I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targetsNailing them naked to coloured stakes. I cared nothing for all my crews,Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons. When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased. Into the ferocious tide-ripsLast winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas Never endured more triumphant clamourings The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves Which men call eternal rollers of victims, For ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights! Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,The green water penetrated my pinewood hull And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,Carring away both rudder and anchor. And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down; Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriumsAnd slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than musicFerment the bitter rednesses of love! I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,And sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw! I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors.Lighting up long violet coagulations, Like the performers in very-antique dramas Waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds! I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snowsThe kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,The circulation of undreamed-of saps, And the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus! I have followed, for whole months on end, the swellsBattering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows, Never dreaming that the luminous feet of the MarysCould force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans! I have struck, do you realize, incredible FloridasWhere mingle with flowers the eyes of panthersIn human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridlesUnder the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds! I have seen the enormous swamps seething, trapsWhere a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calmAnd distances cataracting down into abysses! Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfsWhere the giant snakes devoured by verminFall from the twisted trees with black odours! I should have liked to show to children those dolphinsOf the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.- Foam of flowers rocked my driftingsAnd at times ineffable winds would lend me wings. Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollingsLifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward meAnd I hung there like a kneeling woman... Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawlsAnd droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage Drowned men sank backwards into sleep! But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,Hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether, I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water,neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up; Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious, Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot, Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,A crazy plank, with black sea-horses for escort, When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows Skies of ultramarine into burning funnels; I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues' distanceThe groans of Behemoth's rutting, and of the dense MaelstromsEternal spinner of blue immobilitiesI long for Europe with it's aged old parapets! I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islandsWhose delirious skies are open to sailor: - Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? - But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom! If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the Black cold pool where into the scented twilightA child squatting full of sadness, launchesA boat as fragile as a butterfly in May. I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.
12/1/2008 2:43:37 PM
Fly into the rising sun,Faces, smiling everyoneYeah, she is a whole new traditionI feel it in my heartMy woman from TokyoShe makes me seeMy woman from TokyoShes so good to meTalk about her like a queenDancing in a eastern dreamYeah, she makes me feel like a riverThat carries me awayMy woman from TokyoShe makes me seeMy woman from TokyoShes so good to meBut Im at home and I just dont belong ...So far away from the garden we loveShe is what moves in the soul of a doveSoon I shall see just how black was my nightWhen were alone in her city of lightRising from the neon gloomShining like a crazy moonYeah, she turns me on like a fireI get highMy woman from TokyoShe makes me seeMy woman from TokyoShes so good to me
12/1/2008 2:48:03 PM
12/1/2008 2:48:30 PM
Down by Okkervil River slow silent thick and black, I stared into the water, and the water it stared back. The night it fell from tangles of the branches on the shore as it had on Okkervil River before. Down by Okkervil River's cigarettes and rusty tires, we made ourselves an altar, we lit our nightly fires. And the smoke lay thick and smothered all the skunk cabbage and vines where Gods were born and Gods lay down to die. With your hand inside my pocket, you whispered in my ear "We have come from ugliness to find some refuge here. With this bracken for a blanket, where these limbs stick out like bones, we have found a place where we can be alone." And I tried to tell you, as I kissed your hard dry lips, all the things I dreamed about. I touched your bone white hips. Far away our parents slept in while we watched our fire burn. They dreamed of nothing and got nothing in return. And the water slipped on slowly past our bodies in the weeds, pulling plastic wrap and razors on its current through the reeds. Then I woke up one cold morning, felt an absence at my back, and I searched and stared but only the river stared back.
12/1/2008 2:50:02 PM
Why, oh why must you swoop through the hoodlike everybody from the hood is up to no good.You think all the girls around here are trickinup there lookin like SuperchickenAt night I see your light through my bedroom windowBut I ain't got shit but the pad and pencilI can't wait till I hear you say"I'm going down, mayday, mayday." I'm gonna clownCause everytime that the pigs have got mey'all rub it in with the flying Nazimilitary force, but we don't want yaStandin' on my roof with the rocket launcher"So fly like an eagle."But don't follow us wherever we goThe shit that I'm saying, make it's heardMotherfuck you and your punk-ass ghetto bird"Run, run, run, from the ghetto bird" Now..My homey's here to lick on a trick for a RolexAnd let me try the four nextNow the four I was driving was hotter than julylooked up and didn't see it whippin' in the skySaw a chopper with numbers on the bottom"Calling all cars, I think we've got em."I hit the gas and I mashed past InglewoodI think I drove through every single hoodSouth Central, Compton and WattsLong Beach, bust a U, here come the copsWish I had a genie with about three wishesMetal flake green on D's I look suspiciousYou know that I'm runningShit, I hear it hummingFuck, I see it comingIs it a bird? YupIs it a plane? NoI hit me a right on El SegundoWanted to holla, had to ditch the ImpalaLet's see if they would follaMe, hit a fence, hit a fence, and anothermet me a baby pitbull and his motherRan up in some peoples house and looked out of the windowI wish it was my ten-fourhad to pull a strap on a fool named Louis the Thirdcuz I'm getting chased by the ghetto bird"Just put his hat, ehrrr, he combed his hair and then put his hat backon. Errr, he's acting nonchalant up there in that cockpit, going 115miles an hour, with the police chasing him. Ehm, they're not gonna bereal happy when they catch up with him, no matter what, the eh...Ehrr, they hate, they hate a bigmouth even worse."Officer Bird's on his way, and I don't wanna see himcould you please give me the keys to the B.M.?See, I didn't want to gank youbut don't make me bank you, thank youTried to get yo the hood, and you might guessthat a fool like me woulda shot CyrusIncognito, Ghetto EagleSaying, "Fuck, where did he go?"I bust me a left from Rubellon. ParkThe 735 and I'm bailinWent to my homegirl's house and got a hug man,She helped me run like Harriet TubmanLooked out the window by the black bedI saw the pigs and the four on a flatbedThen the light from the bird hit me in the faceI close the blinds cause I didn't wanna catch a caseAll that night, I heard the bird circlewhile I was eating fish and watching UrkelShe said I could sleep on the couchBy two A.M. I was digging her outFuck the ghetto bird"Which way is he going now?""Ok, now..now he's..he's actually southbound..on a service street..and, uh...Gee whiz, uh, I'm gonna get my maps out here and figureout which service srteet he suddelny turned off on. Uh, the sherriffsare..are...well I know that...Sherriffs ground units got thrown off"Motherfuck you and your punk-ass ghetto bird
12/1/2008 4:43:54 PM