somewhere i have never travelled

The poem below is one of my favorite poems, written by my favorite poet. The only poem I know by heart. This poem taught me many things, one among those, that I do not need capitol letters to be happy. REJOICE young lambs. may your tiny hearts be filled with knowledge and hope! Please read and enjoy.




[somewhere i have never travelled]
by e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands


Self-Portrait, Oil painting. Painted by e.e. cummings in the 1950's.

WE are 1984

Washington, You're Fired! is a film by William Lewis. The film takes a look into the Bush Administrations "terrorist" laws, which are vast, mysterious to most, but most importantly laws that have made a mockery of our Constitution. Here is an excerpt from the film examining the "Thought Crime Bill", H.R. 1955



http://www.washingtonyourefired.com/

With that powerful message in mind, let us FREAK OUT! While doing my own research I came across a lot of comments comparing our current government to that one of 1984.



Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 by George Orwell. I am going to assume we all know the story. Big Brother is watching. right? If not here are some links for some history:

http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four


My thoughts drift to a lesser known book by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin titled We.


This book was actually written in 1920 in response to Zamyatins experiences with the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. We, is the first major dystopian novel to be written. Zamayatin joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, which then led to his arrest and exile from Russia. Returning and eventually gaining amnesty, he began writing fictions, and contributing to a variety of socialist newspapers. The publication of We led to the banning of all his works, including banning any further of his publications in Russia.

We was not published in Russia until 1988, while in America it took until 1924 to be published and released.

We influenced George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.


Here is an excerpt from We by Yevgeny Zamyatin:

I, D-503, builder of the INTEGRAL, I am only one of the mathematicians of OneState. My pen, accustomed to figures, is powerless to create the music of assonance and rhyme. I shall attempt nothing more than to note down what I see, what I think-or, to be more exact, what we think (that's right: we; and let this WE be the title of these records). But this, surely, will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically perfect life of OneState, and if that is so, then won't this be, of its own accord, whatever I may wish, an epic? It will; I believe and I know it will.

I feel my cheeks burning as I write this. This is probably like what a woman feels when she first senses in her the pulse of a new little person, still tiny and blind. It's me, and at the same time it's not me. And for long months to come she will have to nourish it with her own juice, her own blood, and then-tear it painfully out of herself and lay it at the feet of OneState.

But I am ready. Like all of us, or nearly all of us. I am ready.




Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (February 1, 1884 – March 10, 1937)

My Tribute to Richard Brautigan

Coming soon.

random poems from 1999-2002

all written by Sujey Lee during High School Years.



i awoke to your

drowsy touch

so close i felt like sinking into you

to sleep in the crease of your eyelid

melting in so smooth

like the words you tickle my ear with

cotton candy

i wanted to taste the stars on your lips

your breath soaked with rum

i held every moving taste so close to the jar filled with my memories

slowly fading into the rusted tangled dent

where we began

crumbling our sweaty hands let loose

so far our beating hearts heard felt no more of each other

dying were the stars falling around your

silhouette walking away under my bed

false silken demeanor so far

so close in my glass mind

pieces of broken

happiness cut my eyes

bleeding over a white picket fence

i breathe no

more of

you

_____________________________________________________________________________________




to say i am sorry for the winter i spent dying


i could taste you much better under this sun
feeling the blue spill over you
counting the smiles on your flower to say i am sorry
you took it with a grin
holding this between us
embarrassed but oddly comfortable
in this situation
pull me away
because right now i am coming closer with each hot pink petal
dropped our flower
your black nails rip
through this ugly memory
but you dont know this

my sweet confession

_____________________________________________________________________________________



Poem inspired by "The Vanishing" by Stephen Dunn

MAY.1.1999

is it the moon that makes me whirl with ambition
for nothing at all. a sudden stop and a continual buzz.
(only that my breath reeks of your memory)
confusion is simple
pure dripping from my nose

looking up to see the moon
rotund, glowing clam and orange
singing bright and lovely on the wide streets before me

SOAK IT IN LITTLE GIRL
sopping wet with anamnesis
(because in a couple of hours she will see the same moon, she will think the same thoughts, breath the same certain beauty)

a sigh thrown deep into the sky.

im just sleeping with these thoughts tonight. kissing and warm.
looking back on how you smile when you are happy and how you smile when you are content

this should have come with a warning: INTENSITY MAY FADE

_____________________________________________________________________________________


TAPPEN HIGH BOYS (and getting away from the east wrapping herself in this)


I hide under this memory with butter on my toes
trying so lovely to keep the dry away
but my heels hurt and I am kept reminded of that gray carpet
I knocked over the alarm clock with a sigh that woke up the world


wrapped up in shooting stars as you picked the feathers from my hair
let me watch you take off your eyes
and please sing to me forever


but im listening to the songs that define my days spent laughing
a beer between our silence
a smirk behind their backs
we drive off in her rusty white and I fall in love with that burgundy station wagon

singing lucky if we speak on holidays but never believing it could be us
sinning under the sun
and crying curses into the sky with the sight of our breath
the winter cold hit hard that year
knocking the smiles and comfort out of us all
walking away from the music and night colored debaucheries which tied us together
we let go of hands
and drive our cars into the river which divides

im just thinking back on relationships too intense

High Lonesome

When I was old enough to take the train I did and most days I would not know where I was going, but at 14 I always somehow found myself at Astor Pl. Walk past the cube and take a left on 3rd. Walk to the corner and there at St. Mark's bookstore I would spend my time. The tiny rows of books and looking up at the cashier to pay my crumpled dollars. During one of those trips I found this book. I still have not read every story and maybe I won't, but what I have read has stuck with me. Every couple years or so I read a few more pages or end up finishing something I started. I really can not put my finger on wht exactly it is, but I like it. I liked it at 14 and I like it now. I drink it like wine.


Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite stories:

High Lonesome by Barry Hannah



Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night

I have, like every man, seen all through my life lovely women waiting for someone somewhere. I always get involved, I mean in my head. These women, each wonderful, have elicited fine raptures and dreams. Waiting women, each postured in a special way, each in her separate nook of perfect waiting, a gallery that does not belong to me. They are prepared, sharpened, in their dresses and heels-or in their jeans and sandals, their brave halter tops-all open to the great psychological moment of some man's arrival. Negligence really is out of the question, with the right ones. and I have been that man over and over, besuiting myself for the expectant tastes of these lingering, watchful women. I imagined pleasing each one according to her most curious and valiant wants. The world for a few moments becomes wide and happy, not low and cramped. Even voluptuous. I bring extraordinary gifts to these patient women, thinking all day about them. So it is that I have made love to these women of my heady tableaux and been briefly a happier man for it. I hear the women speak softly, delighted by my presence. This is very good, since nobody else on the earth truly needs me, not even the surgeons's wife Jane in the Audi out there as my business closes, soon. For the world I am impertinent and a malingerer.

I've never found anything I was good at worthy to do here. I surely don't blame the world for that. Through me runs an inveterate refractoriness, almost a will to lose. Really, a choice for the whining and pining, at ease in the infantry of unremarkable losers on the lower end of mobility. What I admire is anguish, casual faith, clothes, poise, and minor disaster, or the promise of it. I like the nose lifted a little. The pride of exemption, yet terror in solitude. This is a busy concept. Perhaps too busy.

Mina Loy

Lunar Baedeker


A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris is livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

Stellectric signs

WING SHOWS ON STARWAY
ZODIAC CAROUSEL

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews
in the museums of the moon

NOCTURNAL CYCLOPS
CRYSTAL CONCUBINE

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

Self-Portrait 1905

December 27,1882 - September 29,1966

http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Loy.htm

Richard Silken

you and your lover are making out in the corner booth of a seedy bar. the booths are plush and the drinks are cheap and in this dim and smoky light you can barely tell whose hands are whose. someone raises their glass for a toast. is that the hand of judgment or the hand of mercy? the bartender smiles, running a rag across the burnished wood of the bar. the drink in front of you has already been paid for. drink it, the bartender says. its yours, you deserve it. it's already been paid for. somebodys paid for it already. theres no mistake, he says. its your drink the one you asked for, just the way you like it. how can you refuse? hands of fire, hands of air, hands of water, hands of dirt. someones doing all the talking but no ones lips move. consider the hairpin turn.

Excerpt from poem You are Jeff


Written by Richard Siken



http://yupnet.org/siken/
http://richardsiken.blogspot.com/