this has been stuck in my head since two thousand four.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Rules of Sleep

In the sludge drawer of animals in arms,
Where the legs entwine to keep the body warm
Against the winter night, some cold seeps through-
It is the future: say, a square of stars
In the windowpane, suggesting the abstract
And large, or a sudden shift in position
That lets one body know the other's free to move
An inch away, and then a thousand miles,
And, after that, even intimacy
Is only another form of separation.


-Howard Moss from his book Rules of Sleep

letters and then letters

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead."
-Oscar Wilde

"A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life."
-Woolf

"I always imagined Paradise will be a kind of library."
-Jorge Luis Borges

"All I care about is distances traversed, miles an hour, the geography of despair and coffee and nonsense and beauty, of punk rock and luggage and grime and sugar and young love."
-Al Burian

"One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."
-Nietzsche

"Every weekend is a vacation."
-sign on Colonial

"Asimov was a claustrophile; he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In the first volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading."

no subject

Two Forms of Insomnia-Jorge Luis Borges

What is insomnia?
The question is rhetorical. I know the answer only too well.
It is to count off and dread in the small hours the fateful harsh strokes
of the chime. It is attempting with ineffectual magic to breathe smoothly.
It is the burden of a body that abruptly shifts sides. It is shutting the eyelids down tight. It is a state like fever and is assuredly not watchfulness. It is saying over bits of paragraphs read years and years before. It is knowing how guilty you are to be lying awake when others are asleep. It is trying to sink into slumber and being unable to sink into slumber. It is the horror of being and going on being. It is the dubious daybreak.

What is longevity? It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is carrying the weight of seas and pyramids, of ancient libraries and dynasties, of the dawns that Adam saw. It is being well aware that I am bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be.

summer review

For a season so inundated with unpacking boxes, it is funny that this is not what it will be remembered by. There were no fingers in my hair, no bodies fighting for blankets, no phones(or mailboxes) to wait by. All the pitter-patters I carried into summer have dulled to an almost indecipherable murmur. I spent more money on paint in July than I did on groceries. I forgot to miss you. I bought myself flowers. My tomatoes died. I sat in front of the same picture in the same museum for weeks. Stayed up all night. I rode my bike everyday. I drove around Orlando, I had college girl epiphanies.

for my gal

My best gal, who lives in a land of triple exclamation marks and obscure sayings, who feels colors that cannot be felt.

i saw your future in my sleep

we want we want we want. and then we want.