Anaïs Nin,from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, volume 4

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

~ Anaïs Nin,from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, volume 4

"Night Walk," Franz Wright

The all-night convenience store's empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday's newspaper--
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home, for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

~ Franz Wright, "Night Walk"

“Self Portrait“ by David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

~ David Whyte, "Self Portrait"

"Father and Son," Cat Stevens

Father:
It's not time to make a change,
Just relax, take it easy.
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to know.
Find a girl, settle down,
If you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,
To be calm when you've found something going on.
But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you've got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.

Son:
How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again.
It's always been the same, same old story.
From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen.
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.
I know I have to go.

Father:
It's not time to make a change,
Just sit down, take it slowly.
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to go through.
Find a girl, settle down,
if you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.

Son:
All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside,
It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it.
If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me.
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.
I know I have to go.

 ~ Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, "Father and Son"

excerpts from: If You Follow Me, Malena Watrous

He told me that the best inventions were things that people needed without knowing it, things they wanted but couldn't name, holes they felt but didn't know how to fill. The key was to invent something so elemental that people would forget it hasn't always existed.
p. 59

"Have you heard a baby learn to speak? baby begins with singing. Speech comes second. When we learn fear, we forget how to sing."
p. 88

Wasn't I sad? Of course, I said then too. I could tell that she wanted me to be sadder, or more transparent in my sadness, to share it with her, split the pain. But "sad" was a pathetic little word, too small to contain what I felt. I was a shattered windshield: one tap and I'd collapse. The whole world had been pulled out from under me and I was still waiting to fall. I had wasted tears on so many silly things. How could I cry for this too?
p. 158

"I am confused," Miyoshi-sensei says. "I think correct answer is, 'I want to come with you.' But you wrote that correct answer is, 'I want to come inside you.'"

'Both sentences work grammatically," I say.

"But meaning is different?"

"Sort of." I hope he won't press for clarification.

"Prepositions are so difficult," he says. "I want to come near you. I want to come next to you. I want to come beside you. I want to come close to you... To me, it's so many ways to say the same thing. Can you hear something I don't?"

What I hear, for the first time, is the way these little words  - words distinguishing the relationship between one thing and another, one person and another - also keep them apart. No matter how close you get, you are still separate, still stuck in your own skin.
p. 267


 ~ Malena Watrous, If You Follow Me

From: Windfalls, Jean Hegland

And as Melody had so often pointed out, I'm sorry was just a bullshit way of saying no.

 ~ Jean Hegland, Windfalls

"Blues Tomorrow" | Malkia Amala Cyril

Bleeding into the sound
of headless hunters splintering the spines
of mules carrying my face like an undue burden
split nuclear and factioned
i am dust to this decaying corpse of civilization
abandoned to set with dusk
west of blood
sucking ozone free carbon dioxide
smoked out lungs
wrestled to a burial with the moon
back streets in the belly of Bed-Stuy
swallow bullets
peace treaties branded in the milky flow
of moonlit blood

then what is blood to you

if my abdomen is stretched inside out
seeping down the length of my tears
blowing in the speed of decapitated orgasms
edges of sun playing in the corners
of my mouth
if i could stop spinning
i swear i would
cement the cracks in my windowless smiles
taste blood sweating off the laughter
of thunder
screaming down the throat of
AK's
and be bulletproof
instead of shot to hell military style shit
instead of skin
the bottom line cranes toward jazz
my hunger is naked
and sleeping with revolution
i am the single drop and lava
wanting to arch my blues toward
the instinct of lonely
colored between silences thick with
Holiday or Smith
anger bled tears sing laughter with a soundtrack
and alive forever shaking this song screaming in my ears
and breathing deep the mountains of Martinique
and
oh god
i need to burn into somebody's
skin
be wild and with a different face for every moon
shit
i need to burn

~ Malkia Amala Cyril, "Blues Tomorrow"