ode to an odalisque

you and I
have no memories
no broken down promises
no glasses of half-empty dreams
we never made plans
to conquer exotic islands
to ride whales
in underwater rodeos
I sacrificed no flowers to decorate your hair
no fingerprints of mine
can be found on your skin
the radio never played songs
to make us reminisce
moments on top of a hill
with city lights below.
in a parallel universe
in a cheap motel room
a couple with similar features
as ours
is sweating break-up sex
you and I will meet 
tomorrow
for the first time.

the unicorn lived in a lilac wood ...

Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides. They mate very rarely, and no place is more enchanted than one where a unicorn has been born.
The last time she had seen another unicorn the young virgins who still came seeking her now and then had called to her in a different tongue;  but then, she had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after  generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.

Peter S. Beagle
The Last Unicorn

thank you, Youngchae

olfactory carnal knowledge

I know everything
about you
except your smell
until I have rested
my nose
on your inner thigh
after you have danced
I will not be able
to discern
if you are a paeonia
or
a
lilac.

Joë Bousquet in Bed

οil emulsion in water on canvas. 1947

Paralyzed during World War I, the poet Joë Bousquet was bedridden for decades until his death in 1950. Dubuffet depicts him in bed with two of his books, a newspaper, two letters addressed to him, and a package of Gauloises cigarettes. 
The abstract rendering of Bousquet's face and surroundings deliberately rejects physical exactness. Dubuffet championed graffiti and art brut—his term for the art of children, the insane, and "primitives"—as necessary alternatives to European modernism. 
"Let us find other ingenious ways to transcribe objects onto flat surfaces; make the surface speak its own surface-language and not a false three-dimensional language which is alien to it," he stated. Here the highly textured and gritty pigments help realize this painting’s particular "surface-language."

source: http://www.moma.org