WUTHERING HEIGHTS

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

Sylvia Plath

archetypes of both men and women

Louis L’Amour wasn’t an influence on my fiction stylistically, or how I wanted to approach it, but he was certainly a force to be reckoned with. His appeal was broad. He attracted male and female readers, and understood action, romance, as well as simple, evocative prose. He had plenty of writing experience before he embraced westerns full time. He had written all manner of stories and had many personal experiences he brought to the work, which made it stand out as more than the usual powder burners. Elmer Kelton — and I quote from memory, not by having the quote in front of me — said something to the effect that L’Amour’s characters were 7 feet tall and invincible, while his were 5-foot-8 and nervous. L’Amour gave readers characters bigger than life, archetypes of both men and women that were similar to real people but, like John Wayne, were somehow bigger than life. Nobody did that kind of thing better in modern popular fiction.

Joe R. Lansdale
Louis L’Amour’s Influence

monster cock

Dove tried to take her mind away from his man meat, but it was like her brain was paralyzed by dick osmosis. Johnson’s feet were big, which meant…
He has a monster cock.

Debra Anastasia
Fire Down Below

Humans – self-reproducing robots

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.

Kim Stanley Robinson
2312

sense of isolation

Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.

Haruki Murakami
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running