By E.M. Cioran (via vacantgarde)
From Direct Address
Oh god of walking out
into a field that will burn
in a year, wrap a square
around these peach trees
and call it a holy of holies.
In this empty air I can see
cinderblocks surrounding
an air conditioning unit, and
I need you to breathe this clay
behemoth back to the car lot.
Oh god of life going on unannounced
on the other side of this wall,
there would be so much space here
were it not for all these people.
Come out with me and we’ll lay down
sand bags and tour the entire length
with trumpets. Something will fall,
and I’ll name it after you
by Peter Bogart Johnson
Let’s kiss. Let refrain do what it does. From touching,
how skin withstands toxins, organs glued. I love holding you.
Orchestrating the drive down Occidental Blvd, we’re accident in future tense.
Pigeons make a standstill. Coffee stains upholstery. At intersections,
fever is a combination of fear and hot pavement.
Let kiss and chemicals and cannibals and feathers. Unsnap. Unwhip.
Hinging on: how could you? Warp the mouth around open-ended swallows—
birds, I mean. Stay long enough. Let’s happen.
Do what you’re going to.
“
| — | Seatbelts Off by Kelli Anne Noftle (via decembrist) |
What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.
“
| — | By Anton Chekhov (via decembrist) |
I haven’t the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
“
| — | From Naked by David Sedaris (via larmoyante) |
I know I’m not sufficiently obscure
to please the critics, nor devious enough.
Imagery escapes me.
I cannot find those mild and precious words
to clothe the carnage.
Blood is blood and murder’s murder.
What’s a lavender word for lynch?
to please the critics, nor devious enough.
Imagery escapes me.
I cannot find those mild and precious words
to clothe the carnage.
Blood is blood and murder’s murder.
What’s a lavender word for lynch?
“
| — |
From To the Pale Poets by Ray Durem |
You were unsure which pain is worse — the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.
“
| — | From Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy (via larmoyante) |
I Almost Went to Bed…
I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater
and how i kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I’d
never been your lover
by Leonard Cohen
After a Greek Proverb
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.
We’ve taped the broken window pane, TVs still out of whack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.
When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—
We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,
Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
by A.E. Stallings
The Oregon Trail Is a Lonely Place to Die from Syphilis
I am cowering in the corner of a corner, the halo
so bright I’m like holy shit I can see through my
fingers, holy shit I can see through penance, holy
shit holy shit burning like a heated aerosol can.
We always ford the river, but today child #2,
Wendy, can’t stomach the gummas that have balled
over my earlobes. Love me I say. Love me I whisper.
Love me I carve into the side of my least favorite ox.
I am a brilliant button without any cloth. The rabbits
are rabid. The bears are rabid. The deer are rabid.
Tell me why they walk with antlers on fire. Tell me
why the banker from Boston starts the trail with
twelve hundred dollars more than the farmer
from Illinois. Does he not touch his wife with two
hands? I am not rich but I touch everything worth
touching twice. My syphilis is a hole in the side
of the earth, is a note to ex-lovers: don’t ford
the river alone, is a used pair of overalls I trade
to a carpenter from Ohio for 22 rusted bullets.
When you come home I whisper words I never
learned in your ear. Baby, you are the last shot
of penicillin.
by Gregory Sherl
On Faith
How do people stay true to each other?
When I think of my parents all those years
in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever
longing for anything else — or: no, they must
have longed; there must have been flickerings,
stray desires, nights she turned from him,
sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently,
smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breath
and tangled limbs must have seemed
not enough. But it was. Or they just
held on. A gift, perhaps, I’ve tossed out,
having been always too willing to fly
to the next love, the next and the next, certain
nothing was really mine, certain nothing
would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all;
faith that this latest love won’t end, or ends
in the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard.
When he turns his back to me now, I think:
disappear. I think: not what I want. I think
of my mother lying awake in those arms
that could crush her. That could have. Did not.
by Cecilia Woloch
There are women who have no inner life wherever one looks for it, being nothing but masks. That man is to be pitied who falls in with such ghostly, necessarily unsatisfying creatures; but just these women are able to stimulate a man’s desire most intensely: he searches for their souls — and searches on and on.
“
| — | Human, All Too Human by Nietzsche (via thedailynietzsche) |
The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues—he had heard that, and maybe that was true. What for a certainty was true, however, was that the guilty fled, fled like hell and took plenty of swift precautions, when someone did pursue: someone real and expert and at the same time hidden. And very close by.
“
| — | From A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick |
‘God, am I like the rest after all?’— So he used to think starting awake at night —’Am I like the rest?’
This was poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the world’s rarest work. The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street- lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
“
| — | From F. Scott Fitzgerald by Tender is the Night (via paulshortie) |
