I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.
Can love really belong to the demon?
You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself.
Manchester was all mix. It was radical – Marx and Engels were here. It was repressive – the Peterloo Massacres and the Corn Laws. Manchester spun riches beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, and wove despair and degradation into the human fabric. It was Utilitarian, in that everything was put to the test of ‘Does this work?’ It was Utopian – its Quakerism, its feminism, its anti – slavery movement, its socialism, its communism.
Late-night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium. Till death us do part. Anniversary darling? What’s wrong with that?
The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
I reassured myself as best I could. The minister was a man, but he wore a skirt, so that made him special. There must be others, but were there enough? That was the worry. There were a lot of women, and most of them got married. If they couldn’t marry each other, and I didn’t think they could, because of having babies, some of them would inevitably have to marry beasts.
Yet I wish I had a cat.
I am busy with the Lord in Wigan.
None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness.
Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.
I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don’t want to be swimming for my life.
If the demons lie within they travel with you.
He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that the thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life.
At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn’t care. It was not judgement day, but another morning.
All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
Surely a god can meet passion with passion.
God Forgive Me,′ I say, and feel pity for a Deity that must concern Himself with pots of preserve. Had I lordship of the Universe I should roll men lke marbles in the pan of space and never ask where they stopped or fell.
Keep me in the mop bucket or the slot where the grill pan goes, but don’t let me go because I love you.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.