That Time
Regina Spektor
That Time by Regina Spektor
January 2012
106 posts
Where We Slept Together
I open the doors of my house at night
I latch the screens
Allegory of love
Like a dog shaking all over
Like a bite that itches six inches deep
My old radio is like a toothache
Someone had in summers past
Another place set at the table
There are no longer any shotguns or guitars
In my house
There is a lotion for the hands
Each blister another
Blood-shot moon
A yawn a blessing in disguise
A branch where a bush grows
Its thorns
Allegory of love
There are bookshelves I threw together
I took the lumber
From a horse thief’s barn
Go back
And there are books the dead light their stoves with
Books howling like pines on a ridge
Cats in heat
Deserted and cold
Like a handgun or a spoor
A gar looking for a wife in a swamp
A room where a raped adolescent
Is interrogated
About her past sexual life
Go back
Wearing a hat of smudge candles
Ducking back
Up the fingers of the lake
Like a ring or a cobweb
You can pass my window you can pass
My door
You can step on the blade of my hoe
All these maps
These photographs
I have wasted nails on
The cut lines it took so long to clear
Are growing back
Scars
I have looked for furrows in the dust
On the banister
And long hair in the bed
Scabs like butterflies
Standing up for the flag
Rocks in the garden of love
The clouds are like fat grandmothers
Before they were mothers
Getting ready for a dance
All these spools of barbed-wire
I meant to put up
When the orchard was mine
I’m sore from mending
Small holes with tissue
Allegory of love
The rented tomb
Like a sour mash
Brewing in the ditch
They’re snoring underwater
They’re droning like ships departed
From the black holes of space
In the morning I’m going
To leave
A bottle on the stump
Like thunderclouds
And packages of blood
The seeds in the hardware store
Like a stew for flies
It boils down
To a slop jar at the foot of this bed
by Frank Stanford
“Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and therefore, etc, etc. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do so; and that is an important point.”
—From Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dead Winter Days
Agalloch
Dead Winter Days by Agalloch
The Funnel
As it does not seem to stop on its own I crop my breath and bind it with gauze and surgical ribbons.
As if it were housed elsewhere, as in a radio, I leave parcels of it for later use and yet
even if I do not think, this chest remembers movements of an aerial dance.
Air is everywhere, its portions gauged by pinch or kisses.
For an instant my lungs were worried and still.
Air swirled from them as from a sink,
waving and signaling someone.
I tried to stop what started,
but everything emptied
of everything else
but restraint,
the sum of
all you
have
left
me
by Kathryn Rantala
“I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music.”
—From Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (via distincts)
“Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.”
—From Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson (via corona-borealis)
Lorelei
Cocteau Twins
Lorelei by Cocteau Twins
Last Testaments
The cancer began in her tonsils,
she’d say that with a smile
almost expecting to be teased
for such a serious disease
rooting in that childish place.
She remembered her son at four
when he’d had his out,
the way he’d looked at her as the nurse
slid the cold thermometer up his bum.
She carried on as usual, cleaned the house,
fried a chicken for her husband every Sunday,
cutting the breast in four pieces, the wings in two.
The morning of the day she died
she took him down the basement,
showed him how to separate the clothes,
how to measure the soap, set the dials,
how to hang his shirts and pants
so the creases would fallout
*
The man with a worn-out heart, sold his tools
so his wife wouldn’t be left with that part of him
to deal with. How he had loved them
in his hands, each so perfectly designed
to fit the palm, the wheels, bits and teeth
made for one specific use.
On the empty walls of the garage hung the shapes
of all the tools he’d ever owned,
sixty years of wrenches, saws and drills.
He’d traced around them row on row
so he’d know where to hang each one,
know what his neighbour had borrowed,
and failed to return. From his pocket he removed
a black felt pen and in the corner on a board painted white,
he drew the perfect outline of a man.
*
Before she walked into the river
and didn’t come back, the woman
who couldn’t remember the day of the week
or the faces of her children,
made a list of all the men she’s ever loved,
left it for her husband by the coffee pot,
his name on the bottom,
underlined twice
for emphasis.
by Lorna Crozier
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.”
—From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
—By Franz Kafka (via gildedwhispers)
“Fantasy plays a part in the way I maneuver, slick flourishes,
filed acrylic nails tapping richly on thin glass. Here I bend,
balk, and bray, become something animal for you, curl
my talons into knots. Hunched inwards stealthily, I wait
like this for years, grow briny, fins, take to water—
in the end not bound by air, only breathing wetness, smelling salt.” —From Desire Not Well Tended by Gina Abelkop
filed acrylic nails tapping richly on thin glass. Here I bend,
balk, and bray, become something animal for you, curl
my talons into knots. Hunched inwards stealthily, I wait
like this for years, grow briny, fins, take to water—
in the end not bound by air, only breathing wetness, smelling salt.” —From Desire Not Well Tended by Gina Abelkop
Diana
Comus
Diana by Comus
Galactica
We are now accepting apologies
for the universe’s indignities:
spitting stars, solar burnout,
the cosmic purgatory of hanging
from a fence by your underwear,
for gaseous ruptures, vortexes of nothing,
and certainly for the nothingness.
Could it have been more plain?
Frozen pupils, battered moons.
Weren’t we paying attention?
Even here, what is more worrisome
than the silence of an imploded
mountain, the meteor-pocked face
of a desert, the past coming back?
One moment you’re tending sheep
with an old Navajo woman, asking
for the Diné word for shape-shifter;
the next Crazy Harry’s gyrating
in the school yard as we bang
on downspouts in a downpour.
What were the heavens doing
before we lifted Harry and labored
to nail him with lunch-box fruit?
Did they inch a finger, did they
sleep as he wedged? Milky oval,
cry Uncle! Say you’re sorry
for leaving him with a soap dish
of Brillo pads and lemon juice.
Sorry for the ever-wanting
and scrub brush turning to flame,
for the teeth grinding and drip
like coal slag down our throats.
We’ll take them now: your volcanic spew,
salts and celestial bruises,
weary queries, notes, as Celan says,
and the bottles on the seas
swept up with schools of tuna.
What did we say: If you find this,
write back. If you are reading this,
you’re too close. My name is …
We’ll take them like slugs to beer,
everything we ever wished for
wrapped in sleeping bags, pupa, coma,
as the stars in their death march
move across the sky silent
as coyotes passing in the dark.
by James Hoch
“Like someone whose eyes, when lifted up after staring at a book for a long time, wince at the mere sight of a naturally bright sun, so too, when I lift my eyes from looking at myself, it hurts and stings me to see the vivid clarity and independence-from-me of the world outside, of the existence of others, of the position and correlation of movements in space. I stumble on the real feelings of others. The antagonism of their psyches towards mine shoves me and trips up my steps. I slide and tumble above and between the sounds of their strange words in my ears, the hard and definite falling of their feet on the actual floor, their motions that really exist, their various and complex ways of being persons who are not mere variants of my own.”
—From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
“Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There’s a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing’s kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there’s also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.”
—by David Foster Wallace (via theftbyink)
“She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’etat–they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. And so, while her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby Kochamma followed American NBA league games, one-day cricket and all the Grand Slam tennis tournaments, On weekdays she watched The Bold and The Beautiful and Santa Barbara , where brittle blondes with lipstick and hairstyles rigid with spray seduced androids and defended their sexual empires. Baby Kochamma loved their shiny clothes and the smart, bitchy repartee. During the day, disconnected snatches of it came back to her and made her chuckle.”
—From The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Comme Il Faut
Enslavement of Beauty
Comme Il Faut by Enslavement of Beauty
Eulogy to a Hell of a Dame
some dogs who sleep At night
must dream of bones
and I remember your bones
in flesh
and best
in that dark green dress
and those high-heeled bright
black shoes,
you always cursed when you drank,
your hair coming down you
wanted to explode out of
what was holding you:
rotten memories of a
rotten
past, and
you finally got
out
by dying,
leaving me with the
rotten
present;
you’ve been dead
28 years
yet I remember you
better than any of
the rest;
you were the only one
who understood
the futility of the
arrangement of
life;
all the others were only
displeased with
trivial segments,
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much.
here’s a drink
to your bones
that
this dog
still
dreams about.
by Charles Bukowski
For Jane
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.
by Charles Bukowski
Barfly
Jane, who has been dead for 31 years,
never could have
imagined that I would write a screenplay of our drinking
days together
and
that it would be made into a movie
and
that a beautiful movie star would play her
part.
I can hear Jane now: “A beautiful movie star? oh,
for Christ’s sake!”
Jane, that’s show biz, so go back to sleep, dear, because
no matter how hard they tried they
just couldn’t find anybody exactly like
you.
and neither can
I.
by Charles Bukowski
“
And then in Aliens and Anorexia you wrote about your own physical experience, being slightly anorexic — how anorexia arises not from narcissism, a fixation with your body, but a sense of its aloneness:
“If I’m not touched it becomes impossible to eat. Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm: when things break down. If I’m not touched my skin feels like the flip side of a magnet. It’s only after sex sometimes that I can eat a little.”
And that by recognizing the aloneness of your body it’s possible to reach outside, become an Alien, escape the predetermined world:
“Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal? Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Distant memories of food: strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes…”
” —From I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Blood Roses
Tori Amos
Blood Roses by Tori Amos
How to Tell a Story
There is a way of telling stories. A red pen. A teacher to move it.
Instead you have hands, and a Light inside you, and Bones.
Instead you have ideas, which ricochet, and an anger that won’t sit still,
and dogs from outside which come to die in the quiet spots inside of you.
And, deliberately, you have noise.
You have rape, and cities, the noise of the dumb, and of the very rape of the
earth, an ache, a strangeness like swallowing feathers, a bitterness, you have.
There is a way of telling stories. They tell you it is not like this.
So you remove your arms, that way no hands can find anything.
You reject the light to please the darkness.
You and I, we become just bones, moving with the stiffness of the dead, caught
in the riot of the rotting, and producing similar sounds.
A page opens before you like a new day
and this is where you find your story.
The earth sings with a thousand ways to tell it.
Lose your tongue.
Don’t be confused by shadow, and when you hit water, tread.
Find God, ask questions, don’t leave till you’ve tasted the tea.
You don’t need to multiply. Never divide.
Carry the one on your back if you have to.
When you meet the devil, don’t spit at him, but don’t make love to him either.
When you meet me, take my blooming, bloody palm.
You’ll know where to find me, I’ll be in every page held by greasy fingers.
I will be the bread that sustains you. If you remember your hunger,
I will remember you.
And when they tell you life is not like this, life is never like this,
life will never be like this, insist that the sun
has always found a time and a place, the moon too knows when and where to enter,
and you too have your stories,
and you too have your place.
by Shira Erlichman
“I wish he were here, or Ben, or any man I know. I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterward, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear holes, the nosehairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as children.”
—From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
“A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcehood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.”
—From The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
“
They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples. And banana jam (illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organization) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said.
As per their books.
Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question.
Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.
It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.
It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.
” —From The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Leech Jar
Emilie Autumn
Leech Jar by Emilie Autumn
Lay
down
to sleep
to rest
to waste
across a stretcher
across a shoulder
over a leg
beneath an arm
in a shroud
in a crib
on top of a car
chained to a bumper
beneath a bridge
in town square
in the fountain
in the Tigris
under water boiled from smart bombs
in a cellar
in backseat of car counting streetlamps strobing overhead
under bomblets
under tendrils of phosphorus
in a burnt silhouette
on a cot
under a tent
still holding your breath
beneath dining table
beneath five stories
in a hole
by Solmaz Sharif
