I See You in Colors

I am pretending you did not exist.
Ink nightly washes black
over my consciousness
and abandons me as morning seaweed
upon a foreign beach.

I am pretending we were simply
the sparkling imagination of some higher being,
our life together set below a singular epic sky
unrepeated
in future histories

I am pretending I cannot taste you
each day as I do the sea air in my breath
when I am running,
my heart tied upon one foot,
ancient melancholy tied upon the other,
anxiously racing,
madly racing through lifetimes,
to find our brightened souls.

I see you in colors that don’t exist.

It is all that I see clearly.
and why I run.

Copyright (c) 2009 Paul Matsumoto. All Rights Reserved.
Photo Source

Unraveled

I lingered silent over the geography
of your spirit,
and inhaled its saffron valleys,
sunlit with lissome lilies,
as I drunk deep from its coaxing wells
of cool electricity.

I have tasted the Spring’s first blooms
in your glance and wondered
of the half life of our words
and the extraordinary struggle
of their anxious disorder.

I stopped cold with your slight
“hey mister” and all I could think was
of the fate of crowned angels
in the silvered milky way
watching over,
washing over
my desire to be lured
and unraveled
and…
did you really call me
“mister”?

We shall run away far from all
that is familiar,
toothy fear and excitement our fuel,
until the burdened chatter of others
becomes inaudible,
until all that is unspeakable
is spoken,
and our voice,
clear and charmed in its
undressed debut,
sings.

Image source

Love Is The Only Rational Act

“Love is the only rational act.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

If we don’t breathe to speak of love
then we are wasting our breath.
If we aren’t eating to have the energy to love
then we are still hungry.
If we aren’t moving to love,
then we are moving in the wrong direction.
If our every action, movement, thought, word
does not lead to love
then we have failed as we may have before
and if we do not pick ourselves up
and love ourselves and others even more
then we have declared the ultimate
war upon humanity.
The only true war on war
is to express love
and to share it with everyone
even in the most unlikeliest of moments,
especially in the most unlikeliest of moments,
we must share love
and reach others with it,
teach it, preach it
from the rooftops,
from the mountaintops
to surround every ounce of our being with love
no matter the consequences,
past and future,
for herein lies
the present
and future
for us
all.

Picture Source

On This Splendid Day

As if blown over hot embers
a drowsy wind blew soulless
over the zoo that lined the Boulevard.
There was no redemption
found for those on the 181
as it jerked toward its destiny.

Highland. Vine. Western.
The bus lurched forward,
its captives silent with a lifetime of
guilt and indignity,
their endless untold stories
already forgotten.

In Little Armenia an elderly man
boarded in his Sunday best.
No one noticed the music
that twinkled unashamedly
from his eyes.
Vermont. Los Feliz. Central.

At the Galleria,
I stared out from the bus,
now in disrepair and half emptied,
at the old man
meeting
his loved one,
their imperfect bodies
suddenly perfect,
their arms wrapped around each other
like silk ribbons around a gift,
as they kissed
and kissed,
and kissed for what seemed like
an infinity of moments,
each moment intense and delicate,
soft and unbroken,
with an urgency deep with patience,
I watched
as others soon did

and I soon
discovered too,
unashamedly,
on this splendid day,
how
the broken song
can find its notes
and live
forever.

Poetry copyright (c) 2009 Paul Matsumoto. All rights reserved.
Photo Source

Familiar Love

My Dearest Love,
I do hope this letter finds you
and finds you well.
I have been gone much too long,
I know, in search of longed for
misadventures
and uncalculated
love;
a misspent life, perhaps,
but one,
it seems,
that has led me
to you.

How many perfect sunsets have I been
haunted
with your lilting voice cresting
over the waves,
the waves
that rushed through the ventricles
of my heart, and filled my
desperate lungs
with foam
and hunger
for breath,
and then
abandoned me,
silent and
drowning.

How many times did I find
that home in my mind
that belongs to you,
where the early sea fog
swallows your secret garden
brimmed
with lilies and brambles,
hidden paths and buried jars,
where the bright, bright fields
evaporate
beneath the galloping hooves
taking flight
with winged
fierceness.

How much I have missed you,
sweet girl,
I missed how
you arrested my thoughts
mid sentence with
uncommon grace
that disarmed me
for reasons
I cannot name.
I missed
your lovely genius
that so easily
dismissed the weight of my
measurable life,
I missed the intensity
of our words
which became our truths
and bound us
as kindling
to a starving fire.

When we meet again
on that exquisitely ordinary day
you may not remember my face,
my body,
my clothes,
but the welcomed recognition
of the stark flame behind
my eyes,
will hold a
disturbingly
familiar
love,

and I
will
always
remember
you.

Poetry copyright (c) 2009 Paul Matsumoto. All rights reserved.
Photo source

because you asked

because you asked
we worked the invisible splendid,
soulstruck with the vivid terrains
of unexplained familiarity,
mindful of ancient promises that
locked our spirited fortunes together
with unnerving elegance

because you asked
we worked the invisible splendid,
agents of wanderlust
and unexpected thought,
waking the timid to all that is real,
waking the timid to all their dreams
then watched all of its terrible beauty
as they gracefully turned one into the other.

because you asked
we worked the invisible splendid,
agents of wonderment
and unexpected comfort,
and laughed as old friends do,
laughed as lovers do
as we sat, feet dangling
off the edge of the world.

Take Me Far

I could not explain
to you the angles
of our collision
I awoke to no recognizable
wreckage,
just you easing
stargazers into a vase.
You had left the moon
on all night
and sang McLachlan to me,
bending gentle notes
and jazzy laughter
around our tangled bodies

I asked you to
take me far
away
and
you did
as we inhaled
a clarity
and shuddered
into
being.

Save Us

“I am not the
perfect man you seek.
I have little to impress
you with.
I cannot save you
with my ambition,
my dreams,
my love.”

“Ironically”, she mused,
“You are perfect.
After all,
Who else could have crafted
yourself with tremendous
flaws and virtues
as perfectly as you?
Others have taken from you,
plundered your soul
for more,
left you wanting
for sweet rescue.
But truly,
what person can torture you
greater than you
so that
you would freely
surrender all that is
dear to you?”

“Then perhaps,
I can save myself
with my ambition,
my dreams,
my love.
And that is
most of all
what
I can give to you.”

“I understand not
the explicit mathematics
of our spirit,
only that we are pure
as the light
we travel within
and our love,
given freely,
will save us.”

Diary from the Battle Zone

I have seen the raw
horrors of this war firsthand,
its naked wreckage bleeding,
its perverse hunger feeding
the crippled screams
within lonely dreams
leaving its tortured soul desperate
for painless respite

I have seen the raw
agonies of this war firsthand
where from earth its soldiers disappear,
in nightmares they keenly reappear
where their ashen bones seemly mirror
all their death wish fears,
where their tortured souls slowly anticipate
relief from all that they wholly hate

I have learned to deeply respect
what the wisest have forever written
of the bitter fruit barely bitten
and the grandest stories time will tell
where on earth the angels fell
and before the fingers of those
tortured souls
would strain to deftly spell:
“LOVE IS HELL”

The Thin Whispers

We soon forgot our skittish
introductions,
a day’s silent banter of
suspicion
and pride.
No wills were broken,
no wills won.

We trailed the
thin whispers
from the skies
hallucinogenic,
across uneasy
canyons
along the dry beds
and their bleached umbrella
spine

Brush turned to
scattered pines,
as we turned to
long slow draws
from a palmful of water
between brackish
rocks

Each day eavesdropped
upon evening’s edge
pushing the trailless
ridgelines,
till
the thin whispers
sang

and
rang tiny bones
within her
and she ran
blindly
down,
down
into the startled
valley,
our aching
muscle upon muscle
breathless,
her coat gleaming,
reveling
full stride
in the blurred
tall grasses,
till we
took flight
within
the thin
whispers

Strangers in the Night

“To be is to do.”-Socrates
“To do is to be.”-Sartre
“Do be do be do.”-Sinatra

Strangers In The Night – Frank Sinatra

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
–W.B. Yeats

Ashes and Snow

In 2006 I was enthralled by the Nomadic Museum, a temporary structure at the Santa Monica pier, where artist Gregory Colbert created Ashes and Snow as an installation
of photographs, films (narrated in 3 languages by Laurence Fishburne, Ken Watanabe, and Enrique Rocha), and two short film haikus.
Breathtaking and breathgiving, Ashes and Snow astonishes and captivates you as you explore the spiritual poetry between wild animals and humans.
Over 10 million visitors in Venice, New York, Tokyo, Santa Monica, and Mexico City have been transported to this realm of infinite sensitivity and beauty.

The Meaning Behind Don McLean’s “American Pie”

What do Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, JFK, Martin Luther King, Elvis, The Beatles, The Byrds, Altamont, Hell’s Angels,
Janis, Kent State, Waylon Jennings and, of course, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper have in common?

Click Here For More on “American Pie”

Neil Gaiman

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”
-Neil Gaiman, “The Sandman”

English born author, Neil Gaiman, has delighted millions with fantasy tales of imaginative genius. Through short stories, poems, novels, graphic novels,
comics, and film he breathes life into fantastic universes that reveal welcomed insights about ourselves and the nature of humankind.

A friendship with Tori Amos led to a character in “Stardust” (and her referencing him in songs “Tear in Your Hand”, “Spacedog”, “Horses” and “Carbon”). Tori muses here…

The Hugo and Nebula award winning novella
“Coraline” comes out in 2009 in film…

From the book “Fragile Things” the poem, “Instructions”….

“The little folk dare anything”, said his friend. “And they talk a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to ‘em at your peril, and you ignore ‘em at your peril, too.”
-”Stardust”

The Seven Blunders of the World

Distilled from a lifetime of disseminating

non violence in a violent world,

this is the list that Mohandas Gandhi gave

his grandson, Arun, on their final day together

shortly before his assassination.

The Seven Blunders of the World

* Wealth without work
* Pleasure without conscience
* Knowledge without character
* Commerce without morality
* Science without humanity
* Worship without sacrifice
* Politics without principle

Arun Gandhi later added an eighth blunder,

“Rights without responsibilities”.

If one could prevent these acts of

passive violence, Gandhi believed,

perhaps greater acts of violence

could be averted…

Mystic Emotion

“The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties – this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.”
-Albert Einstein

The Time Is Now

While this may bring a laugh, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms.
A must read is Naomi Wolfe’s piece in The Guardian. Click here for the article
And see this interview given two days ago…if you’ve read the Presidential directives on the White House site
and have followed the radical unconstitutional changes in laws, you may see these are not acts of incompetence by our leaders,
but well thought out acts toward specific ends. For us, apathy and fear are not an option. Waiting for a presidential candidate or someone else will do little good without our own personal responsibility, courage and action.

Robert & Alison

A spellbinding collaboration between two great and truly unique voices, produced by the legendary T-Bone Burnett.

Awareness Test

Yes, in an insane world it’s very easy to be distracted in a shell game and not use our complete awareness.
Yet it is hardly an excuse to not be fully responsible for the world around us.
Economics is an example of a subject that is strewn with misleading and outright false data that makes it appear “impossible” to understand.
Indeed, it is made impossible to be understood by the unethical few who stand to benefit from a manufactured chaos.
Modern economics, based on Lord Keynes treatises, is a nightmare of clever deviousness in it’s covert argument for a totalitarian state. He was hailed as the most brilliant economist of his time, but was also noted for his aberrant sexual proclivities as well as his interest in eugenics and racial cleansing and his oft quoted “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” Yet his solutions only opened the doors for the most wickedest of men to do their deeds.
But all this aside, isn’t it peculiar that for the past 60 years a “campaign of distraction”, as I’ve long called it, has been taking place?
As precisely executed as wartime battleplans and twice as insidious, we have been taught to love our distractions more than life itself. After all, if we’re all distracted we don’t observe the obvious. From sports to entertainment, television, media advertisements, and mindless consumerism, we have been distracted to not notice the obvious.
Back in the 60’s the often repeated quip was “a frog thrown in boiling water would reflexively leap out, but a frog placed in a pot of cool water which was very slowly heated would remain in the pot till he perished”.
Meanwhile, a world economy crashes because we fail to notice that money is not being burned, destroyed, or lost, it is simply redistributed by a few who have pulled off a massive shell game.
Could you imagine how much could be accomplished if we took one tenth the time to understand the basics of economics or our current fractional banking system or government, as we do say, a football game?

Look at what the “Bailout Plans” have cost us:

Bailout type…..Cost to taxpayers (Source: Reuters)
Financial bailout package approved this week up to or more than $700 billion
Bear Stearns financing $29 billion
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalization $200 billion
AIG loan and nationalization $85 billion
Federal Housing Administration housing rescue bill $300 billion
Mortgage community grants $4 billion
JPMorgan Chase repayments $87 billion
Loans to banks via Fed’s Term Auction Facility $200 billion+
Loans from Depression-era Exchange Stabilization Fund $50 billion
Purchases of mortgage securities by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac $144 billion
POSSIBLE TOTAL $1.8 trillion+
NUMBER OF HOUSEHOLDS PER U.S. CENSUS 105,480,101
POSSIBLE COST PER HOUSEHOLD $17,064+

Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain both failed miserably to understand the basics of the consequences of their positions in our economy.
In a country where both parties have been corrupted by individuals and industries who back only flawed and
manipulable candidates, it is time to take full responsibility for the world we live in and to first understand
the position we are in.
It may seem boring.
It may seem time consuming.
It may seem overwhelmingly unconfrontable.
But no one can say it is not worth it.
We can blame the evil in this world for the condition we find ourselves in.
And we would soon perish as a boiling amphibian.
It is our world.
It is the world we are handing to our children.

One idea on the economic end…Click Here to Read the Article
It is just one idea.
Another can be found here
Many more can be developed and be put in place.
Of course, that is just one small aspect of what needs to be dealt with.
There is so much more.

We live in exciting times.
We could choose to simply turn away and ignore it.
Or we could choose, as Gandhi put it, “to be the change you want to see in the world.”

Whitman

“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families, re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.” –Walt Whitman

The Finest Creative Juices

A behind the scenes tour of an award-winning creative farm and juicing process in South West England…

Cherokee Story

Synchronicity

Milton Katselas

I lost a dear friend last Friday, Milton Katselas.
A brilliantly insightful man. An uncommon teacher. A respectful listener. A friend.
To those whose lives he touched, he inspired and, indeed, fueled us to reach further than we thought imaginable.
On Broadway and on film he directed the award winning performances of Blythe Danner (Tony), Eileen Heckart (Academy Award),
and Bette Davis (Emmy).
The list of his students at the Beverly Hills Playhouse is legendary, but the songs of praises are uniformly extraordinary.
Gene Hackman. Michelle Pfeiffer. George Clooney. Anne Archer. Catherine Bell. Chris Noth. David Carradine. Alec Baldwin. Miguel Ferrer.
Tom Selleck, Burt Reynolds, Ted Danson, Giovanni Ribisi. Tyne Daly. Patrick Swayze. And on and on.
A life well lived by how he brought out the very best in all those who knew him.
He will be dearly missed.
But the light he gave us will shine forever.

Thank you, Milton.
Thank you.

Straight No Chaser

Dare you not to smile…

The Bowl

The still air stabbed by foreign words.
“I hate you, daddy.”
Its dull thunder rumbled through
his humbled body
and left
as an uninvited guest.

A distant star dimmed.

Feeble eyes darted
to regain
focus.
Guilt replaced the drained blood.

(“Didshereallymeanthat?
WhathaveIdonewrong?
IseverythingItouchruined?
Sheshouldbepunished!
Butruinthisfragilelovetoo?
and,and…”)

The star brightened.

“You know, sweetness,
I would probably hate my daddy too
if he didn’t let me have
my fourth bowl of ice cream!”

Their duet of unbridled bouquets
of laughter
squealed from the carpeted floor.

The Blessings of True Fables

Outside the Palace of Fine Arts
the brassy bedouin gifted
this uneasy teen
her guitar.
And as
he slipped beneath
the sassy spell of
crazed voodoo spirits,
wicked fingers blazed
electric on its strings,
and wailed alongside the waif’s bluesy
this-is-the-last-song-I-will-ever-sing voice.
A mic in one hand and swigs of
Southern Comfort from her other,
she would dub him “Raoul”,
an unsung
discovery,
sober no longer
in the drunken
merriment
of the spring moment
that would never
leave him.

Weeks passed.
Time stopped again
as music channeled
from some
other distant life took hold,
and ephemeral summer
magic howled
its symphony,
then took sudden flight as a thief
in the stolen
night
never to return.

Sadly, Janis soon passed as well.

The young man grew older,
accomplished
many other things
in his life,
until the last sepia’d memory
of Raoul faded
to white.

One day a lost friend,
a godchild unseen
in decades,
passed as a ghost
through his thoughts.
As if by whim, he typed random numbers
into the address bar.
Her profile splashed
on the screen.
He was startled,
delighted.
It was magic!
She’d moved across a continent
and an ocean,
eight time zones away,
and yet here she was
before him.

Conversations followed.

And he smiled.

Raoul had never left.

Validation

“Validation” is a fable about the magic of free parking. Starring TJ Thyne & Vicki Davis. Writer/Director/Composer – Kurt Kuenne. Winner – Best Narrative Short, Cleveland Int’l Film Festival, Winner – Jury Award, Gen Art Chicago Film Festival, Winner – Audience Award, Hawaii Int’l Film Festival, Winner – Best Short Comedy, Breckenridge Festival of Film, Winner – Crystal Heart Award, Best Short Film & Audience Award, Heartland Film Festival, Winner – Christopher & Dana Reeve Audience Award, Williamstown Film Festival, Winner – Best Comedy, Dam Short Film Festival, Winner – Best Short Film, Sedona Int’l Film Festival.

City Lights

I raced the night fantastic
over soulless rooftops
whispering my neoned escape,
over bitter hills of
half bitten dreams arriving late,
rising high over pale
white lights below,
and higher still
into the stilled air,
I dropped, flashing white,
and melded into earth.

I raced the night fantastic
over Embarcadero darkness,
whispering my neoned escape
into the brickened hills
of half bitten dreams arriving late,
falling slow to pale
white skin of
Broadway inviting me within
the cavern air, still,
I dropped, breathing stilled,
and melded into flesh.

I raced the night fantastic
jonesing for my lyrical fix.
I whispered my neoned escape
down narrow stairs
into translucent dreams arriving,
falling slow to poetic hypnotism
of passioned voices
of epiphonic choices
into the stilled air,
I soared flashing white
and melded into
the night
fantastic.

Love’s Tender Violence

We lost all sense
of love’s tender violence
as we raided each others dreams,
invaded convenient bodies whole,
and stole their ghosted voices;
renewed actors in an unrehearsed play
pulsating images of fluent whimsy
across a foreign planet’s stage,
we lit an impassioned sky
of love’s tender silence
where its invisible ink
will never
dry.

The Gift of the Magi

By O. Henry

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”

The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling–something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pierglass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: “Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”

“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”

Down rippled the brown cascade.

“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.

“Give it to me quick,” said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation–as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value–the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends–a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do–oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?”

At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two–and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again–you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice– what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”

Jim looked about the room curiously.

“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you–sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year–what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs–the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims–just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”

And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.”

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ‘em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

The magi, as you know, were wise men–wonderfully wise men–who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

Elephants

Rachael Yamagata

Alexandra Burke- Hallelujah

‘The X Factor’ winner Alexandra Burke has raced to Number One in the UK singles chart, nabbing the coveted Christmas top spot with her cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’.
Burke’s ‘Hallelujah’ became the fastest-selling single by a female solo artist, with 576,000 copies shifted during Christmas. For the first time at Christmas the same song is at Number One and Number Two, as Jeff Buckley’s cover entered on download sales alone.
To add a further twist, the song’s creator Cohen, who returned to tour this year, entered the chart with his original version at Number 36.

I Walk the Earth

I walk the earth
with gravity’s comfort
gliding past the ghost ships
of unglinted eyes
in dreamless imprecision

I walk the earth
with misspent intent
hiding infinite complicity
of epiphanic eyes
in ripened anticipation

I walk the earth
till I slip its orbit
sliding past the hanging stars
of your eyes peering
through my imagination
with silver indulgence

Song of a Chosen Sunrise

Your finger presses my lips
presses me beyond the eclipse
of sinking souls of wrecked ships
the sinking souls of wrecked ships

Madness pursues my indecision
mind ruined by its revisions
victim of its lack of vision
victim of its own imprecision

Your eyes unfold me as sunrise
unfolds her ripened skies
as this sleepless soul can rise
this soul will rise

Beyond my life’s keen disguise
unravels all that is wise
as this sleepless soul can rise
this soul will rise

Straight to You

Down the dwindling
spiral of the rabbit hole,
past the spiritual madness
of conspiracies unknown,
past the perfect delusions
of finely manufactured truth,
past the triumphs of bloodthirsty kings
and the ruthless ignorant,
past the whirring generators
of pharmaceutical high anxiety
and the hypnotic bliss
of senseless propaganda,
past the pixelated memories
of misspent lives
on this prison planet
of tormented souls,
and fired deep inward into
the vacuum of uncharted space,
I have been somehow delivered
straight to you
and our one chance out.

In the Rain

Under a parched sky and its unforgiving sun
I searched through the tallgrass plains
for a sign our work is done
and I will languish in your Serengeti rains

Under an arched sky and Cassiopeia’s stars
we searched through the unwelcomed pain
for a sign of life on our dying Mars
and to anguish in its inviting rains

Under the cloud towers we made our pact
before our souls would part again
for a sign to remember a love intact
where we will dance forever in the rain

Dreams of Your Elegant Escape

sing me your
dreams of the firefly
escape
beyond the wind chimes’
uneven
evening reach

let me
dream of your elegant
bones
within this world
of
watery touch

let me
bathe in naked
starlight
with music releasing
me
from my thoughts

let me
be gone with
you
with clear eyes
of
perfect light

Let It First Taste

If this raw flame
should go out,
let it first taste
the vibrant fast twitch
muscle fiber
of willing thighs,
and the quivering
tuning forks’ reach across
an unknown universe,

let it taste
the doomed sea floor
heartbroken
before the mermaids’ rescue
and your heroic lips
pressed into my soul’s
secret retreats

let it taste
the sublime upheavals
of your victories
violent with wet perfume
and feast in
its humid bliss

let it taste,
and I will forever embrace
the drenching
of my light

Being

I have come to the frightening conclusion…
That I am the decisive element.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration,
I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.
In all situations, it is my response that decides
whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated,
and a person is humanized or de-humanized.
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.
If we treat people as they ought to be,
we help them become
what they are capable of becoming.
J.W.Goethe

Our Return

My arms open to your fractured sky
spread beneath our unwieldy youth and sweat,
merciless enthusiasms,
kisses of flesh and vapor
that stab the empty air

Our lips taste the measured pride and savagery,
our fingertips trace the distant constellations
spread beneath the wisdom
and lissome rhythms
of our sovereignty

Let me bury deep all memory
of earth’s unforgiving minute,
and the colors of her countries,
and spread myself beneath your breath
and triumph

Let us sing our redemptive anthems
to unsuspecting gods
and bathe the night skies
with reckless pageantry
of our return

The Ventricle

I have mounted the orchestral wave
rising and falling beneath a shaken landscape
racing a blinded horse with guided sight
as cathedral bells unravel the thick air

We swallowed surrendered geographies whole,
the disturbed earth no longer elegantly polite,
and raided a swollen ventricle
and raised the smoky alto deeply into the night

Your eyes traveled across my soul’s domain
drunken with fresh sonnets and mystery
and quieted the storms as
prime numbers spread beneath our infinite sky.

Kiss Deeply the Remarkable Sky

Let me walk with you to the edge
of our despair
and leave our garments
of ordained prose
and expectation
We have explored the unbroken
terrain with the tongues
of linguists
lingering over a life
less ordinary
Kiss deeply the remarkable sky
It sings our mystery
and our embrace
of haunted splendor
that hungers for every
moment of new infinity

I Saved Your Dreams in My Eyes

(For My Children of Whimsy)

I saved your dreams in my eyes
Whatever I see, I see your dreams
opening its first orchids

I saved your eyes in my dreams
Whatever I dream, I dream with your eyes
as stars sing light

I saved your thoughts in my whimsy
Whatever I think, my heart
imagines its smile

I saved your dreams in my eyes
Whatever I see, I see your dreams

A Dreamless Night

I came to you
on a dreamless night.
In your deepest sleep
your eyes were alive
and had not forgotten
the promised possibilities
that once stilled
a world’s breath,
and quickened ours.

We had trampled over the
imagination of lesser gods
and parted bodies of water
as we did flesh,
and we had not forgotten
the promised possibilities
that once stilled
a world’s breath,
and quickened ours.

You had come to me
on a dreamless night.
In my deepest sleep
my eyes were alive.

closer

gentle emily sings by the sea
strands of opera
and seaweed that
untangle beneath
a lustful sky
as the tides pull her closer
to (than i will ever know)
the mercurial faces
of angels
leaning
with soft elbows
upon my chest
who rise with
the inhaling of mist
and fall with
each exhaled breath
as the sea
pulls me
closer

Into Our Star Splintered Silence

into a star splintered
silence
i reach
with hopeful fingers
into the light
of distant
mornings
captive in the
unbloomed
flower.

into a star splintered
silence
the desert swan
glides
between my shadow
and redemption,
captive in her blithe
grandness of
renewal

into our star splintered
silence
i will not always
understand the spirited
flourish
of our higher
being’s wand
but i will always be
captive in the lithe
grace of
your
love

She Forced The Restless Night

She forced the restless night
with rifle scope attention,
arms akimbo,
head weighted back
tilted by attitude and hair,
movement absent,
save jaws that kindly
chewed my imaginary future

My thoughts stuttered
in rhythm to the
teakettle steam,
vaporous,
useless
as the gazelle’s dream
of outrunning the
lion’s devotion

Still,
as the stars contemplate
their own eternity,
I consider my threadless
mortality,
amused by Hamlet’s torment,
for I have chosen
to be

devoured,
as she forced the restless night,
feasting upon my glistening organs,
wet twisted muscle and sinew
entwined in fragrant seizures,
inhaling my soul whole
in open delirium,
and falling,
falling,
in storm drunken bliss
as we forced
the restless night

The Untested Key

I exposed your
old diaries locked away
behind your crowned eyes
(as easily as you
chewed off your glove
for your naked fingers
to breathe)
and touched each of
your concealed desires
that were
carefully named
and dated
for a less guarded
moment

We rushed
the crowd of stars
unburdened from
the dragging of
shadows
and muslin,
the untested key
opening the cool
steel lock,
and teeth bared,
reveled in an
oyster dawn
fully
undone

To Love Differently

We have exchanged
no histories,
no storied details
amongst strong coffee
and
ritual laughter,
mild
confessions
and rehearsed wit,

still,
this silence
between us
speaks complete
as the
forgiven
moment and
the orbit
of small
planets

I seek no one,
no more
than
the evening seeks
its darkness,
Yet,
I am
compelled
in my madness
to love differently.

To love you.

I do not love you as
the high desert admires
the wild blue Canterbury Bells
that rub your ankles,
(like a cat that grazes
affection in the hollows
of your neck)

I love you as
the sweeping heat squeals
and shudders to a halt before
the sudden storm,
and with your breath locked
in mine,
my soul inhaled into yours,
we exult across
the holy
sands

I love you as
the downpour wakens
the fragrant earth,
the ancient red rocks ingest
our wisdom,
the golden poppies,
like nervous stars,
blink in excitement,
and as we
release our quakened
light
beyond my madness
to love differently.

To love you.