Trap Song Quotes

I've been burdened with blame trapped in the past for too long, I'm moving on

Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.

In the pits of our souls - if I amuse myself with the notion that I have a soul - Elian and I aren't so different. Two kingdoms that come with responsibilities we each have trouble bearing. Him, the shackles of being pinned to one land and one life. Me, trapped in the confines of my mother's murderous legacy. And the ocean, calling out to us both. A song of freedom and longing.

Your partner may have injuries that you can't repair. Your partner may be trapped in a dark room without windows. Your life narrative might bring him more relief than an opiate. Some people make better windows than windows. Your kind words and enlightened perspective is a window of wonders to someone living in pain.

It was never wise for a ruler to eschew the trappings of power, for power itself flows in no small measure from such trappings.

Then sudden Felagund there swaying Sang in answer a song of staying, Resisting, battling against power, Of secrets kept, strength like a tower, And trust unbroken, freedom, escape; Of changing and of shifting shape, Of snares eluded, broken traps, The prison opening, the chain that snaps.

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened every day and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breath in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.

Whenever you start feeling trapped or helpless, just close your eyes, and you have more space than you’ll ever need.

Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.

Chimes?" Phyllis asked. "Chimes to call a lover? Chimes with the voice of a bird trapped in them? Chimes that play you whatever song you most desire to hear?" "No thanks," said Nick. "We've got MTV.

Fireflies are stars that could not journey to the sky.

The point of desperation is often the point of truth. When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.

Some day you will look back on these days as the happiest of your life. You will forget your financial struggles. You will forget the unfair division of duties. You will forget feeling trapped and smothered, imagining that you are in a loveless marriage. You will only remember the joy of a young family, working together making your way through an unfamiliar world. Appreciate what you have now. pg vi

Being under him, trapped, objectified, I lost all fear. With Jonathan, I felt safe. I felt a loss of control so complete, a surrender so honest that it became a luxurious indulgence.

Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth's wing, and past, present, and future are one.

What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit “Love Is Like Oxygen”—you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.

No one saw me and no one knew, and for this reason, these nighttime walks were the only times that I didn't feel trapped in my life.

Mercy, thought Theon as Luwin dropped back. There’s a bloody trap. Too much and they call you weak, too little and you’re monstrous.

What's up with you?" "I'm grounded," I say, just to say something real. "I told Mum to fuck off." He whistles. "Why'd you tell her that? Any other 'off' leaves room for parole. 'Sod off,' 'shove off'—even 'sock off' is still pretty satisfying." "You've told your dad to sock off?" "Once. He said, 'What the fuck is "sock off"? Be a man and tell me to fuck off.'" "So did you tell him?" "No. Because that was the trap. There's never time out for good behavior with 'fuck off.

She is a mortal danger to all men. She is beautiful without knowing it, and possesses charms that she's not even aware of. She is like a trap set by nature - a sweet perfumed rose in whose petals Cupid lurks in ambush. Anyone who has seen her smile has known perfection. She instills grace in every common thing and divinity in every careless gesture. Venus in her shell was never so lovely, and Diana in the forest never so graceful as you,” I whispered. Lifting my head up, I looked deep into her eyes.

In the pits of our souls—if I amuse myself with the notion that I have a soul—Elian and I aren't so different. Two kingdoms that come with responsibilities we each have trouble bearing. Him, the shackles of being pinned to one land and one life. Me, trapped in the confines of my mother's murderous legacy. And the ocean, calling out to us both. A song of freedom and longing.

Perhaps he did not think himself worthy of the King’s Tower, or perhaps he did not care. That was his mistake, the false humility of youth that is itself a sort of pride. It was never wise for a ruler to eschew the trappings of power, for power itself flows in no small measure from such trappings.

The Fallen It was the night a comet with its silver tail fell through darkness to earth's eroded field, the night I found the wolf, starved in metal trap, teeth broken from pain's hard bite, its belly swollen with unborn young. In our astronomy the Great Wolf lived in the sky. It was the mother of all women and howled her daughter's names into the winds of night. But the new people, whatever stepped inside their shadow, they would kill, whatever crossed their path, they came to fear. In their science, Wolf as not the mother. Wolf was not wind. They did not learn healing from her song. In their stories Wolf was the devil, falling down an empty, shrinking universe, God's Lucifer with yellow eyes that had seen their failings and knew that they could kill the earth, that they would kill each other. That night I threw the fallen stone back to sky and falling stars and watched it all come down to ruined earth again. Sky would not take back what it had done. That night, sky was a wilderness so close the eerie light of heaven and storming hands of sun reached down the swollen belly and dried up nipples of a hungry world. That night, I saw the trapper's shadow and it had four legs.

Night smelt the way Havoc’s songs sounded. It smelt of steel and rushlights and the marsh welcoming a misstep and anger souring like old blood.

The trap had teeth.

Dear lieutenant, I think we all seduced you, deflected you from a course that might have let you live. Seeking something in the quick of us, searching to secure a kind of love with the provenance of age and land and family, you took over our premises; you presumed to the legacy that was ours, and if you did not see that such assumptions have their own ramifying repercussions, and that the stones demand their own continuity of blood, if you did not understand the gravity of their isolation, the solitude of their trapped state or the hardness of their old responsibility, still you cannot fault the castle or either one of us, or complain that you were led to your own conclusion. I left the castle; you brought us all back.

In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self-- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass-- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

In the end, what we believe to be true—our conventional wisdom—is really nothing more than sixty years of misconceived nutrition research. Before 1961, there were our ancestors, with their recipes. And before them, there were their ancestors, with their hunting bows or traps or livestock—but like lost languages, lost skills, and lost songs, it takes only a few generations to forget.

But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed. Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye. You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down. You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living. And though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing. For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

The greatest fear, I sometimes think, is that we are trapped: in bodies, in rooms, in time. Or the greatest fear is that we are not - that we can spill wide open. If one is, as Kafka says, dead in one's own lifetime, the heart thuds a traitorous song: alive, alive.

For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction.

Then there’s the trap of easy rhymes.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

Daniel stays with us till midnight. He’s a little afraid to leave, afraid, in fact, to hit those streets, and Fonny realizes this and walks him to the subway. Daniel, who cannot abandon his mother, yet longs to be free to confront his life; is terrified at the same time of what that life may bring, is terrified of freedom; and is struggling in a trap. And Fonny, who is younger, struggles now to be older, in order to help his friend toward his deliverance. Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? And why not every man? The song is old, the question unanswered.

I spent the first few days with his earbuds in, immersed in sensory overload. I finally had to tuck them away in my desk, having decided anyone who listens to music while emotionally compromised is a masochist. It’s utter agony knowing my mind now associates certain songs with a man forever trapped in a place and time I don’t want to outlive.

There’s a line you never get to cross, as long as you live. The edge of your body. You’re trapped inside your skin, and no matter how many times you reach out to touch a friend or a lover, no matter how close you hold someone or how fiercely you make love, when it begins, when it ends, and all the moments in between, you are still yourself, alone. I know you knew this. It was in all the love songs you wrote. I think it was the hidden impulse we both had, down inside, that made us take razors to our skin, that desire to open up and let the world in, to let ourselves out, to take that sharp thin line of flesh and erase it.

There are always problems in the world, and the world has always been there, and the world will remain there. If you start trying to work it out—changing circumstances, changing people, thinking of a utopian world, changing the government, the structure, the economy, the politics, the education—you will be lost. That is the trap known as politics. That’s how many people waste their own lives. Be very clear about it: The only person you can help right now is you yourself. Right now you cannot help anybody. This may be just a distraction, just a trick of the mind. See your own problems, see your own anxieties, see your own mind, and first try to change that. It happens to many people: The moment they become interested in some sort of religion, meditation, prayer, immediately the mind tells them, “What are you doing sitting here silently? The world needs you; there are so many poor people. There is much conflict, violence, aggression. What are you doing praying in the temple? Go and help people.” How can you help those people? You are just like them. You may create even more problems for them, but you cannot help. That’s how all the revolutions have always failed. No revolution has yet succeeded because the revolutionaries are in the same boat. The religious person is one who understands that “I am very tiny, I am very limited. If with this limited energy, even if I can change myself, that will be a miracle.” And if you can change yourself, if you are a totally different being with new life shining in your eyes and a new song in your heart, then maybe you can be helpful to others also, because then you will have something to share.

Snow still chose to dwell behind the armory, in a pair of modest rooms previously occupied by the Watch's late blacksmith. Perhaps he did not think himself worthy of the King's Tower, or perhaps he did not care. That was his mistake, the false humility of youth that is itself a sort of pride. It was never wise for a ruler to eschew the trappings of power, for power itself flows in no small measure from such trappings.

Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain? Tell me, have you these in your houses? Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master? Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires. Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron. It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh. It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels. Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral. But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed. Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye. You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down. You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living. And though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing. For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

Jimmy (to Allison):We'll be together in our bear's cave, and our squirrel's drey, and we'll live on honey, and nuts-lots and lots of nuts. And we'll sing songs about ourselves-about warm trees and snug caves, and lying in the sun. And you'll keep those big eyes on my fur, and help me keep my claws in order, because I'm a bit of a soppy, scruffy sort of a bear. And I'll see that you keep that sleek, bushy tail glistening as it should, because you're a very beautiful squirre, but you're none too bright either, so we've got to be careful. There are cruel steel traps lying about everywhere, just waiting for rather mad, slightly satanic, and very timid little animals.

derelict. my voice cracked and yolk poured out. wind chimes rigid, no breeze, no song. my wings found hidden in your suitcase. pleas for help mistaken for a swan song. i'm stuffing pages from my journal down my throat as kindling. hoping the smoke will get the taste of you out of my mouth. he looks at me from across the room and all i want is to push him against the wall. ravage. ravage. carnage has never been more vogue. is it still art if it doesn't bring you to your knees? lover, let me prey at your altar. let me bare my fangs in praise. don't i look so pretty in a funeral shroud? i keep time with the click of my creaking bones. dance with me under the milky translucence of a world suffocating. how did you find me? i buried myself beneath the cicadas. is a girl trapped in glass still a prize? let me get under your skin. i want to know what your fears taste like. i want to consume.

On a starry night like this, I want to be trapped inside your bliss. Lay your sweet lips on mine, As our bodies entangled and freeze in time.

Modesty did not suit me, but desperate times called for desperate trappings, and though it pained me, I had risen to the challenge.

Sometimes insecurities dictate our feelings – we project thoughts onto other people and let them trap us – but a good song stirs emotion with knowledge.

And as I close my eyes, the gentle chords of his guitar carry through the phone’s speaker, followed by his deep voice singing a song that I’ve heard on the radio, Jason Mraz’s “I won’t give up.

Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget. Lord, what is this? All of this walking about, trying, smiling, bowing, joking? This sitting-down-at-table, pressing-of-shirts, tying-of-ties, shining-of-shoes, planning-of-trips, singing-of-songs-in-the-bath? When he is to be left out here? Is a person to nod, dance, reason, walk, discuss? As before? A parade passes. He can’t rise and join. Am I to run after it, take my place, lift knees high, wave a flag, blow a horn? Was he dear or not? Then let me be happy no more.

Tyrion. “None.” “A pity. Well, the threat may serve to keep the Marcher lords close to their castles, at least. What news of my father?” “If Lord Tywin has won across the Red Fork, no word has reached me yet. If he does not hasten, he may be trapped between his foes. The Oakheart leaf and the Rowan tree have been seen north of the Mander.” “No word from Littlefinger?” “Perhaps he never reached

He chanted a song of wizardry, of piercing, opening, of treachery, 490 revealing, uncovering, betraying. Then sudden Felagund there swaying sang in answer a song of staying, resisting, battling against power, of secrets kept, strength like a tower, 500 and trust unbroken, freedom, escape; of changing and of shifting shape, of snares eluded, broken traps, the prison opening, the chain that snaps.

The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.

Joffrey called out, “Dog!” Sandor Clegane seemed to take form out of the night, so quickly did he appear. He had exchanged his armor for a red woolen tunic with a leather dog’s head sewn on the front. The light of the torches made his burned face shine a dull red. “Yes, Your Grace?” he said. “Take my betrothed back to the castle, and see that no harm befalls her,” the prince told him brusquely. And without even a word of farewell, Joffrey strode off, leaving her there. Sansa could feel the Hound watching her. “Did you think Joff was going to take you himself?” He laughed. He had a laugh like the snarling of dogs in a pit. “Small chance of that.” He pulled her unresisting to her feet. “Come, you’re not the only one needs sleep. I’ve drunk too much, and I may need to kill my brother tomorrow.” He laughed again. He was mocking her, she realized. “No one could withstand him,” she managed at last, proud of herself. It was no lie. Sandor Clegane stopped suddenly in the middle of a dark and empty field. She had no choice but to stop beside him. “Some septa trained you well. You’re like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren’t you? A pretty little talking -bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite.” “ Take your look.” His fingers held her jaw as hard as an iron trap. His eyes watched hers. Drunken eyes, sullen with anger. She had to look. The right side of his face was gaunt, with sharp cheekbones and a grey eye beneath a heavy brow. His nose was large and hooked, his hair thin, dark. He wore it long and brushed it sideways, because no hair grew on the other side of that face. The left side of his face was a ruin. His ear had been burned away; there was nothing left but a hole. His eye was still good, but all around it was a twisted mass of scar, slick black flesh hard as leather, pocked with craters and fissured by deep cracks.

For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them.

I don’t know how to dance to your songs,” he said. “I don’t have the esteem of your friends. I don’t use seventeen pieces of silverware at dinner.” He let go of her hair, and it billowed out, catching in the wind once more. “I have no means of expanding your inheritance.” He knew he was walking a fine line, reminding her of the reasons they made no sense. That this charade they were playing was a weak one. But if the goal was to be vulnerable, to entice her to be vulnerable, too, he needed to speak the truth. “People like you are impossible,” she said. “I don’t care about those things.” He almost rolled his eyes. “Of course you do.” “Then why are we here? If I’m so shallow—all trappings and no substance—what are you doing with me? Why would someone like you want someone like me?” Gideon opened his mouth to respond, only he didn’t know the answer. He studied her, hair ablaze in the setting sun. Gray eyes like molten steel.

Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness; You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs, And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory. Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance, Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot And not to be trapped by withering laurels. And in you I have found aloneness And the joy of being shunned and scorned. Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield, In your eyes I have read That to be enthroned is to be enslaved, And to be understood is to be leveled down, And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed. Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion, You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences, And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings, And urging of seas, And of mountains that burn in the night, And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul. Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage, You and I shall laugh together with the storm, And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us, And we shall stand in the sun with a will, And we shall be dangerous.

She dances, She dances around the burning flames with passion, Under the same dull stars, Under the same hell with crimson embers crashing, Under the same silver chains that wires, All her beauty and who she is inside, She's left with the loneliness of human existence, She's left questioning how she's survived, She's left with this awakening of brutal resilience, Her true beauty that she denies, As much she's like to deny it, As much as it continues to shine, That she doesn't even have to admit, Because we all know it's true, Her glory and success, After all she's been through, Her triumph and madness, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Broken legs- but she's still standing, Still dancing in this void, You must wonder how she's still dancing, You must wonder how she's not destroyed, She doesn't even begin to drown within the flames, But little do you realize, Within these chains, She weeps and she cries, But she still goes on, And just you thought you could stop her? You thought you'd be the one? Well, let me tell you, because you thought wrong. Nothing will ever silence her, Because I KNOW, I know that she is admiringly strong, Her undeniable beauty, The triumph of her song, She's shining bright like a ruby, Reflecting in the golden sand, She's shining brighter like no other, She's far more than human or man, AND YET, SHE STANDS. She continues to dance with free-spirit, Even though she's locked in these chains, Though she never desired to change it, Even throughout the agonizing pain, Throughout all the distress, Anxiety, depression, tears and sorrow, She still dances so beautify in her dress, She looks forward to tomorrow, Not because of a fresh start but a new page, A new day full of opportunities, Despite being trapped in her cage, She still smiles after being beaten so brutally, A smile that could brighten anyone's day, She's so much more than anyone could ask for, She's so much more than I could ever say, She's a girl absolutely everyone should adore, She never gets in the way, Even after her hearts been broken, Even after the way she has been treated, After all these severe emotions, After all all the blood she's bled, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Even if sometimes she wonders why she's still here, She wonders why she's not dead, But there's this one thing that had been here throughout every tear, Throughout the blazing fire leaving her cheeks cherry red, Everyday this thing has given her a place to exist, This thing, person, these people, Like warm sunlight it had so softly kissed, The apples of her cheeks, Even when she's feeling feeble, Always there at her worst and at her best Because of you and all the other people, She has this thing deep inside her chest, That she will cherish forever, Even once you're gone, Because today she smiles like no other, Even when the sun sets at dawn, Because today is the day, She just wants you to remember, In dark and stormy weather, It gets better. And after what she's been through she knows, Throughout the highs and the lows, Because of you and all others, After crossing the seas, She has come to understand, You have formed this key, This key to free her from this land, This endless gorge that swallowed her, Her and other men, She had never knew, nor had she planned, That because of you, She's free. AND YET, THIS VERY DAY, SHE DANCES. EVEN IN THE RAIN.

Book, when I close you life itself opens. I hear broken screams in the harbor. The copper slugs cross the sandy areas, descending to Tocopilla. It is night. Between the islands our ocean palpitates with fish. It touches the feet, the thighs, the chalky ribs of my homeland. Night touches the shoreline and rises while singing at daybreak like a guitar awakening. I feel the irresistible force of the ocean's call. I am called by the wind, and called by Rodriguez, José Antonio, I received a telegram from the "Mina" worker's union and the one I love (I won't tell you her name) waits for me in Bucalemu. Book, you haven't been able to enwrap me, you haven't covered me with typography, with celestial impressions, you haven't been able to trap my eyes between covers, I leave you so I can populate groves with the hoarse family of my song, to work burning metals or to eat grilled meat at the fireside in the mountains. I love books that are explorers, books with forest and snow, depth and sky, but I despise the book of spiders that employs thought to weave its venomous wires to trap the young and unsuspecting fly. Book, free me. I don't want to be entombed like a volume, I don't come from a tome, my poems don't eat poems, they devour passionate events, they're nurtured by the open air and fed by the earth and by men. Book, let me wander the road with dust in my low shoes and without mythology: go back to the library while I go into the streets. I've learned to take life from life, to love after a single kiss, and I didn't teach anything to anyone except what I myself lived, what I shared with other men, what I fought along with them: what I expressed from all of us in my song.

Jacob," Rose persisted, "I still want to know what gave you the idea of singing like that. You weren't really drunk, were you?" "Jews don't get drunk." "You don't know everybody I do." "Anyway, it was this." He laid a finger across the bridge of his nose and swept it down to the tip. "Put me in a lineup with a Chinaman, a Choctow, and a Hottentot, and ask anybody to pick out the Jew and they'll get it right on the first try." "But--" "But nothing, Rose. It's the old Poe gimmick. Hide in plain sight. If a Jew tried to infiltrate that bunch of Nazis, what's the obvious thing to do? He'd head to the darkest corner he could find, he'd keep his head down and his trap shut and hope that nobody'd notice him. And do you think that would work? In a pig's ass - pardon my French, Rose - they'd catch him out in a minute. So I stood up and acted drunk and sang Nazi songs. No Jew would do that; so they just figured I was an unlucky Aryan who managed to pick up a bad gene from a wandering ancestor. So maybe this drunk wasn't quite one hundred percent pure Aryan, but he was obviously as good Nazi, so let him be. At least for now.

Sarabeth wondered at the sheer energy it must have taken for her mother to be dissatisfied by so much. Her psyche was like a huge grid of mousetraps, set to spring at the lightest touch. There were traps for Sarabeth's father,traps for Sarabeth. The biggest trap, though, was the grid itself,the trap of being Lorelei.

Time really is a circle; I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can't return to and a future that is uncertain. And it takes guts to live here, in the hard space between anticipation and realization. How quickly we believe that nothing can be new again but then, look. Another Leonard Cohen song is being sung. Hallelujah.

It was a trap. Later, if I heard the song played on the radio or at a club, i would think of him, and of a time in my life when autumn turned to spring. I would recall the excitement, the adventure, and the child who was reborn out of God knows where. That's what he was thinking. He was wise, and experienced; he knew how to woo the woman he wanted.

I’ve discovered that Kell has a pleasant tenor singing voice, and Runt is actually an accomplished mime, a skill that few know is widespread on his homeworld of Thakwaa. By integrating modern holographic technology with traditional song-and-dance routines, we could capture the warlord’s attention—” By now the other Wraiths were snickering. Wedge caught Face’s eye and glowered. “Perhaps you could give us the set of conclusions you turned in to me, Loran?” Face had the gall to look surprised. “Oh, those. Sorry.” He sobered. “I

What if..." is my philosophy. I won't say it's plays like a broken record, no, it plays like a I hit the continuous repeat button on a one song playlist. When I see people who are pained and stressed by the world their trapped in, I ask, "What if?" and create their story about why they're constantly rolling their eyes behind their spouses back, then paste a smile when needed. We weren't born to live a life of misery, don't ever believe it. That's just not how it is, it's never to late too find your voice. Dig deep, grasp it and roar.

A Different Holding Pattern If I am to hold the world in my heart, then let me hold it the way leaves hold sunshine, trapping the energy not for the sake of holding it, but to transform it into nourishment. Though the process isn't simple, it's common. All around the globe, in every season, leaves hold and synthesize whatever the day gives them. On a day when the energy of the world seems to much to hold let me bid my heart turn like a leaf to the sun and make sugar. The way Rilke turned grief into sonnets. The way Sibelius turned war into song. by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

My back hit the wall. He closed in with an almost terrifying intensity. His muscular body boxed me in. “Rogan,” I warned. In my head, a song played over and over, singing to me in a seductive voice, Rogan, Rogan, Rogan, sex . . . want . . . “Remember that dream you had?” His voice was low, commanding. “Rogan!” The delicious warmth danced around my neck. “Where I had no clothes?” The warmth split and slid over me, over the sensitive nerves in the back of my neck, over my collarbone, around my breasts, cupping them and sliding fast to the tips, tightening my nipples, then sliding down, over my stomach, over my sides and butt, down between my legs. It was everywhere at once, and it flowed over me like a cascade of sensual ecstasy, overloading my senses, overriding my reason, and rendering me speechless. I hurtled through it, trying to sort through the sensations and failing. My head spun. He was right there, masculine, hot, sexy, so incredibly sexy, and I wanted to taste him. I wanted his hands on me. I wanted him to press himself against the aching spot between my legs. His arms closed around me. His face was too close, his eyes enticing, compelling, excited. “Let’s talk about that dream, Nevada.” I was trapped. I had nowhere to go. If he kissed me, I would melt right here. I would moan and beg him, and I would have sex with him right here, in the Galleria, in public. A spark of pain drained down my arm, driven by pure instinct. I grabbed his shoulder. Feathery lightning shot out and singed him. Agony exploded in me, cleansing like an ice-cold shower. Rogan’s body jerked, as if struck by an electric current. It lasted only a second, and I didn’t push as hard as I could have. I was learning to control it. Rogan whipped back to me, his eyes feral. His voice was a ragged growl. “Was that supposed to hurt?” “It was supposed to get your attention.” I pushed him back with my hand. “You were getting really excited.” “‘No’ would’ve been sufficient.” “I wasn’t sure.” I pushed from the wall and headed for the exit. “I said ‘once.’ That was more than once. I wanted you to stop.” “I was encouraged by you breathlessly moaning my name.” I spun on my foot. “I wasn’t moaning your name. I was shrieking in alarm.” “That was the sexiest throaty shrieking I’ve ever heard.” “You need to get out more.” My cheeks were burning.

As Miriam took her seat, Willow suddenly became conscious of the impropriety of her intimate position under Rider's arm. She straightened and would have slid to the opposite side of the swing, but he stubbornly tightened his arm around her. She tried her best to elbow his ribs, but her arm was trapped between their bodies. "Do sit still, Willow." Miriam sighed. "It's not ladylike to squirm so. I'm not going to reprimand you for Mr. Sinclair's public mauling." Rider tossed the dragon lady a disgruntled scowl but nonetheless allowed Willow to sit up straight and put a few inches between them. Not to be totally thwarted, however, he grapped her hand and held it in his lap.

What would the poor and lowly do, without children?" said St. Clare, leaning on the railing, and watching Eva, as she tripped off, leading Tom with her. "Your little child is your only true democrat. Tom, now is a hero to Eva; his stories are wonders in her eyes, his songs and Methodist hymns are better than an opera, and the traps and little bits of trash in his pocket a mine of jewels, and he the most wonderful Tom that ever wore a black skin. This is one of the roses of Eden that the Lord has dropped down expressly for the poor and lowly, who get few enough of any other kind." "It's strange, cousin," said Miss Ophelia, "one might almost think you were a professor, to hear you talk.

Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.

Western people today may have acquaintances, but few have relationships that even remotely approximate the honest, vulnerable, committed, covenantal relationships that weave the body of Christ together in the New Testament. Related to this, while the New Testament views the church as a community of people who unite around a mission, who spend significant amounts of time together in study, worship, and ministry, and who help one another become “fully mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28; cf. Eph. 4:13; James 1:4), most Westerners assume church is a place they go to once a week to sit alongside strangers, sing a few songs, and listen to a message before returning to their insulated lives. So too, whereas the New Testament envisions the bride of Christ as a community of people who convince the world that Jesus is for real by the way our unity reflects and participates in the loving unity of the Trinity (John 17:20–23), the Western church today has been reduced to little more than a brief gathering of consumers who are otherwise unconnected and who attend the weekend event with hopes of getting something that will benefit their lives. From a kingdom perspective, this individualistic and impoverished consumer-driven view of the church is nothing short of tragic, as is the perpetual immaturity of the believers who are trapped in it. If we are serious about our covenant with Christ, we have no choice but to get serious about cultivating covenant relationships with other disciples. There are no individual brides of Christ. Jesus is not a polygamist! There

People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before one's decisions—it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds—and so people had a tendency to talk to it. [...] I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees that I would. [...] It would be a boy very far away—and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful o songs.

She dances, She dances around the burning flames with passion, Under the same dull stars, Under the same hell with crimson embers crashing, Under the same silver chains that wires, All her beauty and who she is inside, She's left with the loneliness of human existence, She's left questioning how she's survived, She's left with this awakening of brutal resilience, Her true beauty that she denies, As much she's like to deny it, As much as it continues to shine, That she doesn't even have to admit, Because we all know it's true, Her glory and success, After all she's been through, Her triumph and madness, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Broken legs- but she's still standing, Still dancing in this void, You must wonder how she's still dancing, You must wonder how she's not destroyed, She doesn't even begin to drown within the flames, But little do you realize, Within these chains, She weeps and she cries, But she still goes on, And just you thought you could stop her? You thought you'd be the one? Well, let me tell you, because you thought wrong. Nothing will ever silence her, Because I KNOW, I know that she is admiringly strong, Her undeniable beauty, The triumph of her song, She's shining bright like a ruby, Reflecting in the golden sand, She's shining brighter like no other, She's far more than human or man, AND YET, SHE STANDS. She continues to dance with free-spirit, Even though she's locked in these chains, Though she never desired to change it, Even throughout the agonizing pain, Throughout all the distress, Anxiety, depression, tears and sorrow, She still dances so beautify in her dress, She looks forward to tomorrow, Not because of a fresh start but a new page, A new day full of opportunities, Despite being trapped in her cage, She still smiles after being beaten so brutally, A smile that could brighten anyone's day, She's so much more than anyone could ask for, She's so much more than I could ever say, She's a girl absolutely everyone should adore, She never gets in the way, Even after her hearts been broken, Even after the way she has been treated, After all these severe emotions, After all all the blood she's bled, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Even if sometimes she wonders why she's still here, She wonders why she's not dead, But there's this one thing that had been here throughout every tear, Throughout the blazing fire leaving her cheeks cherry red, Everyday this thing has given her a place to exist, This thing, person, these people, Like warm sunlight it had so softly kissed, The apples of her cheeks, Even when she's feeling feeble, Always there at her worst and at her best Because of you and all the other people, She has this thing deep inside her chest, That she will cherish forever, Even once you're gone, Because today she smiles like no other, Even when the sun sets at dawn, Because today is the day, She just wants you to remember, In dark and stormy weather, It gets better. And after what she's been through she knows, Throughout the highs and the lows, Because of you and all others, After crossing the seas, She has come to understand, You have formed this key, This key to free her from this land, This endless gorge that swallowed her, Her and other men, She had never knew, nor had she planned, That because of you, She's free. AND YET, THIS VERY DAY, SHE STILL DANCES, EVEN IN THE RAIN.

Leonardo had a copy of the bestiary written by Pliny the Elder and three others by medieval compilers. In contrast to the entries in these collections, Leonardo’s tended to be pithy and unadorned with religious trappings. They were probably connected to emblems, heraldic shields, and performances that he created for those in the Sforza circle. “The swan is white without any spot, and it sings sweetly as it dies, its life ending with that song,” one of them states. Occasionally Leonardo appended a moral lesson to the entry, such as this: “The oyster, when the moon is full, opens itself wide, and when the crab looks in he throws in a stone or seaweed and the oyster cannot close again, whereby it serves for food to that crab. This is what happens to him who opens his mouth to tell his secret. He becomes the prey of the treacherous hearer.” 31

I drink to the health of the child prodigy who finally met the gentleman with the golden ass. Vive little Sébastien, he’ll grow up. And the Schubert song that you said you only played for me, you little viper, you played it for him, your fingers melting on the notes like butter. You’re selling yourself. You’re giving yourself to a fur-trader, a man who’s going to kill seals on their sacred ground, who’s going to set traps for wolves in the wildest, most beautiful depths of the forests, who burns their territory — a merchant whom Jesus himself chased out of the temple! You’re the one who is riff-raff, not the man who kisses me on the mouth at the public pool! That’s what happens when you think you’re delicate, different from the others: you get yourself recognized by a pig. You’ve been recognized, now go lick his feet and anything else you want.

Essay on Lust Identity can’t be concise. It’s knit from sequins and lust and scatters. Mostly everyone was fucking the seven arts with a willed difficulty. Then for one day there was the collective sensation that we carried our lovely voices as if in baskets, piled up in clear tones like grapes. Each voice had achieved its particular mass. From an interior space we heard the word sequin repeating in relation to leaves and the image was yellow-gold leaves moving on dark water. We had undergone an influence of death which was itself imprinted on such a moving sequin: the breath sequins, the heartbeat sequins, the organs and their slowing articulation sequins which drifting from the foreground appear to dim since they gradually go out to illuminate some event so distant we will never own the moment of its perception. But all this gives the illusion of peacefulness which is inert or at least passive when breaths burst smashing into sobbed words some urgent errand trapped in these letters as labour of light diminishing rhythm and if we fiercely decide to clear the stupid human stuff stop waiting for something to come to the father-studded earth shouldn’t this impatience release itself as a tongue so new weeping stops. In young women enamoured of their own intensities the Latin element wells up and knits from lust the pelt on the wall that’s ocelot or shadepelt or the imagination of matter. Nothing’s frugal. As for us, we want to give the city what lust has never ceased to put together. Young women or other women carrying their lovely voices as if on platters, their ten voices or nine voices in urgent errand dictating the imagination of matter. It is not our purpose to obscure the song of no-knowledge.

Couldn't I come along with you? I've been trapped inside for days now and I need some sunshine and exercise. If you're really busy today, maybe I could hhelp. It's not as if I'm a greenhorn who'd get in your way." "This isn't a good idea, Freckles, and you know it." The feisty redhead grinned. "I admit I'm somewhat ignorant on the subject, but I've never heard of doing "it" on the back of a horse." A roguish grin dangled from the corner of his mouth. "Sweetheart, you'd be surprised where...Never mind." Though he'd tried to sound gruff, Willow detected a slight wavering in his determination. "I'll promise not to attack your body, if that's what you're worried about." She started laughing. Moving closer, she backed him against the door. Then tilting her head, she hit him full force with her big blue-green sparklers. Her lips parted in a very seductive, very naughty smile. "Please, just a short ride?" She toyed with the edge of his black leather vest, the backs of her fingers sliding up and down his chest. Rider sucked in a gulp of air. "Dammit, woman,what's Mrs. Brigham been teaching you? Stop that!" He batted her hand away, laughing despite himself. He was beaten and he knew it. "Well?" She smiled slyly. He grasped her arms and set her away to a safer distance. "All right, all right. I give up. I'll take you for a ride." When her face lit up,he raised a cautioning finger and hastened to add, "On one condition. You have to keep yours hands to yourself. No touching!" "Yes! I promise!" Willow threw herself into his arms and pulled his face close for a brisk buss on the cheek. Then she sprang free and skipped past him to the door. "I kow, no touching. That was just a thank you. Hurry up, I'm all ready to go." Following in her wake, Rider groaned, "Yeah,so am I-in more ways than one." "What did you say?" she called back. "I said you were a little flirt!" She gave him an innocent smile over her shoulder and sprinted off to saddle Sugar.

It came as a gift. A large gray bird flew up with a loud alarm call as he approached. As it gained height and wheeled away over the valley, it gave out a piping sound on three notes, which he recognized as the inversion of a line he had already scored for a piccolo. How elegant, how simple. Turning the sequence round opened up the idea of a plain and beautiful song in common time, which he could almost hear. But not quite. An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending-from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, and then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalizing afterimage and the fading call of a sad little tune....These notes were perfectly interdependent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc. He could almost hear it again as he reached the top of the angled rock slab and paused to reach into his pocket for notebook and pencil.

It soon became apparent to me that deniers were a new type of neo-Nazi. Unlike previous generations of neo-Nazis—people who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, sported SS-like uniforms, and hung swastikas at meetings where they would give the Sieg Heil salute—this group eschewed all that.5 They were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They didn’t bother with the physical trappings of Nazism—salutes, songs, and banners—but proclaimed themselves “revisionists”—serious scholars who simply wished to revise “mistakes” in the historical record, to which end they established an impressive-sounding organization—the Institute for Historical Review—and created a benign-sounding publication—the Journal for Historical Review.6 Nothing in these names suggested the revisionists’ real agenda. They held conferences that, at first blush, seemed to be the most mundane academic confabs. But a close inspection of their publications and conference programs revealed the same extremism, adulation of the Third Reich, antisemitism, and racism as the swastika-waving neo-Nazis. This was extremism posing as rational discourse.

My Rush You are my rush You are my tortured dreams You are my fear come running on a busted knee You’re a life raft I cling onto I’ll keep an eye on the bottom And my arms around you You are the current that I can’t escape Draw me down into your depths, Down to your depths A storm coming trying to throw me back You’re the angel’s voice ringing And the Devil in the trap The hunter’s game and a lover’s song You’re a hand on the trigger And a whisper in my ear You are the water swirling round my feet You’re a knife-edge that cuts to a steady beat You are the current that I can’t escape Pull me down, pull me down, pull me down To your depths So Soldier (feat. Ainslie Wills) So you’ve been hiding You’ve been hiding that secret under your shirt collar You can’t breathe easy So if he finds it That you’re hiding that secret under your shirt collar You can’t breathe easy When you have to, you’ll find When you have to, you’ll show it Forever leaves behind Forever is not knowing Fearing is a feeling of mine And everybody’s doing their time Those shadows creeping up from behind Are calling out your name

Those groans men use passing a woman on the street or on the steps of the subway to tell her she is a female and their flesh knows it, are they a sort of tune, an ugly enough song, sung by a bird with a slit tongue but meant for music? Or are they the muffled roaring of deafmutes trapped in a building that is slowly filling with smoke? Perhaps both. Such men most often look as if groan were all they could do, yet a woman, in spite of herself, knows it's a tribute: if she were lacking all grace they'd pass her in silence: so it's not only to say she's a warm hole. It's a word in grief-language, nothing to do with primitive, not an ur-language; language stricken, sickened, cast down in decrepitude. She wants to throw the tribute away, dis- gusted, and can't, it goes on buzzing in her ear, it changes the pace of her walk, the torn posters in echoing corridors spell it out, it quakes and gnashes as the train comes in. Her pulse sullenly had picked up speed, but the cars slow down and jar to a stop while her understanding keeps on translating: 'Life after life after life goes by without poetry, without seemliness, without love.

Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb When yer laggin' behind an' losin' yer pace In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race No matter what yer doing if you start givin' up If the wine don't come to the top of yer cup If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holdin' on And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it And the wood's easy findin' but yer lazy to fetch it And yer sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long And you start walkin' backwards though you know its wrong And lonesome comes up as down goes the day And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin' And yer rope is a-slidin' 'cause yer hands are a-drippin' And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe's a-pourin' And the lightnin's a-flashing and the thunder's a-crashin' And the windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops a-shakin' And yer whole world's a-slammin' and bangin' And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm And to yourself you sometimes say "I never knew it was gonna be this way Why didn't they tell me the day I was born" And you start gettin' chills and yer jumping from sweat And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air And the whole world's a-watchin' with a window peek stare And yer good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flying And yer heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin' And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet And you need it badly but it lays on the street And yer bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat And you think yer ears might a been hurt Or yer eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush When you were faked out an' fooled white facing a four flush And all the time you were holdin' three queens And it's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean Like in the middle of Life magazine Bouncin' around a pinball machine And there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying That somebody someplace oughta be hearin' But it's trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed And no matter how you try you just can't say it And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead And the lion's mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth And his jaws start closin with you underneath And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign And you say to yourself just what am I doin' On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin' On this curve I'm hanging On this pathway I'm strolling, in the space I'm taking In this air I'm inhaling Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard Why am I walking, where am I running What am I saying, what am I knowing On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailin' On this mandolin I'm strummin', in the song I'm singin' In the tune I'm hummin', in the words I'm writin' In the words that I'm thinkin' In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinkin' Who am I helping, what am I breaking What am I giving, what am I taking But you try with your whole soul best Never to think these thoughts and never to let Them kind of thoughts gain ground Or make yer heart pound ...

If there’s one thing you learn from me, after hearing about just under one year of my life can it be that you should do whatever makes you happy. People can bring you down, people can bully you, can cheat on you but if you are doing whatever makes you happy they’ll never break you. Like you saw Jacob cried but he went back fighting, no way was he going to drop out that course, it was what he wanted to do in his life and Noah was as happy as always when he told us about Stephen, because he knew although that hurt him he was about to go onto bigger and better things. Oh and never let people hold you back, ever. Mason wouldn’t be going to university this September if he had and he wouldn’t be doing what makes him happy (see full circle). And most of all, always have the courage to stand up and say I am what I am, never apologize for who you are or who you love and always take a chance because you never know what could happen and although some people call it cliché, it’s okay to fall in love with your best friend because sometimes having your best friend as your lover is the best thing you could ask for. I promise. It’s also perfectly acceptable to dress up as a women on a weekly basis and singing popular songs as long as it makes you happy doing so.

Then Strathcona discussed literature. He paid his tribute to the "Fleurs de Mal" and the "Songs before Sunrise"; but most, he said, he owed to "the divine Oscar." This English poet of many poses and some vices the law had seized and flung into jail; and since the law is a thing so brutal and wicked that whoever is touched by it is made thereby a martyr and a hero, there had grown up quite a cult about the memory of "Oscar." All up-to-date poets imitated his style and his attitude to life; and so the most revolting of vices had the cloak of romance flung about them—were given long Greek and Latin names, and discussed with parade of learning as revivals of Hellenic ideals. The young men in Strathcona's set referred to each other as their "lovers"; and if one showed any perplexity over this, he was regarded, not with contempt—for it was not aesthetic to feel contempt—but with a slight lifting of the eyebrows, intended to annihilate. One must not forget, of course, that these young people were poets, and to that extent were protected from their own doctrines. They were interested, not in life, but in making pretty verses about life; there were some among them who lived as cheerful ascetics in garret rooms, and gave melodious expression to devilish emotions. But, on the other hand, for every poet, there were thousands who were not poets, but people to whom life was real. And these lived out the creed, and wrecked their lives; and with the aid of the poet's magic, the glamour of melody and the fire divine, they wrecked the lives with which they came into contact. The new generation of boys and girls were deriving their spiritual sustenance from the poetry of Baudelaire and Wilde; and rushing with the hot impulsiveness of youth into the dreadful traps which the traders in vice prepared for them. One's heart bled to see them, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, pursuing the hem of the Muse's robe in brothels and dens of infamy!

The ghost of Merle Haggard kept Sophia trapped in her house for two weeks. Every time she went to the door she’d see him standing on her lawn, clutching his guitar and wagging a disapproving finger at her. She knew her medication would probably make him go away, just like she knew the real Merle Haggard was alive and well in California, but she hated how the pills made her feel. Stuffy, slow, like scratchy wool was wrapped around her brain.

Minerva’s heart sank as she realized just how far out of her depth she actually was. In less than an hour she had crossed over to a world of darkness and cruelty. And her own arrogance had led her to it. ‘Please,’ she said. She struggled to maintain her composure. ‘Please.’ Kong adjusted his grip on the knife. ‘Don’t look away now, little girl. Watch and remember who’s boss.’ Minerva could not avert her eyes. Her gaze was trapped by this terrible tableau. It was like a scene from a scary movie, complete with its own soundtrack. Minerva frowned. Real life did not have a soundtrack. There was music coming from somewhere. The somewhere proved to be Kong’s trouser pocket. His polyphonic phone was playing ‘The Toreador Song’ from Carmen. Kong pulled the phone from his pocket. ‘Who is this?’ he snapped. ‘My name is not important,’ said a youthful voice. ‘The important thing is that I have something you want.’ ‘How did you get this number?’ ‘I have a friend,’ replied the mystery caller. ‘He knows all the numbers. Now, to business. I believe you’re in the market for a demon?

All meditators who practice shamatha Have powerful experiences, vivid and clear, And are happy, thinking that experience is vipashyana.*10 But when the vipashyana of dharmakaya at the time of death is needed, Mother and child luminosity do not meet. That shamatha from before won’t help at death, And again, they’ll be trapped in the animal realm. Upasaka son, supreme protector,*11 now listen! When resting evenly in meditation with the points of body, If appearances cease and you are without thoughts, These are the doings of a lethargic shamatha. But when you rouse yourself with mindfulness, It’s like a candle, self-luminous and shining bright, Or like a flower that’s naturally vivid and clear. Like looking with your eyes at the glow of the sky, Awareness-emptiness is naked, open, and clear. That nonconceptuality that’s luminous and clear Is the arising of the shamatha experience. On the basis of that meditative experience, While supplicating the precious jewels, Gain certainty by studying and contemplating the dharma. Take the vipashyana that brings the understanding of no self And tie the sturdy rope of shamatha to that.*12 Then that strong noble being with love and compassion Through the mighty strength of rousing bodhichitta to benefit others, Having been lifted up with a pure aspiration To the completely pure path of seeing, There, vipashyana directly realizes the purity that cannot be seen And then the faults of mind’s hopes and fears will be known. Without going anywhere, you’ll arrive at the Buddha’s ground. Without looking at anything, you’ll see dharmakaya. Without achieving anything, your aim will be spontaneously accomplished. My upasaka son, work with mind like this.

It’s the trappiest trap since Maria von Trapp got all seven von Trapp children together to sing a song called “Do-Re-Mi, It’s Obviously a Trap”.

Raskob decided to enter the world of New York real estate and give his pal a job as the head of the undertaking. Raskob convinced some of his wealthy friends, including Pierre S. du Pont, to join him in a syndicate, and they negotiated with Chatham Phenix for the Waldorf-Astoria site. They were the mysterious prospective buyers whose interest in the site had been floated. By all accounts, they got the property for a song—$16 or $17 million. On August 29, 1929, the same day the city announced that Second Avenue would be the site for the next subway line, former governor Al Smith lived up to a promise made months before to newspaper reporters to announce his business plans. From his suite in the Hotel Biltmore, surrounded by trappings of his former office, Smith announced the creation of a company that would build a thousand-foot-high eighty-

As he thought about the journey he’d made to end up here in this Nicobar village he contemplated his own tribe seen through his new ethnological lens. The despotic patriarch figure, Malky, served by his reluctant sons and daughters, trapped through penury in his privileged dwelling in their cold northern habitat. And, next door, the place of worship with its own rituals, its songs, its incantations, its readings and its own potent symbols – the tortured, naked man dying slowly on a wooden cross. It was good to gain some objectivity on a situation that familiarity had made stale. Your life was turned on its head when you thought about it in this way. If the Nicobars seemed strange and their beliefs outlandish, then so were ours, Brodie thought, seen from another perspective. Those girls had every right to laugh at him.

It was a wrathful God who constructed man’s body with strength and hate enough to kill, but his conscience, his memory, to preserve such a sin. Such contradiction explained why man rose and fell in God’s once wild Eden. If man confessed, sought baptism among Earth’s winged and gilled creatures, God’s forgiveness was as assured as the hum of summer bees. But the wind rose and trapped unearthed anger beneath my skin, muting any such confession.

When college students were asked to tap out the rhythm of any of twenty-five well-known songs, they predicted that the people listening would correctly guess about half of them. After all, the person doing the tapping could “hear” the melody, the instruments, and even the lyrics in her head. It was so obvious! Out of 120 tapped-out songs, the listeners guessed just under 3 percent correctly. This is the illusion of communication. We consistently overestimate our ability to communicate. We lack empathy for what it is like to be outside our own heads. The listener occupies a different reality, hearing only a series of dull, barren taps, one after the other. It sounds like nothing at all. “The biggest problem in communication,” as the saying goes, “is the illusion that it has taken place.

they started and ended each day with songs and prayers.

Gorillas, like autistic people, are misunderstood. They are seen as ugly, as caricatures of fully formed humanity, as unfinished or trapped in an anachronistic world that has no value. Prejudices about what it means to be a person necessarily exclude those who are not bright on the stage of common action; those who do not welcome the glare of shining, blinding smiles, who do not lean closer to hear the roar and macramé of shouted words, who do not cut themselves and mold their flesh and spirit to fit the narrow human path, funneling upward without looking back. Autistic people can be left behind, hunted and haunted, looking through an often opaque glass.

and who are these people without their eyes and who are these people with their eyes blinded to the future, these people trapped between the fire and the dark?

The worst part, though, was the wail. The wail of a mother who had lost her child or an animal caught in a trap. It was bottomless and aching. After several minutes of it, Miss Fairchild couldn’t take any more and walked away. But Jessica and Alicia stayed. They sat on the floor by the door and whispered to Norah. They sang songs and read stories. They stayed for hours, until finally Miss Fairchild permitted them to let her out.

If you complain, you have to bring a workable solution, or there’s no complaining.

The moral of the story is to be happy with what you have. It can always be worse.

I walked out of a chic downtown Manhattan restaurant not long ago, with friends, before we’d ordered, because the music was so loud we were reduced to making hand signals. Four gestures I remember making (the extent of my sign language) were: “thumbs down,” “knife across throat,” “this is bullshit,” and “let’s get out of here.” The cacophony, increasingly, is the point. It’s a way to keep out the oldies, of which now, I suppose, we were. When I’m trapped in a restaurant that’s playing shitty songs at defenestrating volume, I think longingly of the house rules at St. John, Fergus Henderson’s restaurant in London: “No art. No music.” To crib a line from the poet William Matthews, the jukebox plays Marcel Marceau.

I cracked the top and peered in, confused by the contents. Why did Catherine have strips of paper stashed away? Turning the envelope over, I let them spill out on her desk. I chose one and read her neat handwriting. P.S. You remind me of porridge. Frowning, I read it again and again, but clarification didn’t dawn. What was this? I read more, one by one. P.S. Your cyborg is showing. P.S. I bet you sing Barry Manilow in the shower. P.S. You wear pleated khakis on the weekend. I just know it. It took me until the fourth strip to realize they were all exactly one inch wide and the paper matched the notebook. Son of a bitch. I scooped the strips back into the envelope and carried them into my office. There, I dumped them all out again and matched one perfectly to Catherine’s previously written schedules. My heart slammed in my chest, but my brain was five steps behind. I read more of them, still trying to comprehend what I was seeing. P.S. Are you even human? P.S. Do you shower in your bathing suit? P.S. You’ve memorized the lyrics to every single Nickelback song, haven’t you? P.S. I would rather be trapped in an invisible box with a mime before hanging out with you.

Traps' body leaned all the ways of the rope. He discovered the freedom in loosening and the protection in wrapping. The transformation in twisting and anticipation with coiling. And his commitment to the rope was his greatest knot. The pull of that rope was its very own raging desire -- his intentions and instinct, his fate and free will, all of it danced in the weave. His choices became tethers, his fears learned freedom.That was true rope to him. In that sacred inner place, the fight between surrender and control in no way rivaled the art of holding on. The innate beauty of letting go. Each twist and turn was a song in his soul. A song that sang silently for only his ears to hear.

Three miners were trapped in a cave for a month after a landslide. All of them survived except poor Timothy, who was never seen again. They didn't say it in the song, but there was no doubt they ate his ass.

I swore and stood, shaking her off. I didn’t want to argue with her. I headed for the door. I now understood Millie’s need to walk everywhere she went. Walking beat being trapped. And I was trapped. “When are you going to start believing that you are worthy to be loved?” Her voice rang out behind me, clear and controlled, but there was a barely restrained fury that made her words wobble. I paused and faced her once more. She was trying to follow me, and I had no doubt that if I walked out of the house, she would grab her stick, and I would be forced to play a game of Marco Polo down the streets of Levan so she wouldn’t lose me. I needed her to let me go and she obviously wasn’t going to do that.

if we live for and love any thing more than God himself, we are trapped. They become things we have to have, so we “run,” exhausted, after them.

You do not like me too good. This is a sad thing, eh?” With a sweep of his hand, he indicated the world around them. “The sky is up, the earth is down. The sun shows its face, only to be chased away by Mother Moon. These things are for always, eh? Just as you are my woman. The song was sung long ago, and the song must come to pass. You must accept, Blue Eyes.” Loretta yearned to break eye contact but found she couldn’t. The silken threads of his deep voice wove a spell around her. She must accept? Already he was planning to give her away to his horrible cousin. She sank lower in the water, keeping her arms crossed to hide her breasts. Could he see through the ripples? Still studying her with the same unnerving intensity, he said, “When the wind blows, the sapling bends, the flowers lie low against the earth, the grass is flattened.” He thumped his chest with his fist. “I am your wind, Blue Eyes. Bend or break.” Bend or break. In all her life, she had never felt quite so helpless. Her attention moved to the knife on his hip. If only he would drop his guard--just for a moment. As if he sensed what she was thinking, he smiled another humorless smile and lowered his gaze to her chest where the water lapped just above her splayed fingertips. She tightened her arms around herself. He said nothing more, but words weren’t necessary. She couldn’t stay in the river forever, and when she emerged, he would be waiting. She was trapped. Always, forever, with no horizon.

Areas of Consciousness The Rational (Day) Philosophy, history 1. Cognition and knowledge is treated in Finnegans Wake. a. Myth: history as a nightmare b. Theory: history as a joke. 2. History of mankind/history of Ireland 3. Popular and Formal Culture a. Music -Musical hall and popular song/ballads, Irish folk music b. Sports, boating, etc. c. Technology d. Science and cosmology e. Cinema and still photography The Irrational (Night) Pre-Sleep World (all the puzzling images that flash through our minds before we fall asleep). Jungian, collective unconscious Left and right sides of the brain Id/ego/superego Anima and Animus Techniques of Tension: the circle, twinning, yang and yin of reconciliation of opposites, yoking, transmission into other areas of being, intertexuality. Techniques of Style: Portmanteau words, punning, piling of one image upon the other, montage, doubling, etc. The Language Trap: The tyranny of language             The betrayal of language             Rhetorical traps             Decay of language

What if..." is my philosophy. I won't say it's plays like a broken record, no, it plays like a I hit the continuous repeat button on a one song playlist. When I see people who are pained and stressed by the world their trapped in, I ask, "What if?" and create their story about why they're constantly rolling their eyes behind their spouses back, then paste a smile when needed. We weren't born to live a life of misery, don't ever believe it. That's just not how it is, it's never too late to find your voice. Dig deep, grasp it and roar.

SpottieOttieDopaliscious [Hook] Damn damn damn James [Verse 1: Sleepy Brown] Dickie shorts and Lincoln's clean Leanin', checking out the scene Gangsta boys, blizzes lit Ridin' out, talkin' shit Nigga where you wanna go? You know the club don't close 'til four Let's party 'til we can't no more Watch out here come the folks (Damn - oh lord) [Verse 2: André 3000] As the plot thickens it gives me the dickens Reminiscent of Charles a lil' discotheque Nestled in the ghettos of Niggaville, USA Via Atlanta, Georgia a lil' spot where Young men and young women go to experience They first li'l taste of the night life Me? Well I've never been there; well perhaps once But I was so engulfed in the Olde E I never made it to the door you speak of, hardcore While the DJ sweatin' out all the problems And the troubles of the day While this fine bow-legged girl fine as all outdoors Lulls lukewarm lullabies in your left ear Competing with "Set it Off," in the right But it all blends perfectly let the liquor tell it "Hey hey look baby they playin' our song" And the crowd goes wild as if Holyfield has just won the fight But in actuality it's only about 3 A.M And three niggas just don' got hauled Off in the ambulance (sliced up) Two niggas don' start bustin' (wham wham) And one nigga don' took his shirt off talkin' 'bout "Now who else wanna fuck with Hollywood Courts?" It's just my interpretation of the situation [Hook] [Verse 3: Big Boi] Yes, when I first met my SpottieOttieDopalicious Angel I can remember that damn thing like yesterday The way she moved reminded me of a Brown Stallion Horse with skates on, ya know Smooth like a hot comb on nappy ass hair I walked up on her and was almost paralyzed Her neck was smelling sweeter Than a plate of yams with extra syrup Eyes beaming like four karats apiece just blindin' a nigga Felt like I chiefed a whole O of that Presidential My heart was beating so damn fast Never knowing this moment would bring another Life into this world Funny how shit come together sometimes (ya dig) One moment you frequent the booty clubs and The next four years you & somebody's daughter Raisin' y'all own young'n now that's a beautiful thang That's if you're on top of your game And man enough to handle real life situations (that is) Can't gamble feeding baby on that dope money Might not always be sufficient but the United Parcel Service & the people at the Post Office Didn't call you back because you had cloudy piss So now you back in the trap just that, trapped Go on and marinate on that for a minute

As the moth falls into the lamp, as the thief steals without hesitation, as the elephant is trapped by its sexual urges, as the sinner is caught in his sins, as the gambler’s addiction does not leave him, so is this mind of Nanak’s attached to the Lord.  || 8 ||   As the deer loves the sound of the bell, and as the song-bird longs for the rain, the Lord’s humble servant lives in the Society of the Saints, lovingly meditating and vibrating upon the Lord of the Universe.

Does she ever feel lonely as I do? The silence is dead in the rooms of our house, made up of impoverished ghosts, their voices clanging like the sailing song of a wind chime in the wind through orphaned autumn leaves grounded in my head. She frustrates me like a blue fly I cannot swat, gut or trap. I cannot pull its wings off, disguise my frustration in a plume of smoke like my younger brother and his friends. My father and I have retreated to the room that we now share. I lay sprawled out on the single bed watching him sleep. My mother sleeps in my sister's room now. She sleeps enshrouded in the dark under the dense cover of blankets over her head. Her door is closed.

There’s plenty of food here,” Erik said dismissively. “We have fish traps and eel traps, we net wildfowl and eat well. And the prospect of silver and gold buys a lot of wheat, barley, oats, meat, fish, and ale.

was Jack and the one was incomplete without the other. It was no use trying to restrain her feelings because she loved him in the same way she loved the soft rain, the craggy hills, the white sands and tempestuous sea: with her whole being. Seeing Michael Doyle had opened a chamber in her memory that she had long ago sealed and now he too surfaced with his threatening face and ominous presence when she lost control of her thoughts. She had been struck by the murky aura that had surrounded him at the fair, as if he were an evil spirit trapped

Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness; You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs, And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory. Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance, Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot And not to be trapped by withering laurels. And in you I have found aloneness And the joy of being shunned and scorned. Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield, In your eyes I have read That to be enthroned is to be enslaved, And to be understood is to be leveled down, And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed. Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion, You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences, And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings, And urging of seas, And of mountains that burn in the night, And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul. Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage, You and I shall laugh together with the storm, And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us, And we shall stand in the sun with a will, And we shall be dangerous.

That blizzard knocked many a man out, for the crowd outside begging for work was never greater, and the packers would not wait long for any one. When it was over, the soul of Jurgis was a song, for he had met the enemy and conquered, and felt himself the master of his fate.—So it might be with some monarch of the forest that has vanquished his foes in fair fight, and then falls into some cowardly trap in the night-time.

We loved the wide-open west. Our explorations of the numinous Canadian landscape fed the songs, and our souls. We caught the west in the last of its wild state. Many of the songs I wrote in the seventies reflect our travels through the great expanse of the Canadian prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, to the moisture-rich West Coast. Space was everywhere, and there is space in the songs. Everything wasn’t a tourist trap yet, clear-cutting was not so evident, and agribusiness hadn’t completely killed off the family farm. In the first couple of years that Kitty, Aroo, and I travelled westward from Ontario, we were practically the only road campers out there. Seldom did we run across anyone else travelling the way we were. The prairies were full of abandoned old farmhouses—no families to be seen—harbingers of the reversion to feudal agricultural economics. All around the land still looked wild. Our journeys offered at least the illusion of freedom, as well as a deep sense of the land as Divine creation. Soon, though, we were seeing the spaces fill up with scabrous industrial sites, hotels, housing developments, shopping opportunities. We’d watch like gawkers at a train wreck as the land was eaten up before our eyes by inevitable human expansion and greed. There were ever more rules about where you could park your camper. It was the tail end of an epoch when the land was open and it, and we, could breathe freely. That will never come again.

I happened to be talking to George at a meeting—we were sorting out some of the Apple business,” Paul later recalled. “Someone said something, and George just said, ‘Well, we’re all prisoners, kind of inside ourselves,’ or, you know, ‘inside every fat man, there’s a thin man trying to get out.’ I just took up that theme of, we’re all prisoners in a way, so I kind of wrote a prison song. And as I say, you can take it symbolically or straight, it works on both levels.”35 Getting from George’s comments to a prison song took some doing, however, and as Paul turned over the remark in his mind, his first thoughts reflected his own sense of still being trapped in the Beatles partnership agreement—and at an Apple legal meeting. The first verse he wrote,36 “If we ever get out of here / Thought of giving it all away / To a registered charity” is the kind of internal bargaining one does when stuck in circumstances—a business meeting, say—and hoping for liberation. Another verse moves closer to the prison metaphor—“Stuck inside these four walls / Sent inside forever / Never seeing no-one nice again.

That, of course, was what made it such a brilliant trap. It appeared susceptible to the dim; beautiful to the empathetic. A foolish hero would walk gladly into the trap. A wise hero would turn away. A great hero would punch through to the other side and emerge with the throbbing core of the place clutched in one hand.

Sometimes I feel as if I am trapped, as if the events and habits of my past have worn deep ruts in the road from which my wheels cannot escape, and I am doomed to follow them over and over again.

Katie appeared as a ghost and cradled him in her arms and carried him, a frail dying version of her old husband, to heaven. The radio which was powered off suddenly comes on and played their song Follow Me. Nobody could see her only Ronan and he smiled and says “I knew you would come back for me love

One does end up sympathizing with Harold, though not for the reasons that Sinclair intends. Harold's great conflict is not that he is trapped within a ruthless economic system, but that he is trapped within a ruthless novel, a structure infinitely more dehumanizing, rigid, and predetermined that the capitalism it denounces. The wonderful thing about America is that you always have a shot, while the dreadful thing about a Sinclair novel is that you don't. Poor Harold, he was born into a Socialist novel. Kid never had a chance.

You have gifts that people can only dream of having. They make you special and utterly unique in a way that is as far from weird as you can get. You blew my mind when you were a girl. I loved coming here to see what you could do, whether it was solving difficult math puzzles, destroying your dad at chess, memorizing the entire Human section of The Guinness Book of World Records, or trying to beat me at video games." She jolted up, her mouth curving in a grin. "Trying? Seriously? Was there a video game I didn't win?" Cheer-up mission accomplished, but his ego was taking a beating. "Guitar Hero was never your strong suit." "Don't even think about challenging me," Daisy warned. "I was a free-shredding machine." He gave a dismissive shrug, baiting his trap. "You were young, so Sanjay and I let you win..." She gave him a calculating stare and jumped to her feet. "The guitar is mine." "The guitar is lame. Drums are where it's at." He picked up the mugs and plates. "Two songs and I'll call an Uber." "What if we tie? It will have to be the best of three songs and I'll call an Uber." "Are you sure you're up for it?" He watched the gentle sway of her hips as she climbed the stairs. "I don't want you to feel bad when I destroy you." Daisy looked back over her shoulder and gave him a grin. "You are so going down in flames.

What IS this place? I have arrhythmia. My arms are prickling. I thought I was so smart. I was going to save the show. But there IS no show! Spider-Man the Musical was never Spider-Man the Musical. I see that now. It’s always been nothing more than a diabolical machine built by the gods to teach humility. And I’m trapped in the dead center of its workings .

Time really is a circle; I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can't return to and a future that is uncertain. And it takes guts to live here, in the hard space between anticipation and realization. How quickly we believe that nothing can be new again but then, look. Another Leonard Cohen song is being sung. Hallelujah.

The songs transported her backwards in time, to when she first wrote them. As each one melted into the next, as her voice sang lyrics and melodies from her past, memories burst like colors across a blank canvas. Because inside each and every one of these songs---songs she'd written before she ever left Edgewood---memories were hidden. Emeline choked on them. Hot tears burned in her eyes as she tapped the next file, and the next, racing through songs and, with them, memories that had been stolen from her. Images of a younger Sable flashed before her eyes, interwoven with a younger Rooke. And someone else. Hawthorne. He was everywhere, with his dark hair and strange eyes. Her songs were so full of him, Emeline felt like she was drowning in him. Hawthorne, sitting next to the fire, reading a book. Hawthorne, shucking off his shirt and diving into a moonlit pond. Hawthorne, climbing in through her bedroom window. Kissing her in the dark. She'd embedded him inside her music. Because songs were never just songs for Emeline. They were capsules, each one containing a moment trapped inside it. As the next one started to play through her headphones, an image of a tree rose up in her mind. Emeline could see its thirsty roots; the twisting, twirling gray-brown bark; the gnarly branches stretching towards the sky. A silent sentinel, standing guard at the edge of the woods. Her tree.

You gotta figure your shit out faster because I don’t think my ears can handle any more of her singing sad love songs at Pipes.” He shuddered. “She’s really bad, man.” “Yeah, I know.

The memory circled inside her head like a bat trapped in an attic without windows.

In other circumstances, maybe some of the other suitors might have agreed with Antinous. But now they are trapped in the gambler's error, seeing each man's failure as proof certain that when they try - when they try - they will surely succeed. This is the madness by which many a mortal has damned themselves, and from which many gods grow fat upon fervent, futile prayer.

we must all live for something, and if we live for and love any thing more than God himself, we are trapped.

If it is some trap, better that I die than let them hurt me more,

Hot Sauce Shrine" I used to be a high priestess of tail-feather feel-good mumbo jumbo, naysayer extraordinaire cobbling together some crazy quilt catechism to cling to as I tangled in the world's thorns, frantic, fearing the chill soon to come. I haven't turned holy roller or handler of snakes, but things changed slowly, or all at once. Maybe it was when I drove through a dust devil and inhaled its grit of cut grass and cigarette butts. I've taken to praying since the whirlwind shook me loose, or anyway I dip my head at stoplights until I get distracted by scenery, or birds, and the prayers come out confused. I'm clueless—my angel of place smokes blunts and speaks to me in bug bite braille. I know to visit Saint Roch and turn his statue to the wall, but I hunger for alone time on an island with an organ that plays itself, or to whisper all my secrets to the hot sauce shrine. I read that the world is a dream of God, and now I don't know what to do with my hands. The world is God's dream and I am a sparrow passing through song and the brass glow of fire, or maybe that is wrong, and I'm trapped inside, stunned against the glass or down the chimney, terrified of kind hands that sweep me to the door. When I wake I'm walking the moonlit labyrinth with wet feet, and the birds are quiet because I have terrified them with the thunder of my stumbling. Oh God of everything that creeps, I light a candle and ask my question: Is it pilgrimage enough if I spend my life remembering the few seconds I was a bird?

Scorn the food and shun the drink, For faerie food and faerie tricks, Will snare the tongue and trap the sick. Sprinkle salt from human lands Sprinkle salt with human hands. Meat loves salt and salt loves meat, I pray the lord my soul to keep. So sprinkle salt, else restless sleep, So sprinkle salt, else endless weep. Traditional folk rhyme, collected by J Ritson in Fairy Tales and Folk Songs, Now First Collected, with Two Dissertations on Pygmies and on Fairies

Talon.” Her voice reached him just as he began the first note of his death song and his heart leaped. “Talon. Can you hear me?” He tried to open his eyes, but they were weighed down with mud. He smelled her. She was very close. He wanted to reach out to her, but he was so tired. “Talon.” Something warm and alive brushed his lips. Her caress was sweet and powerful. Feather-light, it jolted him with the intensity of a lightning bolt. If he didn’t hold on to her, the cold mud would seep into his nose and throat and choke the life from him. “Talon . . . don’t die,” she whispered. He opened his eyes just as she kissed him a second time with infinite tenderness. She gasped as he threw his good arm around her and crushed her against him. She was warm and alive. Vision or flesh and blood woman, she’d not leave him. Talon pressed his mouth against hers with searing heat. “Talon,” she cried, as she struggled free of his embrace and stood trembling, apparently unsure whether to run or fling herself back into his arms. “You’re . . . you’re awake,” she managed. A slow smile spread over his face. She covered her mouth with her hand. Her lips were tingling. “I was afraid . . .” she began. “I mean . . . I thought that you . . .” She put distance between them. “Your fever was very high,” she said quickly. “We . . . I was afraid that you—” “I am not dead, Becca,” he said hoarsely. “I . . . can see that.” Unconsciously, she rubbed her mouth. “You . . . you kissed me,” she whispered. “You kissed me first.” She felt giddy. “I did, didn’t I?” He closed his eyes again. “We must talk of this later,” he murmured. “Now, I can’t seem to keep my eyes open.” She reached for the brimming cup of medicine his sister had left when she went out. “You . . . you must have something to drink,” she said. “Are you in pain?” He made a sound that might have been either a low groan or a chuckle. “A man who was not a warrior of the Mecate Shawnee might say that.” “You fought with a bear,” she reminded him. “What shame is there to admit that you hurt? You’re human, aren’t you?” His black eyes snapped open with the intensity of a steel trap. “A Shawnee? Human?” he challenged. “Do you hear what you say?” “By Christ’s wounds, Talon! You’re as human as I am.” He sighed and his eyelids drifted closed. “Remember that, Becca . . . remember. I am just a man. A man . . . who cannot . . . cannot hate his . . . prisoner.

I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

Wind Song" LONG ago I learned how to sleep, In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away, In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all, In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, 'Who, who are you?' I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson. There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds. Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine, Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars: Who, who are you? Who can ever forget listening to the wind go by counting its money and throwing it away?

They had entombed her in darkness and iron. She slept, for they had forced her to—had wafted curling, sweet smoke through the cleverly hidden airholes in the slab of iron above. Around. Beneath. A coffin built by an ancient queen to trap the sun inside. Draped with iron, encased in it, she slept. Dreamed. Drifted through seas, through darkness, through fire. A princess of nothing. Nameless. The princess sang to the darkness, to the flame. And they sang back. There was no beginning or end or middle. Only the song, and the sea, and the iron sarcophagus that had become her bower. Until they were gone. Until blinding light flooded the slumbering, warm dark. Until the wind swept in, crisp and scented with rain. She could not feel it on her face. Not with the death-mask still chained to it. Her eyes cracked open. The light burned away all shape and color after so long in the dim depths. But a face appeared before her—above her. Peering over the lid that had been hauled aside. Dark, flowing hair. Moon-pale skin. Lips as red as blood. The ancient queen’s mouth parted in a smile. Teeth as white as bone. “You’re awake. Good.” Lovely and cold, it was a voice that could devour the stars. From somewhere, from the blinding light, rough and scar-flecked hands reached into the coffin. Grasped the chains binding her. The queen’s huntsman; the queen’s blade. He hauled the princess upright, her body a distant, aching thing. She did not want to slide back into this body. Struggled against it, clawing for the flame and the darkness that now ebbed away from her like a morning tide. But the huntsman yanked her closer to that cruel, beautiful face watching with a spider’s smile. And he held her still as that ancient queen purred, “Let’s begin.

It seems odd to me to think of my voice scratched into a wax cylinder, trapped like a spirit caught in a jar. Worse still a computer chip: the tip of my tongue striking my teeth, the glottal contractions in my throat, even the air that circulates through my lungs and my blood, all somehow frozen onto a thumb drive that I can toss in my purse. A song is best sustained through performance, where it can respond to the world around it. Be shaped by its surroundings. Made new. In that way it's like a story, never so alive as when it's being told.

Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven’t collected a single snake. Maybe it’s the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in the north of the island as in the south, has passed the peak of its cycle and declined. Maybe the trap design is no good, or possibly we’re using the wrong bait. Temporarily, for whatever reason, B. irregularis has turned invisible. But the consequences of its presence surround us like a web.

What’s your name?” “Anne Shirley.” He quirked a brow and she amended, “Miss Havisham.” “Tell me in truth.” “Honestly?” She snatched her self-harming kit from his grasp before he could blink. The fingers of his empty hands curled closed. She tucked it beneath her arm with smug satisfaction. “Scarlett O’Hara.” Luca extended an arm, leaning against the stone wall and intending to trap her in the corner. She drew back from him, bravado faltering. In that moment he saw a woman cringing under a man’s wrath, afraid. He felt ashamed for intimidating her, and he relaxed his posture slightly. She stared back into his eyes, waiting. “Tell me your name,” he commanded. Her lips parted and she exhaled in a confiding whisper, “Amelia Bedelia.

She dances, She dances around the burning flames with passion, Under the same dull stars, Under the same hell with crimson embers crashing, Under the same silver chains that wires, All her beauty and who she is inside, She's left with the loneliness of human existence, She's left questioning how she's survived, She's left with this awakening of brutal resilience, Her true beauty that she denies, As much she's like to deny it, As much as it continues to shine, That she doesn't even have to admit, Because we all know it's true, Her glory and success, After all she's been through, Her triumph and madness, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Broken legs- but she's still standing, Still dancing in this void, You must wonder how she's still dancing, You must wonder how she's not destroyed, She doesn't even begin to drown within the flames, But little do you realize, Within these chains, She weeps and she cries, But she still goes on, And just you thought you could stop her? You thought you'd be the one? Well, let me tell you, because you thought wrong. Nothing will ever silence her, Because I KNOW, I know that she is admiringly strong, Her undeniable beauty, The triumph of her song, She's shining bright like a ruby, Reflecting in the golden sand, She's shining brighter like no other, She's far more than human or man, AND YET, SHE STANDS. She continues to dance with free-spirit, Even though she's locked in these chains, Though she never desired to change it, Even throughout the agonizing pain, Throughout all the distress, Anxiety, depression, tears and sorrow, She still dances so beautify in her dress, She looks forward to tomorrow, Not because of a fresh start but a new page, A new day full of opportunities, Despite being trapped in her cage, She still smiles after being beaten so brutally, A smile that could brighten anyone's day, She's so much more than anyone could ask for, She's so much more than I could ever say, She's a girl absolutely everyone should adore, She never gets in the way, Even after her hearts been broken, Even after the way she has been treated, After all these severe emotions, After all all the blood she's bled, AND YET, SHE STANDS. Even if sometimes she wonders why she's still here, She wonders why she's not dead, But there's this one thing that had been here throughout every tear, Throughout the blazing fire leaving her cheeks cherry red, Everyday this thing has given her a place to exist, This thing, person, these people, Like warm sunlight it had so softly kissed, The apples of her cheeks, Even when she's feeling feeble, Always there at her worst and at her best Because of you and all the other people, She has this thing deep inside her chest, That she will cherish forever, Even once you're gone, Because today she smiles like no other, Even when the sun sets at dawn, Because today is the day, She just wants you to remember, In dark and stormy weather, It gets better. And after what she's been through she knows, Throughout the highs and the lows, Because of you and all others, After crossing the seas, She has come to understand, You have formed this key, This key to free her from this land, This endless gorge that swallowed her, Her and other men, She had never knew, nor had she planned, That because of you, AND YET, THIS VERY DAY, SHE DANCES. EVEN IN THE RAIN.

No place in Haiti was easy to get to and to drive to their lodge would take a couple of hours, so they sent a van to pick us up. It was already evening and the sun had just set, as we made our way up into the mountains behind Port-au-Prince. As we bounced along the dirt road winding through the hills, I could distinctly hear the rhythm of drums and see fires on the distant mountains. Mrs. Allen, who was with us, explained that in the 1940’s devout members of the Catholic faith considered the Voodoo rites an abomination of their faith. They armed themselves and started to eradicate from Haiti what they considered a cult. The entire thing turned into a war! They burned voodoo temples and shrines, and killed some of the practitioners as well as voodoo priests. In the end, the Catholic hierarchy gave up and after a time reached a tacit understanding with them. They now allowed Voodoo drums and songs to be sung in Catholic Church services and ignored what they once called devil worship. At the lodge, we were assigned rooms with real beds instead of the cots we were used to on the ship. Dinner consisted of chicken in a hot tomato and garlic sauce, over rice, with a heap of picklese on the side. Picklese is a pickled dish or Vinaigre Piquant, indigenous to Haiti consisting of peppers, shredded cabbage, onions, carrots, peas, vinegar, peppercorns and cloves. The dessert was Haitian Flan. It could not have been better and I was glad that I had availed myself of this generous offer. After dinner we went outside to where there was a large fire roaring, surrounded by benches made of split logs. We were warned that it gets cool in these mountains, and I was glad that I had brought along a sweater and jacket. We seated ourselves on the logs around the fire and listened to a gaunt-looking old Haitian woman explain what Voodoo was. She sounded convincing as she told of the Grand Voodoo Zombie rituals that were held at “Wishing Spot,” and how snakes slithered about the feet of the young women dancers. She spoke reverently about the walking dead in the Lower Artibonite Valley and the Spirits trapped in bottles near Cape Haitian. It was all very spooky and gave me something to think about that night. However before her talk ended, she came directly up to me and, looking deep into my eyes, said that I was to beware…. “I would witness death before leaving the island….” Ouch!

Ten Things I Need to Know" The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. Superstition Reviews issue 2 fall 2008

TABLE OF CONTENTS The Sentimentalists, by Murray Leinster The Girls from Earth, by Frank Robinson The Death Traps of FX-31, by Sewell Wright Song in a minor key, by C.L. Moore Sentry of the Sky, by Evelyn E. Smith Meeting of the Minds, by Robert Sheckley Junior, by Robert Abernathy Death Wish, by Ned Lang Dead World, by Jack Douglas Cost of Living, by Robert Sheckley Aloys, by R.A. Lafferty

A city filled with women who fight for what they love and who laugh despite the tragedy that surrounds them daily. We may be trapped behind these walls, and our stories will surely vanish when the last of us takes her final breath. Yet neither war, nor sickness, nor enslavement can stop us from weaving our lives together. As mothers and daughters and wives. As friends. For that is what women do. It is what we have always done and will continue doing for as long as there are sad songs and warm lips to sing them.

I’ve always wanted to be like the little ballerina inside the music box. Beautiful, graceful, delicate . . . everything I’ve ever been told I should aspire to be. So, it never made sense to me why the music she dances to is so sad. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized it’s because she’s trapped, spinning endlessly in

The trick, I find," muses Penelope, "to living with a pain that cannot be reconciled, a grief, or a fury, a rage that you think will burn you from the inside out, is not to dwell on all the reasons why your life has ended, but to wonder what it might become now. I am a widow queen. This is my trap, my curse. My power. My grief is a knife. My anger is cunning. Having been denied the purpose intended for me--to be a wife, a loving mother--my purpose is to be a queen, to serve not myself, but my kingdom. *Mine.* The land that is entrusted to *me.* Not to my husband's ghost. Not some... poet's picture of Odysseus. But to me. I will live and I will take all that has been put upon me and I will make of it something new. Something better.

He’d played my body like his violin, and now I was trapped by the beautiful song he’d wrapped around us. A song borne of gasps and moans, of desperation and desire. Phoenix had bewitched me.

MARYBOROUGH MINER" "Come all you sons of liberty and listen to my song, I'll tell you my observations and it won't take very long, I've fossicked around this continent, five hundred miles or more, And many's the time I might have starved, but for the cheek I bore. I've been on all the diggings, boys, from famous Ballarat, I've long-tommed on the Lachlan, and I've fossicked Lambing Flat, So you can understand, my boys, just from this little rhyme, I'm a Maryborough miner, and I'm one of the good old time. I came to the Fitzroy River, all with my Bendigo rig, I had a shovel, a pick and a pan, and for a licence I begged, But the assay-man called me a loafer, said for work I'd no desire, And so, to do him justice, boys, I set his office on fire. Oh yes, my jolly jokers, I've done it on the cross, Although I carry my bluey now, I've sweated many a horse, I've helped to rob the escort of many an ounce of gold, And the traps have been upon my tail more tiroes than I ever told. Oh yes, the traps have trailed me and been frightened out of their stripes, They never could have caught me, for they feared my cure for gripes, And well they knew I carried it, for they had often seen it, Glistening in my flipper, chaps, my 'patent pill machine'. I'm one of the men who cradled on the reef at Tarrangower, Anxiety and misery my grim companions there, I puddled the clay at Bendigo, and chanced my arm at Kew, And I wound up my avocation with ten years on Cockatoo. So you can understand, my boys, just from this little rhyme, I'm a Maryborough miner, and I'm one of the good old time.

When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.

I'm a fly that's trapped in a web but I'm thinking that my spider's dead

Ziro Valley – Hill Station in Arunachal Pradesh Leave a Comment / Off-Beat Places. / By Still Unseen Ziro Valley – A Beautiful Offbeat Hill Station in Arunachal Pradesh | Nature, Culture & Calmness Ziro Valley in Arunachal Pradesh is one of the most soulful offbeat hill stations in India – known for its lush rice fields, Apatani tribal culture, peaceful vibe, and Ziro Music Festival. Explore this unseen heaven in Northeast India. Introduction – What is Zero Valley? And why it is India’s most Soulful Offbeat Destination. Whenever we think of Hill Stations, the first name that comes to our mind is Himachal, Uttarakhand or Kashmir. But if you really want a place without crowds or fake tourist traps where you can see only nature, peace and real culture, then this small paradise of Ziro Valley, Arunachal Pradesh is for you. Ziro Valley is not a place, but a feeling where time slows down and life takes a new turn. Where every morning the fog emerges from between the rice fields and every evening it ends under the sun with a tribal song. Ziro’s Identity – Apatani Tribe and Their Life Apatani Tribe and Their Life The most special element of Ziro valley is the Apatani tribe – an indigenous tribal community whose lifestyle and values are connected with nature. Their paddy-cum-fish cultivation system is famous in the world, And even the United Nations has recognized this system as an example of a sustainable model. Apatani people build their houses with bamboo sticks, they make their own tools, and their surrounding community is also emotionally connected with each other. Their cultural identity is their attire, like jewelry, and facial tattoos. – which feels like a living history in the modern world. “When the Apatani tribe’s grandmother showed me her nose plug and tattoos, I felt as if I had time-traveled and come to Zoro Valley. She was looking very beautiful at that time. Ziro vallet’s history is not just included in their books but is written on people’s faces.

Asher thought the memories were trapped half a decade deep in her camera roll, never to be seen again, but now they’re trapped in music instead; the song sounds like a version of herself that she can’t return to anymore.

Song of Mihika Nagari Every night, ships cut through the fog. Their sailors sip their dark, dangerous grog. No one sees them arrive. No one sees them leave. Mihika Nagari traps them in her weave. Happiness is a transaction, and gold buys time. Weed is temptation, every voice is chime. The goddess, once mighty, now slumbers in shame, Her temples turned brothels, her blessings now lame. By dawn, everyone's gone, no trace, no name, The city denies that they ever came. But one day the goddess will rise and glare, And the city will sink, as if never there.

When he has finished his morning round, Bartholomew is tired and feels lonely. There is still a little time before lunch, and instead of returning to Brother Alice's empty office, he gives himself permission to visit the gardens. He hungers for the sight of birds, he wants to hear the leaves whisper around him and to sit so still the birds accept him as a shrub. He wants the birds to land on his limbs and mistake his eyes for berries. In this cold dry space between seasons, few birds remain. No snow has fallen yet, but the ducks and geese and hummingbirds are gone, while Bartholomew, bound to his clock and trapped inside, has missed their going, the shape and sound of their flight. A few crows and sparrows are the most he hopes to find as he wheels himself into his blind between bushes, birds as ordinary and steadfast as he is himself. The white sky is birdless above him and the wind's small dirge the only song he hears. Deeply he breathes and listens closely inside himself for his own heartbeat, for the clock that keeps his body's time. Eyes closed, he tries to clean his mind of images and of the voices that would tell him he should not be sitting here, that he is a thief of time, or that the Fathers know of and will punish the theft. He breathes and does not mark his breaths with numbers, only in-out, in-out, until he hears the hum of blood in his ears and the inside of his mind is a uniform, cool gray, unmarked by shadows. He waits for birds, but does not name his waiting. His eyes open, his breathing shallows and he hears the wind. Listens, embodied now, with tension in his body. The moan comes again, is fainter. Waits two, three, four. The source is very near him. He moves his chair from the blind and circles the bushes slowly. The voice cries again, and this time, he knows it calls to him. On the ground, which is black and dry, half hidden in the tangle of oldest, lowest branches, bare of leaves, a crow rests, wings pulled tight against its body, impersonating a black stone. The crow's head inclines toward one shoulder, the black dot of an eye regards him and shares its knowledge: I am dying. It is my time to die. The moan now is almost beyond hearing, a soft deep sound free both of anger and of pain. It is too late to speak or intervene. Bartholomew is chosen witness and he watches the death, silent and simple and wholly terrifying. The last breath is released, the bird-heart stops its beating, the film of a lid closing hides the round eye, the black head slumps to rest against the wing, and Bartholomew breathes slowly, without moving, and binds his mind to blankness. If a spirit leaves, he does not see or hear or feel it go. If he has a soul himself, it does not stir. The death of the crow defeats the Fathers' time. At last the lunch bell rings, and it almost surprises him to find he is alive, his body capable of hunger and of obedience to bells. His hands fly automatically to the controls of his chair, automatically he leaves the garden and steers toward the dining hall, looking back only once to the still black form, mostly obscured by branches. The great room is warm and full of people talking, laughing, eating, all oblivious to death, and what separates him from them, what makes him lonely in their company is his awareness that they each and all must die.