Let us learn to increase our self-restraint, to curb luxury, to moderate ambition, to soften anger, to regard poverty without prejudice, to practice frugality, curb hope, and control our mind obsessed with the future.
Seneca
Let us learn to increase our self-restraint, to curb luxury, to moderate ambition, to soften anger, to regard poverty without prejudice, to practice frugality, curb hope, and control our mind obsessed with the future.
Seneca
I love you most
In the morning
When you roll to the sun
On the window
Eyes half shut
I love you most
There
In your tangled sheets
and sticky hair
In a t-shirt
With your guard down
Got to be the first time
Anyone has seen God
At least,
In this town
Before you’ve had
Your cigarette
Your coffee
The film in your eyes
I’ll be there
Seeping into you
My goddess,
Unaware
Burning.
When you decide to find the source of the pull within yourself, when you give yourself over to this mad god of fire, you will find yourself more and more alone. With every advance, every great book read, every goal reached comes fewer and fewer friends. What do you say to people rehashing twenty year old slang? What is the worth of a conversation you can already see through? And to go back is impossible. Like sitting in a plastic chair and calling it a gold throne and your own legs tell you you’re lying.
“longing is a room built entirely of knives”
— Leslie Harrison, from “[Sirens],” The Book of Endings
Today I thought about my old neighborhood
Riding my bike around the bayou
The duck pond
Friends’ houses who have long moved away, still sentimental
I think of my bedroom
Which I avoided, because to me it meant loneliness
But not quite as lonely as this
And my mother’s bathroom
With wall to wall mirrors
Where I sat, at the vanity
Hundreds of times
Getting ready for dates
Or outings with friends
Listening to the radio as I combed through my hair
Sometimes mom would come in, and tell me that I looked beautiful
Sometimes I left the house in haste, angry at my father
Other times I sat in the tranquility of the darkening skies
and nesting birds on my back porch
Pretending I was too dissolving
My home is scattered
It is with those that I love
Some are here
And some are gone
I will be home again in the end
