December 2011
70 posts
hibernating
November 2011
95 posts
I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them no one else gets to see. Like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and saw them crying in their bed at night or singing in the shower or humming quietly to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street. And even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think, after seeing...
eating chili at midnight on the kitchen floor in my underwear
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“Some days I woke up and got out of bed and brushed my teeth like any normal...”
– Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind Of A Funny Story
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excuses, excuses
…my writing is bad.
and my stories are distant, always, and my figurative language is just nauseating at times, and i don’t think anything that anybody hasn’t already (so why bother straining myself? i imagine that my mind is something like orange juice, but all i’m left with now is pulp), and none of my characters have a breath of life anymore, especially myself…and...
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Last night I had a dream that Gene Kelly gave my dog rabies. I was really upset because we were going to have to put him down and I was just sitting outside in the rain crying while Gene Kelly danced around in the streetlights, foaming at the mouth.
“dear samantha i’m sorry we have to get a divorce i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain: it’s not you it sure as hell isn’t me it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night i know you would never DO...
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Nothing has been easy, not for a long time. You want to write a story but it seems all the people you can think of are colorless. Human experience is so limited, you realize. So many people live the same story, and the ones deviating from the control are too busy living to write any of it down. So you don’t begin because you already know how it will end.
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Rub your beleaguered eyes, shift your weight from one foot to another. Try to make some sense of this. ‘What’s that you have there, crossed out’ she asks and you try to think of words for your desperation, words for your vague, fuzzy endings, how you tune people in and out like a radio signal, cleanly and calmly but never completely. You don’t want her to know how nothing...
A Love of Form is a Love of Endings
Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels. You want happy endings, read cookbooks. Not closure, word filched from self-help fuzzing the argument. The ever-grudge of love and endsville. I believe in scars and making scars shine. Kaput. Form is the shape of the selecting intelligence because time is running out. Form enacts fatality. To pretend otherwise is obfuscation,...
My head is creaking like floorboards
“We want ‘poems that kill.’
Assassin poems, poems that shoot
guns. Poems that...”
– Amiri Baraka
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“I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking...”
– The unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962
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grumpyskunk-deactivated20120604 asked: Please write about something you are ashamed of... and find a way of revealing it that is artistic, rather than purely confessional. I offer this challenge because I think you can rise to it.
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Sometimes I think I write just because I’m afraid of…not (writing, if that makes sense?) I’m afraid of silence. I’m afraid of losing this thing that has always feels slightly out of my grasp, this so-called ‘being a writer’—you know, me, little ol’ me, being a writer—why won’t I just let myself believe it, say it, describe myself as such?...
“So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know...”
– The Perks of Being a Wallflower
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Hey, are you still awake?
‘Yeah.’
I wanted to talk to you, if that’s okay.
‘It’s fine, what do you need to talk about?’
What you said earlier.
…
About us all being damaged goods.
‘What about it?’
Why did you say it?
‘I don’t know. I thought it could be true. Maybe we’re all just lying around in this second-rate...
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When it comes to riding public transit, listen. Bodies hum, quiet and slightly off-pitch, tapping, different sucking mouths competing for the air, all rhythmic. Driven to distraction; the strange panic that bleeds and pools on the track, the way it can crush your chest in, the anonymity. Take it all in.
I’m lonely. For some reason, I think people expect me not to be. But I am.
Blue by Joni Mitchell
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Poetry is
hard—more so than some expect.
hard to reach, hard to find,
hard to look square in the jaw.
the page expects you to be
ragged, flaming, &
honest.
(it is hard to be those things).
poetry is not
for wusses;
& it is not for people
who are afraid of asking after the soul
frantic and starving beneath their bubbling skin.
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On Thought in Harness, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
My falcon to my wrist Returns From no high air. I sent her toward the sun that burns Above the mist; But she has not been there.
Her talons are not cold; her beak Is closed upon no wonder; Her head stinks of its hood, her feathers reek Of me, that quake at the thunder.
Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed; Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;...
clearhead-----andthewell asked: Hope you found something you could make yours in The Sun Also Rises. A clerk at Borders also warned me of Hemingway's prose when I bought my copy, now Borders is no more.. People tend to be fans of the fiction of dressings, of ugly things draped in similie and metaphor until they're made to look beautiful. I endorse a literature of roughness, of prose like daggers that can cut and...
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Boston, pt. 1
There’s a certain ambiguity in cities, I’m sure you know what I mean. A hesitation, an insecurity in how to proceed—unless you live there, in which case you bypass it all because you move fast enough, skyrocketing and falling and splatting on the pavement on the yellow painted line that means you’re too close to the subway tracks, and you don’t mind because...
Alex here. I have been working up here in Carthage South Dakota for nearly two weeks now. I arrived up here three days after we parted in Grand Junction, Colorado. I hope that you made it back to Salton City wihtout too many problems. I enjoy working here and things are going well. The weather is not very badn and many days are surprisingly mild. Some of the farmers are even already going into...
Some favorite words
harrowing
esoteric
enigma
alacrity
insipid
ostensibly
diaphanous
bona fide
quintessential
antithesis
languid
libertine
Anschluss
penultimate
euphemism
drainpipe
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I was thinking earlier, my writing is always stuck in this fucked up limbo: do I want it to seem clever and pointed, or lithe and pretty? But I suppose this the same limbo I’m stuck in, as a person, alternatively talking about the smell of old books and trying to think of the exact word to describe the dewy wetness of the grass in the morning, and discussing the foundations for Argentinian...
“To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break...”
– Anaïs Nin
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I think a lot of people…don’t realize that cynicism and naivety aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive things.
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When winter comes and the wind huffs just a bit harder, pushing
I retreat inward, lose touch, crawl a bit further into the heat I feel
inside myself, banging and inelegant as a radiator.
Pounding head—children sleep but I never
do, I can never achieve the smoothness of dreams
and when I look in the mirror I seem tired and pale and cracked and
my mother reminds me again that I should...
“When I say that she was the greatest,
I mean that she resembled a circus.
She...”
– “The First Girl” by Robert Macdonald
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This Thanksgiving break, I’m going to read nearly nonstop. I haven’t been giving myself enough time lately; I’m lucky to get a half hour or an hour every day. I miss getting swallowed up by my books and shutting out the world.
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“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
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A question, or actually, a statement—you are strange about your love. I mean it, and I can think of no other way in which to describe it. You are ever-changing. One day you claim to love, the next to have loved, and another to have never loved, or maybe not only to have never loved but also that you will never love, either, and I’m sorry, but I can’t keep up. All the days in...
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Here is a small story about shame; here is a girl wrapped in blankets, cocooned in comforts, here is a girl who will never have the heart nor the stomach of a king. Let me make a list: I’m good at hiding, I’m good at bleaching sinks, I can shrink on sight and I’m an expert at glazing—pots and cups, my eyes, you name it. But—there are so many stories I’ll never...
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Today is one of those self-confidence-is-in-the-toilet days. When I wonder why I even bothered to get out of bed, let alone try to write. It’s a feverish trance, an aching heavy head heavy hard day, and I can’t snap myself out of it. I always overheat when I’m feeling badly, and this makes everything even worse because I can’t sleep unless I’m cold. I honestly...
