I don’t know you. The only thing I know about you is, you’re reading this. I don’t know if your happy or not; I don’t know whether you’re young or not. I sort of hope you’re young and sad. If you’re old and happy, I can imagine that you’ll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You’ll remember someone who broke your heart, and you’ll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can’t, you smug old git. Oh you’ll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again?
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
by Wendell Berry
Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.
When I finish work and get in bed, I always think: let me not wake up. Let me just go on sleeping. ‘Cause then I wouldn’t have to think about anything.
He expects me to console him, for his own guilt and the damage that’s been done to him. But I am not good at this…he spectacle of his suffering does not make me compassionate, but ruthless.
“
| — |
From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
|
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
CONTINUE
by Frank Stanford
Once the people I knew died of suicide and motorcycle crashes and other forms of violence. Now it’s diseases: heart attacks, cancer, the betrayals of the body. The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies-drive them on?
“
| — |
From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
|
Time is a dimension,” he says. “You can’t separate it from space. Space-time is what we live in.” He says there are no such things as discrete objects which remain unchanged, set apart from the flow of time. He says space-time is curved and that in curved space-time the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a line following the curve. He says that time can be stretched or shrunk, and that it runs faster in some places than in others. He says that if you put one identical twin in a high-speed rocket for a week, he’d come back to find his brother ten years older than he is himself. I say I think that would be sad.
“
| — |
From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
|
Letters from Exile - II
It’s snowing in New York
It wasn’t just the snow
eating up the suburban baroque,
or that you had just walked in,
cold as a welldigger’s heart.
It wasn’t the twilight leaving us
with our loneliness, or the night
unfreezing fireflies. It wasn’t you,
with your elbows shored up
on old sienna tables, nor me,
keeling my way to the moon.
It wasn’t the television
drooling relentless channels.
It was us: we were never geared
for love. The regularity was too dull.
Imagine the earth in orbit,
and this giant circumference
of light slowly slipping west:
everyone on that edge, waking
up together, lovers, still in bed,
entering each other and leaving
in fierce automobiles. It was
that routine we couldn’t live.
We were like a dog
in love with his bone.
You throw it to the far end
of the field and he races off,
not to recover the piece,
but just to clear
the distance in between.
by Hemant Mohapatra
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that’s all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual.
“
| — |
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
|
If I cut off my ear, would the market value go up? Better still, stick my head in the oven, blow out my brains. What rich art collectors like to buy, among other things, is a little vicarious craziness.
“
| — |
From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
|
The Only Animal
The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked, and abruptly
returned,
the room empty
The only animal that cries,
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth
somewhere
the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.
REST IS HERE
by Franz Wright
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
The cause of most of man’s unhappiness is sacrificing what he wants most for what he wants now.
