about

Previous blog was too famous, controversial, and emphemeral. This relaunch is an attempt at value over one, ten, one thousand years.

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she

SHE FALLS IN LOVE and wants to be well, is well and forgets to measure. She is noticed or not in the market by the man she met at last night’s party. Though the day is bright — thander — and mist sprinklers come on above the lettuce. Bitterly, the word comes, Silly. She is chilled and losing. The list is numbered. Each shape and color announces at once it is at her service. To keep from reeling, she could use her telephone. Her hand is lax on the cool lemon.

Hélène Lagonelle

Flesh that one would want to subjugate in its fullness, as something offered, but probably not to the point of devouring it, of killing her, a splendor, but one that distances itself, no doubt due to this cruel resistance apparent in her traits, this cache of madness within her: she attracts and repels, disgusts, even. She invites, but does not offer herself, never provides anything, one merely beholds her, this exhaustion, this sinking into desire, the exhaustion Marguerite Duras spoke of regarding Hélène Lagonelle: “The most beautiful of all the things given by God is this body of Hélène Lagonelle’s,” then speaking of her breasts: “Nothing could be more extraordinary than the outer roundness of these breasts proffered to the hands,” her skin, her body under her dress, offered without consciousness of being so entirely given, she speaks of the suffering of looking at this body, a suffering that inspires the wish to kill: “she conjures up the marvellous dream of putting her to death with your own hands,” a subline body, says Duras, within reach and without awareness of itself. To die for.

To defend himself against it, and since there is no better defense than an attack, a man admiring a very beautiful woman on the terrace of a café remarked to her: “You’re so beautiful I could kill you.” A simple truth, to which she responded, with a refinement worthy of her beauty: “Okay.”

axolotls

It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping that mineral lethargy in which they spent whole hours. Above all else, their eyes obsessed me.

church

I KISSED A GIRL WEARING A CROSS AROUND HER NECK HER LIPS DIDN’T TASTE LIKE CHURCH BUT HER HIPS FELT LIKE GOD I WONDER WHAT HER PASTOR WOULD HAVE THOUGHT I WONDER IF THAT CROSS AROUND HER NECK MEANT MORE TO ME THAN IT DOES TO HER

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when a man’s hand touches the hand of a woman they both touch the heart of eternity

i’m ready to raise the ceiling one last time…

The prayer house yard was shaded by great big sapodilla trees. It was spacious and the dirt was swept flat and even. As they ran, taking turns dribbling the ball, their feet started to turn red—the ball’s surface wasn’t smooth, there were raised lines that curved around it, making pentagons and hexagons, and there was a seam around its middle with sharp bits of plastic sticking out. Small welts appeared on their skin where they’d been smacked and nicked, but they didn’t care. They whooped, they yelled, they laughed out loud. Sweating, panting, covered in dirt.

Even then I’d started to think, in the simplest way, that as a child my life was no better than a soccer ball’s. It went rolling along because someone kicked it, and if it was kicked hard it would advance quickly, whizzing through the air, twisting and turning a bit as the breeze teased it along. If someone picked the ball up and held it, though, it couldn’t budge.

It’s possible the life of a ball, even a cheap plastic one, is interesting. People are cheered by its presence, after all, and in a wide open field, it can become the center of attention—but it’s still just a ball. And that’s what I felt like as a child. They dragged me. They pushed me. They talked at me, and forced me to listen to what they said. You must go to school. Must go to the mosque. Must recite verses, must memorize prayers. Must finish your rice. Mustn’t forget to brush your teeth.

The world I lived in was like a never-ending nag. To those who say childhood is a happy time, I can only snort. They can’t know anything about it—it’s as if they’d arrived on Earth with a head full of gray hair and a beard like some kind of billy goat.

i want it all

Stephon kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me And never kissed at all.

Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest, Robin’s lost in play, But the kiss in Colin’s eyes Haunts me night and day.

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to love another is something like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief

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everyone wants someone to understand their personality their childhood and what each of those things has done to the other one

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The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains,     skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall,     he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

night

“There’ll soon be a charming widow” —that’s the talk among the doctors

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In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.

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When the night falls the day starts to break on the brothels

i never knew you could take such a shape

Everything makes sense When you’re wearing that dress

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The domain of the erotic is violence and violation. In those moments you destroy your self-containments; stripping naked is the decisive action, and obscenity is our name for the uneasiness we feel as our self-possession breaks down. You gasped when I entered you. Real people don’t smell like strawberry lavender lime vapor clouds when they fuck, but there was something intoxicating in your pheromones, your sweat, your aura, sickening and satisfying, whorish and moreish. Sexual arousal suppresses disgust reactions, especially if you’re a woman — you know this I’m sure — but I still managed to find an inner heart of disgust in our dalliance.

As you looked over your shoulder at me and screamed out the expletives you’d learned men like. I caught a glimpse of your eyes and saw behind them, into your soul, and I saw that you were pretending, this was just an act, this was fake, this sex was even less real than what you find on the internet. After making so much of authenticity and unmediated presence, we still never dropped the performance. Even sex becomes a form of masturbation; we see each other but we don’t: the arm, the breast, the hip, all become fetishized and transport us to another world. There is no ‘it’ of sex, no brute, naked, definable moment when it happens, there is only a plateau that is both dilated and deferred. So all of these memories are simultaneous to me; the strangely decorated room, the torturous curve of your body, the awareness that your entire presence had been a performance, and still was, and finally, the vertiginous subsumption of the mind into the body.

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it feels so good to be understood, even when it’s only as a caricature

The rat in the shape of a rat

I come to earth, to a field with a flaming truck. With untreated meningitis. I come to in a field of meaning, torn into, sworn upon, pornographic. The truck’s a Ford Ranger, if that matters. Creaks and streams, streaks of cream, darting through the foothills’ sloped shoulders. Severed head in the Denny’s bathroom. I think of cake and of dead ecopoets, of a zoetrope flinging light and shapes against the walls. Thinking, that liquid bone, running through my skull like a lance. There is a new unburdened, unmediated, language, and it’s being used to write a history of hunger. It’s ruining everything, just like that truck. Who replaced the moon with a finger pointing at the moon? Cuneiforms, in uniform, in ordered rows of shapes. Language, the original microplastic, has been found even in our dreams.

Father

They used to cut MDMA with sassafras, he says like this is some holy preliminary fact. Sweeter roll, softer comedown. In pieces, half-thought and half-damage, says there was a night when he couldn’t tell whose blood it was and that he didn’t care. That its absence felt like a kind of education. The world got simpler. He misses that softness, a wound warm with its own light

I imagine him decades ago, younger and sharper and meaner, in love with the wrong kind of cruelty and the right kind of attention. Lit from the inside yet serene in a way that feels wrong in the lungs

Anger is a quiet religion. Efficient and smaller than regret. Sometimes I see the relics, wooden spoons cracked at the neck, belts stretched past the logic of a waist. He tells his stories the way other people pray, each word an apology to something nameless

I used to think the bad things made me interesting. Then I thought they made me real. Tonight I just think they make me loud inside

He taps his chest twice                 Thud thud He doesn’t sound pleased. He does that usually. Talk in the negatives, what he didn’t do, what he never meant, when he                 held back. It always lands heavy in the air, a reminder that restraint is another kind of violence pressed in slow motion.

I wasn’t always like that, he said once. I believe him, I believe it doesn’t matter

i want to get you to want me to love you

When you touch me with your hands, it makes me want to be your man. When you take me with your words, it makes me want to be your girl.

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I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.

I’ve just sent you over 100 DMs

My words rained over you, stroking you. A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body. Until I even believe that you own the universe. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

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I confess I have grown tired of long dreams that take me back to the point where they begin and I end, without us ever meeting in the morning.

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Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart, suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade, and once more I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before

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Since I’ve become ensnared in the tangles of your sweet-smelling hair, Arrows of grief keep sinking into my heart hundreds by hundreds.

Even the physician relinquished his cures and gave up on me: He knows I am being ruined by a destructive drug.

If you desire a soul, decree so and I will surrender mine: You are a sultan and I am a servant in bondage.

Flowers in blossom bring me no joy, roses don’t cheer up my stricken heart: I only yearn for your flushed cheeks and smiling lips.

O fortune! Why keep mangling my bosom and foiling all I try time after time? Extend me your hospitality once, am I not a guest to your realm?

The fervor of my lamentations set my body on fire: I am like a candle in a house of mourning.

throw your elf bar on the floor and stomp it out like a cig

村里的老人都说 Village elders say 我跟我爷爷年轻时很像 I resemble my grandfather in his youth 刚开始我不以为然 I didn’t recognize it 后来经他们一再提起 But listening to them time and again 我就深信不疑了 Won me over 我跟我爷爷 My grandfather and I share 不仅外貌越看越像 Facial expressions 就连脾性和爱好 Temperaments, hobbies 也像同一个娘胎里出来的 Almost as if we came from the same womb 比如我爷爷外号竹竿 They nicknamed him “bamboo pole” 我外号衣架 And me, “clothes hanger” 我爷爷经常忍气吞声 He often swallowed his feelings 我经常唯唯诺诺 I’m often obsequious 我爷爷喜欢猜谜 He liked guessing riddles 我喜欢预言 I like premonitions 1943年秋，鬼子进 In the autumn of 1943, the Japanese devils invaded 我爷爷被活活烧死 and burned my grandfather alive 享年23岁 at the age of 23. 我今年23岁 This year I turn 23.

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until next time, leave me alone

think

… to tell the truth, Veronique had just aborted his baby, she had never thought of consulting him, he had learned the news the day after the operation, a bad sign in itself, and in fact she would leave him a few weeks later, it was she who had uttered the fateful phrase, something along the lines of: ‘I think it’s better if we stop’, or maybe: ‘I think it would be better if we took the time to think’, he couldn’t remember, at any rate it came down to the same thing, as soon as you start thinking it’s always in the same direction, not only in emotional terms, in fact, reflection and life and are simply incompatible.

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The thought of drinking with my mom when she is the age I am now makes me want to cry

what if i told you hearts can be raped?

have you ever been gang banged by everyone you ever loved?

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I try to understand myself, to make myself think of things based on the most basic principles—for example, walking means walking with my feet on the pavement, speaking means saying what I say with my mouth. I try to simplify and make everything basic, fundamental. I reminded myself that facing and coping with daily life is something I must do. But sometimes this is too difficult for me, if walking isn’t really walking, walking is 1, talking is 2, eating is 3, sleeping is 4—wouldn’t that be better, skipping all the details? Life is filled only with numbers, making life feel like numbered musical notation. But walking is still walking; if you want to walk you have to learn to walk first, build a road first, put on shoes, wear socks, wear pants, wear clothes, sometimes even wear a hat, sometimes face the wind, braving the rain, sometimes even “excuse me, excuse me.” These things keep me thinking until nightfall. I can’t sleep, and once I do, I can’t wake up. I curl up under the covers, never wanting to go out again. I was anxious and insecure, anxious, and agitated. I thought I was too ugly. I was still young, but in a few years I would be old. I was afraid of infectious diseases, and also afraid of non-contagious diseases. I thought my pinky finger might swell soon, so I started applying ointment. I felt like a thread of meat was stuffed between my teeth, so I kept licking it with my tongue, teasing it, brushing my teeth, rinsing my mouth, until finally I used a toothpick to prick my gums until it was bloody and mangled. I felt like I couldn’t touch my back. This time it was definitely not an illusion. I tried again and again. I really can’t touch it; it’s like a parched desert, and I actually carry a wasteland every day. One day, I was sprinting wildly in the middle of the road. I saw all the vehicles and crowds gradually shrinking, then dispersing in all directions. All the sounds rose, while the sky fell like an inverted sea surface. Planes flew in the water, birds flew in the water, and the flies and mosquitoes closest to me were also flying in the water. Their flying postures were like seahorses, heads raised, hands hanging over knees, calves bent back, feet straight, like “飞” the character for fly. When I raise my head I can see the bottom of their feet, and even with just the soles I could still recognize them. Finally, I calmed down and sat by the roadside waiting for the imminent tsunami, or a bucket of cold water to be poured on my forehead. I felt my body becoming numb, tingling in waves. I told myself, this is the darkest moment, there will never be a darker moment than now. After this moment, everything else is bright. You don’t have to suffer this much ever again. This did have some effect, although I know deep inside that it is only a temporary self-comfort.

Life is indeed a precious gift, but I often feel as if it was given to the wrong person.

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vampire so depressed they’re waking up at 5AM

murakami

When I was a kid, there was an aquarium thirty minutes by bicycle from where I lived. A chill aquarium-like silence always pervaded the place, with only an occasional splash to be heard. I could almost feel the Creature from the Black Lagoon breathing in some dim corner.

Schools of tuna circled ’round and ’round the enormous pool. Sturgeon plied their own narrow watercourse, piranha set their razor-sharp teeth into chunks of meat, and electric eels sputtered and sparked like shorted-out lightbulbs.

The aquarium was filled with countless other fish as well, all with different names and scales and fins. I couldn’t figure out why on earth there had to be so many kinds of fish.

There were, of course, no whales in the aquarium. One whale would have been too big, even if you knocked out all the walls and made the entire aquarium into one tank. Instead, the aquarium kept a whale penis on display. As a token, if you will.

So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale but a whale’s penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I’d steal off to my place on the bench in the hushed, high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale’s penis.

At times it would remind me of a tiny shriveled palm tree; at other times, a giant ear of corn. In fact, if not for the plaque—WHALE GENITAL: MALE—no one would have taken it to be a whale’s penis. More likely an artifact unearthed from the Central Asian desert than a product of the Antarctic Ocean. It bore no resemblance to my penis, nor to any penis I’d ever seen. What was worse, the severed penis exuded a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness.

It came back to me, that giant whale’s penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time. What twists of fate, what tortuous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room? My heart ached, thinking about it. I felt as if I didn’t have a hope in the world. But I was only seventeen and clearly too young to give up on everything. It was then and there I came to the realization I have borne in mind ever since.

Which is, that I am not a whale.

closer

To love is to reveal the pale underbelly of the arm or to fashion from the magnifying lens a prism it is to dilate oh god dilate or to turn your splintered rib death side down against the gauze or to come if baby says come and should baby say I need you to try and come closer than that you surrender your callus your swan cracks with song oh to love is to open your mouth very wide—

send this post to a friend, please don’t ignore

Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

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When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives-

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

after that her handwriting became a little smaller

Am I ever going to stop doing as I wish? If you gave me thirty lucky breaks, I could succeed! Write me a good line or I’ll zip up my dress. That’s the way I feel about it. Maybe I leave a lot of chances on the table.

Listen, junior, and learn. You want to know what poetry is? A flea circus. That’s a point that’ll take a lot of arguing. But don’t let’s get sticky about it. Kill the people, darling.

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In taking on this accent I take on every fracture in the male ego and every past present and future condemnation of the female one. I am a disgraceful woman and a perfect girl and an evil whore and a lazy bitch and a poor victim and and and. This experience of self is impermeable. Because of that I get to walk the fine lines. I get to be a righteous whore. I don’t work. I get to have clandestine dreams at night and have enough time to speak them in the morning over an expensive piece of fruit.

Xenophon’s Wife

Asapia used to argue with Xenophon’s wife, and with Xenophon himself. “Tell me, I beg of you, O you wife of Xenophon, if your neighbor has better gold than you have, whether you prefer her gold or your own?” “Hers,” says she. “Supposed she has dresses and other ornaments suited to women, of more value than those which you have, should you prefer your own or hers?” “Hers, to be sure,” answered she. “Come, then,” says Aspasia, “suppose she has a better husband than you have, should you then prefer your own husband or hers?” On this the woman blushed.

internet modem at the psychiatrist has some uploads and some downloads

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade: Exit seraphim and Satan’s men: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

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We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

sorry my ozempic is acting up

There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.

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what’s up buttercup?

today I think I’ll go on the computer

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the problem with other people is that one must leave before the other and one always gets there first.

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Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?

don’t make me say it!

Too sick to hustle for housesits like I used to, I decide to move into my parent’s two-bedroom ranch house in North Carolina, where I file for disability and set up a whole new stable of doctors to administer obscure tests. I consume radioactive eggs from a paper cup for a gastric emptying study so they can shoot gamma rays at my intestines to track the movement of the egg down my chute. I buy a George H. W. Bush baseball card that depicts him at age ninety-one throwing out the first pitch at an Astros game. I tell my mom and dad that he’s my spirit animal. My mom says her friend’s daughter said white people can’t have spirit animals. My dad, who voted for Bush twice, asks where my wife is.

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And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse                             Not shaking the grass.

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I shall lie down at home and pretend to be dying. Then the neighbors will all come in to gape at me, and, perhaps, she will come with them. When she comes, I won’t need a doctor, she knows why I am ill.

NOON

I am proud to say that even though my place of origin is mean and soiled, I am totally able to identify a beauty when I see one.         I saw a blond-wood armchair and immediately sensed her importance. when I flipped her over, I saw the special mark of her manufacturer — there his famous brand was proudly stationed.         Her seat has these curves, bent to accommodate the ass of a high-knowing person. This kind of bend means a lot to many people, so I purchased her, and I will situate her prominently at the entrance to my house.         My house is full of such fine furnishings and I enjoy inviting acquaintances to dinner, so that my little collection can receive some admiration.         One evening, my guests – as adults at dinner parties eventually do — recounted the abuse they suffered at the hands of their parents.         Jenny’s mother led her into the backyard to select an exquisitely long and slender reed and proceeded to cut her daughter’s backside with it.         Helen’s mother chased her around the house with a sjambok, a malevolently thick whip used to corral large and obtuse livestock.         Speaking of livestock: Kevin’s father beat him, and then beat him again for crying like a cow!         At this confession, the table laughed — they couldn’t help themselves.         Kevin smiled wide and laughed too. His mouth made a sound like moo moo moo!

stop pretending the chains are so tight

stop pretending you don’t enjoy the weight

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Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

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i want the royal flush i can wait forever if i get what i want

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this too will be a memory. but not right now.

obscurity

I’d never amounted to anything, which was fine by me as a straight-up lover of anonymity, drawn to the city by its promise of defeat, hermetic inferiority complex, and my personal, depreciating favorite: obscurity. Why can’t people have the goddam courage to be an absolute nobody?
…
I wanted my ethics to be impeccable and keep my face out of the public, but at the same time I wanted to be wildly, irreversibly successful, and very rich. Nouveau rich enough to install a floor-to-ceiling fish tank of exotic Australian bluebottle fed prosecco grapes, order smoked potato salad dining at The Met, and lead a sapphire life in general. Collectors and patrons visiting my crib would instantly know I was loaded. I was a resource-sharing Marxist, but potentially not by choice. Contradiction is one of the most beautiful things there is.
…
Could I be famous and have no one notice me?
I’d have to ask a woman over thirty-five.

a week is 2% of a year

Sorry but dressing up as the UPS man and trying to deliver you a parcel, only for you to say that isn’t the package you ordered, then going into the next room where you call me and I pretend to be the UPS complaints department, and then you put on a blindfold and I come in and set about you with the magic wand while still walking you through the process for tracking a missing parcel, until you climax at the point where I say that I’m very sorry but because you lack the requisite information to prove your identity there’s nothing more we can do at this stage, but you’re welcome to call back when you have that info on hand - that isn’t sexy for me. When you described it I rather thought it would just be a bit of preamble about whether I had a ‘big package’ for you. And look I love you, and I’ll try my best if you insist, but you’ve got to understand that this whole rigmarole is as erotic for me as running late for a job interview.

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ha ha guys no don’t put me against your wall…do not grab me by the shirt collar in a dark room…ha ha don’t omg stoppppp

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this is the first summer of my life. in many ways.

yawn

sisyphus pushing the overton window

Except as I started walking down the sidewalk, I watched a truck veer from its lane, flatten a stop sign, desperately try to slow, momentarily direct itself, and then in spite of all the brakes on that monster, all the accompanying smoke and ear puncturing shrieks, it still barreled straight into me. Suddenly I understood what it mean to be weightless, flying through the air, no longer ruled by that happy dyad of gravity &

mass until I was, landing on the roof of a parked car, which turned out to be my car, a good fifteen feet away, hearing the thud but not actually feeling it. I even momentarily blacked out, but came to just in time to watch the truck, still burling towards me until it was actually slamming into me, causing me to think, and you’re not going to believe this—“I can’t believe this asshole just totaled my fucking car! Of all the cars on this street and he had to fucking trash mine!” even as all that steel was grinding into me, instantly pulverizing my legs, my pelvis, the metal from the grill wedging forward like kitchen knives, severing me from the waist down.         People started screaming.         Though not about me.         Something to do with the truck.         It was leaking all over the place.         Gas.         It had caught fire. I was going to burn.         Except it wasn’t gas.         It was milk.         Only there was no milk. There was no gas. No leak either. There weren’t even any people. Certainly none who were screaming. And there sure as hell wasn’t any truck. I was alone. My street was empty. A tree fell on me. So heavy, it took a crane to lift it. Not even a crane could lift it. There are no trees on my lock.         This has got to stop.         I have to go.         I did go.

we can’t tell you where it is, but we’re sure you’ll find it

I am seventy-three years old, people expect me to say wise things about old age. I don’t do that, men of eighty must do that. The Japanese draftsman Hokusai wrote:

Starting in my sixth year of life, I was obsessed by drawing the forms of things. Starting in my fiftieth, I produced a great deal, but nothing that I made before my seventieth year was really worth the trouble. Only in my seventy-third did I at last begin to see something of the essence of birds, animals, insects, fish, and the vital nature of grasses and trees. This is why it is only in my eightieth that I will have registered some progress, that when I am ninety I will have penetrated farther into the deeper meaning of things, that in my hundredth year I will be truly extraordinary, and that in my hundred and tenth every dot and ever line will possess life itself.

I have a neighbor, a boy seventeen years old, I see the passion with which he holds his girl. I think: What a lot you will know when you are a hundred and ten.

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I am out with lanterns looking for myself

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But pleasures are like poppies spread, you seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, a moment white - then melts for ever; Or like the Borealis race, that flit ere you can point their place; Or like the Rainbow’s lovely form evanishing amid the storm.

her

O bow-browed beauty, I am a martyr of your arrows: I’ve found my inspiration in your glance, I am your victim.

The thread of my sanity is woven to your hair curls: Have mercy on me for heaven’s sake, my head is spinning.

What use is listening to the zealots and giving up wine? I have no need for the merriness of drinking, I am your devotee.

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I watched you; thirty birds were watching me; Where we saw what you would have me be: Just such a piece of human that you are, Who, ever since I glimpsed you from afar, Has seemed to harry me like providence, Engulfing and reflecting all my sense Of selfhood, every feather’s daft pretense To call itself my own. But that’s alright, Because in truth the plumage suits you quite As well, that when you looked, no bird could glean Which of us was the seer and the seen, The seeker and the sought - I’d have it such. I’d have you have me make of me so much! Amid the flocking multitude - one touch.

water

‘It’s me or the dog,’ she laughed, though by ‘dog’ she meant ‘void’ and by ‘laughed’ I mean ‘sobbed’ and by ‘me’ she meant ‘us’ and by ‘she’ I mean ‘you’ and by ‘or’ she meant ‘and.’ ‘It’s us and the void’, you sobbed.

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I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

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All was silent after that. No, I heard someone crying. Untying the rest of my bonds, I listened carefully, and I noticed that it was my own crying.

gasp

Their knees are a practical epoch apart. … O to be as stupid and bold as an alarm programmed to wail hold me, … Take me in. Want me how a sentence wants an end, how a memory wants to be spoken. With the urgency of breath when the bag is finally removed from the head.

i have forgotten almost every detail of my past

The midwife approached the bed and positioned herself between the woman’s legs. This mother was a paragon of beauty, a young woman no older than seventeen. None of her features identified her heritage, but from the extremely soft feel of her skin, Zuhra judged that she was a jinni. Zuhra’s fingers sank into this woman’s thighs as if they were soft dough. She had heard from her grandmothers that jinn have no bones in their bodies. Zuhra noticed how lofty the ceiling was and how unusual the room’s furnishings were. In that moment she felt certain that she had entered the land of the jinn on her own two feet. She felt an instinctive fear roil her blood but gained control of herself and pretended to be calm as she attentively assisted the jinni whose labor had begun two days earlier. Now in her third day of labor, she was totally exhausted, and she and her fetus were near death. The young jinni father got everything Zuhra requested and then busied himself with making prostrations to an idol that looked like an ibex, two-and-a-half cubits tall. He kissed the ibex’s hooves, praying fervently that the idol would save his wife and the creature in her womb by butting the angel of death with his horns and sending him reeling back on his heels, filled with remorse. As dawn’s first rays appeared, the baby’s head emerged. Then Zuhra seized hold of him and gently pulled till he landed in her hands yowling with a sound somewhere between weeping and a blazing fire. She cut his umbilical cord and washed him with warm water. The baby was a boy, and his penis was as long as his foot. His mouth reached upward like a crescent moon, slanting slightly toward the right. His nose, there in the middle of his face, emitted a glow like a star. Zuhra wrapped this newborn in a green diaper and handed him to his father, who was over the moon and began to speak tenderly to him, calling him “Waraqa.” Zuhra rubbed relaxant hot mustard oil over the jinni mother’s belly and pressed down. After some effort, the placenta emerged, and the jinni mother’s suffering was finally over. She stopped moaning, and the flush of life returned to her cheeks. Zuhra collected the remains of the delivery in a clay pot, which she asked the jinni father to bury. Then she replaced the dirty sheet with a fresh one and, with an expert hand, cleaned the remaining blood from the jinni mother and instructed her to nurse Waraqa and quiet his bizarre screams. When the young husband was slow to relinquish the newborn and pass him into his mother’s embrace, Zuhra shouted at him to do as she said. The new father obeyed her and walked out. When the jinni mother shyly pulled her breast from an opening in her blouse, it descended all the way to the floor. Then she fed her newborn.

Zuhra’s astonishment was visible, and she wondered whether the other breast was as long.

Waraqa suckled on the gold-colored nipple till he was sated and fell asleep. His mother then set him down and asked Zuhra to help her change. From a green armoire as diaphanous as a huge emerald Zuhra plucked an orange blouse embroidered with beautiful designs. Once the she-jinni had removed all her clothing, Zuhra watched her place her long breasts over her shoulders, so that they hung down her back.