The Gift

Feliz Navidad all you

Some Weird Illustrations (via Dansk Jävlarna)

unholyday dreams to delight

garnering grey’s many insignificancies

didn’t someone of note quote “In Beauty, Truth. Truth,Beauty”

Jim Wittenberg

garnering grey’s many insignificancies
© 2014 Jim Wittenberg All rights reserved

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“CHRISTMAS IN PRISON” by John Prine

It was Christmas in prison and the food was real good
We has turkey and pistols carved out of wood
I dream of her always even when I don’t dream
Her name’s on my tongue and her blood’s in my strings

Wait a while eternity
Old Mother Nature’s got nothin’ on me
Come to me, run to me, come to me now
I’m rollin’ my sweetheart
I’m flowin’ by God

She reminds me of a chess game with someone I admire
Or a picnic in the rain after a prairie fire
Her heart is as big as this whole goddamn jail
And she’s sweeter than saccharine at a drug store sale

Wait a while eternity
Old Mother Nature’s got nothin’ on me
Come to me, run to me, come to me now
I’m rollin’ my sweetheart
I’m flowin’ by God

The search light in the big yard turns ’round with the gun
And spotlights the snowflakes like the dust in the sun
It’s Christmas in prison there’ll be music tonight
I’ll probably get homesick, I love you, Good night

Wait a while eternity
Old Mother Nature’s got nothin’ on me
Come to me, run to me, come to me now
I’m rollin’ my sweetheart
I’m flowin’ by God

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John Prine

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.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2_gx9PrZc

NIGHT CURRENTS

I’m turning & tossing

For yr talk/ yr noise/

Take my private call

Of the wild/

A must call most primal/

Don’t fail to stay ’till

My tail falls off.

.

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teachers to small childrenthe world over,pastors to parish,

they all will tell the pretty truth

(aside the pretty lies, “pretty lies”)

that crystalline snowflakes

are unique. unique.

and maybe later

in both

secular schoolrooms

and sunday school classes

( the world over)

small children might make snowflakes for themselves;

they’ll fold lacy paper exactly in half,

with a good crease,

and taking their round-ended scissors,

they’ll cut their very own unique cuts

so that when everyone unfolds their lacy paper

and lifts it above their heads

everyone can laugh  at their uniquenesses

.

but one thing that ministers & mentors,

rabbis & nuns will not add

is that those one-of-a-kind snowflakes

are  all

alone

in their descent

on icy black currents

all their night fall

MEDITATIVE/ Kafka’s “The Way Home”

The Way Home

by Franz Kafka

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

See what a persuasive force the air has after a thunderstorm! My merits become evident and overpower me, though I don’t put up any resistance, I grant you.

I stride along and my tempo is the tempo of all my side of the street, of the whole street, of the whole quarter. Mine is the responsibility, and rightly so, for all the raps on doors or on the flat of a table, for all toasts drunk, for lovers in their beds, in the scaffolding of new buildings, pressed to each other against the house walls in dark alleys, or on the divans of a brothel.

I weigh my past against my future, but find both of them admirable, cannot give either the preference, and find nothing to grumble at save the injustice of providence that has so clearly favored me.

Only as I come into my room I feel a little meditative, without having met anything on the stairs worth meditating about. It doesn’t help me much to open the window wide and hear music still playing in a garden.

PHANTASMAGLORIOUS

Oh  my

Secret mission is to dream  the dreams

That  visionarys  fly

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Balthus/ Chagall/

Dorothea Tanning/

I see Cecily Brown/ Karen L. Darling/

Munch/ Klimt/

& Sol Halabi/

Falk/ & Kobliha/

Lars Elling/ I have Kanevsky/

.

Fevered Maddening  among jungles

Fervid colorings sing

These are a few of my favorite things

Quote: Joseph Conrad

Explanation, from Mark Strand

STRAND

Well, I think what happens at certain points in my poems is that language takes over, and I follow it. It just sounds right. And I trust the implication of what I’m saying, even though I’m not absolutely sure what it is that I’m saying. I’m just willing to let it be. Because if I were absolutely sure of whatever it was that I said in my poems, if I were sure, and could verify it and check it out and feel, yes, I’ve said what I intended, I don’t think the poem would be smarter than I am. I think the poem would be, finally, a reducible item. It’s this “beyondness,” that depth that you reach in a poem, that keeps you returning to it. And you wonder, The poem seemed so natural at the beginning, how did you get where you ended up? What happened? I mean, I like that, I like it in other people’s poems when it happens. I like to be mystified. Because it’s really that place which is unreachable, or mysterious, at which the poem becomes ours, finally, becomes the possession of the reader. I mean, in the act of figuring it out, of pursuing meaning, the reader is absorbing the poem, even though there’s an absence in the poem. But he just has to live with that. And eventually, it becomes essential that it exists in the poem, so that something beyond his understanding, or beyond his experience, or something that doesn’t quite match up with his experience, becomes more and more his. He comes into possession of a mystery, you know—which is something that we don’t allow ourselves in our lives.

from interview in Paris Review./ http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1070/the-art-of-poetry-no-77-mark-strand

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Mark Strand, April 11,1934-November 29,2014