Ominous Cloud

Bit 35

Tender Buttons

Papercuts

Colour Me In

Life is without meaning.
You bring the meaning to it.

The meaning of life is
whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

The heroic life is living the individual
adventure.

There is no security
in following the call to adventure.

Nothing is exciting
if you know
what the outcome is going to be.

To refuse the call
means stagnation.

What you don’t experience positively
you will experience negatively.

You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,
It is someone else’s path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.

Participate joyfully
in the sorrows of the world.

We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.

When we talk about settling the world’s problems,
we’re barking up the wrong tree.

The world is perfect. It’s a mess.
It has always been a mess.

We are not going to change it.

Our job is to straighten our own lives.

Miss Lonelyhearts threw the letter into an open drawer and lit a cigarette.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts—
I am sixteen years old now and I don’t know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.
I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I can’t blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.
What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?
Sincerely Yours,
Desperate

Those hours give over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with a purpose of impossible grandeur; ah yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of a summer night.

I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonishment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings, failing to distinguish between them. I have grown tired of so much that used to entrance me, tired of watching cloud shadows pass over sunlit grass, of seeing swans glide back and forth across the lake, of peering into the dark, hoping to find an image of a self as yet unborn. Let plainness enter the eye, plainness like a table on which nothing is set, like a table that is not yet even a table.

Featuring artist Richard Forster on the cover.

*BROADCAST TRIBUTE MIXTAPE In honor of Trish Keenan, a small wonder the world sadly lost this time last year.

1. Broadcast – Where Youth and Laughter Go (Buy)
2. Broadcast - Drums On Fire (Buy)
3. Broadcast - Unchanging Window/Chord Simple (Buy)
4. Broadcast - Papercuts (Buy)
5. Broadcast - Man Is Not a Bird (Buy)
6. Broadcast - Coroporeal (Buy)
7. Broadcast - Echo’s Answer (Buy)
8. Broadcast - Hawk (Buy)
9. Broadcast - Winter Now (Buy)
10. Broadcast - Michael Agrammar (Buy)
11. Broadcast - Before We Begin (Buy)
12. Broadcast - Come On Let’s Go (Buy)
13. Broadcast - You And Me In Time (Buy)

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise
_________________
Since all the Riches of this World
May be gifts from the Devil & Earthly Kings
I should suspect that I worshipd the Devil
If I thankd my God for Wordly things

Three Virgins at the break of day:
“Whither, young Man, whither away?
Alas for woe! alas for woe!”
They cry, & tears for ever flow.
The one was Clothd in flames of fire,
The other Clothd in iron wire,
The other Clothd in tears & sighs
Dazling bright before my Eyes.
They bore a Net of golden twine
To hang upon the Branches fine.
Pitying I wept to see the woe
That Love & Beauty undergo,
To be consumd in burning Fires
And in ungratified desires,
And in tears clothd Night & day
Melted all my Soul away.
When they saw my Tears, a Smile
That did Heaven itself beguile,
Bore the Golden Net aloft
As on downy Pinions soft
Over the Morning of my day.
Underneath the Net I Stray:
Now intreating Burning Fire,
Now intreating Iron Wire,
Now intreating Tears & Sighs.
O when will the morning rise?

I can’t forget the smile hidden in the umbrage, which seems to have released everything. I don’t think I am nervous at all, for my cheek is flickering in the sunlight. The wind desiccates the sweat in my palm then I find nothing is left to grasp. At this time, the moon has risen to the gap between the buildings and the rays. The light in dusk is all blue. There is a bit of grease on my nose and glabellas. I wonder whether I fell asleep under the trees just then, for it is dusk now. Why am I unable to remember the things all around? How many times I have slept under the umbrage? All the things around me are changed. I always said I am not nervous, but my flickering cheek is unable to be seen under the ray at the moment. I feel pain when I bite my lower lip. At the same time the sour and salty fluid is oozing from the gap of my teeth, I finally understand I may lose something.

A gust roused the waves,
leaves blew into the water,
the waves were ash-gray,
the sky tin-gray,
ash-gray the autumn.

It was good for my heart:
there my feelings were ash-gray,
the sky tin-gray,
ash-gray the autumn.

The breath of wind brought cooler air,
the waves of mourning brought separation:
autumn and autumn
befriend each other.

It must be somewhere, the original harmony,
somewhere in great nature, hidden.
Is it in the furious infinite,
in distant stars’ orbits,
is it in the sun’s scorn,
in a tiny flower, in treegossip,
in heartmusic’s mothersong
or in tears?
It must be somewhere, immortality,
Somewhere the original harmony must be found:
how else could it infuse
the human soul,
that music?

And it grows, the vain
summer,
even for us with our
bright green sins:

behold the dry guest,
the wind,
as it stirs up quarrels
among magnolia boughs

and plays its serene
tune on
the prows of all the leaves –
and then is gone,

leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air.

Ice glitters like it’s good.
The whole world glitters,
sped toward ends,
we all fall in.

Under the ice is water.
But under the world, between you
and the everything
of your vanishing…

Fire, air, water, and earth
still turning, spilling into each other.
He tuned the world tense,
made the elements restless

so any happiness we might contrive
of fire, or air, or water, or earth
cannot rest, has to reach higher
than earth, water, air, or fire.

It’s all echo—whatever world
keeps calling to you
in the woods, in a rick, a deep wave—
Just a lie that vanishes

as soon as it tricks you inside.
Shut up, go away, say to the world.
And it does—into the woods, a rock,
deep waves that keep calling you.

When the sky’s dark face
catches your eye again,
let memory write
of a darkness beyond this:

days self-blinded, nights
of searching untaught,
thinking your own thought,
light.

Wanting what you fear,
fearing your own desire:
icicles at the heart
form to burn apart.

When, in this cycle
of suffering he signs,
does the martyr being
to suspect himself?

There were two kingdoms only:
the first of them threw out both him and me.
The second we abandoned.

Under a bare sky
I for a long time soaked in the rain of my body,
he for a long time rotted in the rain of his.

Then like a poison he drank the fondness of the years.
He held my hand with a trembling hand.
“Come, let’s have a roof over our heads awhile.
Look, further on ahead, there
between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.”