Poppies in July

Poppies in July
By Sylvia Plath

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a
mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Like bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed- or sleep!-
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

The Moon and the Yew Tree

The Moon and the Yew Tree
by Sylvia Plath
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky-
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness-
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness- blackness and silence.

(photo credit to Constant Anee)

I'm currently in the thick of a plethora of Plath analysis for my 20th century writing by women class. Its been a slightly surreal experience finding myself becoming so submerged in her psyche. It is after all, a little unnerving to see in print what felt like 'confidences' of my subconscious.

In My Little Town

my little weekend jaunt back to halifax has been a relaxing treat.
amazingly enough fog city has been sunny two days in a row, my laundry is all done, the cats are cuddling, and the lobsters are boiling for dinner tonight.
this landlocked life is harder when i remember my maritime roots.

sunday monday happy days

winding down from this weekends thrashcore tour with a book, a trip to st.micheles for pretty new jewels and relics, snuggles, and a screening at cinema du parc of woody allen's manhattan.
plus my favourite new indulgence: dark chocolate with lavender!

q: what does falazing mean to me?

in a nutshell.

Tout Va Bien

"they'll say your books thrust you into life, from them you learned to unlearn."

More Memories of Russia

I love you mulchy Maritimes.

An anecdote about my hometown Halifax, Nova Scotia and why I love the underdog that is the east coast of Canada.
Over the past 15 years or so there had been growing concern about the pollution (mulchy sewage times) being dumped into the Halifax Harbour.
The city clean up project began in 2007 with the creation of new treatment plants and culminated in last summer's declaration that the harbour was no longer hazardous made clear by Mayor Peter Kelly's famous summer dip.
Things were going swell until in the middle of the night on January 14th a power outage caused "A generator [to stop] working with the sluice door open seven to eight centimetres. With the pumps not working and the sluice door partly open, it took less than an hour for the plant to fill with waste."
This little story ends with "the facility flooded with nearly seven million litres of sewage. Officials still don’t know why" and the Halifax Harbour is once more contaminated.
This however is only part of the reason that Halifax is mulch capital of the world, the true beauty comes in comparison:

"Critics have said problems can be attributed to the city’s sewage system being underfunded, at $333 million, and such things as a modern plant being hooked up to antiquated sewer pipes.

In contrast, civic leaders in Victoria are considering sewage treatment options that could cost up to $2 billion. The three levels of government have agreed to split the cost. Victoria’s municipal officials hope to have their system working by 2016."

East Coast of Canada? 333 million. West Coast of Canada: 2 fucking billion.

But at least we have these.

A Hymn for Stuffed Dogs

I say a blessing to each splinter and I know that it is just the same--
flaccid, fictional and all so much the same.
If---no---when----fine
I waited in the soil(my soul) for your corrugated wisdom...but you left it in some alley, behind the taxidermists place.
I can’t help but wonder what I’d looked like stuffed over your mantle
Or under your mantle
Soft woolen murmurs as we walk down that alley
Just my battered boots,a paper napkin soul, and some goddamned God I have yet to meet.

Adaptation

The subterranean world heaves with the calamitous humidity of human contact.
It pollutes the pores with its ignominious deceits as I pass through burdened and deliberate.
And what of those conspirators?
They fill the commuter trains in a commiseration and celebration of their mutual fate.

Wasted, a valiant drunk among sober faces---or sober among drunk faces
Oh but a toast to mutual indifference and the ordination of a new God.
Conceal all weapons in this world of tunnels but I don’t forget where mine’s hidden.
I declare to these comrades that I will have no part in the idol worship of numbers and spinal fluid.
I await another fate.

They follow the abortive coat hanger of codependent thought like lambs blind and naked in a cunt like tunnel and always make their stop on time.

In the night the furies rose and spun some eternal wool around my eyes-- filling my ears with cotton-- I’d like to hear from you soon but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to listen.

The Youth of the U.S.S.R

A collection of students in old photographs from the days of Soviet Russia!

morrocan backpacks and a grassy knoll

we usher spring to montreal with a picnic and a frisbee, photo cred to charlie walsh.

Encounter

by Yevtushenko

We were sitting about taking coffee
in the aerodrome cafe at Copenhagen
where everything was brilliance and comfort
and stylish to the point of tedium.
The old man suddenly appeared
or rather happened like an event of nature,
in an ordinary greenish anorak
his face scarred by the salt and burning wind,
ploughing a furrow through the crowded room
and walking like a sailor from the wheel.
His beard was like the white foam of the sea
brimming and glistening around his face.
His gruffness and his winner's certainty
sent up a wave around him as he walked
through the old fashions aping modern fashions
and modern fashions aping old fashions.
He in his open collar and rough shirt
stepping aside from vermouth and pernod
stood at the bar demanding Russian vodka
and waving away soda with a 'No'.
He with scars marking his tanned forearms
his filthy trousers and his noisy shoes
had better style than anyone in the crowd.
The solid ground seemed to quiver under
the heavy authority of that tread.
Somebody smiled across: 'Look at that!
you'd think that was Hemingway,' he said.
Expressed in details of his short gestures
and heavy motions of his fisherman's walk.
He was a statue sketched in rough rock,
one treading down bullets and centuries,
one walking like a man hunched in a trench,
pushing aside people and furniture.
It was the very image of Hemingway.
(Later I heard that it was Hemingay.)

bang bang my baby shot me down

I'm currently knee deep in readings for my summer courses: The Prince by Machiavelli for Poli Sci, and Gertrude Colmore's Suffragette Sally for 20th Century Writing by Women.
As such, brutality and the feminine population have been on my mind more than a little.
How better to merge the two than to reminisce about William S. Burroughs and the trigger happy day he accidentally killed his wife?!

ephemeral eternity

insolent and hovering above a city that coruscates with light like the scales of a fish in forgotten watery gloom- never still.
suffice to say climbing to the top of the mountain in the middle of the night is exhilarating.
(photos by ali bosworth)

the time it passes

spring time in the city is treating me swell.
swirling pastel adventures await on the horizon.
(photos by ann woo)