http://www.mediafire.com/?r9iow7xnihb34y2

i wrote a song called 'crystal tide.' it is available for painless download.

For Shana

I arrived a flashing meteor
Hurled from my era of contradictions,


And laid in the grass something new. 
Let's dance then, I said, Make haste, 


Let's dance then, friend!
Burrs in our hair and sucking thorns 


We can dance for the season. 


And your eyes skimming sadness still
Keen remain lit,


As we awaken bruised from the half-forgotten nights
Of our whisky soaked masochism-soirees,


Wearing dresses made of drapes
With our bourbon stained cheeks.


Let's dance then, friend--
This jumble of loving and loathing, so cruel


This year of notable wildness and vice
Has given grey to my hair,


See it there? Let's dance then,
With our wounded selves let's make nice


Let's pull them sulking by the arms
Into the light


Brush the tangled hair from their eyes
And dance for the season. 

two years

two years ago your hand still clutched your rosary
but it hadn't moved for days

two years ago i was such a fool 
thinking i knew everything


but my heart broke when you died
the saddest empty bell


i knew i'd miss you then
and see, i miss you still. 




ernestine batastini hummel
may 18th, 1918-- july 8th, 2008

"Sunlight pours into his Cairo room. His hand flabby over his Herodotus journal, all the tension in the rest of his body, so he writes words down wrong, the pen sprawling as if without spine. He can hardly write down the word sunlight. The words in love."






It is as we have all said;
Exchanging rivers. 

It is like this, he would say
(Almasy might say)


Capillaries like sprawling creeks
learning the name of each 

Beautiful branches gifted
Pulses in the tides of arteries

It is as we all understand;

Exchanging rivers. 

 

I am peering through my lens; I have no other; I cannot help it.

I am feeling through my gauze; My senses bruised peach; Sweet.

I am tasting on my tongue an aged blood tinged liquor; The Bottle

Reads the year and states the name.

Through lowered eyes I can see my smile; The Blue on the roof.

I cut a pink rose with my pocket knife from its place in the sun on its vine,  although I've heard that one is not to do it, and I lay it on my shrine. 

I'll tell you plainly from all that I've known that no one can know the end. And love grows messily from the very marsh that months stem. 


And the memory is a leaking dam that prefers sunset all-around, and one can cry a river of greenest depth and still not drown. 


And the heart is a cracked canteen, and like a bird it keens, and reaches for the least and the most expected things.


Love can be an ache that makes it difficult to breathe. A strange offspring that I nurse within me. It does  not suggest or advise. It's simply stubbornly alive, devising and demanding that I feed it.

If there were in that pocket of yours a cigarette case I would curl and hide within it until a moment unexpected--

Then crawl out sly to lick your hipbones and run my hand up your thigh; cause a flush to rush across your face as you mingled in public, amidst friends,

You would know again how the little rattle feels which is a dozen small inhales in a row, and those in your company might wonder, why the glow?

A secret, it would be, 

And that would make that piece of cake taste all the sweeter; this is desire speaking.