today I was charged a thousand dollars in room damages and also almost evicted but my charm saved me from joining the hastings hobos. and then I spent hours in a tiny studio streaming technodubtrancehop through the speakers, clawing at the skin on my cheeks and turning over tremendous thoughts about love and chemistry in my head and then I zeroed the boards and stepped outside and found the five-act structure really does exist in real life. so sober at the pub tonight I bit into a beer-soaked chicken wing and thought ‘this it it, cass, you’ve hit your limit’ and I scanned the darkened booths it was another reminder how off the rails I’ve been the past few weeks, sunday ie three mornings ago I woke up and thought ‘november, it’s time’ and that was my ticket out of here, no concessions

so train rides to seattle + russian army winter coats + the lingering taste of milk in my mouth. red-leafed trees disrobing, chalking messages on concrete walls but the rain keeps washing them away. I’m hurtling towards something big and deep and inevitable, all the barriers that tell me where I end and the world begins are shaken from their moorings but sinking slowly amongst the rubble, it’s okay we’re okay. where do we go from here, our beautiful lost generation

Thirty Six

It’s nice sometimes
to open up the heart a little
and let some hurt come in.
It proves you’re still alive.

If nothing else
it says to you–
clear as a high hill air,
uncomfortable
as diving through cold water–

I’m here.
However wretchedly I feel,
I feel.

I’m not sure
why we cannot shake
the old loves
from our minds.
It must be that
we build on memory
and make them more
than what they were.
And is the manufacture
just a safe device
for closing up the wall?

I do remember.
the only fuzzy circumstance
is sometimes where and how.
Why, I know.

It happens
just because we need
to want and to be
wanted, too,
when love is here or gone
to lie down in the darkness

and listen to the warm.

—Rod McKuen

After a while

After a while you learn 
the subtle difference between 
holding a hand and chaining a soul 
and you learn 
that love doesn’t mean leaning 
and company doesn’t always mean security. 
And you begin to learn 
that kisses aren’t contracts 
and presents aren’t promises 
and you begin to accept your defeats 
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of woman, 
not the grief of a child 
and you learn 
to build all your roads on today 
because tomorrow’s ground is 
too uncertain for plans 
and futures have a way of falling down 
in mid-flight. 
After a while you learn 
that even sunshine burns 
if you get too much 
so you plant your own garden 
and decorate your own soul 
instead of waiting for someone 
to bring you flowers. 
And you learn that you really can endure 
you really are strong 
you really do have worth 
and you learn 
and you learn 
with every goodbye, you learn…

—Veronica Shoffstall

"The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart."

maya

When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.

—jostein gaarder

as i lay dying

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

—william faulkner

PomplamooseMusic’s awesome cover of Beyonce’s Single Ladies 
(via iainbroome, thesophie, sparklingpants, suitep, summersolace)

In The Secular Night by Margaret Atwood

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It’s two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it’s baby lima beans.
It’s necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You’d be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn’t now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone’s been run over.
The century grinds on.

(via cankerbloxxom)