The psychotic is a tired narcissist.

Eynel Wardi

Esa luna color de viejo saxofón
me retendrá en París. 
Esa luna vieja buscando sobre el viento
ojos para mirar el fin de siglo, 
gatos que son las dudas de la noche.

Tiéndete junto a mí. Despierta en la memoria 
esa inquietud que guardan los que acaban de amarse, 
la imperceptible prisa de los labios 
que buscaron un cuello donde apoyar su aliento. 
Y déjame mirarte, frente a frente, 
con estos mismos ojos orientales
que utiliza el amor para observarnos.

Luis García Montero.

“The Secret”,

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of

poetry.

I who don't know the

secret wrote

the line. They

told me

(through a third person)

they had found it

but not what it was

not even

what line it was. No doubt

by now, more than a week

later, they have forgotten

the secret,

the line, the name of

the poem. I love them

for finding what

I can't find,

and for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it

so that

a thousand times, till death

finds them, they may

discover it again, in other

lines

in other

happenings. And for

wanting to know it,

for

assuming there is

such a secret, yes,

for that

most of all.

 Denise Levertov

Let us know ourselves as unconscious, altered, other in order better to approach the universal otherness of the strangers that we are—for only strangeness is universal and such might be the post-Freudian expression of stoicism.

Julia Kristeva

Nations Without Nationalism

'Talking things over'


(for B)


If merit (you once wrote) is merited
at all (then) vulnerability's the measure…
today, i met you on the cobbled campus
at Trinity, your vulnerable face
cobbled with suffering; self-accusing; sad.
We stopped to chat of poetry; foreign lands;
knowing i knew you needed love not talk.


Yet talk is what i offer. Talk is what
we do to one another: man-to-man
(and man to woman, too). Is talk enough
to undo talk's inflictions; sorrows, scars?
There is no guilty party and no innocent.
The naked light bulbs in O'Connell Street
Red, orange, yellow, beaconing goodwill,
obscure the trees' December nakedness
as words obscure the Word; assail the truth
of love. Love's not a gift or a privilege.
Love must be worked at; scoured; refurbished; taken
as it goes and comes and comes and goes again.
I'll tell you straight what love it: love is sin
made innocent; as sin is lovelessness.

My vulnerable friend, forgive. Forgive yourself
for being yourself; then be yourself again,
vulnerable; loving; meritorious.
The rest is plain sailing.

Basil Payne

"When we ask ourselves whether or not the dreamer is conscious of the sexual content of his dreams, we are really asking the wrong question. If sexuality, as we have explained above, is indeed one of our ways of entering into a relationship with the world, then whenever our meta-sexual being is overshadowed, as happens in dreams, sexuality is everywhere and nowhere; it is, in the nature of the case, ambiguous and cannot emerge clearly as itself."

Merlau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty Basic Writings

The myth they chose was the constant lovers.
The theme was richness over time.
It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it
because it requires a long performance
and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts.
It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman
he fucks in the ass underneath the stars
because it is summer and they are full of longing
and sick of birth. They burn coolly
like phosphorus, and the thing need be done
only once. Like the sacking of Troy
it survives in imagination,
in the longing brought perfectly to closing,
the woman's white hands opening, opening,
and the man churning inside her, thrashing there.
And light travels as if all the stars they were under
exploded centuries ago and they are resting now, glowing.

The woman thinks what she is feeling is like the dark
and utterly complete. The man is past sadness,
though his eyes are wet. He is learning about gratitude,
how final it is, as if the grace in Botticelli's Primavera, 

the one with sad eyes who representes pleasure,
had a canvas to herself, entirely to herself.

Robert Hass

Against Botticelli