Just Under the Canopy

Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

- Sylvia Plath, "Mushrooms"

El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido!

The American Worker

This is the furthest I will go.
Never the same again.
The vile path calling me,
the day I ran from life again.

If I win this one time,
it will still be the end of me.
My belief that nothing ends well.
This is the end for me.

Day and night heart was uneased.
Broken will frozen smile.
Riding on, heart pumping tears.
Day and night I walk alone.

Bones rotting in the earth,
like your secrets
that you long kept from me.
But blood weighs more than silence.

Broken words, shards in your mouth,
cut deeper than any wound.
Broken vows will never be the same.
Lies like the viper's bite.

- Sólstafir, "Fjara (Beach)"

More Songs of Innocence

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"
So I piped with a merry chear.
"Piper, pipe that song again;"
So I piped: he wept to hear.

"Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy chear:"
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

"Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read."
So he vanish'd from my sight,
And I pluck'd a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs,
Every child may joy to hear.- William Blake

Light Play

Modern Adventures in Reciprocity

What Will the Future Bring Me?

A flower or a thorn?

Stereoscopic

Salvador Dali, "Gala's Foot" (1974)

Still Pining for the Fjords

Separate Streams of Consciousness

Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river-tides!

Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.

So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends, --

From the same cradle's side,
From the same mother's knee, --
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Two Streams"

Camus, Mon Dieu!

Albert Camus, "The Madness of Sincerity" (BBC 1997)