June 9th, 2013 [I’ll get over it in Prague, or in 4 months, 5 days]

Jessica M

I hate myself for wanting to be pretty but even more, I hate the world I live in for   making me feel like I need to be pretty in order to amount to anything   but it's been etched into my brain      like the alphabet or "I'm fine, thanks, how are you?"

I guess I ran out of words when I stopped believing   that I needed you to love me back

sometimes I still think of you but only in the moment between tracks on a CD or at stoplights or in the the spaces of light between my fingers  when I shield my eyes from the sun

but there are a lot of things I sometimes think about so maybe   you're not so special after all just a speck of static I clung to  when I had nothing else to hold  or when there was no one else to fill the space around me

?

The Earthquake

MT Ecreso

It's like an earthquake.

The world shifts around you,

Shaking your heart, shaking your mind,

Shaking your control until it crumbles away

Leaving you both helpless and defenceless,

And you are scared and shaking

But not because of the ground.

It's like an earthquake.

Because debris falls around you

And it blurs your vision,

But it's not debris, not really.

It is your emotions,

Overwhelming and all-consuming,

Until they are all you can see.

It's like an earthquake,

As you sit surrounded completely,

By that debris, those powerful emotions,

And you feel suffocated.

So breathing takes effort.

In and out, you breathe, in and out.

And you attempt to find that control you lost.

It's like an earthquake

Because you're confused at the start,

And you don't know what's happening.

You might figure out what it is somehow

But the confusion still remains.

It's disorienting and debilitating.

Making you incapable of helping yourself.

And in this earthquake,

Where you fight to breathe,

Where confusion is everywhere,

All you can do is struggle.

And you try to grip the edges of the world,

To hold it still, to calm it.

But you can't ever succeed.

In an earthquake like this,

You have no power at all.

You cannot calm the world.

You cannot calm yourself.

Then the tears finally come,

And stream down your face;

The only visible hint of the storm inside.

An earthquake is so cruel,

That your friends cannot fathom it.

Because they weren't there.

They didn't experience it.

So they smile awkwardly at you,

Because they can accept it,

Even if they never understand.

And after the earthquake,

When the world has settled

And finally you can breathe,

You smile softly to yourself.

Because you have survived.

And are thankful for all that is good.

And maybe even for the earthquakes.

Because an earthquake teaches you.

To adapt and to grow,

To be thankful for the stillness,

And never take it for granted.

It gives you eyes for the truth,

The truth of what's really important.

Like love, virtue, and family.

And even in my own earthen storm,

When my mind, body, and soul are in pain,

I still know the truth somehow;

That the earthquake is not real,

Even though it feels like it is.

So I will be alright in time.

At least until the next earthquake.

Favourite Place

Liz Lochhead   (This. But my spot is over the ferry at Corran and drive as far as you can westward).

We would be snaking up Loch Lomond, the road narrow and winding after the turn at Tarbert, and we’d be bending branches as we slid through the green and dripping overhang of the trees. All the bickering over the packing, and the – as usual – much, much later-than-we’d-meant-to leaving, all that falling from us, our moods lifting, lightening, becoming our good mood the more miles we put between our freed and weekend selves and Glasgow.

Driving in the dark means: slot in another CD without even looking at what it is, another any-old-silver-disc from the zippered case that, when you reminded me, I’d have quickly stuffed far too full and randomly, then jammed it, last minute, into the top of my rucksack. Golden oldies, yours or mine, whose favourite? Anyway, the music would spool us through Tyndrum, past the shut Real Food Café where other days we like to stop, and over moonscape Rannoch Moor to the moonlit majesty of Glencoe, over the bridge at Ballachulish, past Corran with the ferry stilled and the loch like glass; we’d be wriggling along Loch Linnhe then straighten up past the long strip of darkened lochside Big hotels and their Vacancies or No Vacancies signs to 30 mph Fort William – Full-Of-Rain-Town-With-Its-Limitless-Litres-In-A-Mist! – we’d shout it out and we’d be honouring a long ago and someone else’s family pass-the-time-car- journey game we never even played, but Michael, proud of his teenage wordsmith son, once told us about – and it has stuck. We’d be speeding up now, taking the bend’s wide sweep as we bypass the sleeping town, making for the second-last turn-off: Mallaig and The Road To The Isles. And you’d say, ‘Last thirty miles, Lizzie, we’ll be there by midnight.’

The always longest fifteen miles from Glenfinnan to Lochailort and a wee cheer at the last turn, down past the big house and the fish farm, beyond the lay-by – full of travellers’ ramshackle vans now the yellow’s on the broom again – our eyes peeled now for the white-painted stone so we’ll not miss the overgrown entrance to the field of caravans.

There would be that sigh of always glad-to-see our old van still standing, opening the door, the sniffing – no dampness, no mice… I’d be unloading the first cool bags of food, while you’d be round the van’s side, down in the mud turning the stopcock for the water, fixing the gas – and soon, breathing a big sigh, laughing in relief at how that huge stag that had suddenly filled the windscreen a mile back stopping our hearts as – ho! – we’d shouted our alarm – had somehow astonishingly leapt free, was gone, and no harm done, we’d be lighting candles, pouring a dram, drinking the first cup of tea from the old black and white teapot.

And tonight the sky would be huge with stars. Tomorrow there would be the distant islands cut out of sugar paper, or else cloud, the rain in great veils coming in across the water, the earliest tenderest feathering of green on the trees, mibbe autumn laying bare the birches stark white. There would be blood-red rowan berries, that bold robin eating from my plate again, or – for a week or two in May – the elusive, insistent cuckoo, or else the slow untidy flapping of the flight of the heron, the oil-black cormorant’s disappear-and-dive, shifts of sun, double or even treble rainbows. The waterfall would be a wide white plume or a thin silver trickle, depending… There would be bracken’s early unfurling or late summer’s heather pinking and purpling over, there’d be a plague of hairy caterpillars and the last drunken bees. Mibbe you’d nudge me, and hushed, again we’d watch that otter swim to shore on New Year’s Day with a big fish in its mouth, emerge so near us on the flat rocks we wouldn’t dare to breathe as we’d watch it, unconcerned, oblivious, make a meal of eating it before our eyes. Or it would be a late Easter this year and, everywhere along the roadside, the chrome-yellow straight-out-of-the-tube-and- laid-on-with-a-palette-knife brashness, the amazing coconut smell of the gorse.

But tonight you are three months dead and I must pull down the bed and lie in it alone. Tomorrow, and every day in this place these words of Sorley MacLean’s will echo through me: The world is still beautiful, though you are not in it. And this will not be a consolation but a further desolation.

Assisi

Norman MacCaig

The dwarf with his hands on backwards

sat, slumped like a half-filled sack

on tiny twisted legs from which

sawdust might run,

outside the three tiers of churches built

in honour of St Francis, brother

of the poor, talker with birds, over whom

he had the advantage

of not being dead yet.

A priest explained

how clever it was of Giotto

to make his frescoes tell stories

that would reveal to the illiterate the goodness

of God and the suffering

of His Son. I understood

the explanation and

the cleverness.

A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly,

fluttered after him as he scattered

the grain of the Word. It was they who had passed

the ruined temple outside, whose eyes

wept pus, whose back was higher

than his head, whose lopsided mouth

said Grazie in a voice as sweet

as a child’s when she speaks to her mother

or a bird’s when it spoke

to St Francis.

Death of a Philosopher

William Greco

name: Socrates

the crime: asebeia

the verdict: conium maculatum

“Oh, what an irony!

now let me finish my last drink

I’ve been training long enough

so I won’t tremble or run away

give me the coins, my eyes are ready

and don’t forget about that rooster!

since I’ll exist without my physical body

from now on“

Fontana di Trevi

Alfred Austin reconciles himself to loss and loneliness

Why do I sit within the spell Of eyes like thine, who oft have known What 'tis in Beauty's gaze to dwell, And then—to feel alone: Back be remitted to my cell, Too lately near a throne?

What though the moon on Trevi's fount, Whilst we together drink, doth shine, Can it the rural miles remount, Or I subtract from mine? Whilst Time hath scarce begun to count The pleasant paths of thine.

How vain to thus divide its wave! It will not help to blend our own. Thy voice is gay, but mine is grave, As thine too will have grown In days when nought is left thee save A half-remembered tone.

The light that gilds my world no more, But only now just breaks on thine; Thy shadows stretch all bright before, Behind in darkness mine. Leave me my unillumined shore, And in thy lustre shine!

Forth to thy Future, gifted child! Oh, be it fair as thou! As thy sweet tones and temper mild, And cloudless as thy brow; And thou wilt then be reconciled That I am silent now!

Happy the Man

John Dryden on a universal truth - so happy the ONE... 

Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. Be fair or foul or rain or shine The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. Not Heaven itself upon the past has power, But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.