Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
All that was a dream, you couldn’t hold on, you couldn’t depend on frosted glass and Debussy.
She was my life raft, my turtle.
Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil. But at least she was thinking of me. I existed once more.
I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind.
His voice was cloves and nightingales.
Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world.
Memory is the fourth landscape.
Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. she wanted then. That’s what he’d seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around, watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature.
Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.
Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed.
I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.
In stages, that’s how. First you let go of the things you loved.
We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand.
They can’t touch us. We’re the Vikings. We go into battle without armor for the flush and the blood of it.
Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it.
Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.
This ragged heart,” she said, pulling at her kimono. “I should rip it out and bury it for compost.