Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps… perhaps…love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.
I believe that one day the distance between myself and God will disappear.
He spoke of death as if he had lived it,
and I listened with the faith of a believer,
his words—soft, rivered fire, the nuzzled breath
of his father’s horses in late December.
And the lines bit like a twist from some twitch,
bringing me to notice from that night on
more than I had before. In a month,
the inconspicuous grass began to spread
as a clutch of whispers along the ditch bank,
each haunting rasp, a faint voice that would
eventually find me.
My tongue will tell the anger of my heart / Or else my heart, concealing it, will break,
[…] remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
And I’ll go away lightning myself in the shadows
And constellations of the eyes of night.
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions.
You can’t be wise and in love at the same time.
But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
I twist like a sunflower
At the sound of your voice
and to this quick spark in the emptiness
to say Yes I miss how love
may make us otherwise
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me… And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
I am not a graceful person. I am not a
Sunday morning or Friday sunset. I am a
Tuesday 2am, I am gunshots muffled by a
few city blocks, I am a broken window
during February. My bones crack on a
nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a
dull thud, and I apologize for my
awkward sadness. I sometimes believe
that I don’t belong around people, that I
belong to all the leap days that didn’t
happen. The way the light and darkness mix
under my skin has become a storm.
You don’t see the lightning, but you hear the
echoes.
… the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.
I love the French language. I have sampled every language, French is my favourite - fantastic language, especially to curse with. Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards d’enculé de ta mère. It’s like wiping your arse with silk, I love it.
… And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
We are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
somewhere behind the napes,
armorial backbone.
ripeness that goes on and on.
a kayak, waist-deep.
in blood is where the acorn grows.
which means the world
is ravenous.
i want to eat my cake
and have it.
lover, am i not your invention?
There is in certain living souls
a quality of loneliness unspeakable,
so great it must be shared
as company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
that in immensity
there is one lonelier than you.
The loveliest things in life are but shadows; they come and go, and change and fade away…
I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
Beneath the clothing is the skin
and beneath the skin, viscera, bones
but beneath that there is just the skin
of the other side so clearly something
is unaccounted for.
whiskey makes the heart beat faster
but it sure doesn’t help the
mind and isn’t it funny how you can ache just
from the deadly drone
of existence?
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyes the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
You bastards, she thought.
You lovely bastards.
There is something arbitrary in stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it. Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.
Run my dear,
from anything that may not strengthen your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
from anyone likely to put a sharp knife Into the sacred,
tender vision of your beautiful heart.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.
…like a flash of lightning between the clouds. We live in the flicker…
Love’s language is hyperbole, but whispered.
It’s easy to imagine you’ve misheard.
What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.
Your voice reverberated against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration.
The more you throw black into a color, the more dreamy it gets…Black has depth. It’s like a little egress, you can go into it, and because it keeps continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love and it becomes like a dream…
There are tears which pierce through the earth and rise as stars in other skies. I wonder who has wept our stars?
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.
Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go?
As always, silence will have the last word,
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray…
Dark be not dark but some other desire
I have sea foam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly with one another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is above all else a variable. With a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
An artist should not fall in love with another artist.
A poet should not fall in love with another poet.
Play it safe. It’s easier that way.
Kiss people who can’t understand why you cry when the sun sets,
who think it is because you’re afraid of the dark.
What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?
So much of what we live goes on inside–
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
Remember me as one of your lovers,
not the greatest of these, not the least,
but in some way small way distinguished from all the others.
The same [voice] that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn.
Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.
Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. “I am alone and they are everyone,” I thought - and pondered.
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
And I swear to you by the garden of the angels,
I swear by the miracle-working icon,
And by the fire and smoke of our nights:
I will never come back to you.
