Feeling Crabby

Normally, feeling "crabby" would be a negative thing, but isn't that a beauty?
Vintage shot.

Kennelly: "Bread"

BREAD

Someone else cut off my head
In a golden field.
Now I am re-created
By her fingers. This
Moulding is more delicate
Than a first kiss,
More deliberate than her own
Rising up
And lying down.
Even at my weakest, I am
Finer than anything
In this legendary garden.
Yet I am nothing till
She runs her fingers through me
And shapes me with her skill.

--Brendan Kennelly

Don Paterson: "The Lie"

THE LIE

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door

--Don Paterson

Guilty Pleasure

(I feel guilty about liking that Gor novel, but it made an impression when I was 13 and so I keep rereading it.)

Murky Day

Sometimes, that's Monterey diving.

Feb. 18th.

Gazebo Rocks

Spirits in mind and memory.

By the Breakwater

Monterey, CA
2/17/19