stop now before it's too late, been eating in the ghetto on a $100 plate

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over."
--Neil Gaiman, Fahrenheit 451 introduction


"For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself."
--George Orwell, 1984


"Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too--the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I'm sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos."
--James Baldwin


"Larch"
short-sleeves in Vermont late November the leaves long gone
only evergreens the white birch bark and our feral black cat
not sheltering prowling improbably in her thickened coat
one more free-range lunch one more of her nine lives
put back into reserve unlike the year's fresh deaths

as for me I keep my votive candles burning as the larches burned
on the hillside their needles yellow deciduous like the leaves
and now sloughed in the yard beneath the small larch
bent double cascading like a willow weeping is the proper name for it
also for the cherry tree in the yard of the house where my parents' friend
shot an intruder it was his wife their tree

might as well be here with all my other lost trees childhood mimosas
magnolias the willow oak blown down in a storm surviving in my head
beside the friend the murdered wife the subsequent wife
my parents too and now Peter with his lazy eye and glamorous
doom-ridden Rynn and Carol who had her own reprieves

who used them up I confess the weather matters more and more to me
diurnal is a lovely word another is circadian
--Ellen Bryant Voigt


"Storm"

one minute a slender pine indistinguishable from the others
the next its trunk horizontal still green the jagged stump
a nest for the flickers
                       one minute high wind and rain the skies
lit up the next a few bright winking stars the lashing of the brook

one minute an exaltation in the apple trees the shadblow trees
the next white trash on the ground new birds
or the same birds crowding the feeder
one minute the children were sleeping in their beds

you got sick you got well you got sick

the lilac bush we planted is a tree the cat creeps past
with something in her mouth she's hurrying down to where

the culvert overflowed one minute bright yellow
marsh marigolds springing up the next
the farmer sweeps them into his bales of hay

--Ellen Bryant Voigt


I could recite the grass on a hill and memorize
the moon. I know the cloud forms of love by
heart and have brought tears to the eye of a
storm. My memory banks vaults of autumn
forests and Amazon River banks. I've screamed
them into sunsets that echo in earthquakes.
Shadows have been my spotlight as I monologue
the night and dialogue with days. Soliloquies of
wind and breeze applauded by sunrays.

We put language in zoos to observe caged
thought and tossed peanuts and P-Funk at
intellect. And MTHRFKRs think these are
metaphors. I speak what I see. All words
and worlds are metaphors of me. My life
is authored by the moon. Footprints written
in soil. The fountain pen of Martian men
novelling human toil.

And, yes, the soil speaks highly of me, when
earth seeds root me poet-tree. And we forest
forever through recitation.
--Saul Williams, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-hop