. . .

Perhaps it’s my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

~ Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.

~ Alberto Manguel, The Book Fool

Boléro ~ Sylvie Guillem

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies Peris in livery prepare Lethe for posthumous parvenues Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoria from Pharoah’s tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdays Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorous—- the eye-white sky-light white-light district of lunar lusts —-Stellectric signs “Wing shows on Starway” “Zodiac carrousel” Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams browse on Necropolis From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros obsolete And “Immortality” mildews… in the museums of the moon “Nocturnal cyclops” “Crystal concubine” ———- Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes——

~ Mina Loy

Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors.

~ Alejandra Pizarnik, 29 April 1936 - 25 September 1972

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, p 29

Summertime ~ Ella Fitzgerald       ᔥ  bessjazz

SONNET 129

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.