"But now it is the rain 
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain."

Alun Lewis

"The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, 
And drinks and gapes for drink again"

Abraham Cowley

Gustave Caillebotte

"The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. 
The rain makes running pools in the gutter. 
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night"

Langston Hughes

Jeremy Mann

"There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down."

Don Delillo

J M W Turner

"The flowers are ravined 
by bees, the fruit blossoms 

are thrown to the ground, the wind 
the rain forces everything."

Charles Olsen

Albert Goodwin

John Atkinson Grimshaw

"I have been one acquainted with the night. 
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. 
I have outwalked the furthest city light."

Robert Frost

Vincent Van Gogh

"Flame burns, rain sinks into the cracks 
And they all go to rack ruin beneath the thud of the years, 
Stands genius a deathless adornment, 
a name not to be worn out with the years."

Ezra Pound

Fiodor Yasilev

Barbara Newton http://barbaranewton.blogspot.co.uk/

John K Harell

Claudia Finn http://claudiafinn.blogspot.co.uk/

Hermann Huppen

Kristin Kemper

Illustrations to the poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti ~ 

Kinuko Craft

Arthur Rackham

http://rackham.artpassions.net/

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Emma Florence Harrison

Laurence Housman

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/gobmarket.html

James McPartlin

Amelia Baeurle (Bowerly)

John Byam Liston Shaw

by ? (if anyone knows please inform me in comments)

Full poem after page-break

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Defy not the urge to buy! For this book could save your very living soul. ISBN 978-0-9522064-9-1.

Available now from ~ http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/godmanstone-blues/18718703

To see some more of the images from the book - http://andy-paciorek.posterous.com/godmanstone-blues-revisited

the beautiful~grotesque

From deep within

the reptile-mind,

stirs a metamorphic urge

to dream of the past

and of the future,

to become lost

in sleepy-eyed reverie

and bittersweet nostalgia

of things yet to pass;

to think

too much

or not enough.

To ponder

the meaningless

of the universe.

To dance

without movement

to the music of dead planets

from twilight to midnight,

from midnight to dawn.

To seek out

signs and wonders,

omens and augurs.

To soar

with the owls and angels,

then plunge

to an oceanic nadir.

To gorge on forbidden fruit

and then repent.

To speak in the tongues

of the pantheons

and seek

reconciliation with the godhead.

Only to question,

eternally,

what is the point?

poem: the beautiful~grotesque © Andy Paciorek 2004

The Art of Tetsuya Ishida presented by Special Guest curator Boris Glikman

I never did get adjusted to childhood or to teenage years. I never could work out how to be young.

I knew - I felt - with merciless certainty that I had never before experienced in life, that I have been irreversibly changed by this realization. 

So many times in this metropolis, I have failed to see life for what it is worth. Get up; run to work; run back home. This routine was as dehumanizing as any torture, and I was a part of it for a long time. My existence was reduced to that of an automaton. 

And I was frightened. Frightened, for I felt the grey mediocrity invading my very being. There it was penetrating me from all angles, filling in all the cracks exposed by my meager defenses.

Alone in the ocean of humanity, waves of people endlessly washing over you, who are these beings that rush past you? Strange, unfamiliar faces that you never saw before and you will never see again, they have no time for you and you have no time for them, your existence as meaningless and insignificant to them as theirs is to you.

Yesterday I spent most of the time in bed. I did not feel like getting up and just laid there and analyzed the past, trying to understand the linkage of events that lead me to my present condition, trying to determine the exact moment when it all started to go wrong for me.

While all the other people of my age were looking forward to socializing, finishing school and bright futures, I myself now had to face a titanic struggle with an enemy I could not flee from, an enemy from which there was no hiding place.

Today my life shimmered before me in all of its multitudinous facets, in all of its innumerable permutations but I just stood there dumbfounded, overwhelmed by the infinite choice offered to me. I knew not what to do, could not reach out and hold onto even one possibility. 

The pale buds of doubt have now blossomed into the bright flowers of despair.

*Text excepts from 'The Find'  : a short story by Boris Glikman  

 http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977283986

Tetsuya Ishida was born in June 1973 in Shizuoka, Japan . He died on May 23,2005 after being hit by a train, a possible suicide. Tetsuya Ishida painted scenes of ordinary Japanese life, but with the protagonist (a self portrait) always trapped in a machine-like body, or treated as part of a production line. 

The paintings of Tetsuya Ishida address the anxieties of an individual adrift in a world becoming unrecognizable through economic growth and technological advance. Although his paintings are wrapped heavily in skepticism, claustrophia and solitude, the works are above all beautiful, touching self-portaits of a man helplessly adrift in a world lacking in meaningful contact with others.

All images © Tetsuya Ishida

http://www.tetsuyaishida.jp/

A special guest post by the poet, author and sharer of images~ BORIS GLIKMAN

http://bozlich.gather.com/