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Your library is your portrait.

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Open Book's Monologue Part 5: Welcome To The Library!

Welcome to the library! come one come all
Welcome to the library! come with your brethren on this wall
Welcome to the library! come all you books tattered or new
Welcome to the library! come tired and overdue

Yes welcome to the library the place where you're most mundane
Yes welcome to the library the place where you're to endure most pain
Yes welcome to the library where you'll sit unwanted
Yes welcome to the library where you'll sit haunted
Yes welcome to the library where everyone's just like you
Yes welcome to the library where we're all books too!
Yes welcome to the library where you can take comfort
Yes welcome to the library where In the fact you're no longer unique
Yes welcome to the library You're just pen marks ink

Departing the library? I think not, even if you get out we'll bring you back
Departing the library? Here you rot, but we'll dust you to ease your passing
Departing the library? Don't make me laugh, here you're black and white
Departing the library? Nobody argues on your behalf, look more amassing

Welcome to the library! A place of keeping and safety
Welcome to the library! Take your place you'll like it, just wait and see
Welcome to the library! New books don't mind the old they're disillusioned
Welcome to the library! You've sold your soul... but it's too late for you

so WELCOME

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Love In The Library

Love in the library
By: jimmy buffett, mac mcanally
1994
On the corner of government and bay avenue
The old doomsday fanatic wore a crown of kudzu
Sirens were wailing in the gulf coastal heat
And it seemed like the whole world was in forced retreat
Paid no attention, revolved through the door
Past the newspaper racks on the worn marble floor
Near civil war history my heart skipped a beat
She was standing in fiction stretched high on bare feet
Chorus:
Love in the library
Quiet and cool
Love in the library
There are no rules
Surrounded by stories
Surreal and sublime
I fell in love in the library
Once upon a time
I was the pirate, she was the queen
Sir francis and elizabeth, the best theres ever been
Then she strolled past my table and stopped at the stairs
Then sent me a smile as she reached for flaubert
Chorus:
Love in the library
Quiet and cool
Love in the library
There are no rules
Surrounded by stories
Surreal and sublime
I fell in love in the library
Once upon a time
She gathered her books, walked while she read
Words never spoken, but so much was said
You can read all you want into this rendezvous
But its safer than most things that lovers can do
Well stories have endings, fantasies fade
And the guard by the door starts drawing the shade
So write your own ending and hope it comes true
For the lovers and strangers on bay avenue
Chorus:
Love in the library
Quiet and cool
Love in the library
There are no rules
Surrounded by stories
Surreal and sublime
I fell in love in the library
Once upon a time

[...] Read more

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The House Of Dust: Complete

I.

The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.

And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
The gorgeous night has begun again.

'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.

We hear him and take him among us, like a wind of music,
Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .

Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces
To what the eternal evening brings.

Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers.

Our hands are light, they are singing with emptiness.
Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . .
What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . .
Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . .
And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.


II.

[...] Read more

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Berenice by edgar allan poe

MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, -as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? -from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars -in the character of the family mansion -in the frescos of the chief saloon -in the tapestries of the dormitories -in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory -but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings -in the fashion of the library chamber -and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents, there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.

The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes -of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before -that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it? -let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms -of spiritual and meaning eyes -of sounds, musical yet sad -a remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.

In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy-land -into a palace of imagination -into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition -it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye -that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers -it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life -wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, -not the material of my every-day existence-but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew -I ill of health, and buried in gloom -she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side -mine the studies of the cloister -I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation -she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! -I call upon her name -Berenice! -and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh! sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! -Oh! Naiad among its fountains! -and then -then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease -a fatal disease -fell like the simoom upon her frame, and, even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept, over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer came and went, and the victim -where was she, I knew her not -or knew her no longer as Berenice.

Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself -trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease -for I have been told that I should call it by no other appelation -my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form -hourly and momently gaining vigor -and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin, or in the topography of a book; to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the door; to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in; -such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.

Yet let me not be misapprehended. -The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.

My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio 'de Amplitudine Beati Regni dei'; St. Austin's great work, the 'City of God'; and Tertullian 'de Carne Christi, ' in which the paradoxical sentence 'Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est' occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although, to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the moral condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any degree the case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and, taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder frequently and bitterly upon the wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred, under similar circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice -in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning -among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday -and in the silence of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her -not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream -not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being-not as a thing to admire, but to analyze -not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And now -now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach; yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.

And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year, -one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon*, -I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But uplifting my eyes I saw that Berenice stood before me.

*For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twice seven days of warmth, men have called this clement and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon -Simonides.

Was it my own excited imagination -or the misty influence of the atmosphere -or the uncertain twilight of the chamber -or the gray draperies which fell around her figure -that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word, I -not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being, lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face.

The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets now of a vivid yellow, and Jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupil-less, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!

The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not a speck on their surface -not a shade on their enamel -not an indenture in their edges -but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth! -the teeth! -they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They -they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mad'selle Salle it has been well said, 'que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments, ' and of Berenice I more seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient des idees. Des idees! -ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idees! -ah therefore it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.

And the evening closed in upon me thus-and then the darkness came, and tarried, and went -and the day again dawned -and the mists of a second night were now gathering around -and still I sat motionless in that solitary room; and still I sat buried in meditation, and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy as, with the most vivid hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow, or of pain. I arose from my seat and, throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was -no more. She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed.

I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the setting of the sun Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive -at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror -horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed -what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, 'what was it? '

On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the family physician; but how came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words were the singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat, 'Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.' Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins?

There came a light tap at the library door, and pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said he? -some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the night -of the gathering together of the household-of a search in the direction of the sound; -and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave -of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!

He pointed to garments; -they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand; -it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall; -I looked at it for some minutes; -it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

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Charles Baudelaire

Un Fantôme (A Phantom)

I Les Ténèbres

Dans les caveaux d'insondable tristesse
Où le Destin m'a déjà relégué;
Où jamais n'entre un rayon rose et gai;
Où, seul avec la Nuit, maussade hôtesse,

Je suis comme un peintre qu'un Dieu moqueur
Condamne à peindre, hélas! sur les ténèbres;
Où, cuisinier aux appétits funèbres,
Je fais bouillir et je mange mon coeur,

Par instants brille, et s'allonge, et s'étale
Un spectre fait de grâce et de splendeur.
À sa rêveuse allure orientale,
Quand il atteint sa totale grandeur,
Je reconnais ma belle visiteuse:

C'est Elle! noire et pourtant lumineuse.


II Le Parfum

Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré
Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise
Ce grain d'encens qui remplit une église,
Ou d'un sachet le musc invétéré?

Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise
Dans le présent le passé restauré!
Ainsi l'amant sur un corps adoré
Du souvenir cueille la fleur exquise.

De ses cheveux élastiques et lourds,
Vivant sachet, encensoir de l'alcôve,
Une senteur montait, sauvage et fauve,

Et des habits, mousseline ou velours,
Tout imprégnés de sa jeunesse pure,
Se dégageait un parfum de fourrure.


III Le Cadre

Comme un beau cadre ajoute à la peinture,
Bien qu'elle soit d'un pinceau très-vanté,
Je ne sais quoi d'étrange et d'enchanté
En l'isolant de l'immense nature,

Ainsi bijoux, meubles, métaux, dorure,

[...] Read more

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The Double Image

1.

I am thirty this November.
You are still small, in your fourth year.
We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,
flapping in the winter rain.
falling flat and washed. And I remember
mostly the three autumns you did not live here.
They said I'd never get you back again.
I tell you what you'll never really know:
all the medical hypothesis
that explained my brain will never be as true as these
struck leaves letting go.

I, who chose two times
to kill myself, had said your nickname
the mewling mouths when you first came;
until a fever rattled
in your throat and I moved like a pantomine
above your head. Ugly angels spoke to me. The blame,
I heard them say, was mine. They tattled
like green witches in my head, letting doom
leak like a broken faucet;
as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet,
an old debt I must assume.

Death was simpler than I'd thought.
The day life made you well and whole
I let the witches take away my guilty soul.
I pretended I was dead
until the white men pumped the poison out,
putting me armless and washed through the rigamarole
of talking boxes and the electric bed.
I laughed to see the private iron in that hotel.
Today the yellow leaves
go queer. You ask me where they go I say today believed
in itself, or else it fell.

Today, my small child, Joyce,
love your self's self where it lives.
There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
why did I let you grow
in another place. You did not know my voice
when I came back to call. All the superlatives
of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe
will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.
The time I did not love
myself, I visited your shoveled walks; you held my glove.
There was new snow after this.

[...] Read more

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I'm Not One Of Those Peephole Old People

I'm not a portrait painting on a canvas.
Waiting for a visit to exhibit.
I'm not one of those peephole old people...
Peeking out of keyholes all day,
Hey...
I,
Am much...
Alive.

I'm not a portrait painting on a canvas.
Waiting for a visit to exhibit.

I,
Am much...
Alive.

I,
Am much...
Alive.

I'm not one of those peephole old people,
Peeking out of keyholes all day!
I'm not a portrait painting on a canvas.
Waiting for a visit to exhibit.

I,
Am much...
Alive.

I,
Am much...
Alive.

I'm not a portrait painting on a canvas.
Waiting for a visit to exhibit.
I'm not one of those peephole old people...
Peeking out of keyholes all day,
Hey...
I'm not a portrait painting on a canvas.
Waiting for a visit to exhibit.
I'm not one of those peephole old people...
Peeking out of keyholes all day,
Hey...
I,
Am much...
Alive.

I'm not one of those peephole old people.

I,

[...] Read more

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The House Of Dust: Part 03: 02: The Screen Maiden

You read—what is it, then that you are reading?
What music moves so silently in your mind?
Your bright hand turns the page.
I watch you from my window, unsuspected:
You move in an alien land, a silent age . . .

. . . The poet—what was his name—? Tokkei—Tokkei—
The poet walked alone in a cold late rain,
And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds;
For his lover was dead, he never would love again.

Rain in the dreams of the mind—rain forever—
Rain in the sky of the heart—rain in the willows—
But then he saw this face, this face like flame,
This quiet lady, this portrait by Hiroshigi;
And took it home with him; and with it came

What unexpected changes, subtle as weather!
The dark room, cold as rain,
Grew faintly fragrant, stirred with a stir of April,
Warmed its corners with light again,

And smoke of incense whirled about this portrait,
And the quiet lady there,
So young, so quietly smiling, with calm hands,
Seemed ready to loose her hair,

And smile, and lean from the picture, or say one word,
The word already clear,
Which seemed to rise like light between her eyelids . .
He held his breath to hear,

And smiled for shame, and drank a cup of wine,
And held a candle, and searched her face
Through all the little shadows, to see what secret
Might give so warm a grace . . .

Was it the quiet mouth, restrained a little?
The eyes, half-turned aside?
The jade ring on her wrist, still almost swinging? . . .
The secret was denied,

He chose his favorite pen and drew these verses,
And slept; and as he slept
A dream came into his heart, his lover entered,
And chided him, and wept.

And in the morning, waking, he remembered,
And thought the dream was strange.
Why did his darkened lover rise from the garden?

[...] Read more

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Library In You

The words that you speak.The wisdom you have inspired me. The stories you tell and the author in you comes out. Library In You
The parallel lines in you words the experience in the language the art of storytelling.Reception from people how these stories affect many lives.The library In You. Your literature speaks volumes to me.You are the simile and I; m the metaphore.The tone of beautiful words the elegance of rhythem in which you speak from. Listening brings many to high altitudes.The library In You
Grammar in how you use it.The ingredent to mothers cake the master in your own league.An idle mirror on how I can tell my story. Your flowetry with a pen and paper tells all issues of those in the ghetto. You are the symphony of art.
The mathematics of an artist and his brush.The fuel to the fire I ignite with inspiration. The mother speaks as the child listen.The library in You
To conquer all paths of storytelling to imply and relate with a pen and recongize these thoughts.

The pen writes the story but the mind conquers the thought.Words explains the love of literature.I accept the library in me

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Nothing Natural About It At All

That portrait painted,
Hangs much too low,
The light from it appears to be shaded.
Where did the gleeming smiles,
And the brightness go?

Those sloping lush hills,
Seemed so green just yesterday.
Even when the clouds and rain came near...
None of it on this portrait showed.
The rays of the Sun,
Were then so clear.

Wasn't the Sunrise on the horizon,
Full of vivid promises free of duels?
And who came to smear a tinge of darkness upon it?
That had to have been just after noon.

The peaks of mountains,
Snowcapped and strong?
There is something about it,
That will not be prolonged.
The melting of snow,
Seems to have gone.

What 'is' this?

Something about it,
Has to be stopped.

I can see in its future,
This portrait is going to be forgotten.
Snatched off the wall.
And its presence remembered...
From memories dropped.

That can not be the same portrait!
Seen now to hang so pitifully.
Tilted, in a lopsidedness.
That brings not a hint of joy to me.

Is this someone's idea,
Of a joke to provoke?
My atmosphere...
Is not a place to invite tears?
The sweeping of the strokes...
Has abandoned its meaning.
To another scene in a secret elope.

That portrait painted,

[...] Read more

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For Mr. Thomas

From faded newsprint used to wrap a fish
Inscrutably the muse selects your face
As i sit drinking famously in an irish bar
Five thousand miles and thirty years away
With the usual ceremonial you were crowned one night
King of the field where doctors nail the cows
To make of the cock's quill the rights of language
And the pricking heart a sword against the hours
Let smirking scholars writhe in their favourite bondage
And hold you plaintiff to the charge of art
Exhibit a: he falls on legendary lines
Singing mother i don't want a pain here in my heart
The judge in me sucks eggs and jerks the sacred meat
But the boy in me still dreams in milk wood town
Like two provincial bastards playing the galleries
I hold your photo to a mirror upside down
And as bacon wafts through hungry streets, your ghost pervades
Just like an old ex-boxer aged twenty two
Staged-up like falstaff or the wild welsh rimbaud
You'd laugh to see the monograms they make of you
Ah, mr. thomas let us ramble through the midnight fair
Let us throw old bottles at the ferris wheel
Let us paint library on the library let us raid the moonlight
Let us steal whatever we are supposed to steal
Let us watch while the days grow daily more mundane
That rough god go riding with his shears
Hack wide the belly of the swollen mountains
And rip molten heroes forth from their furious tears
Oh, mr. thomas, oh, mr. thomas,
Let us steal whatever we're supposed to steal
Mr. thomas, oh, mr. thomas,
Why don't we feel whatever we're supposed to feel
Oh, mr. thomas, mr. thomas,
Why don't we feel whatever we're supposed to feel
Oh, mr. thomas let us ramble through the midnight
Let us throw bottles at the ferris wheel
Let us paint library on the library let us raid the moonlight
Let us steal whatever we're supposed to steal

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In Loving Memory

A long time ago,1976 to be exact
a friend said I should go along
to a writing class he had joined.
Therefore, I did and met someone,
who was to change my life.
However, I did not know it at the time.
For the first couple of years he was simply my tutor.

However, as the years rolled on,
he became my mentor,
and most of all my friend.
For every year, we knew one another
the friendship grew stronger than before.
Before I met Maurice,
he had published four novels
and I have every one.

He started with A City Called Holy,
next came The Splendour and the Havoc,
and then The World and the Flesh,
and finally Across the Frontier.
He also wrote plays,
produced, directed and acted
in them with his wife Peggy.
When I met him his books
were out of print,
but through the years,
I found them one by one.

After a friendship that lasted
over seventeen years Maurice died.
However just before he passed away,
he told me how his local library
had approached him, wanting to know
if he had any copies of his books,
as they only had one left.
He did not and felt sadly about that.
As he told me, I made a promise to myself.

Not matter how long it took,
or how much it would cost,
his local library would have,
those books of his they did not have.
More than ten years passed from the time of his death,
until I was finally able to fulfil my promise.
I collected through the years
the books the library was missing.
In January 2006, I presented them to his local library.

It was a way of saluting a special friend,

[...] Read more

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Dr. Library

Creations!
Sweet shadow,
Romance,
Full of love and passion! !
Dr. Library;
Sure, treasure!
Emotional and beautiful,
Longing,
Unleash!
Expressions,
Brilliant!
Dr. Library;
Passionate,
Enjoyed by both sides,
To see you and to feel you!
You have the skills and,
You are well known;
Lead, led!
Switch off the light;
Wild romance!
Leisurely,
Expressed, impressed!
Sweet shadow,
Romance,
Drive, arrive!
Dr. Library;
Longing,
Press, express!
Expressions,
Emotional and beautiful;
The, there!
Updates,
Real time;
In, remain!
Something nice,
Something sweet,
Down there with your muse;
Dates, updates!
From the north,
Main, remain!
From the east,
Under, wonder!
From the south,
Floor, flower!
From the west,
Country fair!
Combinations,
With Dr. Library.

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Portrait

As I gaze blink-less
At the bare beauty of your persona
Behind the thin satin coat
Your portrait steps out alive
Out of the golden frame.

Your portrait generates
A multitude of elemental emotions,
Some romantically elusive like fluttering butterflies,
Others tangible like love-making,
Yet some others audible like the dying cadence
Of a stringed music played on my lyre.

Am churned by the immaculate portrait
Like the ocean
And I deliver nectar and parijat
From the dark womb of my private secrecy.

I owe it to your portrait timeless,
As I take the yet-to-be christened
Eleventh incarnation of Indian pantheon
Embodying love and truth
With an assured confidence.

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Lady Of Fayum

Do you know
you are about to die?

Did you know
you were about to die?
Was this naturalistic
painted portrait

upon choice wooden panel
commissioned veritable
painted prior
to encroaching death?

Prestigious portrait
face covering inserted
brilliant colours bright
in far gaze farewell

in height of Roman fashion
in hair styles clothes jewelry
in lifelike rank status realistic
loving verisimilitude memory

attached to cloth
embalming mummy
bandages as funeral
custom dictated.

Noble fee paid portrait
beautifully painted
in encaustic veneer upon
previously prepared

coated receptive surface
contains rich beeswax
mixed with pigments
to retain colour intensity.

Shoulders life beat breast
in pose three-quarter view
head almost fully frontal
slightly tilted far sight left.

No melancholy serene pallor
wrinkleless yet no lip telling
tragedy confessed contempt
in tribute commissioned artist

a youthful time typical death
bitterly felt sorrow not shown

[...] Read more

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Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

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The Silence of the Library

the silence of a library
it is the weight of knowledge
on the axis of the mind
waiting to swing into action

the silence of the library
each brain negotiates a path
through the written words where
the tjhoughts of great men flow

the silence of the library
a section of the books
that has gathered dust waits
for a life to be put into them

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Library

That is why it is called library
Where stand all books buried
Built with huge grant amount to carry
Impressions of dead poets for all that past sorry

New generation wants fast result
Press the Google button and everything is built
Right from old warriors to new breed if politicians
History is on hand and can be seen as produced by the magician

Time is not far off when "library" word may become extinct
Boards may remain with sign but not more called distinct
All work and manuscripts may be stand converted
Into "e" governance and whole of the past may be subverted

It is our glorious past and heritage
We have maintained it as history on page
Many old scripture still find their place
They are the sacred heritage and must be preserved in any case

"Go and have reference from library" may become thing of past
The past may not only remain as past but soon deteriorate last
Few of the pages may speak about glorious death of civilization
Where as we need them as our only witness for old link and new relation

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Careful. You're In the Library!

All this talk about who ain't did what!
And who was suppose to do that,
And do it without getting fat,
On wide spreading butts.
All this talk about who ain't did what!
Ain't said 'sssssshhhh...'

'Careful.
You're in the library! '

I'm trying to keep my voice down,
But you all have too much information...
Researched that I've found.
And it makes me pissed and angry.
How can you keep calm?
You should be angry too!
And far more alarmed.

All this talk about who ain't did what!
And who was suppose to do that,
And do it without getting fat,
On wide spreading butts.
All this talk about who ain't did what!
Ain't said 'sssssshhhh...'

'Careful.
You're in the library! '

Is this whisper good enough for you.
See how my teeth grit.
As I move my lips?

See how I make my eyes enlarge?
See how I...

'Careful.
You're in the library!
And when you are inside here...
I am in charge.
Ssssshhh.
Or get out!
And...
Don't think of taking those books,
Before you check them.'

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My Library

Like prim Professor of a College
I primed my shelves with books of knowledge;
And now I stand before them dumb,
Just like a child that sucks its thumb,
And stares forlorn and turns away,
With dolls or painted bricks to play.

They glour at me, my tomes of learning.
"You dolt!" they jibe; "you undiscerning
Moronic oaf, you make a fuss,
With highbrow swank selecting us;
Saying: "I'll read you all some day' -
And now you yawn and turn away.

"Unwanted wait we with our store
Of facts and philosophic lore;
The scholarship of all the ages
Snug packed within our uncut pages;
The mystery of all mankind
In part revealed - but you are blind.

"You have no time to read, you tell us;
Oh, do not think that we are jealous
Of all the trash that wins your favour,
The flimsy fiction that you savour:
We only beg that sometimes you
Will spare us just an hour or two.

"For all the minds that went to make us
Are dust if folk like you forsake us,
And they can only live again
By virtue of your kindling brain;
In magice print they packed their best:
Come - try their wisdom to digest. . . ."

Said I: "Alas! I am not able;
I lay my cards upon the table,
And with deep shame and blame avow
I am too old to read you now;
So I will lock you in glass cases
And shun your sad, reproachful faces."

* * * * * * * * *

My library is noble planned,
Yet in it desolate I stand;
And though my thousand books I prize,
Feeling a witling in their eyes,
I turn from them in weariness
To wallow in the Daily Press.

[...] Read more

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