Antipodal Dwelling by Aimé Césaire

Crucible in which is born the world hair humus of the first earth

hair first worry stone

when the rain shall be the thread with which bit by bit the world undoes itself

when the sun shall be a spider in which to lose ourselves one by one

when the sea shall be an octopus to spit our hopes at us in our faces

when the moon shall uncoil and will unroll for us its long serpent body

when the volcano shall shake its wrinkled pachyderm body

when the wind shall no longer blow because we have forgotten to strike the wind stones

when the stones shall cease to speak for having preached too much in the desert

(entangling my veins an entire forest down to its lowest branches

entangling my veins completely the water and the regime of faithful fires

entangling that from the bottom shall dash waterlilies in my face and my blood

of redemption and my shoulders slipping better than any knots

entangling

a drop of water in the precious alembic of water tables that shall go to the window and
cry out in Esperanto that the weather is fine poorly heard by the volutes scored by our bitterest spit)

a drop of fire in the throat without risk of wind

firefly and water I shall assemble myself in little drops of water of fire too beautiful for any other architect

dwelling made of water glimpsed upon waking

dwelling made of rumpled perfumes

dwelling made of spangled sleep

dwelling made of swelled chests stretched out of benumbed lizards

strength lines me up on the shadowless meridian

pythons crews of catastrophes unnatural brothers of my longitude

roads raise themselves to the height of green-eyed female gnomes intersected with

prayers taking aim at us on the footbridge of the malfunctioning compass sky

dwelling made of a laying-on of palms of hands

dwelling made of red cheetah eyes

dwelling made of a rain of shells of sand

the revolver shots give me a halo too vast this time for my head which arrives via portage in spare parts

In a Grove by Philip Lamantia

Ulysses on water

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

– from Ulysses, Chapter 17

born.

Clearing out my desktop, I found a short poem and remembered I haven't been posting here enough.
Translations from Polish:
o boże boli= oh god it hurts
kwiatuszki= flowers in a sweet way, something like "little flowers"
tuśki= the way I'd say kwiatuszki when I was small :P

There are also references to a Polish poem about the soldiers of Westerplatte, and though the translation is really bad, at least you'll understand this poem better.

Oh god explaining is as long as the poem itself. Anyway, here it is:
___________

born out of o boże boli and sunlight whipping up the air.
born here and not there.
behind the walls they sing the song of the soldiers
of westerplatte.
but it is not summer, and there are no flowers;
only the memory of how I'd say kwiatuszki, tuśki, and throw them
above my head,
giving birth to a completely new gesture.
but sometimes I doubt there was any birth, ever.
soil is eternal, ever-present, bitter and smiling.

bbc (again!): man drowns rescuing two children

man drowns rescuing two children

How the sea's lullaby rocks the rubber ring,
and every wave speaks the universal language
of tide, of force, of the feminine:
shhhh for she and seducing the moon.
But children are no moon. They are bodies
in a ring, the ring is rubber, is a ring because of its hole.

He also has a hole in him now.
Death could be a hole in which there is no air.
Dying could be slow elimination,
like water disappearing from the beach,
like the moon smiling at his lover
and kissing her goodnight.

bbc: thousands take part in 10km run

I haven't done my whole bbc thing for ages, though I was so excited about it. My excuse is travel, but I laze around so much (watching eurovision, for example) that it's not a real reason at all. Anyway, I'm in a good poetry mood today, so I'll share my good mood and bad poetry with everyone else <3

thousands take part in 10km run

the run of the sole
the run of the soul
the run of the lung that ties you to your breath
until it's lost in a plethora of air
the run of a shoe pointing east
because heading east is shoe factories not money
only when you head too far
you bump into the statue of liberty which is a
stone symbolising standing

this is why i'm on the run, you're on it, and the road

the philosophy obsession.

 BBC day 2 and I'm reading philosophy.


no breakthrough in greek talks


oh plato poor plato banging his elbows against the table spilling the soup
nobody wants to discuss this there there
what of the utopian country on which the philosopher is throned
now he asks as he bangs and there is euro falling from the sky
how strong the soul can be

but you know money is more than an idea
beneath the toga
it throbs