I'll make it, I'll make it back alright.
My limbs aren't lank but they seem to be failing me now.
Thighs that were made for bolting,
Columns full of thunder and might.
But, I'm gathering food from this fight
Enough to pressurise the flight

Food for thought

Your voice girl, is like a body

Dancing, dissolving worries, erasing sorrow,

And your body, my pretty one, is like words,

Words of philosophers who got drunk and forgot time.

How strange!

S O S

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer

serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous---

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

---Stellectric signs
"Wing shows on Starway"
"Zodiac carrousel"

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews...
in the museums of the moon

"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes---- 

Mina Loy

Mr Rochester.
& the Forgotten Prince

You know that cliche scene where she run run runs, straight into his arms?
Like he was the only man who ever lived and she was the most beautiful woman in the world?

the forgotten prince

"While lying next to you I was thinking how I should've responded earlier. I recalled what you brought out in me last summer and the refuge you provided. I can't answer whether or not there's a 'person' inside but I can say with certainty there is some light in you drawing in all us lowly moths..."

Nourbo

Saubode

abode

Noleebode

bambode

Rania El Hakim

Review: Kamal Khalifa Gallery, Monoprints, Rania El Hakim

A new show by Rania El-Hakim opens at Kamal Khalifa Gallery, Gezira Arts Centre. Simply entitled 'Monoprints' the new works try to capture the 'melange of relationships' encapsulated in the City, relationships that create the energy and vibrancy one may feel simply by walking down a street. El-Hakims Monoprints in this sense share themes with her previous works and exhibits, where by we see her effort to reveal the living being or soul not as a separate entity but as interconnected with the world it inhabits and the people with whom it shares its space.

If the show seeks to capture the contradictory dialogues of city, living; between the moving and the static, the visible and the invisible it does this so softly, so delicately, that each little pocket of colour, on its small square of off white paper makes for its own little peaceful contradiction - the self made miniature landscape is more harmony than flux.

A birds-eye view of a construction site in motion on a desert scape with a docking station where boats are just beginning to set a sail, sometimes the emblem of a snake appears, and a satellite station watches the movements of beings, who are all but little dots on an abstracted map of town. Do we spot artillery? Is this place preparing for something? Is it all about to go off?

The tracking system with its bleeping digital clock takes us down to ancient ruins and back up to the end of another day and the quieting down of its metropolis. What is so prevalent though is the sense of civilization that occurs within each frame, the vibrations of scurrying human existence - an ant farm - is mapped only through movement and time. Abstracted shapes create areas of settlement, buildings, tracks, seedbeds, gravel – walked through, dirt stains, blood blots and traces of fine hairs.

Skins of the earth.

Though we talk of the human soul as the one which is looking for balance, here the artist in question is mark-making in a way that appears undomestic; like a creature of another species scratching at the surface, proving his existence, making himself vital, searching for food and asking to survive. Repetitively each print is signed in pencil together with a small text marking them each 1/1 (one of one), matching the title of the show; the mono print is a one off, a moment which has passed and will not be replicated. The artist describes the works as painting, and this is justifiable since the print making process has been edited, overlaid, patched up and in places even eliminated and scratched out. Earthy tones are aligned and misaligned with blocks and patches of inky pigments, a bright blue, a fluorescent yellow, is dynamite in this otherwise still-scape.

Ask me where I have been, 

what I have done, 

who I have seen

I will tell you, 

'what I have done', 

'where I have been' and 

'who I have seen'

Take my breath
and recycle it
for your used up 
respiratory system
I have plenty.

Wake up 'sister'!
Like a brat on a stick.

/səˈkəm/

Verb

There are no Captions!

AlexandRA.

Its time to pick it apart.
To make that exploration.
To be in touch with what is, 
or all that you will ever know of this place.
Its time to keep the sand in the hand, and use it for production purposes...
However thinly you may have spread it there before...
Its time to get up.
And write it. Write it down down soldier.
You are, you are, you are.
You are entitled 
to build - so knock down the thought of anyone who won't let you
(on purpose, or dimly not so)
And
You are you are
AlexandRA. 

K

Whenever I am scared of new beginnings, or anxious about unfamiliar grounds, whether in love or friendship, work or geography, I think of Kamilya and a number of other women. They, at different stages in their lives, have burned the bridges of comfort and went off towards further living, more intense. They have accepted the loses but celebrated the gains. These women are my heroes.

Helene Cixous: This procedure [demarche] of truth is for me the gift you

give to humanity. In reading you we learn that the truth is always a bit further on. From the place where you arrive, you set off again, you take

yourself back up, you relaunch yourself, you do not sit the truth on your knees. Truth makes you tick [La verite tefait marcher] in all the senses of the word. It's also the law of writing: one can only write in the direction of that which does not let itself be written and which one must try to write. What I can write is already written, it is no longer of interest. I always head towards the most frightening. This is what makes writing thrilling but painful. I write towards what I flee. I dream about it. It is

always a jardin d'Essai, but it is an infernal, expelling garden.

the greed is the unraveling

Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out

I think I shall fall in love with grammar

I want to read Caribbean literature