Bed

My mother taught me to bleed based on the instructions of my grandmother– she made sure I might never forget. My daughters’ birthdays hurt like bee stings.

He says I am ugly, which is why he wanted to touch me, my breasts swollen unchristian things, and painful; there was darkness wrapped inside my apology.

                                                                   (my sex)

He looked upon my girls, who slept. He said they sleep as buds sleep, those carved nubs which only flower bright in funeral dress. I paid for anaesthetics.

Cut a little deeper, I told him, cut high up into the beds in their hard round bellies, cut, for if it hurts enough I heard you might find Him, deep, deeper…

                                                                  (resting)

On a small pink pad – like a petal, you said – He’ll wait, for the only explanation is the paradise you’re trying to extract, entering my little cubs in hard neat slits.

If you find Him, tell Him to come to me. Tell Him I’m sorry. Tell Him He’s wet my appetite – I want to be a fruit, or foam on the sea, I want, I want, I want…

                                                            (they bleed)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They All Want To Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of the flowers–O flowers,
flowers slung by a dancing girl–in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare,
ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to
stand by an open grave with a joker’s skull in the hand and then to say over
slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking a heart that’s
breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.

Carl Sandburg

Good Place…

misery…

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Graham Greene
The End of the Affair

imagination…

Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.

Patrick McGrath
The Grotesque

Bye…

Conjuror’s Hat

As if he could fold
fish from the air:
silver quick magnets,
broad sluggards of slate.

As if he could
set them swimming on the wind
barely spinning their waters
or
churning motes in a moiré.

I had wanted to be
that liquid magician;
jokes fretting at his fingertips;
skulking in his cuffs: white,
fluttering.

But his hat slewed over my eyes:
tobacco reek in its brim;
split lining spilling
blood and a stuff like feathers.

As if, netting a stickleback
in the brook below my school
it dreamed itself into a book
or unfolded into
the drape of cut swans
that had been waiting in my scissors

Noel Williams

Life Advice For Girls…

If you’re late for a date, don’t worry. If you’re very late, just tell him it’s because you were masturbating – no man is going to worry about the late part, believe me!

what happens in love-making…

The pleasure we derive from sex is also bound up with our recognizing, and giving a distinctive seal of approval to, those ingredients of a good life whose presence we have detected in another person. The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

[…]

Our culture encourages us to acknowledge very little of who we normally are in the act of sex. It seems as if it might be a purely physical process, without any psychological importance. But …what happens in love-making is closely bound up with some of our most central ambitions. The act of sex plays out through the rubbing together of organs, but our excitement is no boorish physiological reaction; rather, it is an ecstasy we feel at encountering someone who may be able to put to rest certain of our greatest fears, and with whom we may hope to build a shared life based upon common values.

Alain de Botton
How to Think More About Sex

never seen a ghost…

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor – most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren’t careful – if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.

Shirley Jackson
Come Along With Me