Turn now your mind away from Everything Monstrous:

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/dandy-cane-brandishing

Have then That Confidence. 

Let these be "The American Days."

At times in my life, I've kept it better together.

Your present?  This Now--with all of its trappings!

Let these be The American Days

--whatever that yet might mean!

Who decides what's invasive?

Who can carry you or me?

These are The Deeds; these are The Moments; these are The Ways:

Today is The Lesson: ...It's worth repairing.

Meditate on Cosmic Goodness:

That Art Thou!

& All Such Bother!

Love cannot Out Eternal

The Ocean

&

Even Ocean fades and falls... fades and falls away...

Springing Verses cannot match

The Passions as those passions go through paces...

& run their courses...

Signing-Off: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/track/american-days

Five to One: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/twitch-glisten

"44 1/4": https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/44-1-4

Some Reflections on This Present Age:

* Ripe & full, our God will show me all that dust.

* Everything is seasonal: Wind and Winter and Spring and Finery.

* Leaves: They will land as our winds will weave them.

* Just because it comes from within you doesn't mean it comes from you.

* Oh, you, my so-tender friend: Stay with me and pass this time now.

* And if you share your secret, do I have to believe it?

* I know that you'd like a poem that will tell you "You're beautiful! You're wild! And you're worth every look!"

* One life to live: Many lives to touch.

* That clinging vibe of peaceful nighttime can't wait itself to attend on us.

* There is no winning: There never was: And still there's always been that story...

* How 'bout a lighthouse to peek through your storm?

Promotional Single:  https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/track/youre-beautiful

Some concluding reflections from Dr. Johnson:

It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward....

A large work is difficult because it is large, even though all its parts might singly be performed with facility; where there are many things to be done, each must be allowed its share of time and labour, in the proportion only which it bears to the whole; nor can it be expected, thatthe stones which form the dome of a temple, should be squared and polished like the diamond of a ring....

Of the event of this work, for which, having laboured it with so much application, I cannot but have some degree of parental fondness, it isnatural to form conjectures....

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years....

I look with pleasure on my [work], however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail....

In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the [current work] was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow: and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed....

I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

"Stay with me, and watch a little while: Another law will come on down."

You're a healthy French model: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/track/everythings-meant-to-be

You're a hungry French model: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/high-romance-2

Everything's Meant To Be: On "High Romance": Do not give your time or your heart away.

Well, you're here right now.  Won't you won't be back again?

I am The Patience.  The Patience Found "Most Infuriating."

Be my Valentine?

M.

"Animal Heats" of The Rope River Blues Band

"All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.... I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin." -- from Middlemarch by George Eliot

https://roperiverbluesband.bandcamp.com/album/field-stream-animal-heat

"Summer's Almost Gone; Summer Never Ends."

 "Summer's Almost Gone; Summer Never Ends."

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/sir-richards-theatre-hour

Show Me to My Wessex Heights.

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/show-me-to-my-wessex-heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand 
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, 
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly, 
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be. 

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend - 
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend: 
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I, But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky. 

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways - Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days: 
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things - 
Men with a wintry sneer, and women with tart disparagings. 

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was, 
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this, 
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis. 

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon, Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune; 
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed 
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast. 

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night, 
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white, 
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near, 
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear. 

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, 
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; 
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know; 
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go. 

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west, 
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest, 
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, 
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty. 

- Thomas Hardy (December 1896)