for shadow-light week, some shadow-light poetry. dylan thomas. in shadow, reaching for the light, and never quite touching it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love in the Asylum

 

A stranger has come

To share my room in the house not right in the head,

A girl mad as birds

 

 

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.

Strait in the mazed bed

She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

 

 

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,

At large as the dead,

Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

 

 

She has come possessed

Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,

Possessed by the skies

 

 

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust

Yet raves at her will

On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

 

 

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last

I may without fail

Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

 

 

 

by Dylan Thomas

 

 

 

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

 

Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

 

 

A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;

Where no seed stirs,

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,

Bright as a fig;

Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

 

 

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea;

Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

Spout to the rod

Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

 

 

Night in the sockets rounds,

Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;

Day lights the bone;

Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin

The winter's robes;

 

 

The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;

When logics die,The

secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

 

by Dylan Thomas

 

 

love this one. probably got him into some trouble. i guess he was past caring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love

 

 

 

 

If I were tickled by the rub of love,

A rooking girl who stole me for her side,

Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,

If the red tickle as the cattle calve

Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,

I would not fear the apple nor the flood

Nor the bad blood of spring.

 

 

Shall it be male or female? say the cells,

And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.

If I were tickled by the hatching hair,

The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,

The itch of man upon the baby's thigh,

I would not fear the gallows nor the axe

Nor the crossed sticks of war.

 

 

Shall it be male or female? say the fingers

That chalk the walls with greet girls and their men.

I would not fear the muscling-in of love

If I were tickled by the urchin hungers

Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.

I would not fear the devil in the loin

Nor the outspoken grave.

 

 

If I were tickled by the lovers' rub

That wipes away not crow's-foot nor the lock

Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,

Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib

Would leave me cold as butter for the flies

The sea of scums could drown me as it broke

Dead on the sweethearts' toes.

 

 

This world is half the devil's and my own,

Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl

And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

An old man's shank one-marrowed with my bone,

And all the herrings smelling in the sea,

I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail

Wearing the quick away.

 

 

And that's the rub, the only rub that tickles.

The knobbly ape that swings along his sex

From damp love-darkness and the nurse's twist

Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,

Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast

Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six

Feet in the rubbing dust.

 

 

And what's the rub? Death's feather on the nerve?

Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?

My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?

The words of death are dryer than his stiff,

My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.

I would be tickled by the rub that is:

Man be my metaphor.

 

 

by Dylan Thomas

 

 

 

________________________________________

 

 

shadow and light indeed

"These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't."

 

Dylan Thomas

necro depressive thread.

 

I was retreading and realized Im nowhere near bottom yet.

 

but I'm sure I can get a push, or just slide on my own

 

:)

I was randomly thinking about a different post you started today :P

which one?

oh, the one you wer reading today, not the one i started today.

 

not really related. that other one didn't turn out the way i expected.

neverwhere. good book.

 

 

i don't know what these have to do with anything. i just like them.

Which what?

skip it

the answer to all life's problems. massage. seriously. get one. then get another one. don't stop till you can't wipe the gin off your face.

 

so happy

lol the grin. don't need no gin now.

happy kitteh is happy

um... yeah, also... try to have a real life. I skipped that part which seemed like a good idea at the time, but holidays and a lot of the rest of the time kinda sucks. so... do what you can with that. some things in life it gets too late to learn. bob said that.

 

merry Christmas.

 

I don't think he said that...

weird what a difference some caffeine makes.

 

 

 

life schmife.

 

 

get some better distractions. lives get messy.

got an email today with some real nice pictures. you probably did too but i dont care gonna try to find them and post them anyway.

thors well

 

emerald lake

 

dubai

 

looking down