What Does not Kill me...

Up Close and Personal

...oh, wait...

I am All that I Need

I am all that I need
And I'll be till I'm through
And I'm light on my feet
Good to be without you
Distant light, distant dancer
Mute at midnight she might look like the answer
But I'm all that I need

So it's true, I've gone too far to find you
And the thumbprint scar I let define you
Was a myth I made you measure up to
It was all just water, winding by you
And the basking, gnashing, foaling, feeding
And the rising, falling, melting, freezing
And the raising for destroying feeling
(All we do, this repeats)
You've got all you need on me
And now I see that it's all corroding
Soonest seething, soonest folding
But the night won't last if you just hold fast, so calm down
(I'm hardly made of steel)
Tell me, are you so concealed?
(Can't I just go to sleep?)
You're no more so blind to me

Are you alone?
I don't believe you
Are you at home, I'll come right now
I need to see you
Thin as a shim and Scottish pale
Bright white light like a bridal veil
"I don't need you"
Cut to chewed through finger nails

I was a child in the ivy then
I never knew you, you knew me
Not like you knew me
Off on the other ocean now
All is behind you, all is sea

Follow the Day!

The Death of the Epic..

...and surrender to spectacle (the "shadow" of the epic) in the post-modern age.

Rimbaud and Baudelaire

Arthur Rimbaud, "Evening Prayer" (Translated by Paul Schmidt)

I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.
Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,
And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern.

Charles Baudelaire, "A Pagan's Prayer" (Translated by William Aggeler)

Ah! do not dampen your ardor;
Warm my numb heart again,
Pleasure, torture of souls!
Goddess! hear me, I beseech you!

Goddess who permeates the air,
Flame in our underground cavern!
Grant the prayer of a soul bored utterly,
Who offers you a brazen hymn.

Pleasure, be my queen forever!
Put on a siren's mask
Fashioned of flesh and of velvet

Or pour on me your heavy sleep,
In wine, formless and mystical,
O Pleasure, elastic phantom!