Thread: Memorable Passages

sitting in a dark bedroom with 3 junkies,
female.
brown paper bags filled with trash are
everywhere.

it is one-thirty in the afternoon.
they talk about madhouses,
hospitals.

they are waiting for a fix.

none of them work.
it’s relief and food-stamps and
Medi-Cal.

men are usable objects
toward the fix.

it is one-thirty in the afternoon
and outside small plants grow.

their children are still in school.
the females smoke cigarettes
and suck listlessly on beer and
tequila
which I have purchased.

I sit with them.
I wait on my fix:
I am a poetry junkie.

they pulled Ezra through the streets
in a wooden cage.
Blake was sure of God.
Villon was a mugger.
Lorca sucked cock.
TS Eliot worked a teller’s cage.

most poets are swans,
egrets.

I sit with 3 junkies
at one-thirty in the afternoon.

the smoke pisses upward.
I wait.
death is a nothing jumbo.

one of the females says that she likes
my yellow shirt.

I believe in a simple violence.
this is
some of it.

- Charles Bukowski, Junk

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”

― Wallace Stevens

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”

-Harper Lee

Life was much easier when Apple and Blackberry were just fruits.

Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love, they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds her mirror
And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust her
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.

- Leonard Cohen, Suzanne

Originally Posted by GracelessFawn

Life was much easier when Apple and Blackberry were just fruits.

'No, it wasn't'

-fred j flintstone

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“That estrangement, that detachment, that distance allow me to buy, without any qualms and with full awareness of what I'm doing, a pair of shoes whose price in my native land would be enough to feed a family of five for one whole year. The salesperson just has to promise me, You'll walk on air, and I buy them.

When we're able to float in the air, to separate ourselves from our roots - not only by crossing an ocean and two continents but by distancing ourselves from our condition as stateless refugees, from the empty space of an identity crisis - we can also laugh at whatever might have happened to my acrylic bracelet ...”

― Kim Thúy, Ru

“The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland must have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn't a trace of topsoil; only sand and clay. The Belgians call them 'clyttes', these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become.

In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rains (which is almost constantly from early September through to March, except when it snows) the water rises at you out of the ground. It rises from your footprints - and an army marching over a field can cause a flood.

In 1916, it was said that you 'waded to the front'. Men and horses sank from sight. They drowned in mud. Their graves, it seemed, just dug themselves and pulled them down.”

― Timothy Findley, The Wars

“I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,
and I have followed the source of rivers towards their
source or plunged into forests, always making for other
cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and
I could never turn back any more than a record can spin
in reverse. And all that was leading me where?
To this very moment...”

― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

Don't Let That Horse


Don't let that horse
eat that violin

cried Chagall's mother

But he
kept right on
painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
and rode away
waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across


And there were no strings
attached

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Mad Yak


I am watching them churn the last milk they'll ever get from me.
They are waiting for me to die;
They want to make buttons out of my bones.
Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his--
I never saw that muffler before.
Poor uncle, he lets them load him.
How sad he is, how tired!
I wonder what they'll do with his bones?
And that beautiful tail!
How many shoelaces will they make of that!


- Gregory Corso

Frank's Wild Years

Well Frank settled down in the Valley
and he hung his wild years
on a nail that he drove through
his wife's forehead

he sold used office furniture
out there on San Fernando Road
and assumed a $30,000 loan
at 15 1/4% and put a down payment
on a little two bedroom place

his wife was a spent piece of used jet trash
made good bloody marys
kept her mouth shut most of the time
had a little Chihuahua named Carlos
that had some kind of skin disease
and was totally blind

they had a thoroughly modern kitchen
self-cleaning oven (the whole bit)
Frank drove a little sedan
they were so happy

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store
picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouths

drank 'em in the car on his way
to the Shell station, got a gallon of
gas in a can, drove home, doused
everything in the house, torched it

parked across the street laughing
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red then
Frank put on a top forty station
got on the Hollywood Freeway
headed north

Never could stand that dog

- Tom Waits

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“She wasn't happy, but then she wasn't unhappy. She wasn't anything. But I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream.”

― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.

― Czesław Miłosz

“With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence.”

― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

― George Borrow

"The trite mythos of the outlaw; the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw; the black wardrobe of the outlaw; the fey smile of the outlaw; the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw; respectable men sneer and say 'outlaw'; young women palpitate and say 'outlaw'. The outlaw boat sails against the flow; outlaws toilet where badgers toilet. All outlaws are photogenic. 'When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.' There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.”

― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

A Close Call While Shopping

pushing my cart through the supermarket
today
the thought passed through my mind
that I could start
knocking cans from the shelves and
also rolls of towels, toilet paper,
silver foil,
I could throw oranges, bananas, tomatoes
through the air, I could take cans of
beer from the refrigerated section and
start gulping them, I could pull up
women's skirts, grab their asses,
I could ram my shopping cart through
the plate-glass window...

then another thought occurred to me:
people generally consider something
before they do it.

I pushed my cart along...

a woman in a checkered skirt was
bending over the pet food section.
I seriously considered grabbing her
ass
but I didn't, I rolled on
by.

I had the items I needed and I rolled
my cart up to the checkout stand.
a lady in a red smock with a nameplate
on
awaited me.
the nameplate indicated her as
"Robin."

Robin looked at me: "how you doing?"
she asked.

"fine," I told her.

and then she began tabulating my
purchases
not in the least knowing that
the fellow standing there before her
had just two minutes ago been
one grab from the
madhouse.

- Charles Bukowski

Dinner in the diner
Nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham an' eggs in Carolina

- Mack Gordon ("Chattanooga Choo Choo")

“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

― Jorge Luis Borges,

“I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.”

― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov