Achtung Baby!

discipline

Reader, I am anxious about
your discipline
are you constant as me?
Otherwise, burn this book
Go to the movies
if you aren’t doubled up with laughing.
Leonard Cohen

[ Spain: It's So True ]

I love to see you naked over there

[ Leonard Cohen - Take This Longing ]

I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say "siempre",

"siempre", "siempre" : garden of my agony,
your body elusive always

Gacela of Unforseen Love, Federico García Lorca

Woman is the content of a Man's life...

+ Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell: Just One Of Those Things

My old teacher said 'The older you become, the lonelier you get and the deeper love you need'.
Leonard Cohen

+ Diana Krall - A Case of You
+ Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now (live)
+ Joni Mitchell - Goodbye Blue Sky
+ Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock: Together again

I want you the right way

Nicole Patricia Malina

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. 
Leonard Cohen, "The Favorite Game"

> The Afghan Whigs: 66
> Maxwell: Welcome
> Radiohead: Nobody Does It Better
> PJ Harvey: Is This Desire?
> Marvin Gaye: I Want You
> Beck: Kangaroo
Her "Map of Your Desire" playlist.

"I've seen the future of Rock and Roll and it is not Leonard Cohen"

Leonard Cohen's Induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean

+ Leonard Cohen "Video Profile" 1994 ( thanks to my muse for the link )
+ Leonard Cohen To Enter Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame
+ The Best Leonard Cohen Song You’ve (Probably) Never Heard
+ a "Famous Blue Raincoat" cover

Alone with my radio

by ~maciejpiotr

His silence in pain. I have come through the fire of family and love. I smoke with my darling, I sleep with my friend. We talk of the poor men, broken and fled. Alone with my radio I lift up my hands. Welcome to you who read me today. Welcome to you who put my heart down. Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your trip to the end.
Leonard Cohen

+ Regina Spektor: On the Radio (Live)

[ Prologue - I can't make the Hills ]

[ Philip Glass + Leonard Cohen: Prologue - I can't make the Hills ]

I listen in such a way so as not to add to your loneliness

"you've got a friend" by woolloomooloo

"Friend, when u speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say. I listen in such a way so as not to add to your loneliness. I make some replay at every opportunity so as not to compound you loneliness. Thus the conversation continues under an umbrella of optimism, If you suggest a feeling, I affirm it. If you provoke, I accept the challenge. "
L. Cohen, "The Book of mercy"

+ Elliott Smith covers "Friends"
+ Veruca Salt - "Loneliness is Worse”
+ Idlewild - "Love Steals Us From Loneliness"

Secret

+ Feist: "Secret Heart" live
+ Leonard Cohen: "In My Secret Life"

A Love Letter From Leonard Cohen

From Leonard Cohen

You're going to leave me. I know you're going to leave me. Like you left Laporte. Like you left Arif. I'll be someone you call by his last name. Laporte didn't look too good tonight at the Alhambra when he limped over to say hello to you. He didn't want to give me his hand because it was so wet. He took the tips of my fingers and he smiled cheerlessly, as if to say: The greatest fuck you've ever had, the deepest love you've ever known, and she's going to leave you very soon, you poor stunned sonovabitch. In the car you told me that his hands always get that wet when he has to meet people. You know his terrors, don't you? As you know mine. We haven't seen too much from Laporte lately, film-maker of a certain period, when you were his juice, when he was allowed to tie you up, and you commanded him to treat you like a slave. Then you told me to look at the moon, so I looked through the windshield at the moon. Then you told me to be impressed by the colour of the sky, so I applied myself to a study of the royal blue Paris sky. The turbaned Sikh assigned you, as he always does, the most impossible space in the garage, and when we walked past his window, he said, as he always does, The Champion of Parking. In the room you did sail so sweetly into my arms. I'm yours. For tonight. Your big joke. And my heart still leaps up between the declaration and the punchline. Like you left Laporte. Like you left Arif, and then slept with his twin brother. I leave them just before they leave me. It's better that way, no? Not to have a crying girl on your hands. Okay, darling, you're sleeping, the night has come to an end, and I'm nervous as hell. You'll either read this by yourself one day, or we'll be reading it together.

1980

Extracted from Four Letter Word: New Love Letters, edited by Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter, published by Chatto & Windus on November 1, 2007 at £12.99. Editors © Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter 2007 Individual contributors © 2007

+  David Bazan  -  Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen cover)
+  Gerald Collier  -  Is This What You Wanted (Leonard Cohen cover)
+  Ravens & Chimes - So Long, Marianne (Leonard Cohen Cover)

Love generally...

"Love generally but do not commit yourself to a particular love. You will become known as sympathetic friend and faithful lover because you never really permit these roles to seize your heart, you can practice and perfect them. But the heart is guarded, kept free and untarnished by any simple human affiliation so that it will reflect in glorious accuracy all the charts of the stars which the clouds one day will part to reveal. The important thing is not to approach anyone too close because tomorrow you may have become pure light."
Leonard Cohen

    [ Love generally...a mix ]

    Fiona Apple
In fact I can't stop falling out
I miss that stupid ache

    Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova
The little cracks that escalated

    PJ Harvey
I'm in New York now, No need for words now

    Twilight Singers
What makes you think I'm the one
Who will love you forever?
Everything you do has been done
And this won't last forever

    Nick Cave
Out of longing great wonders have been willed

    Rufus Wainwright
Tonight with words unspoken

    Pedro The Lion
Let down and hanging around

    The Kills
X-O, took my heart and crossed it
Set it down and lost it, set it down and lost it

    Morrissey
This is good or bad, all depending on
My general mood

    Minipop
But You Wanna Say
What You wanna Hear

    Tori Amos
Make it easy
Make this easy
It's not as heavy as it seems

    Cardigans
Whether you want empathy, animosity
An enemy or company, call me

    James
For Every Woman You Will Leave and Open Door

Art/Photos:
The Umbrella by Olena / + Autumn.In.Manhattan + by Olena / The Romance In Her Coffee by Olena / .alarm clock II by ~Braina / .shoes vs. music by ~Braina / Inside... by ~Nhung / A kiss by ~becoming-death

sex for depressives

/wendy bevan/

[ Spottiswoode And His Enemies - Never Gonna Get That Girl ]

“Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.”
Jeanette Winterson

“It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.”
Leonard Cohen

baby i've been here before

+ Marissa Nadler - Chelsea Hotel #2

So brave and so sweet

+ Allison Crowe - Hallelujah

You don't really care for music, do you?

+ Regina Spektor - Hotel Song

You will never be my fool

+ Sara Bareilles - Love Song

Blank stares at blank pages
No easy way to say this
You mean well but you make this hard on me

+ The White Stripes - I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself

Movies only make me sad
parties make me feel as bad
cause I'm not with you

+ Radiohead - The Bends

where are you now when I need you

send them a letter

via

You're reading them again,
The ones you didn't burn.
You press them to your lips,
My pages of concern.

[ Leonard Cohen - The Letters ] 

Erase

I took my pills for my memory
but I could not stop it
from erasing
Leonard Cohen

[ The Cardigans - Erase/Rewind (KCRW Session) ]

+ The Cardigans - Erase/Rewind (From The Old School Mix)

Please save me from this Avalanche

/ Elvis Costello - Please / 

/ Aimee Mann - Save me /

/ Leonard Cohen - Avalanche /

God is alive; Magic is afoot

[  "God is Alive, Magic is Afoot...." ]

Leonard reading from "BEAUTIFUL LOSERS"

+ Leonard Cohen - "Famous Blue Raincoat" - Germany, 1979

+ Leonard Cohen - Under Review: 1934-1977 - Thanks to this I now have a great little introductory DVD for my friends who ask "Who is this Leonard Cohen person?"
 

//Man

Javier Vallhonrat, Acaso 2000-2002 (Untitled #78)

What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate.
Leonard Cohen

[ Hawksley Workman - Complicated Man ]

[ Born To Lose ]

photo: Terry Richards

[ Leonard Cohen & Elton John - Born To Lose ]

[ Why Don't You Try ]

Hands by =roxytrollope

Do you really need his hands for your passion? 
Do you really need his heart for your throne? 

[ Leonard Cohen - Why Don't You Try (live) ]

She asked: Why this song?
I said: Because its better than saying "What does he have that I don't"?

[ Alone Together ]

Photo: Christophe Kutner

[ Judy Garland - Alone Together ]

I have never loved a woman for herself alone, but because I was caught up in the time with her, between train arrivals and train departures and other commitments. I have loved because she was beautiful and we were two humans lying in the forest at the edge of a dark lake or because she was not beautiful and we were two humans walking between buildings who understood something about suffering. I have loved because so many loved her or because so many were indifferent to her, or to make her believe that she was a girl in a meadow upon whose approved knees I laid my head or to make her believe that I was saint and that she had been loved by a saint. I never told a woman I liked her and when I wrote the words “My love,” I never meant it to mean “I love you.”

L.Cohen “Poems Written / While Dying of Love”

[ ('Til) I Kissed You ]

Art by ALEX MALEEV from "The ballad of Clint Barton and Wanda Maximoff"

[ The Everly Brothers - ('Til) I Kissed You ]

I want to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. I want to kiss with one eye open. Or I did. I don’t want to anymore”
L. Cohen

[ Alone + Easy Target ]

[ Foo Fighter - Alone + Easy Target ]

"I am not protected from your agitation of my heart. I am a bee in your world. I am a squirrel. I move too quickly. I die too fast. Your song is cruel and selfish. You have no gasp to express me. I appeared in this world with you when you were lost in the pride of being alone."
L. Cohen

The Moon

The Moon is outside.
I saw the great uncomplicated thing
when I went to take a leak just now.
I should have looked at it longer.
I am a poor lover of the moon.
I see it all at once and that's it
for me and the moon.
Leonard Cohen

+ "I had an affair with the Moon, in which there was neither sin nor shame......"

Nora Zehetner, the femme fatale in Brick.

    The moon's Celestial Highness;
    There's not a trace / upon her face
    Of diffidence or shyness:
    She borrows light / that, through the night,
    Mankind may all acclaim her--
    And, truth to tell, / she lights up well,
    So I, for one, don't blame her.
    Ah, pray make no mistake; / We're not shy--
    We're very wide awake,
    The moon and I..."
    The Mikado

[ Nora Zehetner - The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze ]

[ Tower Of Song ]

[ Tower Of Song  - Leonard Cohen, U2 ]

+ Official Page for the soundtrack
+ Martha Wainwright "Tower of Song" (Letterman)
+ Tower of Song Live
+ Leonard Cohen & Friends -- " So Long Marianne"

What is a saint?.....

[ It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City - David Bowie ]

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love

L. Cohen, Beautiful Losers

Saw I'm Your Man

I went to a screening of "I'm Your Man". One of the highlights for me was Leonard reading the foreword to the Chinese edition of Beautiful Losers. Was Bono talking about Mr. Cohen or was he talking about Jesus, Superman and Buddha incarnated into one? He easily wins the best ass kisser award out of all the interviews. Funniest goes to Rufus Wainwright who was kind of the co-star of the whole movie. At first I wasn't sold on Rufus's Latin cabaret take on "Everybody Knows" but it grew on me. Antony's "If It Be Your Will" was otherworldly. Jarvis did a theatrical "I Can't Forget", but its hard to overcome the pixies version.

+ Director Lian Lunson on musicians, poets and singers as "spiritual warriors"
+ Antony & The Johnsons - The Guests
+ Regina Spektor - "Chelsea Hotel"

I'm Your Man track list

Hot Damn! Nick Cave covering "I'm Your Man". To be released on July 25th.

+ Gibson's passion for Cohen - "Although millions of moviegoers know Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," what most people don't know is that Gibson also has another passion -- for the music of Leonard Cohen."

+ Film Forum Podcasts - Q & A session with filmmaker Lian Lunson, director of LEONARD COHEN: I’M YOUR MAN

+ PROFILE: LIAN LUNSON
+ Salon Letters to the Editor "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man"
+ The Man Himself performing last month

Cohen on the Radio

Fresh Air from WHYY, · Leonard Cohen's poetry career began 50 years ago with the 1956 publication of Let Us Compare Mythologies. His new volume of poetry is called Book of Longing. Cohen, known better as the deep-voiced writers of songs that straddle the folk-rock fence, is also working on an upcoming album to be released later this year.

CBC Radio (at the bottom),· Poet, singer, songwriter, Canadian icon Leonard Cohen joins Shelagh Rogers for a full hour of great conversation about his life in music and poetry. Five of Leonard Cohen's songs were recently inducted into the Canadian Songwriters' Hall of Fame.

+ Paste - the 100 living songwriters issue: #6. leonard cohen
+ Rufus - Chelsea Hotel #2

He's your man

Fantastic trailer for the film, featuring clips of U2 performing "Tower of Song" and Antony singing "If it be your will".

+ Film Review
+ Wikipedia - I'm Your Man 
+ R.E.M. Covers Leonard Cohen
+ The Cohen Covers: "Famous Blue Raincoat"
+ Previously...[ Everybody Knows ]

Coming Next Month - at long last....

Go little book
And stop disgracing me
There are serious men
And women in my life
And you have given them
The upper hand

+ Publisher's Weekly Review

[ Saving All My Love For You ]

text: L. Cohen
photo: Nikola

[ Tom waits - Saving All My Love For You ]

I wish women would hurry up and take over

I wish women would hurry up and take over. It’s going to happen so let’s get it over with…then we can finally recognize that women really are the minds and the force that holds everything together; and men really are gossips and artists. Then we could go about our childish work and they could keep the world going. I really am for the matriarchy.
Photo: Bersa
Text: Cohen

[ Take This Waltz ]

[ Leonard Cohen - Take This Waltz (live) ]
"I'm so happy, so happy, to sing this song for Garcia Lorca, I stood on my head for him."

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint
Federico García Lorca

  Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.

  I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.

  If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

  never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

[ She Haunts My Dreams ]

[ Spain - She Haunts My Dream ]

In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
Leonard Cohen

photo:  jasonnocito

[ Everybody Knows ]

[ Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows (live) ]

+ "Go Little Book" from the forthcoming Book of Longing - via LCF.
+  Leonard Cohen Leads Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame Inductees

+ Official Site for I'm Your Man

WHEN I WENT OUT

WHEN I WENT OUT - Leonard Cohen 

Bono + Cohen

L. Cohen ( God ) and Bono ( Jesus )

" I filmed the Came So Far For Beauty show produced by Hal Willner at the Sydney Opera House in January 2005. All those great performances by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Antony, Linda Thompson, Teddy Thompson, Beth Orton and the Handsome Family will be included in the film."

+ Lian Lunson talks about his film: I'm Your Man
+ "Bono wants to be Leonard Cohen."

[ Bono - Hallelujah ]

POETRY...

Art: Frank Miller

POETRY IS NOT AN OCCUPATION
BUT A VEREDICT.
Leonard Cohen

[ Leonard Cohen - Democracy ( spoken word )]

[ J. Tweedy - No More Poetry ]

[ Woke Up In A Strange Place ]

[ Jeff Buckley - Woke Up In A Strange Place (acoustic) ]

"I heard my soul singing behind a leaf, plucked the leaf, but then I heard it singing behind a veil. I tore the veil, but then I heard it singing behind a wall. I broke the wall, and I heard my soul singing against me. I build up the wall, mended the curtain, but I could not put back the leaf. I held it in my hand and I heard my soul singing mightily against me. This is what it's like to study without a friend."
The Book Of Mercy - Leonard Cohen

U2 & Cohen

Bono: 'We need to talk'

KOT: You told me the other day that U2 had "Kid A'd" itself to death [a reference to Radiohead's 2000 progressive-rock album "Kid A"]. It was a funny line, but I'm disappointed to hear that.
 
BONO: I want to hear Radiohead, extraordinary band that they are, on MTV. I want them setting fire to the imaginations of 16-, 15-, 14-year-old kids

+ U2 film video with Leonard Cohen
+ "Cohen's upcoming projects include a book, television special, DVD, CD album and extensive worldwide touring." [via] "The Book of Longing" will finally come out?
+ Radiohead to have new album done by Feb. `06

raveonettes show

Ode to Sharin Foo

Went to the raveonettes show this past week with Colleen and ran into "the" Tony Cooke ( frequent commentator here) and zenbetty. They put on a thunderous show, my personal highlights were "Veronica Fever", "Great Love Sound" and "My boyfriend's Back". The shirt Sharin was wearing reminded me of the Velvet Underground. Well, she reminds me of Nico anyways, which made me think of "Joan Of Arc".

{ about the image on the back of Songs of Leonard Cohen }

[ Letters ]

{ photo: Let It Burn }

You never liked to get
The letters that I sent.
But now you've got the gist
Of what my letters meant.
You're reading them again,
The ones you didn't burn.
"The Letters" - Leonard Cohen

Letters always get burned
"Motion Picture Soundtrack" - Christopher O'Riley (Radiohead cover)

Cohen for Nobel

[ AUDIO ]  Paul Kennedy convenes a public forum at Montreal's Blue Metropolis Literary Festival to nominate Leonard Cohen for The Nobel Prize in Literature.

+ CBC Archives - Leonard Cohen: Canada's Melancholy Bard - Excellent collection of Audio and Video.
+ CBC host heads Nobel drive for Leonard Cohen

Previously.... [ Lustless ] [ Cohen is 70 ][ "Beautiful Losers is...." ] [ Women.. ]

[ I came so far for beauty ]

" Her shoulders were intolerably graceful: I would never permit my wife to wear strapless gowns with such shoulders, but how could she be my wife? Renny says to Nell in the English version of Monparnasse's rather comic tale: "The infamous shadow of our unnatural affair will follow us into the low depths of the Inferno which our Father who is in the sky shows to us with his superb digit." For some odd reason the worse translations are not from the Chinese, but from plain French."
Vladimir Nabokov, "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle"

[ Stina Nordenstam -  I came so far for beauty ]

"They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died. Everything else was fiction. It was the beauty they carried. He remembered them all, there was nothing lost. To serve them. His mind sang praise as he climbed a street to the mountain.
For the body of Heather, which slept and slept.
For the body of Bertha, which fell with apples and a flute.
For the body of Lisa, early and late, which smelled of speed and forests.
For the body of Tamara, whose thighs made him a fetishist of thighs.
For the body of Norma, goosefleshed, wet.
For the body of Patricia, which he had still to tame.
For the body of Shell, which was altogether sweet in his memory, which he loved as he walked, the little breasts he wrote about, and her hair which was so black it shone blue.
For all the bodies in and out of bathing suits, clothes, water, going between rooms, lying on grass, taking the print of grass, dancing discipline, leaping over horses, growing in mirrors, felt like treasure, slobbered over, cheated for, all of them, the great ballet line, the cream in them, the sun on them, the oil anointed."
Leonard Cohen, "The Favorite Game"

"Beautiful Losers is...."

" Beautiful Losers is
a love story
a psalm
a black mass
a monument
a satire
a prayer
a shriek
a road map through the wilderness
a joke
a tasteless affront
an hallucination
a bore
an irrelevant display of diseased virtuosity
a Jesuitical tract
an Orange sneer
a Scataological Lutheran extravagance
in short
a disagreeable religious epic of astounding beauty."

"This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously.  May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like? Dip into it here and there.  Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity.  After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.  In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer æ an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part. '"
A NOTE TO THE READER

+ Excerpt from "Beautiful Losers"
+ Amazon: Look inside this book
  Beautiful Losers is my favorite book.

Lustless

text: Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen is 70

+ Toronto Star: Leonard Cohen hits 70 [ via Chromewaves ]
+ 70 things you may not know about him

Entertainment Weekly, January 1993:

Page 2, Page 3.

Thomas Crown

In the elevator after the boardroom meeting, Thomas Crown and his subordinates quote from the Leonard Cohen song "The Stranger Song": "Ah, you hate to see another tired man lay down his hand like he was giving up the holy game of poker." [ Trivia for Thomas Crown Affair]

+ "After The Sunset" - I wish this was a Thomas Crown sequel.

[ Willie Nelson - Lonely Nights ]

 

[ Willie Nelson - Lonely Nights ]

Text: L. C.

[ Famous Blue Raincoat ]

[ Famous Blue Raincoat (Live) ] 

“I want to touch people like a magician, to change them or hurt them, leave my brand, make them beautiful. I want to  be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. I want to kiss with one eye open. Or I did. I don’t want to anymore”

Women...

Text: Leonard Cohen
Photo: Diana Scheunemann

Curiosities: signed books

Since I was talking about a signed book earlier....I took bad pictures of the Chris Ware and Chip Kidd ones so I'll add them later.

Leonard Cohen has a stamp made out of the symbol on the cover for "Book of Mercy".

Neil Gaiman drew a luna.

Quentin Tarantino + Leonard Cohen

This month's WTF moment ( and when I type "WTF" I'm hearing Gilbert Gottfried's voice from "I love the 80's strikes back" on vh1 ): Quentin Tarantino in a Leonard Cohen video. [ via Drew's blog-o-rama ]

Democracy

[ Cohen reads "Democracy" ]

Cohen Collection

Some of my Leonard Cohen books. Can you tell hes my favorite?

She sat down at the piano...

She sat down at the piano
the most beautiful pianist in the world
dressed in a photographer's robe
I was rambling through the yellow pages
of my old slave's heart
for something better than gratitude
when upon the mucous she installed
the tiniest royal sailing ship
the sea has ever given back
saying, Sometimes I am with thee
sometimes I must go to where
a man is stranger to his pain.
Leonard Cohen , The Energy of Slaves

from The Book Of Mercy

" Friend, when u speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say. I listen in such a way so as not to add to your loneliness. I make some replay at every opportunity so as not to compound you loneliness. Thus the conversation continues under an umbrella of optimism, If you suggest a feeling, I affirm it. If you provoke, I accept the challenge. "

L. Cohen, "The Book of mercy"

The Only Poem

[ First we take Manhattan - Leonard Cohen ]

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin