Everything Was Beautiful: one thousand and one nights
You remove your shoes and walk to the edge of the sea.
To your right: houses, and the floodgates spray painted red with calls for revolution, obscured by heavy bird shit.
The runoff has made home for the birds, and it reeks of sewer. The sea is green and dirty but you walk straight in anyway,…
bell hooks (via wretchedoftheearth)
All the people must challenge.. Bur more importantly we must challenge ourselves.
(via breathingrevolution)
(Source: zenpencils.com)
“Oh when I think of my long-suffering race, For weary centuries, despised, oppressed Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place In the great life line of the Christian West; And in the Black Land disinherited, Robbed in the ancient country of its birth, My heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lead, For this my race that has no home on earth. Then from the dark depth of my should I cry To the avenging angel to consume The white man’s world of wonders utterly: Let it be swallowed up in earth’s vast womb, Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke To liberate my people from its yoke!” - Poet Claude McKay
Geminid
It’s the Geminid shower tonight, they say. Winter’s fireworks. A light show for you, from the heavens. A gift. Just go outside. Look up!
But I live in the city. Police and news helicopters, and the landing lights of airplanes are the only heaven’s lights I see. To look up is to see a blank gray, with the occasional blinking of some manned or un-manned manmade vehicle.
Except the Moon. And Venus, Mercury or Mars, when they are terribly close, close enough to cut through the smog, the street lights, the car lights, the boat lights and airport and sirens and screams and hums, laughs, music
I would like to see once, all those lights, those speckled stars, like sparkling freckles against the ink black night skin.
The lights my father saw on a ship crossing the sea, for the first time, fresh from the battlefields and trenches
Looking up, only to see one big, silent peace
And the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis, they’re called. Aurora, the Dawn. A beautiful word. And how beautiful it must be away from the small apartment with the rooftop up against the wires threaded along like robot arteries, carrying electricity fired from coal plants somewhere burning black dirt into the silence that accepts it.
A shooting star, a falling star, a dying star. I have never seen one. I have never wished on one. I have never wished. Just prayed feverishly, quietly alone, in public sometimes, and no one knew. To save a life, to heal, to find something lost, to find my way home when I am lost.
And sometimes, many times I thought, those prayers were answered. By something up there in the dark, vast heavens shaking out a glowing blanket and making the dust rain down on us.
Those heavens I can’t see. Only an artificial light in front of my face. From the lamps and cars, and the bridge. And the port and the machines and the ships that carry the things to the port that we all buy and wear and eat.
As we forget we can easily forge these things here, in the abundance of the warm and fecund climate where Indians once prospered
and died.
when the Spanish came. And the Mexicans followed. Then the Americans came. And all was lost. All was lost.
But I want to see the stars, the falling stars, splashing across the sky like waves crashing against rocks. Stars moving like living things, like flocks of Tinkerbell fairies, little lights, like tiny birds. Yes, I want to move among them and feel their motion.
If we destroy all, they will remain forever, and when it all expands and collapses and explodes, they will be reborn.
They say we’re made of stars. Star particles, that’s the material we were built from. And when we die and the planet is burned in the Sun and then the Sun collapses and everything takes one big pulse
in
and out again
we’ll still exist in another form
in the stars, in glowing, churning particles of galaxies
And maybe we will get a chance to try it all again.
-BPM
Profile, charcoal on paper
Hunter Thompson rode with the Hells Angels for a year and wrote his first successful book about it.
Somewhere where nothing is familiar.
John Singer Sargent
The Edge…there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. -HST
Bukowski
Nepal seems to be a country between two worlds.
Henry Miller
