Before

By Carl Adamshick

I always thought death would be like traveling
in a car, moving through the desert,
the earth a little darker than sky at the horizon,
that your life would settle like the end of a day
and you would think of everyone you ever met,
that you would be the invisible passenger,
quiet in the car, moving through the night,
forever, with the beautiful thought of home.

Finding Emilie

Vertical

By Linda Pastan

Perhaps the purpose
of leaves is to conceal
the verticality
of trees
which we notice
in December
as if for the first time:
row after row
of dark forms
yearning upwards.
And since we will be horizontal ourselves
for so long,
let us now honor
the gods
of the vertical:
stalks of wheat
which to the ant
must seem as high
as these trees do to us,
silos and
telephone poles,
stalagmites
and skyscrapers,
but most of all
these winter oaks,
these soft-fleshed poplars,
this birch
whose bark is like
roughened skin
against which I lean
my chilled head,
not ready
to lie down.

Sum

Vocation

By Sandra Beasley

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino.
For six months I played Brahms in a mall.
For six months I arranged museum dioramas;
my hands were too small for the Paleolithic
and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit.
I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them
Help. Yes, I speak Dewey Decimal.
I speak Russian, Latin, a smattering of Tlingit.
I can balance seven dinner plates on my arm.
All I want to do is sit on a veranda while
a hard rain falls around me. I'll file your 1099s.
I'll make love to strangers of your choice.
I'll do whatever you want, as long as I can do it
on that veranda. If it calls you, it's your calling,
right? Once I asked a broker what he loved
about his job, and he said Making a killing.
Once I asked a serial killer what made him
get up in the morning, and he said The people.

I Am Not Yours

By Sara Teasdale

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love—put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

All the Whiskey in Heaven

By Charles Bernstein

Not for all the whiskey in heaven
Not for all the flies in Vermont
Not for all the tears in the basement
Not for a million trips to Mars

Not if you paid me in diamonds
Not if you paid me in pearls
Not if you gave me your pinky ring
Not if you gave me your curls

Not for all the fire in hell
Not for all the blue in the sky
Not for an empire of my own
Not even for peace of mind

No, never, I'll never stop loving you
Not till my heart beats its last
And even then in my words and my songs
I will love you all over again

Happy Birthday

...to someone without whom I would not exist and without whom I would not be who I am today.

Happy Birthday to someone who always fought for what he believed in and put passion into everything that he did.

Happy Birthday to someone who wasn't afraid to cry, whether it was from joy or pain or pride.

Happy Birthday to someone who looked me in the eye and made me understand the importance of respect.

Happy Birthday to someone who took the time to enjoy small moments and helped me to appreciate them too by asking me to sit with him on the patio on summer evenings and just stare at the stars.

Happy Birthday to someone who's hands were rough from working day in and day out.

Happy Birthday to someone who helped me understand what it meant to have faith.

Happy Birthday to someone who was in pain almost every day of his life. Even though his limp showed it, his face did not.

Happy Birthday to a man that could fill a large gymnasium with people he touched in one way or another.

Happy Birthday to someone who wasn't perfect and knew it.

Happy Birthday to my role model.

Happy Birthday Dad.

Daniel J. Geis

(June 18th, 1962 - March 19th, 2007)

Insomnia

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

But it's really fear you want to talk about
and cannot find the words
so you jeer at yourself

you call yourself a coward
you wake at 2 a.m. thinking failure,
fool, unable to sleep, unable to sleep

buzzing away on your mattress with two pillows
and a quilt, they call them comforters,
which implies that comfort can be bought

and paid for, to help with the fear, the failure
your two walnut chests of drawers snicker, the bookshelves mourn
the art on the walls pities you, the man himself beside you

asleep smelling like mushrooms and moss is a comfort
but never enough, never, the ceiling fixture lightless
velvet drapes hiding the window

traffic noise like a vicious animal
on the loose somewhere out there—
you brag to friends you won't mind death only dying

what a liar you are—
all the other fears, of rejection, of physical pain,
of losing your mind, of losing your eyes,

they are all part of this!
Pawprints of this! Hair snarls in your comb
this glowing clock the single light in the room

Summer Song

By William Carlos Williams

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer's smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

A Greenwich Village Walking Tour

I am posting a walking tour I wrote of the East and West Villages serially on my other blog, Nebraskan Thoughts. I highly recommend you check it out. Here's a taste!

Stop #1: The White Horse Tavern

We start our tour on Hudson Street, deep in the West Village at the White Horse Tavern, at the corner of 11^th Street. This bar was a favorite spot for many members of the literary community during the early 1950s. It is particularly famous for being one of Dylan Thomas’s favorite haunts and the story is that he drank himself to death here, however, although he drank at the Tavern often, he did not drink himself to death and died of unrelated causes.

Later on, this bar became an important spot for writers like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. Musicians such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison also began to spend time in this establishment in the 1960s. It is also worth noting that Bob Dylan, originally Robert Zimmerman, supposedly took his name from Dylan Thomas.

Check out more HERE!

What to do with your new college graduate!

A great guide for parents on what to do with college graduates from the New Yorker! ;-)

Beat Photos

Some very interesting photos taken by Allen Ginsberg, on exhibit at the National Gallery of Art until September. I hope I can make it down to D.C. to check it out!

New York in the Movies

The classic movies that made me want to move here:

New York Movie Mashup

Sometimes all you have is a feeling

Having just graduated with a B.A. from NYU, I have been thinking a lot about the past four years and my reasons for going to New York for college. I've been thinking about how the experience has changed me.

Reading "At Least You Have Pride," by Jennifer Paddock was an eerie experience for me. She speaks of so many feelings and experiences that I have felt in the last four years. It has me thinking even harder about my life in New York City and how it has shaped who I am.

And the thought that plagues my mind even more than any else is, "Who am I?"

Mixtape #1

Wanderlust

noun

Etymology: German, from wandern to wander + Lust desire, pleasure

Date: 1875

1: strong longing for or impulse toward wandering

2: the feeling that keeps me up at night, that makes my fingers and toes itch, wanting to go, just to go, not concerned with where or when or how long it might take or what troubles could be encountered, just wanting to move one foot in front of the other until I am in a different place and a different time surrounded by strangers who seem more familiar to me than the people I have known my entire life, familiar strangers, the familiar sense of outsiderness, of not belonging, of being different, just want to go, go, go...

9

By e.e. cummings

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)

April

By James Schuyler

The morning sky is clouding up
and what is that tree,
dressed up in white? The fruit
tree, French pear. Sulphur-
yellow bees stud the forsythia
canes leaning down into the transfer
across the park. And trees in
skimpy flower bud suggest
the uses of paint thinner, so
fine the net they cast upon
the wind. Cross-pollination
is the order of the fragrant day.
That was yesterday: today is May,
not April and the magnolias
open their goblets up and
an unseen precipitation
fills them. A gray day in May.

My Current Favorite Song.

Jose Gonzalez covers a song by The Knife. It's such a hauntingly beautiful song. I melt every time I hear it.