a dime if

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Edna St Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St Vincent Millay

我们都是中国人
我们都是海外的中国人

老师好
学生好
大家好

我们在超级市场看了糖伯伯

谢谢您!

If the sky falls down tonight,
Make sure, at least that
It waits until 12:40


!!!

Today is a historic day.

After years of citing it and referencing it, today I bought a copy of Orientalism by Edward Said.

And the choir erupts in applause!

XXIII

“GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him—
Tell him the page I did n’t write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried,
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.

“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled;
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him—No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it,
And then you and I were silenter.

“Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended—
What could it hinder so, to say?
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,—happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!”

-Emily Dickinson


since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other:then
laugh,leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

ee cummings

We've started crafting demons, one a night, and in a quarter of a year, there will be three hundred, three sets in three hundred media. There will be demons on the walls, demons crowded on end-tables and nightstands, demons on the shelves with books and clocks, demons in stacks of paper and files in a box. They will be huge and tiny, they will gaze down on us as we cook eggs and chop celery, and peek out from behind cereal boxes; demons. They will be still in their displays and they will hang precariously from lights and hooks. They will be brought to life by an orator who will choose a demon each night to animate with voice and quavering breath. Demons.

They will cackle at us, they will yearn for flight, they will mill about inside the aluminum, paint, wool, and binary-code of their forms. They will be sinister and misunderstood, loving and hated. They will glint in the halogen lamp or they will suck light from the room.

We will pull these demons from the street or our dreams, or the unthinking movements of hands on paper, cardboard, and glass. Demons in the tilted metal of a bicycle's basket, demons in a pig's embrace, demons in the words "Three I Have Fucked," demons.

And when there are demons everywhere, demons will surround us, demons in our thoughts and in the bedsheets. Demons inside of me yearning to be recognized, tired of Freud and defense, and yearning to be appraised in their grotesque beauty. Yearning to be listened to, loved, and embraced, demons.

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange--silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

--Robert Hass

"Slip of the Tongue" on Google Video
“What’s your ethnic make up?” A young man makes a pass at a beautiful stranger and gets an eye-opening schooling on race and gender.

I liked this. I usually don't like spoken word, but I liked this. And it's angrier than I would have been, and it's beyond the cool-headed critique that I would stick to, but I like this. For its energy and passion, its conviction that some things are just wrong.

But I just can't stop deconstructing it!