The Avenue, Hampden neighborhood, Baltimore

Outsider art is alive and well in Baltimore.  This construction, Nevermore, by Bryan Cunningham, is at Paradiso on 36th Street in the Hampden neighborhood.  If you need to have this—I know someone out there absolutely must — call the Paradiso at 410-243-1317 for price. They carry other great area artists wo may also be found in the American Visionary Art Museum (http://www.avam.org/)

Watching the Stars is by Chris-Roberts Antieau, a Michigan artist whose fabric paintings are also in the American Visionary Art Museum. This one may be found at the Paradiso also.

Willing to go to any lengths...are we?

Robert Desnos

I Have Dreamed of You so Much 

 by Robert Desnos

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, 

to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again?
I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, 

grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, 

would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me 

and governed me for so many days and years, 

I would surely become a shadow.
O scales of feeling.
I have dreamed of you so much that surely 

there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, 

and you, the only one who counts for me today, 

I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.
I have dreamed of you so much,

have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left

for me is to become a phantom among phantoms, 

a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow the
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

....

Desnos at Thereisienstadt concentration camp

Desnos was sent to Buchenwald and from there to other concentration camps. At Auschwitz, in May of 1944, the poet Andre Verdet, who was also a prisoner, saw Desnos standing in the rain in a crowd of men who were emaciated and dying of hunger. The crematoria were belching smoke, and the S.S. guards as they walked by would say, “You are all going to die.” Verdet saw Desnos going from one group to another. Taking a man by the arm, he would read the lines in his hand. Then, Verdet said, a miracle happened: Desnos spoke to the men of their future with such confidence that they forgot where they were and their faces lit up with hope.

Would we?

But Would He Do It Again Today?

I Love You Sweatheart by Thomas Lux

(and yes, the spelling is the point)

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway.  And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work...?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the world.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed--always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.

Andrea Bocelli- Con te Partiro

Happy New Year

If Pablo Neruda and Yannis Ritsos had a child it would be Fernando Pessoa

TOBACCO KIOSK
by Fernando Pessoa

I am nothing
I shall always be nothing
I cannot wish to be anything.
Aside from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world. 
 

Windows of my room,
The room of one of the world's millions nobody knows about
(And if they knew about me, what would they know?)
Open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people,
To a street inaccessible to any thought,
Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly certain,
With the mystery of things beneath the stones and beings,
With death making the walls damp and men's hair white,
With the Destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing. 

Today I am defeated, as if I knew the truth.
Today I am clear-minded, as if I were about to die
And had no more kinship with things
Than a goodbye, this building and this side of the street becoming
A long row of train carriages, and a whistle departing
From inside my head,
And a jolt of my nerves and a creak of bones as we go.

Today I am bewildered, as one who wondered and discovered and forgot.
Today I am divided between the loyalty I owe
To the outward reality of the Tobacco Kiosk of the other side of the street
And to the inward real feeling that everything is but a dream.
I have missed everything.
And since I had no aims, maybe everything was indeed nothing.

What I was taught,
I go down from the window at the back of the house.
I went to the countryside with grand plans,
But all I found in it was grass and trees,
And when there were people, they were just like other people
I step back from the window and sit in a chair. What should I think about now? 

......

I have dreamed more than Napoleon did.
I have held against the hypothetical heart more humanities than Christ.
I have secretly created philosophies no Kant has ever written.
But I am, and perhaps always should be, the one from the attic
Although I don't live in it;
I shall always be someone not born for this;
I shall always be the one who just had qualities;
I shall always be the one who has waited for a gate to open next a wall without a door
And sang the song of the infinite in a poultry-yard,
And heard God's voice in a blocked-up well.
Believe in myself? No, not in me and not in nothing.
May Nature be dissolved on my feverish head
Her sun, her rain, the wind that ruffles my hair,
And the rest, let it come if it must, it doesn't matter.
Hearts in thrall to the stars,
We have conquered the whole world before leaving our beds.
But we were awakened and it was opaque,
We rose and he was strange to us
We left the house and it was the whole world,
And also the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Indefinite...

(Eat your chocolates, little one!
Eat chocolates!
Know there are no metaphysics in the world but chocolates.
Know that all the faiths don't teach more than confectionery.
Eat, dirty one, eat!
If only I could eat chocolates with the same veracity you do!
But I think, and when I lift the silver paper of a leaf of tin-foil
I let everything fall to the ground, as I have done to my life.)

....

Musical essence of my useless verses,
If only I could face you as something I had created
Instead of always facing the Tobacco Kiosk across the street,
Forcing underfoot the consciousness of existing,
Like a carpet a drunkard stumbles on
Or a straw mat stolen by gypsies and  worth nothing. 

But the Tobacco Kiosk owner has come to the door and is standing there.
I look at him with the discomfort of an half-turned head
And the discomfort of an half-grasping soul.
He shall die and I shall die.
He shall leave his signboard and I shall leave my poems.
His sign will die, and so will my poems.
And soon the street where the sign is, will die too,
And so will the language in which my poems are written.
And so will the whirling planet where all of this happened.
On other satellites of other systems something like people
Will go on making something like poems and living under things like signboards,
Always one thing facing the other,
Always one thing as useless as the other,
Always the impossible as stupid as reality,
Always the mystery of the bottom as powerful as the mysterious dream of the top.
Always this or always some other thing, or neither one nor the other. 

 But a man has entered the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?),
And plausible reality suddenly hits me.
I half rouse myself, energetic, convinced, human,
And I will try to write these verses in which I say the opposite. 

I light a cigarette as I think about writing them,
And in that cigarette I savour liberation from all thoughts.
I follow the smoke as if it were my personal itinerary
And enjoy, in a sensitive and capable moment
The liberation of all the speculations
With the conscience that metaphysics is a consequence of not feeling well. 

Afterwards I throw myself on the chair
And continue smoking.
As long as Destiny allows, I will keep smoking. 

(If I married my washwoman's daughter
Maybe I should be happy.)
Upon that, I rise. And I go to the window. 

The man has come out of the Tobacco Kiosk (putting change in his trousers?).
Ah, I know him: he is Esteves without metaphysics.
(The Tobacco Kiosk owner has come to the door.)
As if by a divine instinct, Esteves turned around and saw me.
He waved hello, I greet him "Hello there, Esteves!", and the universe
Reconstructed itself for me, without ideal or hope, and the owner of the Tobacco Kiosk smiled.

Kirk Cameron And Bananas

I guess he passed on his explanation for God's masterpiece, the pineapple. See if that fits in your hand and mouth, dude. The above is considered "the atheist's nightmare," for reasons beyond me. Besides, with a trace of irony, there's something monkey-like going on here. Apparently there were brain-damaging drugs on the set of Growing Pains.

A Blessing—by James Wright

I love this poem because, it seems to me, that Wright withheld the surrealist currents that roiled underneath his classicism, until the very last line. Not to mentioned the tenderness, yet inescapable loneliness of the moment in that field.

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.