wretched war-torn cleopatra

'All I post are selfies and spilled ink, and those aren’t too easy to distinguish from one another.'

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What's ethically the highest is to help those closest to us and push everything else to the side.

Rudolf Serkin

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Theaet. I should say, Stranger, that man is a tame animal, and I admit that he is hunted.

The Sophist

Plato

Tr. Jowett

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res severa est verum gaudium

seneca

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i loved

your lips and teeth and tongue and eye and lid,

your compliments and lies and everything

your subtle words that warm nights’ darkness hid

from anxious worry or regret of sweet nothings.

what wondrous time, now far, far in the past

but still so tender, or not tender but

delicate in ways that may not last

through love’s sweet trials, through boredom’s dubious cuts.

to cut away your lips and teeth and tongue,

your voice and glance and touch and scent and taste

and all the things that sweetly, softly stung

like cupid’s charming arrows all in haste

would hurt so much right now -- i know it would, 

but the pain would be so good, my love, so good.   

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Je suis une force qui va ! Agent aveugle et sourd de mystères funèbres Une âme de malheur faite avec des ténèbres ! Où vais-je ? je ne sais. Mais je me sens poussé D'un souffle impétueux, d'un destin insensé. Je descends, je descends, et jamais ne m'arrête. Si parfois, haletant, j'ose tourner la tête, Une voix me dit: Marche! et l'abîme est profond, Et de flamme ou de sang je le vois rouge au fond ! Cependant, à l'entour de ma course farouche, Tout se brise, tout meurt. Malheur à qui me touche ! Oh ! fuis ! détourne-toi de mon chemin fatal, Hélas ! sans le vouloir, je te ferais du mal !

Hernani 

Hugo

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We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time... Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts -- not to hurt others.

Middlemarch

George Eliot

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siegfried, iii.1

The cliff splits open -- there! a figure stirs

Whose color is of rock and stone but has

A power of her own, a pace that’s hers

Alone. Whose mien could compare with Erda’s?  

-

Sleep as dreaming; dream as meditation

Claims she of her powers, and right she seems

Til news of her daughter’s own damnation

Makes a living nightmare of her dream.

-

How could she not have known what came to pass

To her own flesh and blood that night, alas!

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The cursor blinks—

now here, then not.

It disappears

an awful lot,

and leaves no trail

to follow by,

so I don’t know

if I should try.

The cursor blinks—

now here, then not.

It reappears

right on the spot.

I stare and blink

in vague attempts

to figure out

just where it went.

But…

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7/8 of college over

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onoertybadpoerty

Did the illiterati send you?

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unfinished

A golden crown is etched around

the dusty floor of the the seminar room,

scratched away by wicker chairs.

In thorny outcrops, jutting out

in spreading rays of exposed yellow,

grains of wood are light like grains

of flax around a darkened seed bed.

seminarium, what hardened bed

where worn as well as worthy words are spun,

a weary worn-out bed where worthy words

might sometimes linger.

But not as long as earthy words, though,

carved right in the table tops.

EVERYBODY LEAVES reads one in Mellon Hall

on table wood whose leaves have clearly left. 

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The words BEATVS VIR are long sloughed off

the grimy, variegated wood

where forearms,

and maybe fevered foreheads, rest, their

oils corrosive to the carrells.

Ruins remain of the Latin refrain.

SAPIENT...MORITABIT...

JUSTIC...MEDITABIT...

etched on imperfect tablets

of wood and “woulds” and words like

I CAN FINISH -- FOCUS,

though many foci flourish in the orbits

of the wandering eyes that examine 

the “I”s of past but pressing statements.

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Bach’s la folia 

Unser trefflicher, Lieber Kammerherr Ist ein kumpabler Mann, Den niemand tadeln kann.

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6/8 of college over

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Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society, under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign.

Federalist Paper 51

James Madison

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