Devour the fire...Harry Crosby 2 Poems... illustration Alastair...

± RED SKELETONS, 1927 ±

TEMPLE DE LA DOULEUR

My soul has suffered breaking on the wheel,
Flogging with lead, and felt the twinging ache
Of barbéd hooks and jagged points of steel,
Peine forte et dure, slow burning at the stake,
Blinding and branding, stripping on the rack,
The canque and kourbash and the torquéd screw,
The boot and branks, red scourging on the back,
The gallows and the gibbet. All for you.

These tortures are as nothing to the pain
That I have suffered when you gaze at me
With cold disdainful eyes. You do not deign
To smile or talk or even set me free-
Yet once you let me hold your perfumed hand
And danced with me a stately saraband.

SALOME

Proud panoply of fans and frankincense,
Gold blare of trumpets, flowered robes of state,
Unnumbered symbols of magnificence,
To lead Salome through the palace gate,
Where loud the prophet of the Lord blasphemes
The red abominations of her race
And chides her for her flesh-entangled dreams
and turns his back upon her painted face.

Thus do we turn from some red-shadowed lust
That through the broken forests of the brain
Weaves silently with tentacles out-thrust,
Groping in darkness, but for one in vain,
For like a sliding sun the soul has fled
Leaving a princess and a vultured head.

¤ SUN-TESTAMENT ¤

Histoire d'O... Leonor Fini... part 1...

A few scans from a favourite possesion...

Histoire d'O

The Story of O

(1975)
Pauline Reage (Pseudonym for Dominque Aury)
illustrated by Leonor
Fini

AND ALL IN ARMOUR ON HER BED SHE LIES by Paul Holman.... & new drawing

Dolorosa 09

AND ALL IN ARMOUR ON HER BED SHE LIES ...

Her drawings show how she thinks we see her, but it is not the predicament in which she finds herself in the course of each implied adventure, shackled to the steam engine or discharging ectoplasm in some darkened room, by which she is defined, but the quality of distance she brings to these situations,amused and just a little haughty.

This detachment causes her to appear most distinct from her sister - the unicorn might be prettier, but does not gleam so, though both are made up the same -
yet, even in her more recent elegance, the twin we follow may allow
herself to be weirdly exposed, to look not composed but engaging: a
controlled goofiness in a moment that she chose to treat as if
unobserved, as if all eyes were not upon her.

Girl as landscape, girl as costume: how she permeates, sharp faced and quizzical, still unmistakable in the demon mask.

from Tara Morgana
Paul Holman

RIP Alda Merini...

Winged woman, stop your rancor:
the life that you bear of mystery
smells bad above the cushion
and moribund passes away.
Just so every proud tree oozes
love, behind your dark manures
that you spread of seed and of lust,
and pays at least for the seduction
of violated souls. Even so cantata
of the devil, you are an enemy of God
and then sullenly your lust
coagulates over the souls of heroes,
and you are young. You harm
all who see the path
of your peace and no one penalizes
you for the altar of your greatness
which makes offers to gods. As if you
were a goddess dressed in lust,
you call the gold into your arms
as I call the sons of the night.


¤¤¤


I do not need money.
I have need of feelings
of words, words chosen wisely
of flowers called thoughts,
of roses called presences
of dreams inhabiting the trees,
of songs that make statues dance,
of stars that murmur to the ear of lovers.
I need poetry
this spell which burns the weight of words
that arouses emotions and gives new colors.

Love do not damn me to my fate
Hold me open all the seasons
let my great and warm decline
not fall asleep along drives
put in passive all the passions
sleep on the pillow tenderly
where grow provident ambitions
of love and universal passion
take my everything and do not hurt me.

Alda Merini

Female Satyr...18th Century...

La Portentosa Vida de la Muerte (The Astounding Life of Death)...Joaquin Bolaños.

†The Astounding Life of Death†

La Portentosa Vida de la Muerte (The Astounding Life of Death) is an 18th Century Mexican book written by Joaquin Bolaños. In it, Bolaños recounts the many adventures of Death, from her beginnings in the Garden of Eden, where she is said to have been born from Adam’s Sin (Death’s father) and Eve’s Guilt (her mother; see image 1 above), to her dramatic destruction in Judgment Day (image 8), with copious quotations from the Bible and the Church Fathers to back up his facts. The protagonist of the story is referred to as “The Empress of the Sepulchers, The Avenger, and The Very Lady of All Humanity”. Muerte (death) is a female noun in Spanish; this fact allows Bolaños to create a female heroine, a very peculiar one.

Bolaños develops his central character thoroughly, in a lively and humoristic way, reflecting–and contributing to shape–the ambiguous relationship that Mexican culture has with death, marked by eroticism, morbid attraction, sadness and joy. Bolaños’s Death is irreverent, passionate and adventurous, and the book is a very early example of an American character-based novel, with a tongue-in-cheek tone and not lacking social criticism. It was criticized by Mexico’s Colonial literary critics as a piece of bad taste; nevertheless, it has been reevaluated by later scholars as a remarkable testimony of its time.

In the book –which is considered by many scholars to be one of the first Mexican novels–Death suffers, she falls in love, gets married several times (though her marriages were never consummated, as her husbands--all doctors--died upon entering the nuptial bed), and becomes angry when men forget about her continuous presence. The 1792 edition was accompanied by a series of illustrations (shown above)

Salvador Olguin

more at >

Morbid Anatomy

Doce Palabras

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin... book cover & poems...

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a symbolist poet, prose writer, and playwright. Openly gay, he wrote the first celebrations of
gay themes in Russian literature, and the first Russian coming-out novel, Wings (1907), in which a young man learns to accept his sexuality, which makes him feel as if he has grown wings. Kuzmin too was a poet who mined his own biography,incorporating its associations
and events in his poem-cycles.

Wings.Story in Three Parts(Krylya) cover by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov

~Poems~

Sun, Sun

Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!

The Sense Of Your Bidding

The sense of your bidding is unclear:
to pray, to curse, is it, to fight
you bid me, inscrutable genius?
The spring slackens, niggard, meager,
and Benozzo Gozzoli's courier
dozes in the drowsy thickets.

Hills are dark with honeyed cloud.
Look: I do not touch lithe strings.
Your gaze, prophetically flying,
is clenched, gushes no winged streams,
and beckons by no May road, trying
to outstrip Hermes in his flight.

Hobbled horses do not neigh,
Aging warriors sprawl in disarray...
Hold your palms open wide!
Risen spring is bright,
but groves of darkness are not given
to leap for joy having leapt from dreams.

The groom names not the hour,
be not guiled to tarry,
hark through ice the clarion voice,
your flax is drenched with chrism,
and, bidding goodbye to numb laze,
free, in love, you will rise.

Cizhou ware ceramic pillow...1368-1644...

The term 'Cizhou ware' refers to a type of sturdy stoneware produced at many kilns throughout the northern Chinese provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi. These wares
were produced during the Northern Song(960-1127),Jin(1127-1279)and Yuan(1279-1368) dynasties.Cizhou wares are heavily potted and boldly decorated with freely drawn designs.They are called 'popular' ceramics (as opposed to the types produced for the imperial court).
Ceramic pillows were used by the living, but were also buried in tombs for the next
life, along with other items for daily use.

Ex libris...

Fritz Eichenberg... beastium fabulosium...prints

Jorge Luis BORGES... drawing... Self Portrait

Poignantly relating to self-portraits, Borges wrote in his The Art of Poetry:

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water …

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

Ex libris... AOS

more at > AOS