Monday, October 23, 2006

Poem of the minute: Perfume



Perfume

Twirling maybe
Lights dimmed past visionary state

Sparks,
My rough hand extended
pulls you close and frightens me

Entwined in your attention
My breathing stops in time
With a pounding that makes my monkey blood
Thirsty for your laughing eyes.

My hand encircles your small wrist
I can’t remove it though you
Pull and turn and dance,

My arm up and down in time with your circled steps
The rest of me frozen afraid to turn
for a dream once vanished never will return.

Stay in my present always
Mystify my cares
Perfume my long lost fear with flight.


- Athens, 2003 erik_satie_rollerblading

Jose Luis Borges


You'd best be getting to know Borges. He is one of the best cataloguers of madness of the last century. Although he specialized in other fields than solipsism, I owe him a lot. His use of formalism to create fictions and other worlds was careful and well thought out.

The historical flavor of his work is invented, but genuine. The mystery and intrique of his life are reminiscent of Satie and Castaneda.

This next generation hasn't had a chance to inherit much of the richness of history, because the boomers pretty much internalized it for themselves. They will have to start from scratch. Borges is a good place to start.

His most famous story is the Aleph, but there are many many others to choose from. The Library of Babel is an excellent study in formalism, and Funes, the Memorius is very good.

Borges also wrote many stories about the Argentine Gauchos of the Nineteenth Century, to me bearing something similar to the subjects of Ernest Hemingway, if not the form.

There is a world of madness and un-uniformity in existence today, even the scientists are starting to explore it, sort of a continental abyss, like an unseen underwater cliff with an immense ocean of the unknown hidden below.

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