He read that men who have trouble falling asleep have a twenty five percent chance of dying earlier.
He vowed to never sleep again.
What I’m Reading:
“We must look death in the face, recognize and accept it, just as we look at and accept life.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh / The Miracle of Mindfulness
You must remember an aubade is a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn or early morning.
You must remember your rituals—your morning ablutions.
You must remember the wine colored stains on the walls of your coffin length room.
You must remember that all you need to speak, or write, are seven words daily, and then you’ve used your allotment.
You must remember silence is best after that.
You must remember: every dawn is an apocalypse.
What I’m Reading:
“We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death
destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed
hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages.”
— Laure-Anne Bosselaar / “Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs”
Darkness begat a child—
His name was Death.
He had rounds to make,
Appointments to keep,
And so he went to work.
What I’m Reading:
“There’s something indecorous about measuring a corpse for their coffin, like measuring the inseam of a man’s leg at a gentleman’s tailor.”
— Alistair McCartney / The Disintegrations
There is no legacy in semiotics, she thought—nothing to tether to—not land, historical connection, cultural heritage—it was a deep deracination. She found no reason for planting any of her own signs, for setting her own roots, for begetting generations. She expected another apocalyptic culling—this one global. So why read signs?
Take a blithe light around the blockyard, you. Just leave me alone. You gimcrack tchotchke addict. Get your orgiastic superstars elsewhere, maybe at the Debauched Mart—they’re open 24 hours. Be off with you … and your pedestrian fish pix. So, again, why read signs?
What I’m Reading:
“There’s no way to overthrow the system without going outside and making some eye contact. No matter how small your carbon footprint, you can’t simply forgo food and comfort and sex all your life and call yourself ethically self-sacrificial.”
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
What I’m Reading:
“And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.”
— Sara Teasdale / “There Will Come Soft Rains”
“One of the rules of writing that stands throughout time: do not be complacent. Take risks. And most important, listen.”
—Joy Harjo / Catching the Light
“Are you quiet enough to hear horned
owls
at dawn?”
— John Wieners / “Time”
“She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Out-side, the air hung swagged and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen.”
— Patricia Lockwood / No One Is Talking About This
“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
— Anne Sexton / “Admonitions to a Special Person”
“… one fruitless search after another, each one taking an unexpected bad turn, and you’re exhausted — seems like you’ve been here your whole life, squandering opportunities, lost opportunities. Every day another daily dose of poison, what are you going to do?”
— Bob Dylan / The Philosophy of Modern Song
“To ‘have not’ is a mental state as well as an economic one.”
— Kate Beaton / Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
“The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth’s peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.”
— Joy Harjo / Catching the Light
What I’m Listening To:
“…At long last, there’s room to think
At long last, I sleep with hope
At long last, god is in his place
So pay attention…”
— Swell / “At Long Last”
I’m feeling strangely attracted to the can of vicious motor oil in the corner. I could have said “viscous” but I’ve just come from the cornershop thrumming in a pink and light blue aura of sexiness, one that is ineffable in these turbulent times. Anarchic times for desolate people—times for rows and perturbations. Give me some kind of sign. It doesn’t have to be a walking on the waiter kinda sign or a multiplication of leaves and frog’s legs sign, but let it have that old-timey censer mysteriousness about it. It’s driving me crazy all the swinging censers that way, and what is that censorious smell? Is it frankincense? Why so critical? Why so blue?
What I’m Reading:
“The past eight years were the eight hottest ever recorded, a new UN report has found, indicating the world is now deep into the climate crisis.”
— Damian Carrington / The Guardian
i—c—y—u—r—gr8!
What I’m Reading:
“It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.”
— Jane Hirshfield / “A Cottony Fate”
He hadn’t so much lived these 33 years in a daydream as much as he felt that there’d always been a scrim between him and the world. Everything was seen and felt at a slight remove. His emotions and his thoughts always disengaged, unable to moor with what was real or intended in this world. He saw how others acted, and he didn’t feel that way. He heard what others said and never thought in that manner.
Learning that trepanning removed the filter between one’s perception of the world and a true experience of reality—moreover, filled one with a universal love—was all he needed to hear.
Lead me to the drill, he said.
Nothing in his short and concentrated life was quite the same again.
What I’m Reading:
“If I was insane, everything could be made to make sense. If I was sane, nothing could.”
— Tara Westover / Educated
Your voice echoes through the ages — as if from the depths of dry amphora.
Pushcarts and tumbrils full of the dregs of the failed american experiment.
A skim of cream and a puff of smoke are equal in the Inquisitor’s dream —
Spastic as a cobwebbed spindle and dry as a sheaf of faggots left in the sun of a deepening drought.
We move away from each other singed by wind-driven wildfires that ring ever closer.
Each minute hotter and drier, each second etiolating the sun.
The shining city on a hill was an ill-fated fata morgana.
This moment desiccated like the cicada’s abandoned husk.
What I’m Reading:
“What if I return to the open space, only to find that the body writes itself, pen on finger, bomb in hand? The universe doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes I find that beautiful and sometimes I find it horrible, but either way it owns me.”
— Carolyn Zaikowski / In A Dream, I Dance By Myself, And I Collapse
thee istsfor manity reader 