~ Wisława Szymborska ~
Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of a newly excavated 1800 year old Roman burial urn taken in July 1987.
© 2023 nightpoet – all rights reserved
~ Wisława Szymborska ~
Digitally enhanced image created from a photo of a newly excavated 1800 year old Roman burial urn taken in July 1987.
© 2021 nightpoet – all rights reserved
~ Wisława Szymborska ~
Digitally enhanced image created from an original photo of a Roman burial urn taken in Mainz, Germany in July 1987.
© 2018 nightpoet all rights reserved
~ Gretel Ehrlich ~
Digitally enhanced image created from an original photo of my time-worn sandals taken in Paris in May 2018.
© 2018 nightpoet all rights reserved
~ Graffiti in Paris May 1968 ~
Digitally enhanced image “1968” created from an original photo of street art taken in Paris in May 2018.
© 2018 nightpoet all rights reserved
~ Gail Sheehy ~
Digitally enhanced image created from an original photo taken in Paris in May 2018.
© 2018 nightpoet all rights reserved
~ Audrey Hepburn ~
Digitally enhanced image created from an original photo of the inside of the entrance to Jim Morrison’s apartment building at 17 Rue Beautreillis taken in Paris in May 2018. The door to the stairwell is on the left, the street entrance to the right.
© 2018 nightpoet all rights reserved
~ Karl Kraus ~
Digitally enhanced image created from an original photo taken in Paris in September 2017.
© 2017 nightpoet all rights reserved
.
~ Bernard Pivot ~
Digitally enhanced image “Bouche” created from a cropped original photo taken by Bernd Deutschmann in October 2015.
© 2017 nightpoet all rights reserved
To be continued…
© 2017 nightpoet all rights reserved
To be continued…
© 2017 nightpoet all rights reserved
To be continued…
© 2017 nightpoet all rights reserved
~ Ernest Hemingway ~
Photo of a Mercedes typewriter taken at a flea market in October 2016
© 2016 nightpoet all rights reserved
Yesterday I wrote about grayness. Today, an excerpt with sunlight, from a work in progress…
It was August. I lay stretched out on the beach soaking up the sun. I’d been lying there for most of a month, living on the beach with a sleeping bag and a small tent, staying as drunk and as stoned as possible and balling a German girl I’d met on the beach. At the taberna up in the dunes behind me I could hear a donkey braying, probably the one that the grizzled old drunkard’s wife would bring at the end of the afternoon or evening to drape him over and drag him home.
One evening I was sitting with the German girl in the taberna, plying her with ouzo to get her in the proper mood for a long night of lovemaking on the beach when the unshaven old man stumbled onto the tavern’s veranda, sat down at our table and ordered ouzo. He spoke no English or German, but indicated that he wanted to know where we were from. When the girl said Deutschland a real mean and nasty look filled his face. “Germania?” he said in a hoarse voice, “Germania!” He looked at her intensely with his dark eyes growing sharp and deep and repeated, “Germania?” He then took his wrinkled finger and dragged it in a swift movement across his throat. A look of shock coloured her face. Obviously he sill had memories of the war, when the Nazis had committed numerous atrocities during their occupation of Greece. He continued to scowl at her and slid his hand across his throat again. Then he turned his attention to me, waiting for a reply. When I told him that I was from America, the old man’s face lit up and he became animated. “America! America!’ he exclaimed, enthusiastically shaking my hand and kissing me repeatedly on the cheek. I can still feel the stubble on his face and smell his cigarette breath. He even got up a few times and staggered around to slap me on the back. “America, America,” he kept repeating and then started ordering one ouzo after another for me, while every now and then giving her a dirty look, another throat slitting sign and grumbling, “Germania.”
After one too many ouzos he finally nodded off, just as his wife showed up with the donkey. I helped her drape him over it and they waddled off into the night. The girl and I finished our last ouzos and stumbled down through the dunes, first to smoke some hashish and then spend a rather blurry night balling in the sand under a clear black sky filled with millions of stars. I left the island not too long after that and never saw the German girl again. Over the decades since then I have often wondered if, on one of those nebulous nights on that beautiful Grecian beach under all those twinkling eyes of the universe, I didn’t somehow plant a seed. I suppose I’ll never know. Ah, but then, I might be forgiven my youthful impudence, after all, it was the 70’s, when we were young, loose, carefree, foolish and, above all, so very much alive…
A view of the beach on the island of Naxos, seen from up in the mountain range that ran along the shoreline. Photo taken with a 110 format pocket camera in August 1979.
© 2016 nightpoet all rights reserved
Special thanks to Ellen for the original idea…
Digital painting “Reclining Nude” created in 2011.
© 2016 nightpoet all rights reserved
Mr. Frog, his paint almost completely faded, his body cracked in spots and the air valve in his back long lost, will be celebrating his 66th birthday this year. And, properly held, he can still stick out his tongue. Photo taken in January 2016.
© 2016 nightpoet all rights reserved
This is an excerpt from one of three posts done back in January 2014 called the Mad Hatter Hallucinations. When I recently photographed this Cheshire Cat street artwork it brought back the memory of those earlier pieces. The original posts can be accessed in the links below…
Photo of the street art Cheshire Cat taken in Germany in August 2015.
The original Mad Hatter Hallucinations can be accessed here:
Mad Hatter Hallucinations – Part One
https://nitepoetry.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/mad-hatter-hallucinations-part-one/
Mad Hatter Hallucinations – Part Two
https://nitepoetry.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/mad-hatter-hallucinations-part-2/
Mad Hatter Hallucinations – Part Three
https://nitepoetry.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/436/
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© 2015 nightpoet all rights reserved
Death came looking for me the other night. I saw him standing over in the shadows as I was walking up the street to my apartment. So I walked over to him and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” He stared back, fire burning in his coal black eyes, his cold breath in my face. He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. “It’s your time,” he hissed. “Bullshit,” I answered, I had a couple of cards to play. “You haven’t got a clue. You seem to have forgotten a few things. First of all, I am nowhere near being finished working on the six hundred and twenty one photos I took last Friday for my supervisor’s publication. Now you know that he’s not going to buy me cutting out now and not getting all that work completed. Secondly, I have a gig next month. There is no way my management consortium is going to let me skip out on that contract, and you don’t want to mess with their lawyers at all. No way. And kind sir, you seem to have completely forgotten a most important detail, you know, the one concerning that little understanding we have about a certain incident in Paris last July. I mean, it certainly wasn’t my fault that I stumbled upon you cavorting with six or seven of Madame Claudel’s poules in her upper crust Pigalle bordello on that hot summer night. My goodness, there was a lot of leather and lace about. And they were such sweet young things too. You might recall that I agreed upon complete discretion. We did, if I remember correctly, have a gentleman’s agreement. We certainly wouldn’t want Mrs Death to get wind of your, how should we put it, extracurricular activities now would we. Especially when you should have been working.”
He looked again at his watch and then put it back in his pocket. For a brief moment he seemed at a loss for words. And then once again my eyes met his empty shrouded stare as he pushed out the words through clenched teeth. “Yes, a small misunderstanding on my part.” As he turned and walked away into the gloom he spat the words at me over his shoulder, “I’ll be back…”
Photo taken on Friday October 10th 2014.
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© 2014 nightpoet all rights reserved
If you haven’t discovered this small treasure of a book yet, and I would doubt that there are any Patti Smith fans that haven’t, then I highly recommend it. And if you don’t know who Patti Smith is or haven’t read this Pulitzer Prize winning author’s works, then I must assume that you’ve been hibernating for the last 45 years. The original Woolgathering, a collection of sketches published 22 years ago in a small volume for Hanuman Books and distributed to a select group of people, was reissued in 2012 in a revised and slightly expanded edition. It is a poignant and exquisitely crafted series of personal insights of her childhood and her adult perspectives, in which she elevates observation to its finest point, a memoir that takes the reader behind the memory into the realms of the creative process itself.
One of the things that I have always found interesting about Patti Smith was her inspiration from rock idol sex god and poet, Jim Morrison. In her 2010 memoir “Just Kids” she briefly mentions Morrison’s influence on her writing and music. When she saw The Doors live in concert in 1967 and absorbed Morrison’s performance she thought, ‘I could do that!’ Time has certainly shown us that she could and that she has been able to take Morrison’s example to incredible new heights, both in her musical endeavours and in her finely honed prose. Woolgathering embodies the kind of writing that Morrison could only dream about through his sophomoric 1960’s poetical haze, the kind of writing he might have achieved if he had lived another 20 years and hadn’t OD’d in the grubby bathroom of a Paris nightclub and been smuggled back to his apartment to be thrown unceremoniously into that famous myth-filled bathtub. Time and experience seem to have made all the difference, as she states in the book, “How happy we are as children. How the light is dimmed by the voice of reason.” But the loss of that childhood innocence certainly hasn’t dimmed Patti Smith’s light or her ability to shine in wordcrafting. Morrison, eat your poor Parisian poet’s heart out. You left us way too soon to have reached the summit over which Patti Smith hovers today.
Below are a few more photos from last night’s concert. One of the interesting things that happened was when Patti featured her band on a number (I think it might have been the 1960’s song Psychotic Reaction) and she wandered down into the security zone in front of the stage to walk back and forth and talk a bit with the concertgoers. As she finished her stroll she came upon a mother holding a small child. I could see her exchanging words with the lady before she returned to the stage for the next song. Whereupon she told the audience in no uncertain terms that bringing a small child to such a loud performance without earplugs was unconscionable and she asked anyone with small children to “please protect their ears.” “If you don’t have any ear plugs,” she stated, “we have them here on stage.” In a concert where she infused her music with an incredible energy and improvised a number of poems, spit, cursed and pleaded for people to change their world, she also showed the care and concern of a mother. That was typical Patti Smith. And it was an unbelievable concert. Thanks Patti…
All photos of Patti Smith And Her Band taken in Mainz, Germany on August 11, 2014.
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© 2014 nightpoet all rights reserved
To Nicole
de su amigo
Ernesto –
Photo of the 1953 Scribners edition of The Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway taken in Paris in May 2014.
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© 2014 nightpoet all rights reserved
