little snippets

I’ve set up a tumblr tumblelog here, to be used for the purpose that most tumblelogs are used for – posting photos, quotes, images, songs, posts without any explanation or preamble. Sometimes it’s good to be freed of the weight of words and to just share and admire.

In Construction

In the process of streamlining and in essence, recreating this blog. Most older posts will be deleted or made private. Do comment here, though, if there are any posts, uploads, etc. that you would like to be kept.

Caravaggio, from The English Patient

David Caravaggio does not remember Italy. Or if he does, it is no more than an ancestral memory of the warmth of the sun, of small houses in great swathes and wide strokes, Caravagesque, like the painter he shares a name with. What he is familiar with is the landscape of North America. He is familiar with the wind, with the water, with the sharp feel of the rocks near the construction site pressing into his back. He shifts position so that he is no longer lying on some of the sharpest rocks. In the background, he hears the sounds of steel meeting iron as the workers build and his mind translates this into the sound of cowboys and pioneers, their spurs ringing metallic as they urge their horses forward (the dull hammering of iron into wood). Building a new city. David stretches a hand out towards the sun, an eye half-closed like One Eyed Bill The Most Dangerous Outlaw in the West. Behind him, the workers, English, Polish, Russian, Italian, continue to build Canada. There is displacement and expanse.

Inspired by ‘The English Patient’

body marked like a map of old
a visceral cartography of impressioned mountain ranges
red and pale, the ridges of spine and valleys of collarbone
the borders of skin against skin
a mapmaker’s ink of teeth and nails and hair

but there is no reason in this uncreation
nothing save for their shallow breaths
kneeling
falling
the briefest pause
a sensory respite
and then
drowning in an ancient river

Possible Song Lyrics

I remember you like
the taint of my nail polish on your skin
as I turned your wrist to and fro
trying to anatomise the mechany
of your floral veins
paint in the topography of our fingerprints
Fuchsia Rose toxicity
a sudden unfamiliar altitude
oh perhaps we should have should have

More ordinary, colloquial, casual than my usual writing.

Walking In A Sound

Click on ‘Pop-Out Player’ to listen.

Modern, retro, energetic, upbeat, catchy (power)pop and rock from New Zealand and Brazil.

Download Links:
CSS – Alala
Cut Off Your Hands – Still Fond
Cut Off Your Hands – Oh Girl
Kingston – Good Good Feeling

Blunt, heavy-handed and not particularly elegant

What kind of cruelty
Allows justice to be administered
Punishment to be meted out
By an arbitrary judge?

What kind of power
Is great enough
That it can give
One control over another
That it can be complete
Even when divided?

What kind of right
Is joined by
cruelty and power?

A night image

He lies awake, spread flat by the sore, gnawing pain. If he had to describe it, he would say that it felt like his bones and muscles and marrow were all twisting, stretching and yearning- They feel like the growing pains the doctor diagnosed him with when he was 13 or 14. But he knows, in the core of his beating, beating heart, that this is something that is beyond a doctor’s white office. How do you describe the sensation of a body become an anachronism out of time? Or is it the mind that is the anachronism? He doesn’t know.

Is this love?

stretched out along the shore
I think I love you I do I do
like murano glass I love you
blown out and stretched and shaped
by you
I love you.

Two little poems

Untitled haiku

in a brief respite
an uncertain child-like scrawl
miss you I miss you

Untitled freeverse

even
the walls the chairs
the air
know that there are
different kinds of absence
different kinds of permanence

know when permanence and absence entwine