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Upon the lap of Nature

A lonesome bird
A whispering wind
A solitary cloud,
Nature is a singular scene.

A running brook
Gushing falls
Breathing woods,
Nature is a singular voice.

Endless meads
Dancing shades
A grazing cow
Nature is a singular vision.

A ploughman’s call
A melodious song
A barking dog,
Nature is a singular pulse.

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poem by Ravi Panamanna
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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.

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poem by Erie Morganmaples
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A singular person

I like to think that
I'm a singular person

Just not singular in any
Outstanding way

I like to think tho', that
There's something special

In the little things I do
And in a few of the things I say

I'm a man of few words
But a bearer of many emotions

I love wee little birds
And great briney oceans

Rustic ol' bridges
And ol' magic potions

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poem by David Whalen
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In The Wilderness Of Uncertainty

If I had a singular point to make,
From this one soul...
Coming face to face,
With a host of nameless expressions.
I would wish to appear fearless.

Travel as I wonder,
Which door to pick for a short visit.
Would I be embraced...
When my deepest thoughts are revealed,
Comfortably enough to retrace steps I've taken.

If I had a singular desire,
To inspire feelings of love...
I wish to share.
Would I recognize a caring there...
Communicating hope and faith.

And would that singular point I made,
Be accepted as an invitation...

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poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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Uninformed Masses Believed Earth Was Flat

once uninformed masses
believed the earth was flat
during medieval dark ages

yet esteemed ancient Greeks
knew earth was really a sphere
calculated degree of horizons

now sol is a singular star believe masses
yet over 80% of all solar systems
according to NASA have multiple suns

bright stellar fires of smaller suns
some not much bigger than Jupiter
most common suns brown dwarfs

12 to 80 times Jupiter’s size brown dwarfs
found floating freely in interstellar space
also proliferate as binary star companions

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poem by Terence George Craddock
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Each Day, Since We Parted

I have never heard either one of you
Utter a single intelligible word,
Yet, more than else, 'I love you',
Are words, from me, that I regret you've never heard;
I have never been with you
During times of revelry or of sorrow,
Though you may be assured, I miss you-
And shall ever more, tomorrow!

No other two ladies may lay this singular claim:
Both of you share so much more than a last name-
Perhaps, neither one of you knows, the same;
Yet, to alight this upon thee, is my one, singular aim!

Alas, both of you are to the other, unbeknownst;
No one charged with youur guard, has deigned
To believe your unique connection need be announced,
And thus, with time, it has surely waned!

For shame! With each day that passes-for shame!

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poem by Maurice Harris
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Indefinite Pronouns and the Universe

He said;
his arm flowing outward;

'The problem of the 21st Century
is the Indefinite Pronoun.

We're all everyone and no one
indefinite;
pronoun, but not a noun
the universal vagueness
of time, meaning, and identity,

rather like the cloud of electrons
flying around the nucleus of the atom
there and not there;
but capable of being anywhere
or in two places at the same time;
holding many beliefs constantly shifting,
feeling fervently one thing and its opposites
the next minute,

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poem by Lonnie Hicks
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Parfum Exotique (Exotic Perfume)

Quand, les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d'automne,
Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux,
Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux
Qu'éblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone;

Une île paresseuse où la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne.

Guidé par ton odeur vers de charmants climats,
Je vois un port rempli de voiles et de mâts
Encor tout fatigués par la vague marine,

Pendant que le parfum des verts tamariniers,
Qui circule dans l'air et m'enfle la narine,
Se mêle dans mon âme au chant des mariniers.

Exotic Perfume

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poem by Charles Baudelaire
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The Stranger

It was on Queen Street
Auckland, we mystically met.
I hurried past up hill
to swiftly change in hotel room.
I felt presence reach
out, as I rapidly pasted.
I stopped; to glance around.
What had arrested motion?

This unknown man would be
singular alone anywhere.
We looked searching out secrets
deep within each others eyes.
Dressed he was in shielding travel stained
clothes of youth's pilgrims who travel.
Seeking an answer to impelling souls.
Moths ever magnetically magically drawn on.

It was on Queen Street, in my beloved Auckland,
in Aotearoa New Zealand, we mystically met.

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poem by Terence George Craddock
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Machine Messiah

Part i
Run down a street
Where the glass shows
That summer has gone
Age, in the doorways
Resenting the pace of the dawn.
All of them standing in line
All of them waiting for time.
From time, the great healer,
The machine-messiah
Is born.
Cables that carry the life
To the cities we build
Threads that link diamonds of life
To the satanic mills
Ah, to see in every way
That we feel it every
Day, and know that
Maybe well change
Offered the chance

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song performed by Yes
Added by Lucian Velea
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