Genius.

Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

Gustave Adolphe Désiré Crauk, Le Combat du Centaure, 1900

Photo by Robert Doisneau, 1971

The Hermit by Robert Bly

Darkness is falling through darkness 
Falling from ledge
To ledge.
There is a man whose body is perfectly whole.
He stands the storm behind him 
And the grass blades are leaping in the wind.
Darkness is gathered in folds
About his feet.
He is no one. When we see
Him we grow calm 
And sail on into the tunnels of joyful death.

"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." ~ Pablo Picasso

"A genius is the one most like himself." ~ Thelonious Sphere Monk

Mirage Rock is worthy. Listen

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Thinking of you), 2000

Jenny Holzer, SLIPPING INTO MADNESS IS GOOD FOR THE SAKE OF COMPARISON, 2008

In Back of the Real by Allen Ginsberg

railroad yard in San Jose 
I wandered desolate 
in front of a tank factory 
and sat on a bench 
near the switchman's shack. 

A flower lay on the hay on 
the asphalt highway 
--the dread hay flower 
I thought--It had a 
brittle black stem and 
corolla of yellowish dirty 
spikes like Jesus' inchlong 
crown, and a soiled 
dry center cotton tuft 
like a used shaving brush 
that's been lying under 
the garage for a year. 

Yellow, yellow flower, and 
flower of industry, 
tough spiky ugly flower, 
flower nonetheless, 
with the form of the great yellow 
Rose in your brain! 
This is the flower of the World. 

plea to a passing maid by Charles Bukowski

girl in shorts, biting your nails, revolving your ass,
the boys are looking at you --
you hold more, it seems,
than Gauguin or Brahma or Balzac,
more, at least, than the skulls that swim at our feet,
your swagger breaks the Eiffel tower,
turns the heads of old newsboys long ago gone
sexually to pot;
your caged malarkey, your idiot's dance,
mugging it, delightful -- don't ever wash stained under-
wear or chase your acts of love
through neighborhood alleys --
don't spoil it for us,
putting on weight and weariness,
settling for TV and a namby-pamby husband;
don't give up that absurd dispossessed wiggle
to water a Saturday's front lawn --
don't send us back to Balzac or introspection
or Paris
or wine, don't send us back
to the incubation of our doubts or the memory
of death-wiggle, bitch, madden us with love
and hunger, keep the sharks, the bloody sharks,
from the heart.

Eliza Frye, Jean Grey from the X-Men, 2011

The Current by Raymond Carver

These fish have no eyes 
these silver fish that come to me in dreams, 
scattering their roe and milt 
in the pockets of my brain.

But there's one that comes-- 
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest, 
that simply holds against the current,

closing its dark mouth against 
the current, closing and opening 
as it holds to the current.