The Thin Lines Around You

She who did not come, wasn't she determined nonetheless to organize and decorate my heart? If we had to exist to become the one we love, what would the heart have to create? Lovely joy left blank, perhaps you are the center of all my labors and my loves. If I've wept for you so much, it's because I preferred you among so many outlined joys. 

Munch and Magritte

Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.

Modigliani's Faces

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

Bosch and Bruegel 

But who will sing of him? Who will sing of his blessedness? The blameless eye, the radiant grin For he, his own messenger, is gone He has leapt through the orphic glass To wander eternally In search of perfection His blue ankles tattooed with stars.

Patti Smith Drawing, Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf, So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day Nothing gold can stay. 

—do lovers love? why then to heaven with hell. Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well

Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoschka

O cities memories of cities Cities wrapped in our desires Cities come early cities come lately Cities strong and cities secret Plundered of their master's builders All their thinkers all their ghosts  Fields pattern of emerald Bright living surviving The harvest of the sky over our earth Feeds my voice I dream and weep I laugh and dream among the flames Among the clusters of the sun  And over my body your body spreads The sheet of it's bright mirror.

Marc Chagall

Watch out for love (unless it is true,  and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,  it will wrap you up like a mummy,  and your scream won't be heard and none of your running will end. Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on,  give your body to it, give your laugh to it,  give, when the gravelly sand takes you,  your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Magritte and Picasso

I have been happy, tho' in a dream. I have been happy- and I love the theme: Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life, As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife Of semblance with reality, which brings To the delirious eye, more lovely things Of Paradise and Love- and all our own! Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known. 

Egon Schiele