek romance
But I'll take it easy, go slow and listen to my friends
For this man nearly destroyed me, brought me to my knees
And I can't ever go through that again, so other's advice I'll seek
Sean Hunt Sep 2017
I can’t remember when
I last wrote a poem with a pen
Writing once romanticised
now has been exorcised

From touching tablets or touching keys
magically
words begin
appearing on a screen

Organised as I wish
edits in an instant
easily erased
replaced or placed elsewhere on the page

A literary light show
based on binary play
then sent off to cyberspace
until another day
Emily Jul 2015
The buzzing of the phone
a hand held device
that gets in the way of a hand holding life
and you can lie awake at night with thousands of "friends"
but I have a **** hard time believing
this was what Zuckerberg intends
when he says "what's on your mind?"
but nobody wants to know
unless your thoughts are endorsed
as was your image which was forced

filtering out reality
true colors getting dimmer
and when you're looking in the mirror
but you can't see yourself anymore
without the edits and "corrections"
and the comments "such a *****"
that creep into your subconscious
'til you can't take it anymore

and somewhere in the iCloud
a thing went very wrong
when you were sprawled out in bed naked
in your bra and in your thong
and now the whole world thinks they own you
and you've gone and lost yourself
and that phone has taken everything
forget connection, where's your health
healthy relationship
why's your bed so ******* cold
you've got your hand held device
but where's your real life hand to hold?
Robert Ronnow Mar 19
Books to the library
photos to family.
Paint cans and lumber
from renovations years ago.
Most of the furniture
including the piano.
Fastest way to do this
is rent a dumpster.

On the internet
nothing’s permanent.
I like that.
Photosynthesis, evaporation
as if your spirit disappears
when the sun appears.
It’s a burden lifted
not to have to persevere.

Edits
for clarity
and brevity.
One owes the reader
a respite from
the tonnage of
fructifying English.
To drown one’s book is devoutly to be wished.

Coupla trumpets,
big comfy couch,
four beds and dressers
and the contents of closets.
Tools we don’t use,
surge protectors and chargers,
lawn and patio accoutrements,
table settings for ten.

Lamplit underground,
the stray branch,
synchronized chaos,
a red fez.
One canary,
map of Antarctica,
three deaf little otoliths,
six or seven sybils.

Extra salt and pepper shakers,
sharpies and crayons,
a printer and a scanner,
the Bible and Koran.
Kaput calculators and computers,
subscriptions and prescriptions,
a host of vitamins
and the ghosts of ancestors.

Time itself
but not nature.
Wealth
and most of culture
but not my health.
That I’ll keep,
and sleep—practice
for perfect rest.
Pen Lux Nov 2014
Camille is purple
tensing her body
feeling lonely
not lonely
enough
to call anyone
all calls are dry mouthed
and stained ***** red
apothic red if you
want her to be
exact although
unnatural
she writes
drunk
and never edits
the words tumble out
of her like kids who learn
gymnastics at a young age
and laugh at her for plugging
her nose when jumping into the
foam pit, so unnatural

Marilyn talks to her and she
feels a little less lonely, and
a little more comfortable in
her abnormalities as she sips
at her glass before chugging
the rest of the bottle while
pondering another until
she realizes that it's no
good for her rethinks
and decides it's a
yes
supreme

— The End —