December 2008
21 posts
1 tag
'Life Story' by Tennessee Williams
After you’ve been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them,...
1 tag
'Owl Song' by Margaret Atwood
I am the heart of a murdered woman
who took the wrong way home
who was strangled in a vacant lot and not buried
who was shot with care beneath a tree
who was mutilated by a crisp knife.
There are many of us.
I grew feathers and tore my way out of her;
I am shaped like a feathered heart.
My mouth is a chisel, my hands
the crimes done by hands.
I sit in the forest talking of death
which...
1 tag
'Mother, In Love At Sixty' by Susanna Styve
Reason number one it can’t work: his name is Bill. For god’s
sake, he hunts. He has no pets, other than two doting
daughters, and his ex-wife is still alive. He’s simply not my
type. Who wants to get married again, anyway? I’m too old.
I go South at the first frost. Plus, he’s messy. Men are messy.
He could die. Then where would I be?
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'What I Did' by Jim Daniels
What are you going to do when your girlfriend’s pregnant neither of you have health insurance or a decent job and you’ve both been taking enough drugs to kill a horse or two? What are you going to do when she calls up from Wisconsin three states away to tell you she’s pregnant, that she slipped away the night before she’s telling you and she’s crying and she’s...
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'Human Beings' by Adrian Mitchell
Look at your hands your beautiful useful hands you’re not an ape you’re not a parrot you’re not a slow loris or a smart missile you’re human not british not american not israeli not palestinian you’re human not catholic not protestant not muslim not hindu you’re human we all start human we end up human human first human last we’re human or we’re nothing nothing but bombs and poison gas nothing but...
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'Someone Who Used To Have Someone' by Miriam...
There used to be someone to whom I could say do you love me and be sure that the answer would always be yes; there used to be someone to whom I could telephone and be sure when the operator said do you accept the charges the answer would always be yes; but now there is no one to ask no one to telephone from the strangeness of cities in the lateness of nightness now there is no-one always now...
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'High Windows' by Philip Larkin
When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives — Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought,...
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'The Shout' by Simon Armitage
We went out into the school yard together, me and the boy whose name and face I don’t remember. We were testing the range of the human voice: he had to shout for all he was worth, I had to raise an arm from across the divide to signal back that the sound had carried. He called from over the park—I lifted an arm. Out of bounds, he yelled from the end of the road, from the foot of the hill,...
'The Wordsworth Effect' by Joyce Sutphen
Is when you return to a place and it’s not nearly as amazing as you once thought it was, or when you remember how you felt about something (or someone) but you know you’ll never feel that way again. It’s when you notice someone has turned down the volume, and you realize it was you; when you have the suspicion that you’ve met the enemy and you are it, or when you get your...
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'Two Cures For Love' by Wendy Cope
1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter. 2. The easy way: get to know him better.
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'The Archipelago of Kisses' by Jeffrey McDaniel
We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t grow on trees, like in the old days. So where does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy, like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss. The sloppy kiss. The peck. The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips...
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'Birth of Evil' by John Amen
At first, autonomy was encouraged. That changed after the rift, when He banished his eldest. A sarcasm circulated, that He would have blamed Lucifer’s mother had that been possible, but clearly we were all immaculate extensions of Him, knew what we were afraid to say, that He couldn’t stand to see that part of Lucifer so like Himself and so chose to oust him. Many wanted to gibe, Glanced in a...
'Fifty Years Of Popular Songs Condensed Into... →
One of many famous McSweeney’s lists - songs from the last fifty years are summed up in one sentence, and quite humorously so. I did not reproduce the list here as a text post because it is published on the McSweeney website.
1 tag
'6:59 AM' by Shane Koyczan
I’ve been told that people in the army do more by 7:00 am than I do in an entire day
but if I wake at 6:59 am and turn to you to trace the outline of your lips with mine I will have done enough and killed no one in the process.
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'Ode to Hangover' by Dean Young
Hangover, you drive me into the yard to dig holes as a way of working through you as one might work through a sorry childhood by riding the forbidden amusement park rides as a grown-up until puking. Alas, I feel like something spit out by a duck, a duck other ducks are ashamed of when I only tried to protect myself by projecting myself on hilarity’s big screen at the party where one nitwit...
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'When a Man Hasn't Been Kissed' by Jeffrey...
When I haven’t been kissed in a long time, I walk behind well-dressed women on cold, December mornings and shovel the steamy exhalations pluming from their lips down my throat with both hands, hoping a single molecule will cling to my lungs. When I haven’t been kissed in a long time, I sneak into the ladies room of a fancy restaurant, dig into the trashcan for a napkin where a woman...
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'Homework' by Allen Ginsberg
If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle, I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico, Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska, Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that...
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untitled haiku by Shuson Kato
I kill an ant and realize my three children have been watching.
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'Lies I've Told My 3 Year Old Recently' by Raul...
Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose. Tiny bears live in drain pipes. If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky. The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago. Everyone knows at least one secret language. When nobody is looking, I can fly. We are all...
1 tag
'Trouble' by Matthew Dickman
Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter hung in the Tahitian bedroom of her mother’s house, while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes you can look at the clouds or the trees and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground. The performance artist Kathy Change set herself on fire while Bing...