To The Whore Who Took My Poems some say we should keep personal remorse from the poem, stay abstract, and there is some reason in this, but jezus; twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have my paintings too, my best ones; its stifling: are you trying to crush me out like… Continue reading Charles Bukowski
She is beside me, drenched in sweat. She’s breathing gently, long slow breaths. I imagine her soul going in and out: wanting to leave, wanting to come back, wanting to leave, wanting to come back. The day will soon harden into what we need to do. But for now we have each other. We run… Continue reading Luke Davies
’TIS the last rose of summer Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone; No flower of her kindred, No rosebud is nigh, To reflect back her blushes, To give sigh for sigh. I’ll not leave thee, thou… Continue reading Thomas Moore
You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our… Continue reading Stephen Levine
Not enough. One life is not enough. I’d like to live twice on this sad planet, In lonely cities, in starved villages, To look at all evil, at the decay of bodies, And probe the laws to which the time was subject, Time that howled above us like a wind. — Czeslaw Milosz, from “Dawns,”… Continue reading Czeslaw Milosz
I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
Who is alone now, will stay long alone, will lie awake, read, get long letters written, and through the streets that follow up and down will wander restless, when the leaves are driven. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Autumn Day,” The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Ecco, 2010)
Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortable as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of… Continue reading John Green
And soon it’s not just that, but this, this something else, this sticking of gears, this mile of pulled stitches that ravels out of my ear, this tear that comes from nowhere, this fritz, this hitch, this itch that won’t quit, that begets the grains of something like regret and sows them everywhere. — Claire… Continue reading Claire Wahmanholm
Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I’m not anxious, I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because… Continue reading Augusten Burroughs
The Vale of Soul-Making 