she writes
continually
like a long nozzle
spraying
the air,
and she argues
continually;
there is nothing
I can say
that is really not
something else,
so,
I stop saying;
and finally
she argues herself
out the door
saying
something like—
I’m not trying to
impress myself
upon you.
Back to the hostel after an year. You had almost forgotten the musty smell of wet clothes and detergents in the hallways. You had fogotten the winding steep staircases. The loos that smell acrid from incessant piss. (more…)
A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
(more…)
A little called anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope.
No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices.
V.B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,
Washes, shaves and very soon
Is at the lab; he reads his mail,
Swings a tadpole by the tail,
Undoes his coat, removes his hat,
I have never met you
Yet I stare at empty windows
And my heart tumbles at its empty staircase
I never thought I could ever see some reflection of myself
Except in this broken mirror
(more…)
Q. Why do most people end up living mediocre, “regular” lives?
A. It’s easier
-Scott Adams
It is against all scientific reason for two people who hardly know each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves commited to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. He would say: “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
-Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
take the leaf of a tree
trace its exact shape
the outside edges
and inner lines
(more…)
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
“I adore you because you made me a whore.”
Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginty or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
-Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Spoke these words
and your voice
and that laugh that surrounds it
it calms me up
spaces
and
silences
(more…)
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
Instructions
Play “why does it always have to rain on me?” By Travis
Turn the lights off
Open eyes
Side of her bed- Violin plays
Close-up of eyes
Her eyes sparkle
(more…)
Remember, that if thou marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance will neither last nor please thee one year; and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all; for the desire dieth when it is attained, and the affection perisheth when it is satisfied.
-Sir Walter Raleigh