The life of the spirit may be fairly
represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment. At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted. Wassily Kandinsky (1866 –1944)


Sunday, January 15, 2012

Joyce Mansour (1928–1986)





I want to sleep with you


I want to sleep with you side by side
Our hair intertwined
Our sexes joined
With your mouth for a pillow.
I want to sleep with you back to back
With no breath to part us
No words to distract us
No eyes to lie to us
With no clothes on.
To sleep with you breast to breast
Tense and sweating
Shining with a thousand quivers
Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia
Stretched out on your shadow
Hammered by your tongue
To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth
Happy.



Three poems


You threw my eyes in the sea
You tore my dreams out of my hands
You cut out my bluish belly button
And in the green seaweeds of my floating hair
You drowned the embryo.



I've stolen the yellow bird
Living in the devil's sex.
It will teach me how to seduce
Men, deer, angels with double wings.
It will take away my thirst, my clothing, my illusions
It will sleep
But my sleep runs across roofs
Murmuring, gesturing, violently making love
With cats.



Flies on the bed
On the ceiling in your mouth on your eyes
Lying on them sheets up to his neck
The impotent cunning ignorant man
Leave me my skin
Leave me my belly intact.



The Sun In Capricorn


Three days of rest
Why not the grave
I suffocate without your mouth
Waiting drains the stillborn sunrise
And the long hours on the stairway
Smell of gas
Flat on my face I wait for tomorrow
I see your skin glisten
In the black breach of the night
The slow surge of moonlight
On the inner sea of my sex
Dust on dust
Hammer on mattress
Sun on leaden drum
Still smiling your hand beats indifference
Cruelly clothed bend towards emptiness
You say no and the smallest object a woman’s body can shelter
Bows down
Artificial Nice
Synthetic perfume one hour on the couch
For what pale giraffes
Have I left Byzantium
Solitude stinks
A moonstone in an oval frame
Yet another stiff-jointed bout of insomnia
Once more a dagger throbs in rain
Diamonds and delirum tomorrow’s desiderata
Sweat of taffeta beaches without shelter
Lunacy of my lost faith.






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