Winter walk

I am misplaced,
wake me from this winter.
I do not belong here among
buried roses and bare branches
of frozen dreams…a solitary
walk of extraordinary length
into an atmosphere of loneliness.
I belong to no one now, but my
own chilled thoughts of yesterday,
slipping in and out of me as easily
as the snow falls from the clouds…
the beauty of each flake, yet a man
can die unprotected in this world.
The mist will part as I pass,
and leave just enough room for
you to also pass, just a shadow’s
length behind me, yet there is
no more than silence here in this
wilderness of your absence…
and each day the walk becomes longer,
colder, and my breath curls and rises
to be with you, for just a moment of
respite from the inside of my heart.

Forest Walker

disturbing atmosphere

I’m not aware of Enid Blyton writing a series of ghost stories, but she came close in the ones about Barney, the circus boy, his ordinary middle class mates and the politically-incorrect spaniel, Loony. They were all set in places with a disturbing atmosphere and names beginning with R – The Ring o’ Bells Mystery, The Rubadub Mystery, etc. At the age of eight, I decided I wanted to write books a bit like those.

Phil Rickman
Interviewed by Brenden King, 23rd July 2019

Psychopaths are often sexually promiscuous

In an increasingly individualistic society, self-interest and narcissistic behaviours are valued and even rewarded. Society is encouraging behaviour that borderlines on psychopathic in order to achieve individual success. Psychopathic traits such as a lack of remorse can be particularly useful for an individual as they can achieve their goals without concern for how their actions will affect others; this allows them to achieve material and sexual success without the ethical concerns associated with such goals.

Psychopaths are often sexually promiscuous; their superficial charm and manipulativeness allow for easy seduction and coercion into sexual relationships. For impulsive and driven individuals, this allows psychopaths to fulfill their sexual desires successfully. From an evolutionary standpoint, this ensures that they are able to pass on their genes through reproduction.

Hare and Babiak (2006) comment on the reproductive success of psychopaths who can have many children “with little or no emotional and physical investment in their well-being”. However, the definition of ‘sexual success’ is subjective. Although psychopaths are able to have many relationships, they rarely last long and lack the emotional connection others often seek when looking for a romantic partner.

Meyers (2014) argues that the “absence of [an] emotional connection and true empathetic feeling” means a psychopath is incapable of forming meaningful relationships. However, if psychopaths lack empathy and do not experience emotions in the same way as others, one could argue that they may not want emotional connections with people. Society believes that relationships should be romantic and spiritual, but perhaps psychopaths do not share the same beliefs and values; so they may consider promiscuity to be successful.

Angel Harper
The Benefits of Psychopathy for the Individual

first kiss

The kiss is different than I expected. It’s slow and tender, his lips soft and warm against mine. He tastes sweet, like the powdered sugar I spilt and the coffee with chicory he’s always drinking. It’s a perfect first kiss.

D.L. Hess
Sir

Morning Boner

The expression on her face – wonderful!

Location

beautiful garden

The beautiful garden, its silence and its peace, the lovely leisure, the solitude of which we are unworthy.

Colette
On Tour
trans. Matthew Ward

asphyxiations imposed on black life

“Breath and Precarity” grew out of a poem I wrote in the wake of the murder of Eric Garner, a poem in the “Mu” series called “The Overghost Ourkestra’s Next.” Variations on the line or idea that “no matter we couldn’t breathe, we blew” occurred or came to me as I thought about the approach to breath and breathing taken by black horn players. I thought about it in relation to the cutting off of breath, specifically black breath, of which the killing of Garner was yet another horrid instance. I heard the way these horn players have with breath as an artistic othering of the asthmatic conditions imposed on black folk, the asphyxiations imposed on black life, an othering in which the intentness and evidentness of breath and breathing spoke to their social othering’s revocation of breath. I heard an antiphonal or dialectical relationship between the two. I was thinking about a blowing-without-breath that ranges from Hawkins’s or Webster’s use of subtones to John Tchicai’s or Sonny Rollins’s asthmatic, apprehensive stutter to Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s or Roscoe Mitchell’s triumphant or defiant or put-upon recourse to circular breathing. By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter. “Unable to breathe though we were, we blew” is one of the ways it’s put in the poem, a line of thinking I ended up dealing with in a more extended, expository way in “Breath and Precarity.”

That involved reviewing the breath-based poetics of Olson, Creeley, Baraka, and Ginsberg, all of whom were influenced by black music and all of whom influenced me. I see that poetics as less literal, less organic, less a matter of finding and following one’s natural or normal breathing patterns than I did when I first encountered it in my teens and early twenties. I’ve come to see it as being about the ability to alter the rhythm of one’s breathing, to construct alternate breathing patterns. Breath becomes a vehicle for senses of duress exactly with regard to breath, which is to say exactly with regard to life. This bears not only on a racist society in which black lives demonstrably don’t matter but on an era that doesn’t seem to be sure life matters.

Nathaniel Mackey
The Art of Poetry No. 107
Paris Review 232, Spring 2020

like London

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

Stephen Fry
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within