Requiem by designerlove

A piece from designerlove, probably the last one for June unless someone else posts as I leave for Italy on Monday and do not return until July.. I enjoy this poem because it reminds me of all the times I've looked for an analogy but could never find one with the appropriate depth. they normally come out as just surface descriptions which ignore the more intrinsic details required of a decent analogy or metaphor.

Requiem


you were light

not incandescent
(that would burn out)

nor yet fluorescent
(never long cold and blue)

but more like a candle
wavering, smoky, but

not a candle, either, after all
finally they melt

which you never did.
No, you were just light

or when reflective
the moon.

The bed I've made by bowers

a piece from bowers, because it's been a while and i like this one.... crazy brit.

The bed I've made

So I'll distance myself,
And I won't talk about it,
Even though it's the only thing on my mind.

But it was my decision,
My own mind which I made up,
My own mistake.

So I'll lie in the bed I made,
Full of nails and broken glass,
It seemed so much softer when you used to lie with me.

I'll lie there not with a broken heart,
But with a heavy one,
Full of regret, it weighs like a led balloon in my chest.

We can't, she says,
It'll get easier, she says,
I'm sorry, she says,
No regrets, she says,
I know, I say, and that's the worst part.

I should have tried harder,
I took the easy way out,
I shouldn't have taken you for granted, I can see that now.

So I'll lie here in the bed I made,
Full of nails and broken glass
It seemed so much softer when you used to lie with me

Glomy Sunday by ironypills

yes well. some ip for ya'll (because it's good for you). proof that this girl's got style.

Gloomy Sunday

Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless.

To play the blues, says my music teacher, you've got to be black, pickin' cotton, and oppressed. Lumbering in your dark-blue canvas overalls (we call that denim, now) out in the sun. Hot sun. Relentless. You've got to see the worst of the worst, and let it all fall out of you. Never rushing. Rushing is for Chopin and Beethoven. You've got to be slow and steady, your bare feet hitting the hard dirt, colouring them the same way it would colour a white man's. Or a white girl's.

Sunday starts the same way each week. Chaos on the day of rest. Especially the every once in awhile my mother gets distressed. Panicking that we'll end up in hell. Dragging us down to St Paul's or St Peter's or one of those p-named saints. St Paradox? God is just her reassurance that we'll be more than rotting shells. But I'll humor her today. I won't say anything about my profound hatred of Christianity's impact on post-modern society affecting a dissatisfied agnostic-atheist like myself. That's not me, really. This guy I knew said it once. Before he got kicked out of school and started working at the local Woolworths. Spending his wage on drugs he got from god knows where. God again. He sneaks up on you like that.

It's hard to avoid Him really, if you think about it. No matter where you look, there's always some reference. Obvious or subtle - all created as He intended. Me and my friends know how to handle it. Teenaged parties at a holidaying adults house. Lights turned low, personalities masked. People we know, not by name, but by alcohol. We are whoever we want to be in the dim Sunday gloom. We are also who everyone expects. Drinking, dancing, singing, shouting, fighting, cheating, smoking, fucking: Regretful youth. It breaks the monotony of school and jigsaw puzzles. The only other things to do in the God-unforsaken place. I wait for my father to yell at me, anticipating, excited, I am ready to be a disappointment. I used to party when I was your age too. You're kids having fun. You'll grow out of it. It's natural, you can't help it.

But I swear we do it on purpose a lot of the time. Loud music, swear words, hostile behaviour. It saves days, not believing. We don't want to be like our parents. We want to get out. It takes connections to do that though, and bravery. Things most of us will never have. There's one other way: Scholarships work too. Music scholarships for gifted students. There are enough classical pianists 'out there' , I had to learn something new. Have to learn something new - it isn't past tense. It's confusing, and I don't always understand what my teacher is telling me. History is irrelevant - I just want to play. The piano keys, they're black and they're white, without argument or violence. They work together and it doesn't matter what colour they are, because (unless you listen closely) they're not singular, segregated notes. They're a constant flow of equal rights and opportunity.
This is wrong, says my music teacher, you have to concentrate on what's being said, what do the pieces mean? It's more than acting, it's faith too. You have to believe, in what you are playing.

So I try walking, sometimes, to find the rhythm she talks about. At night mostly. The dark makes things easier, cloaking distractions. Some people are scared of it, because their minds tell them there'll be bad things hiding. Even in a small, lost town like this. They don't think there could be good things too. I'm not meant to be looking for those though. I'm searching for blues. My own, suburban poverty kind. For a soul twinging misery, like the sound of the black sea hitting an empty construction site. Waves and concrete were never meant to touch. I'm searching for known impossibility, like shining a flashlight toward the moon, hoping to show the world shadow puppets. Or something so lonely and desolate that my heart stops beating and my tombstone reads something cliched, like 'in pursuit of music.'

I don't have an image of this yet. I haven't found it, and I don't know if I should. But maybe one day I'll stop being scared and step outside with a song for locked cars and dead leaves. With only sepia-tinted street lamps to light my performance. Gritty film noir blending with my melody, which will be made from 'the worst of the worst,' the true sound of sorrow. Someone will walk down the wet footpath. Shoes getting ruined regardless of gender or class or race or religion. They'll listen for awhile, then keep on moving. Because it is cold and late and I'll be almost finished anyway. Then I'll get out of here, on one of those walking bass line trains, leaving behind a letter. The closed down shops, the overgrown gardens, and the crooked windows. A letter addressed to no one, or to God, explaining why I've gone.

Dearest,
The shadows I live with are numberless.

Look. Beauty.

I was going through the A list for the first time in forever, and came across this brilliant piece by the Sands that everyone else had discovered already. It stood out to me because it fulfills one of the main purposes of art, which is to give a new perspective on something that I thought I had a set opinion on. And so, to honor the author for being influential, I present: "Look. Beauty." by burning_sands.

There’s this thing about Photoshop and manipulating portraits. When you’ve been working with it for a while, you start to see things. I don’t mean those midnight, I’ve-got-a-headache-coming-on-and-it’s-been-way-too-long-since-I’ve-seen-sky kind of things. I mean little things.

You’ll be walking down the hallway and see someone with shadows under their eyes and you feel a finger twitch for the dodge tool and the tiniest touch of blur, on 73% opacity, brush size 29.

An unfortunate mole has you matching skin tones and wondering how distinctive it is and whether you should just make it prettier or if you can get away with doing away with it all together.

Acne and freckles make you wish for real life Gaussian blur with a radius of 4.1 pixels and opacity of 62. Smooth skin is only a few clicks away; all you have to sacrifice is texture.

Your colleague’s sloppy eyebrows could never survive two and a half minutes of liquefy and push. Brush size 18. The perfect arch and neat ends. Say goodbye to that unibrow, my good sir.

Double chins and thin lips hardly count as enemies; hooded eyes come close to formidable while you laugh at birthmarks.

You know you can make them beautiful; you see it in every face. A tweak, a push, one more click and you’ve made perfection.

They tell me that Photoshop ruins beauty, that it makes it too easy to be beautiful. It takes the earning out of perfection, makes women strive to be what only software can make them.

They say that I’m a part of the frontline, the offensive against women and their self confidence, their sense of worth and attractiveness. I tell them that the media only plays on the ignorant and continue my ceaseless clicking. There is beauty in there and I’m going to find it, flush it out, and bring it to its heights. I will wrench it from mediocrity even if only for the few seconds before I hit alt F4 and shut down my system.

Because I watch from sleep deprived eyes, with a nose I know is uneven only because I’ve fixed it a million times, and see beauty in every face that passes by. Instead of noticing problems, I find solutions and beauty emerges. What is underneath comes through and perfection is in the placement of a mole, the wrinkles in a brow, the bloodshot eye of your best friend. You start seeing things you don’t like but wouldn’t change. You learn to see people as they are even as you picture them as they could be. You see the wonder of normalcy even as you search for the faces which are impossible to manipulate; the good, the bad and the ugly. But there’s always something else your mouse can do, the turn of a lips, the shadow on skin, to make it better. Not everyone can be perfect but you’ll find that not everyone needs to be.

They say that Photoshop ruins things, but you soon find that Photoshop has you noticing the little things, the things you couldn’t recreate, that make a person unique, beautiful, spectacular.