psalm: west virginia

from the collection Blue on Blue Ground


Psalm: West Virginia


I press my feet to the window, squash birds like ants with my toes.
The phone is a tumor refusing to ring in the part of my brain that wants things.

I kept you tight as tupperware, and I'm sorry. I finally understand:
We eat and we fuck and we bury each other, and not a goddamn thing

I can do about that. I'm scattered like freckles. I'm lost as a wallet.
I'm the neighbor's blue pickup broke down. Come home. Come home.


-Aaron Smith

spring things - men

What I'm musing about this spring.

Marc by Marc sweater. Yes please. Come into my life.

Teal Levi's cords via Opening Ceremony

I feel so dumb. I just discovered Street Etiquette which is a fantastic style blog. Love it. Red socks and loafers... loving this look:

Sperry's:

and this GQ ensemble.

st. john's eve

from the Poems of the Night


St. John's Eve


The setting sun, with implacable splendor,
parted the distances on its blade.
And night is here, tender as a willow.
Whorls of brusque bonfires
Splutter into red:
wood offered in sacrifice
bleeds into the high flames:
living flag, blind mischief.
The darkness is as gentle as someplace far away.
Today the streets remember
that they were fields one day.
And through the holy night,
Solitude says its rosary of far flung stars.


-Jorge Luis Borges
Translation by Christopher Maurer

pow pow

LCD Soundsystem at Webster Hall last night was electrifying. There were J-Lo "Waiting for Tonight" video lazer beams and cowbells. Nancy Whang was amazing on the keyboards and synths and Pat Mahoney on drums. There were also four new and very skilled members: Tyler Pope (bass), Gavin Russom (keyboards), David Scott Stone (guitar) and Matt Thornley (percussion). And then of course there's the tireless James Murphy with a big voice wearing a tight white Oxford and navy pants, and for the encore, a YSL t-shirt (they debuted a song at a fashion show).

We have to wait until May 17th for the new album (Murphy pleaded not to leak the record early). It will be difficult to live up to the first two but I was a fan of the new track "Pow Pow," of which they opened, a fun Giorgio Moroder-punk song reminiscent of their debut. They also played their single "Drunk Girls" and another new track, the mid-tempo, and very 80s electro popped "Change." Everyone was feeling the older stuff and it played well in a small venue, especially the epic "All My Friends." For "Tribulations," it was if long player disco music had been revived for a bit. And the slow build of "Someone's Great" sounded gorgeous. The band appropriately closed with the plaintive "New York, I Love You But You Bringing Me Down." Murphy joked that he was covering a Jay-Z song (a la "Empire State of Mind").

Playlist:
Pow Pow
Yr City's A Sucker
Us vs Them
Drunk Girls
Losing My Edge
All My Friends
Change
Tribulations
Movement
Yeah
Someone Great
Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down

little elegy & full moon

Two poems by Elinor Wylie


Little Elegy


Withouten you
No rose can grow;
No leaf be green
If never seen
Your sweetest face;
No bird have grace
Or power to sing;
Or anything
Be kind, or fair,
And you nowhere.


--


Full Moon


My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The ermine muffled mouth and chin;
I could not suck the moonlight in.

Harlequin in lozenges
Of love and hate, I walked in these
Striped and ragged rigmaroles;
Along the pavement my footsoles
Trod warily on living coals.

Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,
In their corrupt disguises clothed,
Morality I could not tear
From my ribs, to leave them bare
Ivory in silver air.

There I walked, and there I raged;
The spiritual savage caged
Within my skeleton, raged afresh
To feel, behind a carnal mesh,
The clean bones crying in the flesh.


-Elinor Wylie

what haunts him & sorrows

Poems by Lucille Clifton

a pact

A Pact


I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman--
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root--
Let there be commerce between us.


-Ezra Pound