June 2021

[text ID: But you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily. Sideways because I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds you. /end ID]

[text ID: Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper. /end ID]

[text ID:  Here is the hallway and here are the doors and here is the fear of the other thing, the relentless thing, your body drowning in gravity. /end ID]

[text ID: Take a body, dump it, drive. Take a body, maybe your own, and dump it gently. All your dead, unfinished selves and dump them gently. Take only what you need. /end ID]

[text ID: How you say it is how you think it. And, more dramatically: if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. /end ID]

[text ID:  Something has happened in the paint tonight and it is worth keeping. It’s nothing like I thought it would be and closer to what I meant. /end ID]

[text ID:  This is what they found on the dead man’s desk when the landlord let them in: twenty-eight pages, esoteric and unfollowable, written with perfect penmanship and a total disregard for any reader, as if the intended audience was a population not quite human. /end ID]

medeae:

Richard Siken, Straw House, Straw Dog // Little Beast

[text ID: I don’t rally blame you for being dead but you can’t have your sweater back / I couldn’t get the boy to kill me but I wore his jacket for the longest time /end ID]

[text ID: Is there a problem you just can’t get your head around? And, if you can’t think it, how can you solve it? /end ID]

[text ID: People, they make it up as they go along. They find connections between things where there aren’t any. They get moody, they refuse things, they take it deep inside themselves and fold it into something unrecognizable and then they set it down on the table. /end ID]

[text ID: Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything. We made ourselves cold. /end ID]

[text ID: there is something underneath the building that is trying very hard to get your attention - a man with almond eyes and a zipper that runs the length of his spine. /end ID]

from Black Telephone by Richard Siken

[text ID: The phone rings and you pick it up and it’s bad news. Now what do you do? / The phone rings and I pick it up and I really wanted to do something else with my hands. /end ID]   

[text ID:  so it’s summer, so it’s suicide, so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool /end ID]

[text ID:  All this was prepared for me. All this was set in motion long ago. I live in someone else’s future. /end ID]

[text ID: You realize you’re a thing—taking up space and casting a shadow—you’re a dot, a blip on the screen, something graphable hurtling irreversibly through space-time on a trajectory set in motion by events that happened long before you were born. /end ID]

[text ID: What can you learn from your opponent? More than you think. Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word. /end ID]

[text ID: The way we move through time and space, or only time. The way it’s night for many miles, and then suddenly, it’s not /end ID]

[text ID: Just because a thing’s invisible doesn’t mean it don’t exist, you think to yourself, but still, there is no valid way to test it. /end ID]

[text ID: Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure. I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart. /end ID]

[text ID: I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. /end ID]

[text ID: When she saw herself, finished, she said, It doesn’t look like me. Picasso said, It will. Perhaps it will look like her because it is the document and will remain, while she is just a person who will fade. Now, when we think of her, we think of this painting. Picasso was planning ahead. The painting is evidence but not proof. There’s no proof that she looked like that, even though we have the document. She existed enough to be painted. She could have been an idea, but that’s another kind of existing. /end ID]

[text ID: Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them. /end ID]

[text ID: The constant development of thing after thing, cause and effect, the inevitable always waiting for you, up ahead, in the distance, as you inch reluctantly forward. /end ID]

[text ID: I’m a romantic, an absurdist. I am bad with facts and I get confused. I’m a hostile witness. I didn’t want to see this, talk about this.  /end ID]

[text ID: A lover is standing too close to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me with your entire body. /end ID]