Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
Till your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang, sail to me, sail to me, let me enfold you
Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks
For you sing, touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow
Oh, my heart, oh, my heart shies from the sorrow
I’m as puzzled as the newborn child
I’m as troubled as the tide
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or should I lie with death, my bride?
Hear me sing, swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you
Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you
In Your own Bosom You bear your
Heaven and Earth,
and all that You behold,
though it appears Without,
it is Within,
In Your Imagination
of which this World of Mortality
is but a Shadow.
~ William Blake ~
“I have never been able to draw a balance. I am always minus something. I have a reason therefore to go on. I am putting my whole life into the balance in order that it may produce nothing. To get to nothing you have lay out an infinitude of figures. That’s just it; in the living equation the sign for myself is infinity. To get nowhere you must traverse every known universe: you must be everywhere in order to be nowhere. To have disorder you must destroy every form of order. To go mad you must have a terrific accumulation of sanities. All the madmen whose works have inspired me were touched by a cold sanity.”
~Henry Miller, Black Spring
“The dreamers dream from the neck up,their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizeable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are hereof the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not our-selves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greather then the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out.”
~Henry Miller, Black Spring
Alan Watts: “the most common psychotic experience is falling in love. While to fall in love is one of the most fantastic experiences in life, there is absolutely no method and no school which can teach people how to fall in love. You fall in love in the same way as you grow ears, and there is no school for growing ears. But if you’re lucky and you’re human you have ears, and if you’re lucky and you’re human, in the course of life, you undergo the experience of falling in love and when it happens, it is unmistakable and tremendous and you see in a very ordinary woman, an incarnation of the Goddess. The question is, you are certainly not sane when you see this, because she is just an ordinary girl. But actually, the veils have been taken from your eyes, and you have seen one human being as in fact they really are.
But you are of course quite mad. All inspired vision of poetry, drama, of dancing, music, is a certain kind of madness. But this is madness and madness.
“Poetry has an immediate effect on the mind. The simple act of reading poetry alters thought patterns and the shuttle of the breath. Poetry induces trance. Its words are chant. Its rhythms are drum beats. Its images become the icons of the inner eye. Poetry is more than a description of the sacred experience; it carries the experience itself.”
~Ivan M.Granger
The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum
Outside the leaves were falling as they died
A wind had blown away the sun
A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room
Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!
~Lawrence Ferlinghetti