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Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning.
At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially
hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water,
which would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice.
He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it,
and waited for the water to change its character.

On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry,
and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat
and drank his preserved water.

When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow,
this man descended among the other sons of men.
He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before;
yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned.
When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad,
and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.

At first, he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment,
to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however,
he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the
loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else.
He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own
store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had
miraculously been restored to sanity.

Indries Shah, When the waters changed

"I became a fabulous opera. I saw that everyone in the world was doomed to happiness.
Action isn't life; it's merely a way of ruining a kind of strength, a means of
destroying nerves. Morality is water on the brain. It seemed to me that everyone
should have had several other lives as well. This gentleman doesn't know what he's
doing; he's an angel. That family is a litter of puppy dogs. With some men, I often
talked out loud with a moment from one of their other lives-- that's how I happened
to love a pig. Not a single one of the brilliant arguments of madness-- the madness
that gets locked up-- did I forget; I could go through them all again, I've got the
system down by heart. It affected my health. Terror loomed ahead. I would fall again
and again into a heavy sleep, which lasted several days at a time, and when I woke up,
my sorrowful dreams continued. I was ripe for fatal harvest, and my weakness led me down
dangerous roads to the edge of the world, to the Cimmerian shore, the haven of whirlwinds
and darkness. I had to travel, to dissipate the enchantments that crowded my brain. On the
sea, which I loved as if it were to wash away my impurity, I watched the compassionate cross
arise. I had been damned by the rainbow. Felicity was my doom, my gnawing remorse, my worm.
My life would forever be too large to devote to strength and to beauty. Felicity! The deadly
sweetness of its sting would wake me at cockcrow-- ad matutinum, at the Christus venit-- in the
soberest of cities."

Arthur Rimbaud, from the poem Hunger

"I bought a ticket to Russia so I could do that dance in the snow

I saw a calf of miasmas run into barbed wire

I saw a child hang himself at a certain angle

So he could see his shadow a thousandfold

When I was seven I wrote a novel of apples and milk

That lamented the passing of a moonlike character one certain Debureau

And his coughing sidekick the Beast of ice

At night I rowed a blue guitar with swords through the bay

I made my way the gills turning pink in my shoes

Up the fearful symmetry of that stretch of anonymous water

I lent out my broom to the clandestine pollen

I laid my head in the prostitute's lap

I interpreted the dementia of the cheerleader's waist

Going to sleep in the dust was my only accomplishment my destiny

Drenched in the garden of slime and mistrusted mystery

I was accused of the odor of vengeance

The only friend I had I could trust froze in the clover

Through the valleys through the shadowy doorways through the merchandise

Of schoolrooms I go luminous a walking disaster

Forever fighting off dribbling flies that smell of mayonnaise and pencils

That whistle like officers of the law

Through the duration I made myself bleed in a gallop

I listened to the noise in the thistle of the dark

I kept moving undiminished and scorched

Holding a light to the egg

Slashed and weaving I pursue the murmuring cinders

I stagger through the familiar juices of the moon

As if I earned my living in a rodeo I ride down each tear

I pierce the ooze with a submerged kiss dug under contempt and despair

I assume the span of the figurehead's breasts ravished to smithereens

I pass my time in Emily Dickinson's outhouse

I pace through the dishevelment of the recluse's lacuna

I scrawl on the mirror and peel oranges in the shepherd boy's confessional

In the fall of the year I watch the meadows

Shivering like so many sorrel mares in heat

I lurk behind the canvas of the traveling picture show

Smelling of sardine's Sara Bundy's boiled coffee

Black is the color of the school marm's hems pulled up like drapes

I wait my ticket the knife like a Pre-raphaelite suicide

Drunk on the ruined records of Dixie Hummingbirds

The black discs the Negroes sail over the levee

And shoot out of the sky with a hair triggered shotgun"

Frank Stanford

Spine of the Snowman (excerpt)

"Most had a carrot nose, some coal, buttons, and twigs for arms,but others were more complex.
Once they started to melt, things would rise upfrom inside the body.
Maybe a gourd, which was an organ, or a long knobbed stick, which was the spine of the snowman."

David Berman

Governors on Sominex

It had been four days of no weather
as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.
They'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings
and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.
The evening edition carried the magic death of a child
backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.
I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle.
Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.

The moon hung solid over the boarded-up Hobby Shop.
RK. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call
to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light
by which he traveled into this and that.
And out in the city, out in the wide readership,
his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket
in the woods behind the Marriott,
his younger brother who was missing that part of the brain
that allows you to make out with your pillow.
Poor kid.
It was the light in things that made them last.

Tammy called her caseworker from a closed gas station
to relay ideas unaligned with the world we loved.
The tall grass bent in the wind like tachometer needles
and he told her to hang in there, slowly repeating
the number of the Job Info Line.
She hung up and glared at the Killbuck Sweet Shoppe.
The words that had been running through her head,

"employees must wash hands before returning to work",
kept repeating and the sky looked dead.

Hedges formed the long limousine a Tampa sky could die behind.
A sailor stood on the wharf with a clipper ship
reflected on the skin of the bell pepper he held.
He'd had mouthwash at the inn and could still feel
the ice blue carbon pinwheels spinning in his mouth.
There were no new ways to understand the world,
only new days to set our understandings against.
Through the lanes came virgins in tennis shoes,
their hair shining like videotape,
singing us into a kind of sleep we hadn't tried yet.
Each page was a new chance to understand the last.
And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid

David Berman

My Life At Home During Banking Hours

For a solid month I tried
to think of something new to say about rivers
I called the newspaper to find out
how many horses were left on earth,
and numbly watched mosquitos swarm
over a pile of high-heeled shoes
while my colleagues hunted in the corners.

At least I was not in the line of work
that had me spending most of my day
avoiding God. My desk held painfully
complicated surfaces filled with shadow cassettes,
black bear theory and drinking water.

There was the sadness in a name like Jesse Winchester
and the wind howling
on the answering machine when I returned home
from daydreaming in a margarita shop.

All the blessings and counter-blessings
that move my mind like FM waves
from a butter churn, and granted me the sight
of parallel collies standing on a hilltop

And the rain falling on the United States
while it wonders
'What is the United States?'

I used to sing a song that went
'No more Springs, no more Summers, no more Falls'
I believed I was nearing the morning when
nettles would pour from the shower head.
When I would be ripped out of the world for re-casting
the blues in plastic.

I believed that I would finally break
where I had been bent,
that I would lose the game inside the game
But that has not happened,
And now I don't expect it ever will.

David Berman

"That the life if man is only a dream has seemed to be so to many before me now,
and I too always carry this feeling about with me. When I behold the narrow
bounds which confine man's power's of action and investigation;
when I see how all his efficiency aims at satisfaction of needs which in their
turn have no purpose save to prolong our unhappy existence, and then we see
that all our reassurance regarding certain matters of inquiry is merely a
resigned kind of dreaming whereby we paint the walls within which we are
confined with cheerful figures and bright prospects - all this, Wilhelm, forces
me into silence. I return into myself, and find a world! But again a world of groping
and vague desires rather than one of clear delineation and active force. And
then everything grows hazy to my senses, and in a sort of dream I keep on smiling
at the world."

Werther, Geothe

"He thinks he is successful in passing himself as being like everyone else, but he is not successful.
He thinks he is unobtrusive, but that makes him all the more an alien in their midst."

Bernhard

"I have again found, my dear fellow, that misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the
world than deceit and malice do."

Werther, Geothe

"This city of my fathers is in reality a terminal disease which its inhabitants acquire through heredity or contagion.
If they fail to leave at the right moment, they sooner or later either commit suicide, directly or indirectly,
or perish slowly and wretchedly on this lethal soil with its archiepiscopal architecture and its mindless blend
of National Socialism and Catholicism. Anyone who is familiar with the city knows it to be a cemetery of fantasy
and desire, beautiful on the surface but horrifying underneath."

Gathering Evidence, Bernhard

"Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others.
That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood."

Gargoyles, Bernhard