7/10/16

Icarus in Love. - Unknown

I loved you as
Icarus loved
The sun –

Too close,
Too much.

On An Unsociable Family - Elizabeth Hands

O what a strange parcel of creatures are we,
Scarce ever to quarrel, or even agree;
We all are alone, though at home altogether,
Except to the fire constrained by the weather;
Then one says, ‘’Tis cold’, which we all of us know,
And with unanimity answer, ‘’Tis so’:
With shrugs and with shivers all look at the fire,
And shuffle ourselves and our chairs a bit nigher;
Then quickly, preceded by silence profound,
A yawn epidemical catches around:
Like social companions we never fall out,
Nor ever care what one another’s about;
To comfort each other is never our plan,
For to please ourselves, truly, is more than we can.

6/26/16

"They don't lie a lot" - Henry Rollins

They don't lie a lot
They just don't tell the truth very often
Truth does not mean much to them
You can lie to them, or tell the truth
Makes no difference to them
Walk on them if you want
Eat with their forks
Destroy them for the hell of it

6/18/16

The essential - Aleksandar Ristović

I was not allowed to live my life,
so I pretended to be dead
and interested solely in things
a dead man could be interested in:
petrified reptiles,
museum bric-à-brac,
fake evidence passed off as truth.
I felt a great need to be really dead,
and so at all times I wore
a mask made of wood
on which someone occasionally drew,
with colored pencils,
the look of contentment,
impatience, desire, bliss,
or the look of someone who is thinking
about an entirely different matter.

6/14/16

Cousins - Louise Glück

My son’s very graceful; he has perfect balance.
He’s not competitive, like my sister’s daughter.

Day and night, she’s always practicing.
Today, it’s hitting softballs into the copper beech,
retrieving them, hitting them again.
After a while, no one even watches her.
If she were any stronger, the tree would be bald.

My son won’t play with her; he won’t even ride bicycles with her.
She accepts that; she’s used to playing by herself.
The way she sees it, it isn’t personal:
whoever won’t play doesn’t like losing.

It’s not that my son’s inept, that he doesn’t do things well.
I’ve watched him race: he’s natural, effortless—
right from the first, he takes the lead.
And then he stops. It’s as though he was born rejecting
the solitude of the victor.

My sister’s daughter doesn’t have that problem.
She may as well be first; she’s already alone.

5/28/16

“A man feared that he might find an assassin” - Stephen Crane

A man feared that he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.