December 2011
(via onlinejournals:
To feel so unreal, to feel like a toy, this is how I am. Oh whispered moccasin whipped along the roadway. Oh poor merging. A roadtrip of ineloquence.
“This is an installation
for dismantling...”
– Nicole Cooley, from “Compendium of Lost Objects” (via the-final-sentence)
As you wake on the salt of another shore
I stand in the garden with the car fob, Announcing the song of automation; That bird which talks fatigue itself out of the belly of night, Waves the small image of early morning grey into shining. Somewhere golden offers up a glassful of gleam, Weighing droplet upon droplet; Twisted from the earth’s night turn. And the drone of rise Begins its sluggish meanderings on the tarmac, As you wake...
I Will Not Marry You
because I frighten easily because I was born once bitten unready for love and because your head is too small for your body and your nose somewhat big for your face and because when you speak a touch of Quechua all the brown eyes in the street roll sideways because you could throw a six at will making me feel like a wasp on sellotape and because your hanging baskets are too yellow because...
thursday night on the corner of grange road...
the streets here are slippery with leaves. a cyclist struggles to stop, skidding the bicycle carefully across the pavement until the momentum ceases. a pedestrian glares across his shoulder as he sidesteps and says you shouldn’t cycle on the pavement, you know. it’s bloody dangerous. especially in this weather. especially at night. and where are your fucking lights, asshole! i tip my...
“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with...”
– Anne Lamott (via atomos)
To Failure
(via mendingbones:
You do not come dramatically, with dragons That rear up with my life between their paws And dash me butchered down beside the wagons, The horses panicking; nor as a clause Clearly set out to warn what can be lost, What out-of-pocket charges must be borne, Expenses met; nor as a draughty ghost That’s seen, some mornings, running down a lawn. It is these sunless afternoons, I...
“Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a...”
– Jack Gilbert, Going There (via yesyes)
“Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of...”
– Dylan Thomas, from “Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed” (via proustitute)
from "In the Pines" - Charles de Lint
Hickory: "Tell me something ...Are you running from something or running to something?"
Darlene: "What difference does it make?"
Hickory: "A big difference. Running away's only a partial solution. Sooner or later, whatever you're running from is going to catch up to you. Comes a time you're going to have to face it, so it may as well be now. But running to something... well."
Darlene: "Well, what?"
Hickory: "I guess all I wanted to tell you, Darlene, is if you believe in what you're doing, then go at it and be willing to pay the price you have to pay."
“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it...”
– Don DeLillo, Underworld (via libraryland)
no screaming while the bus is in motion
It’s true that I pulled a wardrobe door from the firewood pile and painted a sign: Parker’s Ghost-Hunting Agency in dripping red letters and nailed it to the fence alongside our house where passersby pointed and laughed. Kids threw stones at our windows. A boy they called Bad Dog blacked my left eye for lying. My parents let the sign stay up for a week before my dad burned the...
at the heart of things
Remember when your mother was taken ill- and was rushed anonymously to the hospital? and in the waiting room your older brother - cried and shivered like glass. But you felt like some dumb blunt dull thing- no tears, no panic, no nothing… And the kindly old woman in the corridor- smiled in her knowing and you wished you were sharp enough- to cut away her smile to cut down to the sinewy heart...
Snow
Winter comes with the half-remembrance of rain and the sudden opening out of the city into wide white vistas of snow. A trail of footprints through unsullied whiteness, brings a memory of shuffling home frozen-footed where orange street light created pools and shallows in icy gardens and birds had left their twiggy signatures on the tops of cars. Tonight will freeze the city beneath a brittle...
“I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a...”
– Anne Frank (via night-falling)