Sun Kill Moon - I can't live without my mother's love

"Hotel Lullaby" - Srikanth Reddy

No matter how often you knock

on the ocean the ocean

just waves. No matter

how often you enter the ocean

the ocean still says

no one’s home. You must leave

her dear Ursula. As I write this

they polish the big  

chandelier. Every prism

a sunset in abstract

or bijou foyer depending

on where you stand.

They take it apart every Fall

& call it Spring cleaning.

They bring me my tea.

They ask me my name

& I tell them — Ursula,

I don’t even know

how to miss who you left.  

So many cabanas

to choose from tonight

but only one view.

It’s the sea.

What keeps me awake

is the sound of you sleeping

beside me again my dear Ursula,

Ursula, Ursula dear — then

you’re nothing

but waves & I break.

Srikanth Reddy. Poema publicado na Jacket2. Retirado daqui.

Atoms for Peace - Ingenue

Poema de Natal

Não digo do Natal – digo da nata
do tempo que se coalha com o frio
e nos fica branquíssima e exacta
nas mãos que não sabem de que cio

nasceu esta semente; mas que invade
esses tempos relíquidos e pardos
e faz assim que o coração se agrade
de terrenos de pedras e de cardos
por dezembros cobertos. Só então
é que descobre dias de brancura
esta nova pupila, outra visão,

e as cores da terra são feroz loucura
moídas numa só, e feitas pão
com que a vida resiste, e anda, e dura.

Pedro Tamen

De Cara a la Pared - Lhasa

De Cara a la Pared - Anaifa

De Cara a la Pared

foi talvez a nossa última canção.

oiço ainda os corpos a vincar a noite,
um campo minado de corações tristes
explodindo o rosto na parede.

muitas músicas depois
quando as paredes eram já outras
e nas caras se perdiam novos nomes

voltei a ela: ficara-me sempre, afinal,
um terrível verso solitário
e a culpa de a ter levado

a um coração onde as canções
morreriam de frio.

Renata Correia Botelho. Small Song. Averno, 2010.

Kevin Morby - All of my Life

Há dez anos que escrevo o mesmo poema - Raquel Nobre Guerra

Há dez anos que escrevo o mesmo poema
no mesmo café.
Esta ideia arrumada nesta cadeira triste
todos os dias no mesmo sítio.
Até que me venham bater à porta
ando meio distraída nisto. 
Falam-me da barbárie e dos seus irmãos brutos
mas ninguém falou ainda da flor de Coleridge
nem das pernas melancólicas dos meus amigos. 
Exceptuando isto penso no imenso com os dentes.
Penso num serviço de chá e numa porta de serviço.
Penso num chão absoluto no petróleo e na lixívia.
Penso na tua cabeça enunciativa e és um Rolls
às nove e meia da noite para toda a parte comigo. 

Exceptuando isto talvez não se morra e ninguém
desça à guerra e ao medo senão pelos livros.
Penso no amor e exceptuando isso está frio
e a mudança de hora e a jukebox
e contar-te os meus medos porque penso nisto há dez anos
que penso nisto. 

Cruz na porta da tabacaria e o teu cabelo
cortado à escovinha.
Há dez anos que desconfio do mesmo poema 

forma inteira do homem para diante
e de diante para o abismo

  
E poder ser livre e fumar na cama
com a excitação de arder numa linha. 
É que Sócrates nunca escreveu.
Milton ao menos fingia.
No fim de contas caía bem.
Um Kropotkin e uma bica.
E convicção ser do teu signo.
Porque uma coisa nos atraía.
Fome não era adição.
Erecção não era cinismo.
Porque havia motivo para risos. 
Tu nunca te atrasaste.
Tu nunca te mataste.
Porque enfim não mentiste 
que há dez anos que escreves o mesmo poema 

tu que só queres o sol
para descê-lo para descê-lo
ilha dos amores  

no mesmo corpo no mesmo casaco
apoiado à esquerda do meu braço.

Publicado no nº2 da Enfermaria 6, Julho 2014. Retirado daqui.

Boyhood - Richard Linklater

Before - Sean O'Brien

Make over the alleys and gardens to birdsong,
the hour of not-for-an-hour. Lie still.
Leave the socks you forgot on the clothesline.
Leave slugs to make free with the pansies.
The jets will give Gatwick a miss
and from here you could feel the springs
wake by the doorstep and under the precinct
where now there is nobody frozenly waiting.
This is free time, in the sense that a handbill
goes cartwheeling over the crossroads
past stoplights rehearsing in private
and has neither witness nor outcome.
This is before the first bus has been late
or the knickers sought under the bed
or the first cigarette undertaken,
before the flush and cross word.
Viaducts, tunnels and motorways: still.
The mines and the Japanese sunrise: still.
The high bridges lean out in the wind
on the curve of their pinkening lights,
and the coast is inert as a model.
The wavebands are empty, the mail unimagined
and bacon still wrapped in the freezer
like evidence aimed to intrigue our successors.
The island is dreamless, its slack-jawed insomniacs
stunned by the final long shot of the movie,
its murderers innocent, elsewhere.
The policeman have slipped from their helmets
and money forgets how to count.
In the bowels of Wapping the telephones
shamelessly rest in their cradles.
The bomb in the conference centre’s
a harmless confection of elements
strapped to a duct like an art installation.
The Première sleeps in her fashion,
Her Majesty, all the princesses, tucked up
with the Bishops, the glueys, the DHSS,
in the People’s Republic of Zeds.
And you sleep at my shoulder, the cat at your feet,
and deserve to be spared the irruption
of if, but and ought, which is why
I declare this an hour or general safety
when even the personal monster –
example, the Kraken – is dead to the world
like the deaf submarines with their crewmen
spark out at their fathomless consoles.
No one has died. There need be no regret,
for we do not exist, and I promise
I shall not wake anyone yet.

Sean O'Brien. Emergency Kit. Edited by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney. Faber & Faber, 2004.
Retrieved from here.

Andrew Bird - Lusitania (Ft. Annie Clark)

Return by Noel Duffy

I just never learned to not look back.
I had to see that face one last time
to know, for sure, that it was her hand
I was holding as we approached the grove,
the sunlight shifting in the olive branches.

I turned reflexively and ossified my wife to salt,
my gaze upon her cursing all my hopes
to tears. She who was all that was best in me
frozen there with her hand reaching out for mine,
her eyes turned downward to the blackened ground.

And so each time she is lost to me, I must
regather my strength and repeat the ordeal,
descending again into the darkened world below,
understanding the fate that lies ahead of me,
but knowing I must face it anyway.

On Light & Carbon. Ward Wood Publishing, 2013.

Retirado daqui.

Small Sur - Under Trees

Mensageiros das Estrelas - 19-21 Novembro 2014

Ilustração: Miguel Santos/Design: Sara Didelet

Base - a poem by John Burnside

I 

All day the planes. Morning,
then afternoon.  

The roll of the tide  
the song of the earth  
drowned out  

by the screaming of engines  
that  
Nagasaki howl.  

II 

By the station at Leuchars  
the buds of a Japanese cherry  
are starting to break,  

the March light flowers and pools  
on a sandstone wall  

and out in the yellowing grass  
at the end of the platform  
a yellowhammer flits along the hedge  

its call half song, half  
fragment of conversation 

threaded between the twigs,  
insistent and pure  
like a question that no one can answer.  

It's repeated with small variations  
again and again, 

thrown to the wind 
that follows the simmer of tracks  

to the bridge in the midst of the fields
and that quiet beyond

where a dog fox wakes in the earth
to the scent of the evening 

and little owls float out beneath a moon
that feels so close we might, with one small step

abandon this wreck of a world and begin anew
in The Sea of Tranquility, Carmen, The Lake of Time.

III 

Spring and all. A shadow in the grass
is neither the shadow that forms
in a slant of light  

or the darkness that lingers an hour 
in the blue of day

but something worn: a vacancy; a gap;  
a slow tear in the fabric of the world
that blackens as it spreads, like oil, or blood, 

like oil, or blood, with every scheduled scream.

Retirado daqui.

TV On the Radio - Happy Idiot (New Single)

Display - Sinéad Morrissey

movement is life
- slogan of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, 1930‐1939

Hyde Park, 1936. Cold enough for scarves and hats
among the general populace, but not for the fifteen thousand women
from the League of Health and Beauty performing callisthenics
on the grass. It could be snowing, and they of Bromley‐Croydon,
Slough,
Glasgow, Belfast, would don no more than a pair of satin knickers
and a sleeveless satin vest to spin and stretch and bow
the body beautiful. Athens in London, under a sodden sky,
and Winnie and Molly and Doris metamorphosed.
On the edge of the revolving staves of arms and legs,
pale as comfrey – an army not yet on the move but almost ready –
there are tents for scones and tea. Kiddies, brought to watch
in caps and plaits, wriggle on deckchairs. Their mothers
carry vast, forbidden handbags on their laps and smell
of Lily of the Valley. All around the periphery,
in the huddled clumps of overcoats and smoke,
from offices and railway yards, men joke and talk, gesticulate –
but mostly they just look, quietly and sharply focused,
like eyeing up the horses at a racecourse, but with much more choice.
For those crammed in steaming picturehouses later, a commentator,
brusquely charmed, declares the perfection of British womanhood:
to them belongs the future! – while the ghost of Mary Bagot Stack,
whose dream this is, smiles back. Their hair cut short, slim,
co‐ordinated as the League of German Maidens or a chorus set
from Hollywood, fit for birth, the women twirl and kick,
do foot‐swings and scissor‐jacks, link hands or fall
suddenly flat as pegs in a collapsible building, then bounce back
up again, for movement is life and they are keeping moving.
To hell with it, they may as well be saying. Twist.
To hell with Lizzie Evans and her bitching hate.
With blood and vinegar. With getting in the tin bath last.
With laddered stockings. With sore wrists at the factory.
I’ve got the fresh‐air‐body they promised me. Twist. Its electricity.

Parallax. Carcanet Press, Limited, 2013.

Bon Iver - Heavenly Father

A Man Made of Water - Will Burns (2012)

In the afternoon my father
and I went from the hospital
straight to my grandfather’s
house. We took off our coats,
and sat down and I made coffee.
My grandfather muted
the television and asked how
his wife was.
She is the same, Dad.
* * *
We sat together for the first
time that I could remember –
just us, the three men.
* * *
On the morning that he died,
it began to rain from almost
the exact moment that my father
called to tell me. And although
this would have been
too sentimental for Grandpa’s
tastes, I was glad for a man,
who more than any of us,
was made of the water.

Will Burns, retirado daqui.

Lamb - Wise Enough

CCTV Central Control - Tom Warner

Eight-hour shifts on rolling nights wouldn’t suit some

– people with kids and a wife – but the money’s okay

and I’m my own boss, in a way, or at least it feels like that

when I pan across girls stamping their feet in the taxi rank,

 

zoom in on men squaring up in the street between bars,

or watch a woman sat against the glass of the Turkish Kebab,

head lolling between her bare knees, all her long hair

covering her face. They never look into the camera.

 

The Eye in the Sky, that’s the game I play in my head,

but this job takes serious discretion: Outside of work,

you must never discuss what you see on your screens.

I switch between twenty; the others work ten at the most.

 

Some stick it out for a year or so, then leave or get asked to go.

Darren I know fell asleep on the job. His phone was flashing

and flashing and flashing on the desk next to mine.

Operatives must demonstrate excellent concentration, Darren.

 

Ashley in Archives was sacked for leaving a door unlocked.

Most of the time nothing much happens, just the silent film,

the roll of drunken friends hanging from each other’s necks.

My colleagues find ways to pass the time. I don’t join in.

 

Never record over a shift. I liked Ashley, but sometimes the film

tells it wrong and I’ve been doing this job long enough to know

what’s a crime and what’s just two people fooling around.

These things would be better with the sound turned up.

 

My dad always said I’d never amount to anything

staring at a screen all night, but here I am, doing just that:

a free man with a one-bed rent on the seventh-floor

of that mirrored-glass tower he hated. I’m my own man

 

and when I get home after a shift, I pull a chair up to the glass

like it’s some massive VDU on which I watch the sun

and all those city workers rising from the ground, 

changed, wiped clean, as though nothing was ever as it was.


Tom Warner. Retirado daqui.

St. Vincent - Bill Murray Sings Bob Dylan

Attic - Rachel Boast

My head bowed under the rafters 
I make a start in the attic's advantage, 
the lowered lamp, a cushion 
deleting the daylight, but I'm given 
to climbing out onto the flat roof 
leaving my papers, my books, 
the closed doors and closed windows, 
for those dark sayings 
that have no hinges to swing 
towards what they mean, and so 
are more like song, more necessary. 
I'd rise like this, day after day, 
above the strain of hard angles, servant's quarters, 
clarifying the openness of your face, 
love, and this generous sky.

Sidereal. Picador, 2011. 

Perfume Genius - Take me Home

Why Walking Helps Us Think - by Ferris Jabr (The New Yorker, September 2014)

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”

In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”

Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources that man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.

Still, urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the countryside.

Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.

Retirado daqui.