I listen to the rain fall hard and it doesn’t stop and I hope it means that the world is ending.
January 2010
“I felt his hard knee between my knees. My mouth hurts, my breasts hurt, because it hurts, when you have been dead, to come alive….”
—Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight (via nightmarebrunette)
“What one person sees as degrading and disgusting and bad for women might make some women feel empowered and beautiful and strong.”
—Sasha Grey (via linzo) (zombiegentleman) (via deadgirls) (via josepha-theodora)
“Sometimes I like bleeding from sex. Probably because I like the drama of it, the sense that some price was paid. I like the red proof of having used my body in a type of consensual aggression. And the twinge of pain reminding me into the next day. Maybe that’s how I most truly feel about sex, because that’s how I feel about life, vengeful and passionate as a wild-eyed god: I want everyone to bleed.”
—Chunks of Ash (via nightmarebrunette)
“Each time we don’t say what we want to say we’re dying. Make a list of how many times you died this week.”
—Yoko Ono (via fuckyeahyokoono)
“I never fall apart because I never fall together.”
—Andy Warhol (via thingsgohazy) (via fakepalindromes) (via youarebonbon)
The Falling, Jane Hirshfield
You turn towards meteor showers in August,
wishing yourself like that:
bright and burning wholly out.
When feeling finally comes it is
that falling, matter breaking away
from air, the sound
of crickets moving through the grass like fire—
and the strangely twisted metal
in the field that a child finds:
residue, crown.
Then there’s the story of the Chinese sage,
in anger and despair, who cut his body away in pieces,
flung them into the lake.
Each one, becoming finned and whole, swims off.
(via poetry365)
“In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.”
—
Howard Zinn (via fuckyeahradicalquotes)
See: Germany - Israel - Palestine
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
—Howard Zinn (via fuckyeahradicalquotes) (via ihatethismess) (via letstalkequality) (via ekswitaj)
“Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. But America is different. That’s all we’ve been brought up on… [But] these lovely things about America were never lovely. We have been expansionist and aggressive and mean to other people from the beginning. And we’ve been aggressive and mean to people in this country, and we’ve allocated the wealth of this country in a very unjust way. We’ve never had justice in courts for the poor people, for black people, for radicals. Now how can we boast that America is a very special place?”
—
Howard Zinn, “The Problem is Civil Disobedience” speech at Johns Hopkins University, November 1970 reprinted in Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
The spine of my copy of Voices is broken at this page (484), because this passage informs everything I do, everything I teach, everything I research and read and contextualize.
What a sad day.
(via -smart-tart-) (via hikergirl) (via jhnbrssndn) (via scaramouche) (via ekswitaj)
Howard Zinn, Historian and Activist, Dies at 87 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
“The physical body connects the idea of passion with youthful sexuality, but that is only a small part of passionate experience. A passionate person is never a watered-down personality. Most people can endure passion for only a few moments; Yogis are passionate forever. […] The passion that lies within you is already complete. Its power does not depend on someone outside yourself.”
—
Alice Christensen
Some words I would like to lay down on as though they were a bed of nails and imprint them in my skin. So I never forget.
(via nightmarebrunette)
Me too
Getting Ready, Jack Gilbert
What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,
but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day
on these immense, perishing fields? What then?
(Desire is not the problem. This far south,
we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)
He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.
In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.
(via poetry365)
Only Good For Conversation
Sixto Rodriguez
Sixto Rodriguez - Only Good For Conversation
My pocket don’t drive me fast
My mother treats me slow
My statue’s got a concrete heart
But you’re the coldest bitch I know
In the factory that you call your mind
Graveyard thoughts of stone
A master thief I wouldn’t enter there
You’ve nothing I would care to own, so help me
You’re pretending that you got it made
You know I know you know no truth
You’re still serving cookies and kool-aid
You’re so proper and so cute
My pocket don’t drive me fast
My mother treats me slow
My statue’s got a concrete heart
But you’re the coldest bitch I know, so help me
Rodriguez is on my “Artists/Bands I need to see live before I die” list and he is touring Australia in March/April. I’m going to try to see him at least twice.
We are writing a secret history of us on our skin.
Sex, a kiss that becomes a bite, dancing all night, conversation, secrets, laughter, drunk, hands knitted together:
these write invisible ink tattoos that remain
after my bruises fade
like patterns of crushed leaves on my skin.
I worry when I’m with another man,
I might think of you and my
skin will shine,
I won’t be able to hide it.
His body heat will illuminate your words.
He’ll ask,
“Whose sex and poetry is this,
staining your skin?”
and
“Who kept the map,
to untrace his steps?”
They look like claw marks on the most girl part of me, like someone pawed at me and left a scar. Like maybe all the people who’ve held me have left a mark. Hold me here, they say from my hips, kiss me inside my thighs, touch me softly on the sides of my breasts. I’ve had my share of insecurities but never with these; i love them for sticking with me, reminding me how long they’ve been around; the way the whole world stretches to accomodate a woman coming into herself. Little pink lines in her wake.
(by expectingrain) (via nightmarebrunette)
Summer #7
A ghost gum is whispering secrets to cicadas
about ancient ceremony
their chorus of timbals
is singing death, death, death
death layered upon death
like nymphs shedding their skin.
I am a cicada, digging through the dirt.
I have a curse on my tongue that even
the bush can’t answer.
I’m going to wash my heart in bleach,
then my bones,
white like ghost gum.
Soon, summer and fire will be here
and I don’t yet know
about this kind of black.
“So like, right now for example. The Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, “What about the strain on our resources?” Well it’s like when I had this garden party for my father’s birthday, right? I put R.S.V.P. ‘cause it was a sit-down dinner. But some people came that like did not R.S.V.P. I was like totally buggin’. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, and squish in extra place settings. But by the end of the day it was, like, the more the merrier. And so if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. Thank you very much.”
—Cher (Clueless) (via jshdivision)
“Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled towards a normality that can better accommodate us. There is always risk in eccentricity.”
—From “The Etched City” by K. J. Bishop.
"Any fool can get into an ocean...", Jack Spicer
Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.
(via thefranticsearch) (via poetbabble)
“And if they have a collection of Pablo Neruda poems - shoot to kill.”
—
Stephen Colbert, talking about the threat of love to airport security (via smut-to-go)
Pluto to Persephone, Daniel Williams
I know what it is you
want from me
but you see
I cannot give it
I am hell
and hell
is a nice place to visit
but when you want to leave
you want to leave
when you speak to me
you converse with darkness
hold my hand
old bones rattle
when you kiss me
imagine kissing the skull of a saint
mouldering in a cave
large balloon of spirit
flown imagine taste of white bone
reposed in darkness
sweet bursts of pomegranate
on your tongue
seeds bitter
with promises they have made
the longer you wait for me
the more the world suffers
(via poetry365)
“Q: Pick five words that describe yourself.
A: Oh, The Seven Deadly Sins.” —Leonard Cohen answering a query put forth to him in a 1994 Q Magazine article (via Sarah Belfort & goodcleanwholesomefun) (via Crashingly Beautiful)
A: Oh, The Seven Deadly Sins.” —Leonard Cohen answering a query put forth to him in a 1994 Q Magazine article (via Sarah Belfort & goodcleanwholesomefun) (via Crashingly Beautiful)
“So, we have Bonnie instead—a person who really does exist for all time, but you’ll never be able to actually, physically give him a blow job… because his penis is made of air.”
—Will Oldham explaining the moniker of Bonnie “Prince” Billy (via velveteendream) like? more like LOVE (via jshdivision)
“I’m only leaving here toes up—I’m not going to any home for little old ladies—and I’m not taking anything with me! Word gets out, and people get on the list to come. I don’t know them from Adam, but I seem to be the queen of the gay people. I’m witty, I’m bright, I’m loose, and I wear feathers.”
—The art parties of Phyllis Diller : The New Yorker
“As we pause to honor King’s legacy, it’s tempting to sanitize his radical call for economic justice or temper his prophetic words about war. We prefer King as an icon stored safely behind history’s glass case. When his words are quoted these days, we rarely hear the righteous anger of a preacher who denounced the Vietnam War and described America as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” We choose not to reflect on his warnings about the arrogance of American foreign policy. We avoid an honest grappling with his critique of capitalism as a system that permits “necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.”
—Honoring King: Economic Justice for All - John Gehring - God’s Politics Blog (via apatosaurus) (via breadandwhine) (via tiredofbeingignored) (via glitterbombing) (via ihatethismess) (via letstalkequality) (via ekswitaj)
“Animation isn’t just for kids; it’s for adults who take drugs.”
—Paul McCartney (via oldfilmsflicker) (via yourfavoriteredhead) (via flickflickflicker) (via unicornology)
