I've Been Let Down...

"You cannot will intoxication, vertigo, a ravening or wild love"

Lucie Brock-Broido

"It was heaven sent so I spent it

The sky just slipped through my fingers"

That day his name became a prayer

I wish for one

gold rose morning

to illuminate the last of my longing.

In these five years, mourning

the violence of withheld touch,

I have forgotten nothing,

my own shame bound,

silent, to withering

blindness

Clarice Lispector

"I am alone in the world. I don't believe in anyone for they all tell lies, sometimes even when they're making love. I find that people don't really communicate with each other. The truth comes to me only when I am alone."

from The Hour of the Star

Who, now, is exquisite?

Who, now, is exquisite?

Even for such loveliness,
unsettling, I cannot emerge fully
out of troubled mind and languid slumber,
into the succulent ripe flesh of peach-plum sunrise,
the too-sweet liquor of the tangible, tactile world.

For I am one who thrives on bitterness,
empty, always afflicted by raven dispositions,
circus wishes, limber imaginings
and glittering elephantine dreams.

Each night I will myself incorporeal,
mad with longing for hollow bones
bowed by the way the West wind moves,
coy and audacious as a callous young man.

My cells shall transfigure into temperamental salt-sting,
cold constellations never to be burned
by any stray electric, wounding touch,
every new city a reflection of the last,
a continuous menagerie of unbearable lightness.

This is my religion.

Self Portrait with Magical Thinking

Half sick of shadows,

Winter white-night drifting

She understands the depravity

Of wishing to be seized

By a heavy hot current,

An inescapable hopeless longing

"... roads in autumn will continue to be carnal roads

Else I would be keeping still, living on & on"

Lucie Brock-Broido

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"

Young Nabokov

"...the ancient idea that trees connect the underworld, the human world and the heavens (root, trunk and twigs), which in many ancient tales allowed mortals to climb from the earthly plane to the realm of the gods."

Chris Lavers, The Natural History of Unicorns

Lisbeth Zwerger

The Rifle

Somewhere

on a bed of moss

the Erl King lies,

autumn hair

unmoving,

the forest floor

mourning

as the sky fills --

once plucked

sparrows and larks

rejoicing in freedom.

Autumn wind blows west and whispers truth.

Anais Nin

what a peculiar brand of madness;

your electric lips –

unspoken,

like a poem, perversed,

these exquisite, feral dreams

"Perhaps every single fair is no more than a dissociated fragment of one single, great, original fair which was inexplicably scattered long ago in a diaspora of the amazing."

Angela Carter, Fireworks

Last night the sky lit up; violent longing of the lonely gods.

"But I swear the nights the nights are too much

Nights when poems are made and unmade

Nights when she is too tempted

to leave the substance for the shadow"

Andre Breton, My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed