November 2010
1 post
'call for the seekers of truth', rumi
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a hundred times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
May 2010
4 posts
bit from 'metamorphoses', ovid
The House of the Goddess Envy
She groaned aloud and sighed for that bright presence. Pale, skinny, squint-eyed, mean, her teeth are red With rust, her breast is green with gall, her tongue Suffused with poison, and she never laughs Except when watching pain; she never sleeps, Too troubled by anxiety; if men Succeed, she fails; consumes, and is consumed, Herself her punishment.
“And who by brave assent, who by accident,
who in solitude, who in this mirror,...”
– who by fire - leonard cohen
bit from 'in it what's in it', prakash kona
If I am between morning and night
I am not in any other space.
If for a fraction of an instant I have seen extinction,
I am free of the coils of the mortal world.
I am free of words.
I am free of silence.
I am free of the difference between you and me.
I am...
April 2010
36 posts
notes from my bedside table: 5
This is what it looks like when you take all of your hope and you spit it in an oil drum. —-
I got my shoelace caught in the hinges of your cot, and I think that it was an omen of all bad things to come between us. —- My bruises have been growing like irises. Oh, my flower garden neck - Van Gogh would be so impressed.
'seen and not seen', talking heads
He would see faces in movies, on TV, in magazines and in books. He thought that some of these faces might be right for him and that through the years, by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in his mind, or somewhere in the back of his mind, that he might by force of will cause his face to approach those of his ideal. The change would be very subtle. It might take ten years or so. Gradually his...
bit from 'textbook statistics', arkaye kierulf
Where are you headed, traveler? is a valid philosophical question to pose to a man, I think, along with Why does the blood in your veins travel endlessly? on account of those red cells flowing night and day through the traffic of the blood vessels, which if laid out in a straight line would be over 90,000 miles long. The great Nile River in Egypt is 4,180 miles long. The great circle of the...
bit from 'the contortions, part I', nicole mauro
What a bestial day, I
ought
to be reminded of you. O nostalgia, O
former splendor
of everything wan and
exhumed. The sun, askance. How do we
get the fuck
out of this
room.
“She went crazy with a calm face, justifiably so.”
– ~ douglas coupland, ‘hey nostradamus!’
bit from 'steps', ruth lepson
I dreamt I tied you to a tree. You snapped it in half and walked away.
- - -
Long after you left I lay on the sofa bed.
- - -
We do everything in your studio.
Maroon velveteen sofa.
Candles in glasses.
Wine from styrofoam cups.
Herb tea, dry, crinkles in a purple and yellow box.
...
bit from 'theory of rooms', andrew mcewan
1. Rooms with furniture inside. Inside buildings. Buildings repeat in a city. Food left on the table. A room refuses help. Chairs under table for people. On airplanes crossing oceans people wait. 2. A map of a room in another. Shadow a product of the window. Fruit rots when left out too long. A room made of material from a forest. 3. Animals live in forests shaped like rooms in a building....
bit from 'howl', allen ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats...
“For now, we will pretend we are sleeping…”
– ~ Ali Adam, 25 year-old refugee in Darfur
bit from 'lost parkour ps(alm)s', by laynie browne
Ps(alm) for Honest Sadness
1. Moving away from the universe as I know it, meaning not
coming home, as in what is a home?
2. I’ve been disappointed by a mortal.
3. Unimaginable the way presence may change you. And then abandon.
4. You live so far away.
5. And ...
notes from my bedside table: 4
..but I can’t think of a trickier way to trick you into coming back to me than by whispering in the ear of a boy who whistled for me to come near and bought me a beer before taking me back to his place. I can’t think of a worse way to wear you down than by being a trick to some one-night, low-rate prick in some basement apartment in Centertown.
bit from 'duplex kingdoms', jadon rempel
a fresco painted centuries prior reduced to the sum of its pixels, on the wall beside the bed we cover up something worse than bad photography then argue nightly about the artist
- - -
a planet comprised of water and no water, God’s teeth soaking in hurricane liquid or the last of the storm encased clearly behind glass
- - -
...
March 2010
49 posts
bit from '[specimen]', mark cunningham
She said we must not confuse an individual with his or her task, which is just what we expected someone in her position to say. It was a stare-down match, tense: everybody knew that in the blink of an eye, one of us could blink. He was told to write “Human beings are not insensate photocopying machines” on the blackboard one hundred...
“there are shadows, but they are easily outweighed by the light.”
– peter france, writing of adam ferguson
bit from 'nelcott is my darling', golda fried
“I have a present for you,” she told him. “It’s your birthday,” he said. She gave him a cigarette pack that already had its cellophane torn off. He looked at it suspiciously. She had taken a pack of markers and written a fortune on each cigarette. Today you will have joy. Today you will have luck. Today you will eat something from a can. “I can’t smoke...
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than...”
– ‘risk’, anais nin