:D :D

The Night House

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
Mending a stone wall
Or swinging a sickle through the tall grass-
The grass of civics, the grass of money-
And every night the body curls around itself
And listens for the soft bells of sleep.


But the heart is restless and rises
From the body in the middle of the night,
Leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
With its thick, pictureless walls
To sit by herself at the kitchen table
And heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
And goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
And opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
And roams from room to room in the dark,
Darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.


And the soul is up on the roof
In her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
Singing a song about the wildness of the sea
Until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
The way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,


Resuming their daily colloquy,
Talking to each other or themselves
Even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body-the house of voices-
Sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
To stare into the distance,

To listen to all its names being called
Before bending again to its labor.

Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning (1998)

^I love Billy Collins. It was so nice to have a Poet Laureate named Billy.

Who remembers In the Night Kitchen?


Cake: 42 cents.

oh surely we must remember this first...

I like the dark night well enough;
But sometimes, when it turns bleak
And peaked, as my suffering laughs at me,
Its dreadful kingdom horrifies me,
And I wish to God I could take one look at the sunlight
And the blue of heaven brought back to light by its clouds,
And I want to lie down warm in the wide spaces of the day
Then I can dream of night.

~ Hermann Hesse

I must've watched the film version of that so many times that the tape wore out...

I'd call that wonderful if it weren't for the advert in the last 10 seconds.

On second thought, screw the advert. That was wonderful.

Somewhere in the world it's 3AM and someone is eating dinner bought from a vending machine.

^Oh, man, dinner is the best possible thing it could be.


It could also be previously owned panties, porn, fishing lures, or TP.

edit: that's TP as in "toilet paper." As far as I know, TIP is not yet available from Japanese vending machines.

*click*
*download*

:D

Okay, I can understand porn (an, *ahem*, cultural thing), fishing lures (I guess...), and even toilet paper (in case of emergency :o )

But used panties?! Those crazy Japanese...