He Pulls Himself Up By His Bootstraps
“I went back in time to write this for you. How could you forget?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Mercy: Ephemera
I used to blog at Cyberspace Babes; now I don't.
I used to blog at Cyberspace Babes; now I don't.
“I went back in time to write this for you. How could you forget?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
(Source: neuewave, via pandamonium180)
What question have you never been asked?
And every night I fret
In a bed too fraught
With error:
My fervor.
My fever.
My forever.
Your nerve.
Your no.
Your never.
from Triptych, by Jill Alexander Essbaum
(Source: notellmotel.org)
"How to name what is unnameable.
The long road of history right up till now.
Think about Robert Johnson’s deal with the Devil.
Unnameable, I think of you.
I know my demise is coded in your name."
A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other
(via letsdoitadada)
"I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose."
Margaret Cho (via captainporkerella)
(via grrrlvirus)
"Morality is a hindrance. We limit ourselves because of our perception of social norms, of believing in fair play. The greatest magicians are those who are willing to accept the consequences of their actions. They do not believe in accidents, in randomness. They believe that they are forever at the center of their existence, in control of their fate.” The Red Queen, ENCHANTRESS ON THE EDGE (M Cid D’Angelo)"
Soooz Says Stuff: The Relevance of Sex in Literature in 2011
"Sal said she chose me because I started quoting Henry Miller when I put my finger in her asshole. You wanted that more than you wanted not to wake me, she said. I said, you were already awake, and she said, yeah but you didn’t know and I came on your first word for that."
I’ve been playing with Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet (much thanks to William Ball for the link) almost compulsively for the past few days. I assumed when I first heard of it that it’d generate poetry on its own—which it does, in a wacky kind of way. Input a line in the word processor (which is barely functional on my system, so tread carefully when doing anything other than typing) or even a single word, and it returns suggestions for rhymes, endings, alliteration…madness.
A pulse, random wings
a swinging door
splendid silence
prophetic poses
of threads heard in the dark smoke
Awaken to hear the rains and lose her edges
where they are set
as pearls in the flood
she leans in like the sun upon a string
Her wings to my chest
she shrugs and mind
settles in the cocoon in a rhythm
she turns the family archives
composing partisan speeches in the flood
she shrugs and buries herself
in dim pages thinly leafed and cold as scorn.
This was output with minimal editing for grammar, and a number of extraneous lines removed. I’ve read lots of bad poetry thanks to high school friends and lovelorn IRC buddies. This is better than some. Who am I kidding? This is better than a lot of them.
What has made it so addictive is its ability scan text as I type it in and proffer additional lines that are similar in form or content. It’s like playing a bastardized form of Renku with an amorous monkey. Some turns of phrase are inspiring, others…not so much. Picking among them for the best is half the fun.
A plundered moment of ecstasy
I will drown
I will drownas the notes of destiny
turn its own soulI see her face
her edges
where her lips bear
wing to the rhythm of tuneless memories,
shaped round
the words of
water fervent worship of unspeakable thingsHe stole all of it
and you
Try it out. The basic edition is free. (Note: It requires Windows 95/98, though I got it running on XP and Win7—with a few hiccups.)
Echoes
There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing you are not being
heard noticed only
by others not heard
for the same reason.The flavor of midnight fruit tongue
calling your body through dark light
piercing the allure of safety
ripping the glitter of silence
around you
dazzle me with color
And perhaps I won’t notice
till after you’re gone
your hot grain smell tattooed
into each new poem resonant
beyond escape I am listening
in that fine space
between desire and always
the grave stillness
before choice.As my tongue unravels
in what pitch
will the scream hang unsung
or shiver like lace on the borders
of never recording
which dreams heal which
dream can kill
stabbing a man and burning his body
for cover being caught
making love to a woman
I do not know.
Audre Lorde is one of my heroes, one of the first real people I’d ever deeply admired. I found her when I was just discovering Colette and still thought bisexuality was something exclusive to pornography.
At sixteen, I was that girl who read poetry, classic and classical literature, science-fiction and comic books. That weird chubby girl. For all that I read compulsively, I had never come across anything that seemed to speak to me—the silent me, the excruciatingly self-conscious and perpetually quaking me, that I was convinced I hid so well.
At that age, I was questioning my sexuality—a term I dislike. Maybe because it calls to mind that solitary journey, where it seemed as if I only learned something new about myself when I stumbled and fell over it, face first. Maybe because I wasn’t truly questioning, but desperately groping for an answer to a question I didn’t know how to frame in any meaningful way. Why can’t I be normal? didn’t present any helpful subjects I could search for in the card catalog. (Yeah, back then. It really wasn’t that long ago.) I wondered if I was a lesbian, but I couldn’t make that fit with my intensely deep fascination with both boys and girls. I wondered if I was going through the phase that I’d been told about in sex ed: curiosity about the same sex is normal; it doesn’t mean you’re gay. But even then I suspected my interest wouldn’t be a passing event.
The prologue from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered—to leave and to be left—to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving. I would like to drive forward and at other times to rest or be driven. When I sit and play in the waters of my bath I love to feel the deep inside parts of me, sliding and folded and tender and deep. Other times I like fantasize the core of it, my pearl, a protruding part of me, hard and sensitive and vulnerable in a different way.
I have felt the age-old triangle of mother father and child, with the “I” at its eternal core, elongate and flatten out into the elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the “I” moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed.
Woman forever. My body, a living representation of other life older longer wiser. The mountains and valleys, trees, rocks. Sand and flowers and water and stone. Made in earth.
Finding one of Lorde’s poems in an anthology, a stirring glimpse of eroticism, aroused me in ways beyond the sexual. It validated the maelstrom of desire that had been confounding me since I was twelve years old, and it ameliorated a profound sense of alienation. As I grew older, her writing became more and more meaningful and relevant to my life. From her, I gained one of the tenets I live by today: Your silence will not protect you.
If any writer has contributed to the person I am today, it’s Audre Lorde.
(via coralguetta)
