sestina paste! a poetic form 39 lines, 7 stanzas, 6 end words firstly: choose 6 end words. as a hint, make them be different and unassociative. (i.e. box, nachos, ephemeral, placing, silver, cat) secondly: the scheme... first stanza: a b c d e f second: f a e b d c (repeat, taking final end word and using as new first, first becomes new second, fifth becomes new third, and so on, like a sort of zig zag) third: c f d a b e fourth: e,c,b,f,a,d fifth: d,e,a,c,f,b sixth: b,d,f,e,c,a the final and seventh stanza has three lines, with scheme: a,b c,d e,f where a,c,e end words can be used anywhere WITHIN the lines. elizabeth bishop wrote a fine sestina titled "sestina"...look for it. many, many others out there. try it out! 020103 ... paste! Guidebook If experiencing difficulties with the flashlight, remember that those who created paper only had daylight and still they came up with the idea. Even if you are not deft with tools, or a dodo, you can make a refraction plate with a piece of copper and some aloe vera. It really is fascinating. And it goes on that everything about the outdoors is fascinating. One can surely navigate without a flashlight, especially if all you have are cheap batteries, not the copper- top ones. It’s also hot to take notes on paper. To stay inside, one would have to be a miserable dodo! All it really takes is one impulse, no more than an idea to get your sorry ass out of the chair and into the big idea of natural surroundings. Trees are fascinating! The sky is expansive! Don’t be a dodo! Just one impulse is all it takes, like a flashlight going off in your retroactive brain stuffed with paper from your office, or the wiring they used of copper instead of the requested gold, although copper should get the job done. Conductivity is also an idea that’s old as monocles, about the same time paper was discovered. History, or rather, reflections are fascinating when you finally get the chance to shine a flashlight on the dusty brain that you live with. Mind that dodo that we call memory, and do yourself, dodo, a favor—find some spare time and visit a copper mine, a national forest, a landmark and forget the flashlight. About letting go and just taking off for a weekend, the idea is as old as the ancient Greeks and they…were…fascinating. What do I remember about reading my paper- back with Plato’s The Apology? Socrates unrolling his paper scroll, days before he died trying to convince the dodo republic of Athens that he really was a fascinating person, one that his scholars looked up to as if his face was on a copper coin or something, an otherwise impossible idea for reasons outside of my understanding. Banish your flashlight! Get outside, banish your flashlight! Do not write on your paper list of “ideas to manifest”. Just leave the house, dodo, in your copper-zippered jeans and go do something fascinating! 020103 ... paste! ack! double post! DUCKOLA! 020103 ... lycanthrope Trance Faces were submerged with an inconstant light. Speckled and flashing like so many deferred saccades. Forms were drawn in and same out of a world's blindness, so stretched shoulders, a sharp angle, uncovered skin appears- Then retracts, the burning rejection of the instinctual retinas, the rhythm of it wasn't sound, but visions. Last night is tangled in thickets and dew, memory seems a new vision. petals emerge, a body holds a cherry tree's dark centres under the knife of light. Definitions hinge; fresh sweat - a dense sea, choppy, infinite, detached retinas. Rivulets know nothing of their own shining, leashed in free flow saccades. In evaporating, no irreducible complexities, no blinking appears, till the sun returns their utility. For now they are mirrors,but of blindness. Lips met in a temporary blindness. First another bath of color too far, a vision, untill under patterns swirling hopping appears as if from the corpses of stars, a misty light, brought by shadows and curves, in soft saccades, to the lips' dark summit, numbed the retinas. The morning, though filtered in blinds, expands uniformly my retinas. The bed creaks, a solid yet accomodating escort from blindness finallly weighted. The room expands and returns mundane in drowsy saccades. Was last night this mere moment before waking? the dew left a vision? The room keeps its suspense in elusive smells and elusive light. I expected to wake up in my own bed, but a new room appears. "your lips twist when they kiss, it appears" and again the futility of my retinas, straining when they could be so light, if given the nostalgic and base blindness, the ocean's bottom feeders have in a vision, i had as i looked for her boundries in saccades. I am not anxious to expose meaning beyond darting to my saccades; As it unfolds in light's garish embrace of the covers and what appears to be our story: the knocking over of potted plants, a vision of absolute indifference to how sights would crystallize on my retinas and expose as mired what seemed a mutable and light blindness. Expose her,my sacred best friend, naked, her sleeping face still light. A light touch, and warm flesh in our hands' shadowed saccades, induced blindness. Sordid futures attempted to appear, but retinas washed in light's unseen angles were a now beyond vision. 020515 ... angie i wrote two sestinas last year i love sestinas if anyone cares i will post them on here :) 030120 ... jane to call the night its heavy hands wrapped around my hide i'd disappear into blue- ness if i could, & cozy into stranger's rusty paint to weave tapestries of smoke on dusted smoke--- slipping into radical night moods, weary muscles spent on paint- ing stars, from head to arm to hand disguising me a sort of muted blue in everlasting sky, a stain to hide. why would someone want to hide behind sky? - i should at least content myself on exhaled smoke twisting up my neck to my face, blue asphyxiation until my eyes turn dark like night & you will wrap your hands into my hair, & remember what i did with paint. because of this, you'll never look at paint the same again - in fact, you'll hide from colors, dreaming they have hands & eyes creeping in your direction, blowing smoke like pepper in your nose. retreating to the night, you'll mirror your reflection & see your face, blue like an ocean or Picasso portrait (from his blue period), tuning strings & coaxing women into paint. or, to go back some yeras, the hue from "starry night" of "cafe terrace," or some other scene in which to hide. "seems like a good time for a smoke," you'll think, & watch your hands roll cigarettes, & think of hands being cold like lips being blue, &, contemplating this, forget how to smoke or how to paint & desire only to hide under the covers, or the sky, or night. & if calling out for night meant being anti-blue or if i could see your hands smoothed in cool paint i wouldn't have to hide at all, for worries would be shooed away like smoke. 061114 ... doar . 061114 ... Doar I shall try another day, to witness the sestina. 061114 ... jane this face is something like a mirror - something far from thought, from memory stare at it too long & it will melt too far gone, i'm standing in the desert - the sun stares one mean eye while sinking under the scale of the horizon. i scale the sand, scraping & digging in the mirror of what seems a pool of water. eyes= deceivers. it's only a mirage, a manifestation of the memory of water. only endless desert. if i'm here too long, i'll surely melt. i must avoid the thought of melting. i am a fish, see the scales on my back, my sides. this desert is my ocean, my yellow shiny mirror. nothing quite like a memory to stick in my eye. -too much like an eye on fire, this glance, this stare will melt until it is only a memory. something that barely makes weight on the scale, has no reflection in a mirror, would blend into this desert. oh thoughts, will you desert me? have you an eye on your back to see me as you walk away? Mirror multiplicity, reflecting themselves until they melt into infinity - the everlasting scale. the range of memory & nothing like a memory. the constant drought of a desert. my eyelid like a scale of wool upon my eye. Cyclops. i just want to melt away like candle wax. like a looking glass. mirror. & as a mirror left upon a scale these clocks will melt into the desert; the moony eye. the persistance of memory. 070202 ... Mr. Marksman Jane. marked. . 080325 what's it to you? who go blather from