Sestina

You
used
to
love
me
well.

Well,
you—
me—
used
love
to...

to...
well...
love.
You
used
me.

Me,
too,
used...
well...
you.
Love,

love
me.
You,
too
well
used,

used
love
well.
Me,
too.
You!

You used
to love
me well.

Ciara Shuttleworth

Night Film

I stared at her. She was definitely not from New York. This one screamed Recent grad of Ohio State with a degree in the dramatic arts. Something told me she'd probably played a Pink Lady in some abysmal production of Grease and when someone asked her who she was, she said I'm an actor in the same breathy voice I'd seen people in AA announce I'm an alcoholic. Girls like her moved here by the truckload, hoping to be discovered and to meet Mr. Big but too often ended up in bars in Murray Hill wearing black dresses from Banana Republic, Band-Aids over the blisters on their heels. They'd get their I'll Take Manhattan taken off them soon enough. To live in this city for any extended period of time required masochism, moral flexibility, skin like an alligator's, and mad jack-in-the-box resilience- none of which these faux-confident twenty-very-littles could even begin to wrap their heads around. Within five years she'd be running home to her parents, a boyfriend named Wayne, and a job at her old high school, teaching movement.

Marisha Pessl

Death with Dignity

Spirit of my silence I can hear you
but I'm afraid to be near you
And I don't know where to begin

Somewhere in the desert there's a forest
and an acre before us
But I don't know where to begin
Again I lost my strength completely
or be near me tired old mare
With the wind in your hair

Amethyst and flowers on the table
is it real or a fable?
Well I suppose a friend is a friend
And we all know how this will end

Chimney swift that finds me be my keeper
silhouette on the seater
What is that song you sing for the dead?
I see the signal searchlight strike me
in the window of my room
Well I got nothing to prove

I forgive you mother I can hear you
and I long to be near you
But every road leads to an end
Your aberration passes through me
in the willows and five red hens
You'll never see us again

Sufjan Stevens

The Liars' Club

"That world was long gone before my birth, but I remember it."

Mary Karr

Occident

Long life, show your face
Slow-heart, curb your taste
Smoke me out of my hiding place
Long life, state your case.

Long life, speak your name
So tired of the guessing game
But something is moving
just out of frame
Slow heart, brace and aim.

Long life, speak your name
I wait, while I decry the wait
And when I die, may I relate
Slow heart, congregate.

Joanna Newsom

Disappear

One day I may be disappear
Don't be too surprised
'Cause I get tired of noisy alarms and phone bells

And I don't think we're meant to stay here very long
I don't dream of bringing heaven down
Not like this
I'd rather move on

One day I may go for the longest walk
Don't be too shocked
'Cause I get tired of sneaky societies and combat boots

And I don't think we're meant to stay here very long

I'd rather move on

My Brightest Diamond

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.

But even so, every now and then, I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.

Haruki Murakami

Suspended in Gaffa

I try to get nearer but as it gets clearer
There's something appear in the way
It's a plank in my eye with a camel
Who's trying to get through it
Am I doing it, can I have it all?

Suddenly my feet are feet of mud, it all goes slo-mo
I don't know why I'm crying, am I suspended in Gaffa?
Not till I'm ready for you, can I have it all?

Kate Bush

Helplessness Blues

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me

But I don't know what that will be
I'll get back to you someday soon you will see

What's my name, what's my station
Just tell me what I should do
I don't need to be kind to the armies of night
That would do such injustice to you
Or bow down and be grateful
And say "Sure, take all that you see"
To the men who move only in dimly-lit halls
And determine my future for me

If I know only one thing, it's that everything that I see
Of the world outside is so inconceivable often I barely can speak
Yeah I'm tongue-tied and dizzy and I can't keep it to myself
What good is it to sing helplessness blues,
Why should I wait for anyone else?

If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm raw
If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store

Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore
If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore
Someday I'll be like the man on the screen

Fleet Foxes

Closet

I'm going to talk to you tonight about coming out of the closet. And not in the traditional sense, not just the "gay closet." I think we all have closets. Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time. Or telling someone that you're pregnant. Or telling someone you have cancer. Or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives. All a closet is, is a hard conversation. And though our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal. It is scary and we hate it and it needs to be done.

So like many of us, I lived in a few closets in my life and yeah, most often, my wall happens to be rainbow. But inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are. You just know what it feels like to live in a closet. So really, my closet is no different than yours or yours or yours. Sure, I'll give you a hundred reasons why coming out of my closet was harder than coming out of yours but here's the thing... hard is not relative; hard is hard. Who can tell me that explaining to someone you just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them. Who can tell me that his coming out story is harder than telling your 5-year old you're getting a divorce. There is no harder, there is just hard. We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard. At some point in our lives we all live in closets and they may feel safe. Or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live.

Ash Beckham at TedxBoulder

Common Burn

Simple things like your overcoat
and your beauty

City of Glass

New York is an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.

Paul Auster

I Have Never Loved Someone

I have never loved someone the way I love you
I have never seen a smile like yours
And if you grow up to be king or clown or pauper
I will say you are my favorite one in town

I have never held a hand so soft and sacred
When I hear your laugh I know heaven's key
And when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard
I will send you all my love upon the breeze

And if the breeze won't blow your way, I will be the sun
And if the sun won't shine your way, I will be the rain
And if the rain won't wash away all your aches and pains
I will find some other way to tell you you're okay

my brightest diamond

Sideways

In that moment I realized that not only had we stopped growing together but that I no longer really knew her. The eight years we had spent together were now buried in our separate memories, passionlessly chronicled by photos and other now-meaningless memorabilia. Touching, talking intimately on a daily basis, sleeping together, were now so much confetti fluttering into the void. Someone once said that you only loved once in your life, and perhaps, instead of other women, I had filled the emptiness of Victoria's leaving with the more constant pleasure of wine. She could be a cruel mistress in the morning, but by evening she would always rise and greet me with a welcoming embrace. Bushwhacking my way through life companionless, and often rudderless, it was a relief to know that I, too, could feel desired by someone or something.

rex pickett

Woody Allen: A Documentary

I'm not saying that my grim appraisal is right, of course I think it is, but this is only my particular take on everything- that we all know the same truth, and our live consists of how we choose to distort it.

Wind and Walls

Well always will and would is while you thought you heard him say
So you drifted off to see what's not in yourself
Light is turning slowly, will it lay I ought on the plains
No more night to watch you, roll back in no relief of no rain

It's the same sounds of rivers that you axis it with it
And telling people lies of lying treasures and cares
Nothing's more revealing than the dancer and the doubt
Waving to forget what's never gone, always right, never right

And all these riots of broken sound
Like the last voice you heard
Then you drowned

This is where your passion end of seasons and distress
And this is where you breath and walk and know they will aim
Light is turning slowly to the hand upon your chest
So lay it on the plains where there is fun, there is love, there is rest

From all these riots of broken sound
While you sleep on the track every night

tallest man on earth

Thrasher

With a one-way ticket to the land of truth
And a suitcase in my hand
How I lost my friends I still don't understand

They had the best selection
They were poisoned with protection
There was noting that they needed
Nothing left to find
They were lost in rock formation
Or became park bench mutations
On the sidewalk and in the stations
They were waiting, waiting

So I got bored and left them there
They were just deadweight to me
Better down the road without that load

neil young

The Age of String

So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon'tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI'veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme...


There was a time when it wasn't uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.

The practice of attaching cups to the end of the string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world's first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.

When the world grew bigger, and there wasn't enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

nicole krauss

East Harlem

Sound is the color I know
Sound is what keeps me looking for your eyes
And sound of your breath in the cold
And the sound will bring me home again

zach condon, beirut

Cleopatra (1963)

"How strangely awake I feel, as if living as been a long dream. Someone else's dream, now finished at last. But now I will begin a dream of my own, which will never end. Antony."