the River of forgetfulness

"She has the moon in her mind,

that’s why stars spill off her lips."

Camille. -s.p. 

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄 𝑔𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓈, 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄 𝓉𝒶𝓀𝑒𝓈

“Survival is equally meaningless after the experience of nothingness and after the paroxysm of sexual pleasure.

I can’t understand why people do not commit suicide during orgasm, why they don’t think survival commonplace and vulgar.

Such an intense though brief quiver should reduce us to ashes in seconds.

But if it does not kill us, we should ourselves.”

~ Emil Cioran

He finds time for song:

While I wait for you,

I can’t wait for you

I can’t read Dostoevsky

or listen to Umm Kulthum or Maria Callas

or anyone else.

While I wait for you the hands

in my wristwatch move to the left,

to a time hat has no place,

while I wait for you

I didn’t wait for you,

I waited for eternity.

~Mahmoud Darwish

........

don't get too close

i'll turn you into poetry

Consider one of life’s original situations: that of a “hide ‘n seek” game.

What a thrill to be hidden while someone’s looking for you, what a delightful fright to be fund, but what a panic when, because you are too well hidden, to others give up looking for you after a while and leave.

If you hide too well, the others forget you.

You are forced to come out on your own when they don’t want you anymore.

That is hard to take.

It’s like turning too fine a phrase, so subtle that you are reduced to explaining it.

Nothing is sadder than having to beg for existence and returning naked among the others.

Therefore, it’s better not to know how to play too well;

it’s better to know how to let others unmask you and to endure the rule of the game.

Not too fast, not too late.

~Sophie Calle & Jean Baudrillard

Girls that never die 

"I am hanging out, partying with girls that never die"

Ol’ Dirty Bastard

a girl    ebroilderd 

a girl     teeth bared   locked inside a photograph 

a girl dances to the same coiled song

can never leave

keeps her looks      outlived the other guests

filled up with all her all teeth

never returns from the party 

is never heard from again        is everywhere

Forgotten But Not Gone

cries into your drink & returns it to you

salt in the well kills the whole village

~Safia Elhillo

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because.

But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—

I was trying to break free.

Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

~Ocean Vuong

I am afraid.

I am not solid, but hollow.

I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.

I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered.

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb.

I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

I long for a noble escape from freedom—

I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will.

There is no where to go—not home, where I would blubber and cry, a grotesque fool, into my mother's skirts—not to men where I want more than ever now the stern, final, paternal directive—not to church which is liberal, free—no, I turn wearily to the totalitarian dictatorship where I am absolved of all personal responsibility and can sacrifice myself in a "splurge of altruism" on the altar of the Cause with a capital "C."

~Sylvia Plath

“What haunts is not that which is gone,

it is that which was expected to come but whose condition of arrival has been foreclosed,

and the ghost is an advocate of the promised future that was unrightfully canceled when the past was destroyed.”

~Sadeq Rahimi