February 2012
8 posts
3 tags
“What kind of sun expounds its rays
upon the hills but then mutes
like an...”
– Prageeta Sharma, Poem for Leigh Hunt.
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Jam Hsiao, “The One and Only You”...
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“I’ve decided that some of us, fearful that the world we know might not outlive...”
– Alice Walker, “Coming In from the Cold” (1984), from Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987. (via thecomfortofmybooks)
January 2012
16 posts
2 tags
natk:
Life is what you think is waiting for you outside that front door, crying ‘use me’, but you can’t, not yet, not now, because you’re broke, you’re broken, you’re busy, you haven’t graduated, you can’t get the time from work, you can’t get the time at all. Life is not out that front door, waiting, it is in the room, it is the ache in your hand that you get when you write; it is the clothes...
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The heat is getting to me. It comes as a depletion of air, forcing films of water from my skin and it’s like breathing from the spout of a vacuum cleaner minus all the dust. I read of an English autumn, shuffling leaves and the smell of earth, sunshine slipping off bronzed foliage onto a road leading downhill. Cars weave by and it’s like a river minus all the water but still I am...
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“In the black hours when I lie sleepless,
near drowning, dread-heavy, your face...”
– Kim Addonizio, Mermaid Song.
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“You need me like ice needs the mountain
On which it breeds. Like print needs...”
– Monica Ferrell, Rime Riche.
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Yesterday I went to the park near my house with Emile and Sabs and a 12 year old and we tried to play Tiggy (which I hadn’t played since primary school) and I was huffing and puffing after about two minutes of it. It’s just as well we didn’t attempt to play Forty-Forty because I’m quite sure I would’ve passed out quietly behind a bush or something from the excitement...
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Bones are grating against each other, all fifty-two of them, under the skin of my hands. It’s like a tango; except the tempo is all wrong. Once upon a time I used these hands to wring poison from my whining, dream-haunted brain; but now they lay useless. I’ve even stopped playing shadow puppets with them in the morning sun, because I’ve taken to waking before the sun rose. I hold...
December 2011
5 posts
3 tags
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It’s a laminated red card from the Alfred and its final sentence proclaims the holder of it to be radioactive until 2013. No sex without a condom and no holding babies, he tells me with a wink. I can still shake hands, though and he squeezes the back of my hand as though to prove it. His skin feels like paper softened from sweaty palms and repeated scrunching. Somehow I don’t doubt...
“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be...”
– Sylvia Plath (via stickyeyelids)
November 2011
25 posts
elvedon:
I am a catcher of stars by night, keeping dry bones from crying out in restlessness
A throbbing ache, remedied with sage leaves, the tender nocturnes of Chopin, and a small book of wispy poems bought at a vendor’s market around the corner
Printed words breathe, the writings of tinged wisteria under a lonely paper moon
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It is more likely that you will never have the...
But just in case it ever comes to it, just so that you’ll know— I CAN’T KEEP SECRETS. Not as in I’d go around telling everyone on purpose, but rather that I’d forget to remember not to tell anyone. So, don’t tell me anything you don’t want me to forget about keeping to myself. Seriously.
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“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust...”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via misswallflower)
“Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you...”
– E.L. Konigsburg (via julie911)
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I have forgotten how nostalgia can play tricks like this: one moment I am in my room, fitted snugly into a bean-bag with a seagull-shaped book in my hands, and the next I am on a windy island. Lonely all over again.
Lately I have taken to practising chords in the hazy bluish light right before nightfall. I can’t see the frets and can only, barely, make out the strings. It is not surprising...
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Customer: I would like a very weak skinny cappuccino.
Me: Sure, a very skinny... sorry what was it again?
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“I had a task, did not do it, and now the failure is wrecking my life. I ought to...”
– - Wittgenstein to Engelmann, 1921 (via time immemorial)
(via invisiblestories)
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The human brain is designed to retain. A net of nerves, blood and fluid that is ever-expanding even as it is simultaneously dying. We tire of the pain of knowing and fear the loss of forgetting, and our breaths catch at the sight of another’s memory toppling over the craterous depths of the blackest hole. I’ve once read that having Alzheimer’s is like rubbing out a chalk-filled...
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Later, last night.
Me: Wow, this tastes like a REAL cake!
Emile: *affronted look*
Me: No, I mean it tastes like a real, non-flourless cake.
Annie: WHAT? Is there FLOUR in this?!