More Drawings by Gorka Olmo (via fer1972)
Living the Good Life
There is only one locale for the heart
And that’s somewhere between the dick and the brain.
I don’t believe love is for chickenshits.
It’s low, dark, and cold-blooded, like a cottonmouth.
Children are often involved. They stink
When they sprout in the garden of light,
And they stink mulching their way back down.
Cold-hearted women, work, madness, and death
Are the things separating the nuts from the shells.
Everything else is strictly a pile of shit-
Except for childhood, which we moon over
Because it smells to high heaven. So, go it
Alone. Solitude is a constellation:
People can’t connect light anymore,
The only code they can break is darkness.
You can get a file in the heart
But you can’t jimmy love - a woman once said
by Frank Stanford
What we share…may be a lot like a traffic accident, but we do share it. We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
“
| — | From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood |
It was a distress she’d not felt since childhood when somebody (she’d forgotten who) had taught her the trick of looking at infinity by putting two mirrors face to face, each staring into the other’s reflection. She’d been twelve, thirteen at most, and completely spooked by the idea of this emptiness echoing emptiness, back and forth, back and forth, until they reached the limits of light. For years after she’d remembered that moment, confronted with a physical representation of something her mind revolted at.
“
| — | From The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker |
Before life, the dream of life. Before the thing solid, the solid thing dreamt. And mind, dreaming or awake, knew justice, which was therefore as natural as matter, its absence in any exchange deserving of more than a fatalistic shrug. It merited a howl of outrage; and a passionate pursuit of why. If she wished to live beyond the impending holocaust it was to shout that shout. To find out what crime her species had committed against the universal mind that it should now be tottering on execution.
“
| — | From The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker |
I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.
“
| — | From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood |
Meditation on Self-Mutilation
The difference between habitually
cutting your wrist with a razor
kept in your breast pocket and opening
your chest with broken glass—is it a matter
of impulse control or audience
or both? Which do we admire most?
If you’re going to burn yourself as punishment
for eating, I say make sure your mother knows.
I knew a dominatrix who said, as a kid,
what couldn’t be said by ripping out her
eyelashes. They’re featuring girls who cut themselves in
the New York Times Magazine, yet you’re still purging
secretly after meals. Imagine: someone
intentionally puking on the table—just once.
by Naomi Clewett
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
“
| — | By David Foster Wallace (via tel0s) |
Your letters got sadder. Your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. It didn’t help. You said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.
“
| — | From Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski (via freins) |
Fuck You Poem #45
Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked and defaced.
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.
Fuck you humidly and icily.
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.
Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opium, codeine, laudanum and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.
Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.
Fuck you at low and high tide.
And fuck you astride
anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,
bathrooms, or kitchens.
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.
And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you.
by Amy Gerstler
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
“
| — | From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (via larmoyante) |
I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: ‘Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.’ It works wonders.
“
| — | From Money by Martin Amis (via strangephenomena) |
