Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in.

a quote from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.


It's quite amazing to look back on things from an older perspective. The age of technology has so drastically altered the way people relate, to others and to their past selves. Sometimes things you think are growing are just moving towards a death, which I suppose is really a birth in the larger scheme of things. Poetic as it is, sometimes it's a bad idea to live so deeply in texts. What about our own words.

I'm choosing poems for my application to a workshop for next semester. It's so weird to read things I wrote a while ago and forgot about. It raises the inevitable question of voice: what is it, do I have one, etcetera.

(P.S. Listening to Matthew Herbert with over-the-ear noise canceling headphones is a surreal experience.)



Here are some quotes of things:


“Some say a host of horsemen, and others an army of footmen, and others a navy of ships is the most beautiful thing over the black earth,
 But I say it is whatever one loves most.”
- Sappho, Fragment 16

"Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate for a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover."
-Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

"Old Pete men suck the black smoke in the Chink laundry back room and the Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of Time or cold turkey withdrawal of breath. . . I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers. I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants - a body - after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death. . . I saw it happen. He stood there in the elongated court room shadow, his face torn like a broken film by lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick, flesh that fades at the first silent touch"
- William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

"I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry."
- Allen Ginsberg, Sunflowere Sutra

“There is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
-Booker T. Washington

"What happened to our epistolary correspondence! I miss that my inbox no longer swells with your corpulent sentences, so gorged on psychedelic adjectives and neon nouns! Neon like your aquamarine pants! And as hipster! Moloch! Filth! Behold, the sunflower!"

I miss it too sometimes. But then, oh my god. So ridiculous. I don't think I realized then, it was all sort of a joke. We were so young.