Lisa Hannigan , Prayer for the Dying (Live at WFUV)

A prayer for the dying,
for the waves coming in.
And washing the edges,
the edges away from within.
Of your heart.
My heart.

A prayer for the dying,
for the sun coming up.
To feel all opponent,
so misunderstood.
Of your heart.
My heart.

Your heart
My heart

Your heart

My heart

Peter Murphy, Tale of the Tongue

Pink Floyd , Childhood's End (1972-12-09)

Childhood's End

You shout in your sleep.

Perhaps the price is just too steep.

Is your conscience at rest

If once put to the test?

You awake with a start

To just the beating of your heart.

Just one man beneath the sky,

Just two ears, just two eyes.

You set sail across the sea

Of long past thoughts and memories.

Childhood's end, your fantasies

Merge with harsh realities.

And then as the sail is hoist,

You find your eyes are growing moist.

All the fears never voiced

Say you have to make your final choice.

Who are you and who am I

To say we know the reason why?

Some are born; some men die

Beneath one infinite sky.

There'll be war, there'll be peace.

But everything one day will cease.

All the iron turned to rust;

All the proud men turned to dust.

And so all things, time will mend.

So this song will end.

Lisa Hannigan , Snow (Today FM)

Rachmaninov ,In My Garden at Night, Op. 38, No. 1

Hera Lindsay Bird, Planet of the Apes

Hera Lindsay Bird

Planet of the Apes

If there is a designated point at which return
becomes of no return, so far is how far

I am always beyond it.
We sit in the rain of your hangover

and I tell you the story about my dead aunt
who spent her sixteenth year digging a giant hole

in the field behind her house and never said why.
Mark I love you.

I love you in the jittering shade of a historic windmill.
I love you standing in the water wearing the river

like an invisible pair of shoes. I love you here
at the beginning of your only life and almost gone

getting high on your porch, light drifting between us
like ghost sequins.

I’ve always never felt this way about anyone
but the way in which I’ve never felt about you

is a way of never feeling so new it’s somehow old
like a cave painting of a fax machine

or falling asleep in the attic of a spaceship.
You make me want to think of you in a sentence ending in again.

PAGE 124You make me want to find a collapsed mine shaft
I can call your name in while searching for you.

You make me want to tell you what you make me want
but what can I even say to you, riding a desk chair

through the afternoon like a medieval knight
of contemporary office furniture.

I don’t know what it means
to walk each night into a field alone

and dig, until you are standing in a hole so deep
you cannot be seen above ground. 

I don’t know what it means to fall asleep on your porch
and wake with the illustrated guide to Planet of the Apes open in my hands.

I don’t know what it means to wake each morning and love you
and say nothing, as if saying nothing

was honesty’s default, or maybe just a way
for me to avoid the moronic things I need to tell you like

looking at you is like looking at a beautiful person far away
through a telescope that makes you seem the size you almost are

which is something I mean but don’t understand
like the new hieroglyphics of songbirds

or how the world in which I’m saying this to you
is already receding

that looking at you is like looking
backwards out the window of a slow moving helicopter

PAGE 125            into the 19th-century cornfield of your face
            which my historical inaccuracy

            has suddenly emptied of birds.
            You make my life feel the size of itself.

            You make my life a burning craft
            on some distant and unintended hillside.

            Mark you are the pale green arm
            of the Statue of Liberty

            reaching up through miles of sand.

Hera Lindsay Bird , If you are an ancient egyptian pharaoh

May Sarton, Canticle 6

CANTICLE 6
by May Sarton

Alone one is never lonely: the spirit
              adventures, waking
In a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there;
The spirit adventures in sleep, the sweet thirst-slaking
When only the moon’s reflection touches the wild hair.
There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone:
It finds a lovely certainty in the evening and the morning.
It is only where two have come together bone against bone
That those alonenesses take place, when, without warning
The sky opens over their heads to an infinite hole in space;
It is only turning at night to a lover that one learns
He is set apart like a star forever and that sleeping face
(For whom the heart has cried, for whom the frail hand burns)
Is swung out in the night alone, so luminous and still,
The waking spirit attends, the loving spirit gazes
Without communion, without touch, and comes to know at last
Out of a silence only and never when the body blazes
That love is present, that always burns alone, however steadfast.

..beautiful poem...

Erik Satie , Gnossienne No.6

Satie , Je te veux

Rick and Morty , Rick Fights The Devil

Luka Bloom , Don't be afraid ... (live at Paradiso)

Out of the cold, dark winter space
We come together, looking for Brigid's grace
We dip our open hands deep into the well
Where our rivers run to
Who can tell, who can tell?
We warm our hearts and faces
In the heat of the burning flame
Something about our spirit
Never stays the same
Don't be afraid of the light that shines within you
Don't be afraid of the light that shines within you
Don't be afraid of the light that shines within you
Within you
So many lives in shadows
With so much to give away
Brilliant dreams in waiting
To see the light of day
We step up to the well
At the dawn of springtime
And when we go our way
We let the light shine
Let your light shine
Don't be afraid of the light that shines within you
Don't be afraid of the light that shines within you
Don't be afraid of the light that shines within you

"THE LONGER YA LIFE THE SOONER YA DIE"

TCHAIKOVSKY , Hymn of the Cherubim

The Three Wishes , Pat Speight

family notes, loss and reconciliation

this night later towards the early hours of day my father died , 52 years ago in 1965.
the year after he would have reached the age of 70, being older than my mother's father.
I was 15 years old, and i had nursed him alone for all that year.
there had never been one bad word.

for weeks by then he had been yellow up into his eyes.
The evening before a doctor i remember well visited our house and injected
morphine to ease his troubled breathing.

i had been present in his room, and when his breathing ceased i saw and felt
the release death brings.

all after was confusion and loss, for long, and i buried it inside living with it.
i remember even despising other persons talking about it,
and i didn't share my feelings. i closed.

soon after i was asked to move in with my grandparents to look after them, a good stretch of kilometers away.
grandmother was as good as blind, grandfather had only one eye and was
not safe on his feet. it suited me well enough to leave the house and the influence of my mother.

i remember an influence from this time and i see it reaching into
all my adult life. my father had been the one in whom i could confide, who taught me,
who made me look for wisdom and not for power and worldly gains, the one who took out 'stress'.

my mother suffered fighting to bring up the 3 of us and more so she suffered from
the loss of illusions and the impossibility to be a famous painter.
she was eaten by herself more than by her work as a primary school teacher, a true hungry ghost, and she caused continuous tension in our family,  made us close up because of her days long hysteric fits mostly on money.
all of us always felt guilty though we didn't know why.
she always found something and having a second sight for all negative which could happen or which happened there was no space to breathe.
utmost control of all we did or could have done was her daily aim.
her barbaric aestheticism ruled her judgement more than anything else, she was quick to classify us and all other people.
presents she returned as unfit.
we lived as disqualified children and saw her as a disqualified mother.
hurt, frustration, anger and reproach was daily business giving an undesirable impetus
to hate, flight, hiding and other stuff.
lacking love she was unable to give it.and unable to take it when offered.
reconciliation took a very long time, our forgiveness we needed to create future in a better way-for us.
for her it was too late.

my father had been my retreat and my balance,
my mother the cause to try and rule my world on my own,
to run, to mistrust, to try and be financially independent which i didn't manage well at all as i despised money and its influence.
the cause for fear to fail. o i would have needed my father longer.
i cannot idealize him, he had been a lazy man, studying all his life, gathering knowledge,
meditating, thinking, writing. but i needed his kindness and understanding.
understanding me the way i could be and helping my growth inside.
without his influence i would have turned to suicide or
to be a criminal and i wouldn't have known meditation nor grace nor forgiving.

childhood and adolescence, no, not easy, not fabulous, only possible to survive well
by escape, escape into books and into leaving and leaving. i forgot so much, and it is good.

now i am old, my mother is 91 and fairly demented, often absent for hours,
then suddenly awake and even smiling as she too now 'forgot'.
the mercy of dementia softening the edges, leading to
a peace in riddles.

i wonder at times where i will go. i see what i did myself. not all has been good.
but somehow an often hidden softness and  joy and love survived.
there is no point in eating the past.
and today is another day, and now is now.
i used to have wishes for another now tomorrow, hope, but this looks now as if
impossible, and i go a way of slow detachment, if necessary to not only solitude
but to chosen loneliness. this i do not know yet. only that i will not run after tomorrow
alone. i just walk.

i asked my dead father, and he told me that what i do is right any way,
not to think but to be-and that i cannot be alone. to be alone is just a thought.
this is recognition and consolation.

note: usually i talk and write about this in an ironic way to take and give a distance,
in honour of my father and truth and honesty i didn't do this today.