not that this isn't perfect the way it is.

When you’re at school and you want to quit, people say ‘You’re going to hate it out in the world.’ Well, I didn’t believe them and I was right. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be grown up, and they said ‘Childhood is the best time of your life.’ Well, it wasn’t. And now, I want his company and they say, ‘What’s half a loaf? You’re well shot of him’; and I say ‘I know that… but I miss him, that’s all’ and they say ‘He never made you happy’ and I say ‘But I am happy, apart from missing him. You might throw me a pill or two for my cough.’ [pauses, smiles] All my life, I’ve been looking for somebody courageous, resourceful. [pause, thinks] He’s not it… but something. We were something. [pause] I only came about my cough.  

under the influence.

People kill themselves because of society’s inability to educate, in terms of love, any further than a given point. Nobody in this world seems to be able to love beyond a certain point; they all go up to a certain point then they become emotionally tired of it, or bored or hurt. They change, and their love doesn’t transcend certain obstacles. For somebody who is very sensitive and idealistic, as we all start out to be, it becomes a dramatic experience. You can either make that bridge or not, and we are going to make this picture for people who are possibly lost, and try to point out the reasons for it.

One can always count on Cassavetes to tell it like it is. 

Or Neruda.

But love, this love has not ended: just as it never had a birth, it has no death: it is like a long river, only changing lands, and changing lips.

i beg your pudding

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Antilamentation – Dorianne Laux

(photo: Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen)

central nervous system

When we first met, he told me that he liked large breasted women and that on his way to see me he walked past a child squatting a meter from a high end concept store, his parents whistling him on as a pool of urine slowly coated the pavement around him. “what the fu- I mean, welcome to TST”, I said in a soft voice, while he was already firing questions at me consecutively, without waiting for the actual response.

I was there to write and eat cauliflower soup, it was one of those ‘always-a-buzz’ places, one you definitely avoid if you hate life. He had short frizzy hair that felt like the rough green side of a sponge, the ticklish kind, and his skin could best be described as ‘free from hardship or troubles or fried food’. Except for the dark circles surrounding his eyes. Really big and really sunken. I could tell he had trouble sleeping, though he never seemed to be dozing off.

He talked for minutes on end, while outside’s blistering heat was creeping through the door left ajar. He wasn’t annoying or anything, and he seemed to have been waiting for someone to just sit there and listen. My remarks were scarce and usually followed by a quietness that seemed to bother him for a few seconds, the time it took him to blurt out another shot of nonsensical comments.

I was fiddling with my spoon, the soup already cold, when a sudden halt came into the conversation. His face changed, as if right at that moment he realized where he was. He started sniffing the stale, pungent hot air. “There are scents here that can penetrate to your imagination”, he said. “Some I can only describe as, ‘WHUT’.”

“So much of the city is our bodies with their neverending smells”, I said looking out of the window. “Even the city carries ruins in its heart. Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling. Like phantom limbs. Like in that Stephen King novel, Duma Key. Few buildings, few lives are built so well even their ruins are beautiful.”

Like a room with the air suddenly sucked out, he paused his breathing and looked at me. I held his stare unable to read his eyes, seemingly wandering in mine. We sat in silence for a long time after, minds wandering.

Later, while in a taxi with some friends, without kissing or knowing me, he says ‘I love you’.

‘It’s just literature though’, I respond a few minutes later, as if I knew him. As if I was sure that had to be the correct answer. As if what he had said had come carrying a phantom question mark at the end.

A few months pass and he really, actually, truly falls in love with another girl, and she falls in love with him too. Every now and then I think about them, like today.

Not that I know them well, to me they are just names on a piece of paper, no graphs, no illustrations, no stories for me to read. But they fell in love in an interesting place and lead a- if not interesting, at least not mediocre- life.

I guess that’s what I’m thinking about today, a ‘not mediocre’ life. And literature. 

basically

Leopold: That thing is a damned hazard!
Kate: It’s just a toaster!
Leopold: Well, insertion of bread into that so-called toaster produces no toast at all, merely warm bread! Inserting the bread twice produces charcoal. So, clearly, to make proper toast it requires one and a half insertions, which is something for which the apparatus doesn’t begin to allow! One assumes that when the General of Electric built it, he might have tried using it. One assumes the General might take pride in his creations instead of just foisting them on an unsuspecting public.
Kate: You know something? Nobody gives a rat’s ass that you have to push the toast down twice. You know why? Because everybody pushes their toast down twice!
Leopold: Not where I come from.
Kate: Oh, because where you come from, toast is the result of reflection and study!
Leopold: Ah yes, you mock me. But perhaps one day when you’ve awoken from a pleasant slumber to the scent of a warm brioche smothered in marmalade and fresh creamery butter, you’ll understand that life is not solely composed of tasks, but tastes.

An Entomologist’s Last Love Letter

dear samantha

i’m sorry
we have to get a divorce
i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:
it’s not you
it sure as hell isn’t me
it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do
i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species

i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night
i know you would never DO anything, you never do but..
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night

did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication.

after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together
like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away

this is not true

after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down
while he still has control over his motor functions
he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift
she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes
spooning every morsel into her mouth
she wastes nothing
even the exoskeleton goes
she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them
now that.. is selflessness

i could never do that for you

so i have a new plan
i’m gonna leave you now
i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices
i hope you do the same
i will jay walk at every opportunity
i will steal things i could easily afford
i will be rude to strangers
i hope you do the same
i hope reincarnation is real
i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures
i hope we are reborn as flies
so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.

-Jared Singer