I.
i can be satisfied. i can be very easily satisfied. i ask for no grail no relic no alchemical magic. cigarettes, filtered, yes. coffee. yes. a beautiful joint. yes. one of those pills that stills the shaking, that frenetic haunting rattle? okay, yes. a glass of what you're having, cabernet sauvignon? oh yes.

an honest tongue. yes. an honest face can satisfy me. i can be satisfied. my curiosity leads me. i follow my hands where they insist on going themselves. i can be satisfied. it's easy.

i can be satisfied; i do not require much technology. a revolving record collecting incense ash. Love, 'forever changes.' oh yes i can be satisfied.

an honest tongue. yes. an honest tongue can satisfy me. finding reflected in someone else my own insistence on the truth. i sleep in my blue slip, in that precarious balance. between my naivete, folly which dylan thomas would insist i keep, insist that i not grind beauty down to dust, for 'wisdom is folly, love is not", and that determined Keatsian part of my heart that demands, almost petulantly, the truth.

'for beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

i sleep in the balance, not feeling alone, feeling satisfied





II.
Arthur Lee has taught me a lot about love.

i might succumb to the dry cool breeze blowing today unexpectedly from the east. it doesn't bring a wall of sand or air thick with poison or even smoke from the forest, that constantly smouldering forest down the two-lane highway. it makes the limbs of those nectarine trees sway like unsteady drunks, teetering atop high-heels. only knocks off the lightest blooms and barely bothers the roses.

i do not intimately know the wind; i do not know its various names and only occasionally its origins. the wind and i met anonymously, as in the coatroom of a dark restaurant; we recognized one another immediately as strangers of old.

it can be a gentle nurse administering something cool, calming for a fever that seems infinite as space and deep as time. or a punishing hot hand slapping blood into your cheeks, hot hot hot; and nothing before you but more melting asphalt, steam rising into suffocating air. unpredictable wind; i take what i get. so i lay down this day, to hear its news.

this one...

the man himself, singing in his chains
like the sea...





'...... i want reality to hold
within my palm,
not, as a symbol, stone
speaking or no
but it, reality, whose voice I know
to be the circle not the stair of sound.'

dylan thomas

all the people at this party, they've got a lot of style. they've got stamps of many countries, they've got passport smiles. some are friendly. some are cutting. some are watching it from the wings. some are standing in the center, giving to get something. one beauty gets attention, and her eyepaint's running down. she's got a rose in her teeth and a lampshade crown. one minute she's so happy, next she's crying on someone's knee, saying laughing and crying, you know it's the same release. i told you met when i met you i was crazy; cry for us all, beauty. cry for eddie in the corner thinking there's nobody. and jack behind his joker and stone-cold grace behind her fan, and me, in my frightened silence, thinking i don't understand. i feel like i'm sleeping; can you wake me? you seem to have a broader sensibility. i'm just living on nerves and feelings, with a weak and a lazy mind, and coming to people's parties; stumbling deaf, dumb and blind. i wish i had more sense of humor, keeping the sadness at bay. throwing the lightness on these things, laughing it all away. laughing it all away. joni mitchell

all there is to me now is bleached by the sun and wrung pale by the sea. i have become a simpler thing, i aspire to be a simpler thing

each day. open like a nautilus, strong as a square nail. not a relic you'd find in the sand but something surviving dawn to dawn; picking up its feet to drift with the tides and trusting that it won't be ground into the coral or tossed onto a ragged rock.

life in the sea, so precarious, whether you're a seal or a fish. always outswimming the encroaching jaws of something bigger. sometimes predator and sometimes prey, but always attuned to the nature of the moment. porous as a sponge, recieving the wisdom of the split second. it tends to suggest action.

time has told me you're a rare rare find. a troubled cure for a troubled mind.
and time has told me not to ask for more. someday our ocean will find its shore.
so I`ll leave the ways that are making me be what I really don't want to be.
leave the ways that are making me love what I really don't want to love.
time has told me you came with the dawn, a soul with no footprint, a rose with no thorn
your tears they tell me, there's really no way of ending your troubles with things you can say.
and time will tell you to stay by my side, to keep on trying 'til there's no more to hide.
so leave the ways that are making you be what you really don't want to be.
leave the ways that are making you love what you really don't want to love.
time has told me you're a rare rare find, a troubled cure for a troubled mind.

.nick drake

suzanne

suzanne valadon was a painter; henri toulouse-lautrec's lover, her beautiful face

so alive in its preoccupation isn't it? her wheels are turning.

i reach over through time to try to touch her because i understand. her wheels are turning.

no vapid smile. her jaw is clenched, can you tell? she is biting down on the most bitter truth she's been awarded lately i think

still resonant in her strength.

thank god it is not always necessary to paste on your brightest smile for photos.

thank god we always have a choice, between the truth, and a lie. some of us couldn't lie even if we tried. her eyes like glass. if she tried to make them smile she probably couldn't even swing it. even swilling absinthe in montmartre and watching petticoats fly can bring your face to this state of total granite disillusionment. lautrec himself said:

"i have tried to do what is true and not ideal."

and i think this is wise.
very wise.

she must have really loved him. i don't think i could ever ask more of someone, than to try to do what is true and not ideal.

the truth makes us all so beautiful when it illuminates us with that completely encompassing, totally impartial light

the curtains open in one slow creak of cable, dusty red velvet draws back to reveal all our folly. and all our promise, we're not hopeless, not hopeless at making some beauty & happiness, never