Mystery Smudges Extra

yellowhat (via)

Psychic paper, anyone?

I am trying to scrub you out off me so I will be blank again. I think of the paper fortune teller I left sitting on the computer hundreds of miles away where I left you. I missed you even before then.

(via imjustlikeme)

It’s always fascinating to me how quickly I can learn and get acquainted with various rooms and nooks in a house. Getting familiar with walking on the floors, using a bathroom, knowing where the light switches off. It’s like putting on someone else’s gloves. It’s a weird but unthreateningly gentle experience, and it can be this strangely pleasant thrill, the kind you get from small things, like playing with buttons or finding a childhood book in a second hand store or (insert your own example here). It’s this sense of satisfaction, this sense of rightness. It’s nice, in the purest sense of the word. How lucky we are to have this.

(via my blog)

from The Tent by Margaret Atwood

I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together: no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.

I was born, I would have begun, once. But snip, snip, away go mother and father, white ribbons of paper blown by the wind, with grandparents tossed out for good measure. I spent my childhood. Enough of that as well. Goodbye dirty little dresses, goodbye scuffed shoes that caused me such anguish, goodbye well-thumbed tears and scabby knees, and sadness worn at the edges.

Adolescence can be discarded too, with its salty tanned skin, its fecklessness and bad romance and leakages of seasonal blood. What was it like to breathe so heavily, as if drugged, while rubbing up against strange leather coats in alleyways. I can’t remember.

Once you get started it’s fun. So much free space opens up. Rip, crumple, up in flames, out the window, I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated, I said, I wrote, all gone now. I went, I saw, I did. Farewell crumbling turrets of historic interest, farewell icebergs and war monuments, all those young stone men with eyes upturned, and risky voyages teeming with germs, and dubious hotels, and doorways opening both in and out. Farewell friends and lovers, you’ve slipped from view, erased, defaced: I know you once had hairdos and told jokes, but I can’t recall them. Into the ground with you, my tender fur-brained cats and dogs, and horses and mice as well: I adored you, dozens of you, but what were your names?

I’m getting somewhere now, I’m feeling lighter. I’m coming unstuck from scrapbooks , from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.

I was born.
I was.

I.

(via fiddlersgreen / tarts)

Pictures of walls

Bigfoot’s Town by Christin Weeks

nerdgasms & hummeline & beingmissyaya & hellolovey

Unpacking

the spring of surprise surprise

the things you miss

or thought you missed

the process of putting away

rewinded.

Unpacking

to fill refill rediscover the will

to have again

to have all these again

unlocked unlabeled untagged

breathe out the past and the trapped

memories and thoughts

you are not leaving

you are here

and you are here to stay

yellowhat:

psychotherapy:

Two Friends

I have something to tell you.

I’m listening.

I’m dying.

I’m sorry to hear.

I’m growing old.

It’s terrible.

It is, I thought you should know.

Of course and I’m sorry. Keep in touch.

I will and you too.

And let me know what’s new.

Certainly, though it can’t be much.

And stay well.

And you too.

And go slow.

And you too.

- David Ignatow

matchartbox / yesyes

they were all out on the front porch
talking:
Hemingway, Faulkner, T.S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, Hamsun, Wally Stevens,
e.e. cummings and a few others.

“listen,” said my mother, “can’t you
ask them to stop talking?”

“no,” I said.

“they are talking garbage,” said my
father, “they ought to get
jobs.”

“they have jobs,” I
said.

“like hell,” said my
father.

“exactly,” I
said.

just then Faulkner came
staggering in.
he found the whiskey in the
cupboard and went outside with
it.

“a terrible person,”
said my mother.

then she got up and peeked out
on the porch.

“they’ve got a woman with them,”
she said, “only she looks like a
man.”

“that’s Gertrude,” I
said.

“there’s another guy flexing his
muscles,” she said, “he claims he
can whip any three of
them.”

“that’s Ernie,” I said.

“and he,” my father pointed to me,
“wants to be like them!”

“is that true?” my mother asked.

“not like them,” I said, “but of
them.”

“you get a god-damned job,”
said my father.

“shut up,” I said.

“what?”

“I said, ‘shut up,’ I am listening to
these men.”

my father looked at his wife:
“this is no son of
mine!”

“I hope not,” I said.

Faulkner came staggering into the room
again.

“where’s the telephone?” he
asked.

“what the hell for?” my father
asked.

“Ernie’s just blown his brains
out,” he said.

“you see what happens to men like
that?” screamed my father.

I got up
slowly
and helped Bill find
the
telephone.

— Bukowski

poetry365:

What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.

sent to Robert Blaser in Boston 12/2/56