Closing Time

I loved you for your beauty
But that doesn’t make a fool of me:
You were in it for your beauty too
And I loved you for your body
There’s a voice that sounds like God to me

And I lift my glass to the awful truth
Which you can’t reveal to the ears of youth
Except to say it isn’t worth a dime
It’s Closing Time

Leonard Cohen

House Of The Rising Sun

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I'm one

[…]

Oh, mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

Alan Price
[variation of a folk classic by Clarence “Tom” Ashley  - Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather, Enoch Ashley]

Artists

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide    –    D. W. Winnicott

Valentine’s Day

Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.

All you need is love – written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon-McCartney

MARSYAS

MARSYAS was a Phrygian Satyr who invented the music of the flute. He found the very first flute which had been crafted but cast away by the goddess Athena who had been displeased by the bloating of her cheeks as she played. Marsyas later challenged the god Apollo to a musical contest but lost when the god demanded they play their instruments upside-down in the second round – a feat ill-suited to the flute. As punishment for his hubris, Apollo had Marsyas tied to a tree and flayed alive. The rustic gods then transformed him into a stream.

the moon is full…

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call...

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust

play a new tune

While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” 

Emil Cioran – Drawn and Quartered, trans. Richard Howard 

latch on to something we have felt

We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don’t really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience half-formed and giving them clear expression: “what was often thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly. 

Alain de Botton – Art as Therapy 

hands that will play me

I have been thinking of how I want to be touched by you, with hands that will play me like piano keys, with fingers that will make a symphony out of me.

Karese Burrows – Literary Sexts

One of us cannot be wrong

I lit a thin green candle 
To make you jealous of me 
But the room just filled up with mosquitoes 
They heard that my body was free 

Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night 
And I put it in your little shoe 
And then I confess that I tortured the dress 
That you wore for the world to look through 

I showed my heart to the doctor 
He said I'd just have to quit 
Then he wrote himself a prescription 
And your name was mentioned in it 

Then he locked himself in a library shelf 
With the details of our honeymoon 
And I hear from the nurse that he's gotten much worse 
And his practice is all in a ruin 

I heard of a saint who had loved you 
So I studied all night in his school 
He taught that the duty of lovers 
Is to tarnish the golden rule 

And just when I was sure that his teachings were pure 
He drowned himself in the pool 
His body is gone but back here on the lawn 
His spirit continues to drool 

An Eskimo showed me a movie 
He'd recently taken of you 
The poor man could hardly stop shivering 
His lips and his fingers were blue 

I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes 
And I guess he just never got warm 
But you stand there so nice in your blizzard of ice 
Oh please, let me come into the storm 

 Leonard Cohen