The Philtrum

the heliosgallery.com

Near where the words come from,
through which come the vibrations of a hum,
it has a funny name: the philtrum.

Everyone knows the nose
and mouth, how they open and close.
Everyone talks about the eye, a vortex like a rose.

How many even know the name of the philtrum?
An unassuming kind of plectrum
in the court-orchestra of the kingdom

of the face,
that place
that for humans is the center of meaning and grace.

Dear Joe

http://farmerwife.blogspot.com/

Dear Joe,

Everything at home is fine, except Minnie came home with a torn, bloody ear and the weather's been so hot the candles are melting. The day lilies just bloomed. Mama said I could get my picture at DeSouza's so I'll have another one to send soon.

Mama and Papa say hello. Don't be lonely. Tell me about your life there if you want to.

Love,

Rita

P.S. It's okay to call me honey.

young persons' writing class

http://wvuenglish.blogspot.com/

Elizabeth writes a detective story:

a "kids' detective" wins herself glory.

Zoe describes middle school ins and outs,

Friendships broken, humiliation, routs.

When Eliza's fantasy muscle flexes,

People tumble through worlds of charms and hexes.

Diana's heroine is suicidal, an anorect,

lovelorn and lovable, like Juliet.

Linden write grown-up science fiction

in careful, imagery-laden diction.

Sasha won't show me what she's writing.

I hope she's winning the battle she's fighting.

After Playing Dictionary

http://www.tnoutdoorsmen.com/knots.htm

A newt

played the flute.

He applied portamento

while playing lento.

Eucaine

seemed to spread through his brain.

He thought, "I bless,

I confess; I bless, I confess; I bless . . ."

He imagined he was the snell

between fishhook and line; cool water, green light; he was well.

How to Make a CIT Feel Loved

http://blog.ivman.com/anagrams/

for K.H.

Make him wear bright blue gloves,

name a chord for him,

find out who he loves,

find a good anagram.

Parse the false from true.

Learn from him patience.

Surprise him, it’s not hard to do;

Let the writing commence.

The Ugliness of Boxers

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boxer_dog.jpg

I read about ugly animals in the Times: the star-nosed mole, the vampire bat. It made me think of my brother's dog, a boxer named Cassie. Boxers are grotesque. Cassie's smooshed face makes her face look like that of a giant bat. When she lies down to be petted she, like other dogs, rolls onto her back. Her flews (those upper lips that hang down pendulously) fold downward on account of gravity, and her bright pink gums stand out against the blackness of her flews in an unworldly, impossible-seeming way. When she runs around, saliva hangs down from her flews in droolly ropes.

I love Cassie. I love her more because of her ugliness, not less. Others love boxers too; many people acquire them, though they, like me, have no need of a fighting dog (boxers were bred to fight other dogs).

What an odd business, to love something for its ugliness. Maybe Cassie's ugliness brings out my compassion, my nurturing protectiveness, because the ugliness seems like a form of vulnerability.

Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old nephew posted a series of photos on Facebook of him and his siblings and Cassie. The photographer is expert, my nieces and nephews good-looking, the setting pristine and elegant. My eyes can't keep away from Cassie.

anagram poems

http://www.wordtravels.com/Travelguide/Countries/Senegal/Map

Angels (2)

Senegal's gales sang ageless glee.
A sea's glass angles eagles see.
Legless seals engage slag.
A gang gleans a gag.

Vowels

Vessels solve loss.
Wool sleeves evolve.
Owls lose voles.
Love solves loss.
Wolves low woe.
We wove vowels.

Swimming

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Lake_Winthrop,_Holliston,_MA.JPG

I'm going to see my girlfriend in the only way I can think of. I am swimming across the lake. I started after my father started to snore--maybe eleven p.m. If he wakes up and finds me gone, I will get into trouble. I don't know how long it will take me to swim across. It's about two miles, I've been told. An hour? I don't know if I can swim for an hour. I'm not thinking about having to swim back. If I'm late, it wont be so bad, I'll tell my father I went out for an early morning swim and went out further than I should have.

Libby doesn't know I'm coming. I'll throw a pebble at her window. She'll wake up, come to the window. She'll see me and come down. What if she doesn't wake up? If she doesn't, she doesn't.

My muscles are tired now. I'm not going to think about it. I still have a long way. Instead I'll say something encouraging to myself. Oh--Libby--I'm--coming. One word per stroke.

Oh--Libby--I'm--coming.

The moon. What was that? Snapping turtles in the lake. Keep moving. Keep kicking.

Can I my feet reach the ground now? No.

Oh--Libby--I'm--coming.

I fall onto the beach, a little dizzy. It feels very comfortable there. The gritty sand against my cheek feels good. Maybe I'll sleep. No, mustn't sleep.

She woke up after the tenth pebble. A few minutes later she was leading him by hand away from the house, into some bushes. They sat on the ground.

"You swam across."

He nodded.

"You're freezing." She hugged him. They sat together quietly, her arms around him.

"When do you have to be back?"

"In a few hours."

"I'm going to sneak into the house and got some blankets." She did. She brought an alarm clock, too. "Let's sleep," she said, and they did, after he had dried himself off as best he could.

Beep, beep, beep, said the alarm clock.

A long, full kiss. Then they got up and, leaving his wet shirt behind, he swam back.

It went quickly. He felt her with him a lot of the time.

He snuck into his house and got into the shower. He knew his father hadn't noticed his absence.

a texture

http://www.sustainableisgood.com/products/2007/05/manual-reel-law.html

We have a non-power lawn mower, appropriate to our small yard. Long stems of grass and other plants get wound around the axles between where the blades are and the wheels. Today I used a kitchen pairing knife, serrated, sharp, not too big, and thought, at last, the tool I've needed. The texture of the grass against the sawing knife. The sense of accomplishment when I've picked the axle clean.

I want "toothsome" to mean gratifying to one's teeth, in a texture-y way, and "handsome" to mean gratifying to the hand, in a texture-y way. Our language doesn't have an adequate vocabulary fThe art required is one of mataphor and comparison, and those are treasures, but wo would be words for these sense-of-touch sensations. And it wasn't just the sense of touch: the sound of the knife's serrations rubbing against the grass was part of what was satisfying, and our vocabulary for our sense of hearing isn't so great either.

Lady Gaga to Bert Edwards

http://www.irishcentral.com/

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born March 28, 1986), better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American recording artist.

Some individuals who are related to a celebrity take a different last name so that they are not perceived to have received undue advantage from their family connection. Examples of these include Nicolas Cage (real name Nicolas Coppola, nephew of Francis Ford Coppola).

Cage has been nominated twice for an Academy Award, winning once for his performance as a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas.

Made of gold-plated britannium on a black metal base, [the Oscar statuette] is 13.5 in (34 cm) tall, weighs 8.5 lb (3.85 kg) and depicts a knight rendered in Art Deco style holding a crusader's sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes.

Art Deco affected all areas of design throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including architecture and industrial design, as well as the visual arts such as painting, the graphic arts and film.

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium[1] to a surface (support base).

In mathematics, specifically in topology, a surface is a two-dimensional topological manifold.
A topological space X is called locally Euclidean if there is a non-negative integer n such that every point in X has a neighborhood which is homeomorphic to an open subset of Euclidean space Rn.

Intuitively speaking (see below for a more intuitive discussion), a set U is open if any point x in U can be moved in any "direction" and still be in the set U.

The notion of an open set provides a fundamental way to speak of nearness of points in a topological space, without explicitly having a concept of distance defined.

Distance was a late-1980s rock/funk band led by bassist/producer Bernard Edwards, patterned after the Power Station.

Edwards played a Music Man StingRay (bequeathed to Duran Duran's John Taylor after his death), a Fender Precision Bass, and a B.C. Rich "Eagle" bass during the prime of Chic. Later he would also use a Spector NS. He also was known to play a G & L L-1000 and a Sadowsky standard.

A Martian Sends a Postcard

Dear Glor-glor,

Greetings! Earth is confusing. The subject of my studies, Earthlings, are a series of ovals walking through waves of light. That is all I have discovered so far. More later.

Your co-worker,
Flor-flor

Deawr Glor-glor,

I have learned more.

Humans have antennae, but invisible ones. They always ask, "are we friends? are we equals?" with their antennae.

Singing is something they do constantly. They have two modes (at least) of singing. In mode one, their hypnotism sensor is turned off. In mode two, they hypnotize their listeners.

More later,
Flor-flor

Dear Glor-glor,

Earthlings' favorite thing to do is look at each other. Sometimes they look into a machine that shows them a picture of another earthling who is the same as they are, and even moves the way they do.

They make marks on very, very thin pieces of wood.

Humans' brains are inside but also outside of their bodies.

I am still confused. I think I have to return to Mars and take a break. See you soon.

Flor-flor

Happiness

or that describe three kinds of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

proximity to other happy people

living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion.

Happiness economics suggests that measures of public happiness should be used to supplement more traditional economic measures when evaluating the success of public policy.

50% of one's happiness depends on one's genes, based on studying identical twins, whose happiness is 50% correlated even when growing up in different houses.^[5] About 10% to 15% is a result of various measurable life circumstances variables, such as socioeconomic status, marital status, health, income, sex^[6] and others. The remaining 40% is a combination of unknown factors and the results of actions that individuals deliberately engage in to become happier.

Oxford Happiness Questionnaire^[7] as a broad measure of psychological well-being.

sense of purpose, social interest and kindness, sense of humor and aesthetic appreciation.^[8]

happiness in social networks may spread from person to person. Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness that spread up to 3 degrees of separation on average.

Envy is believed to produce unhappiness.

the majority of well-conducted studies found that higher levels of religious involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being

Nirvana

felicity (Latin equivalent to the Greek eudaimonia), or "blessed happiness", described by the thirteenth-century philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas as a Beatific Vision of God's essence in the next life.

the only thing that humans desire for its own sake, unlike riches, honor, health or friendship.

See also

• Hedonic treadmill
• Paradox of hedonism
• Functional Happiness

Gary

http://www.lurvely.com/index.php?id=353750277

At night he jumps from his window to a branch and has a party with bats, squirrels, and crickets.

For breakfast he heats twigs and leafmeal moistened with aphid milk.

His parents buy TV sets but he always paints pictures on the screens.

He can make his mind go at different speeds: very fast, very slow, normal. Very fast is his favorite.

One day when he woke up he was fifty feet above the earth. His mother was holding a piece of string, tied to his ankle, like in Fellini's 8 1/2, but Gary thought it was funny.

Gary thinks he has nine brothers, six sisters, seven dogs, four cats, three rats, and three crickets. Really he has four crickets, not three.

Sometimes he sleeps, and when he does his mother does a dance, and sings,

Gary is my joy

he is my darling boy

I'm glad he's not a toy

but sometimes I think he might be a koi

and someone enchanted it to seem like a boy.

Gary loves the song. He only pretends to be asleep. But then he really is asleep.

Eagles Sang:

http://www.firstpeople.us/pictures/eagles/1024x768/Bald-Eagle-Wingspan-1024x768.html

"Sane gals

sell all:

eggs, legs, gels.

Nags lean, sag.

Eagles lease lenses.

Glans gleans genes.

Lanes angle."

Has a Secret Plan

http://c-lab.co.uk/default.aspx?id=9&projectid=10

0r he'd like you to think so

his mind scampers to and fro

except when it floats

like a boat

on a lake reflecting dusk-glow

he thinks the world might fall

into fragments people trees and all

but he stays relaxed

stays away from the cracks

he knows when to hurry when to stall

his secret plan for you

is to see things as if they were new

because then he knows

you'll think he's a rose

whose magic power will tell false from true