I've always loved this poem.

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,     
Listen to the DON'TS     
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS     
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me-     
Anything can happen, child, 
ANYTHING can be

--Shel Silverstein

The 14 Billion Years It Took

Do you remember, at the start, how small everything was? Smaller than a point. Like everything was somewhere between a thought, almost, and a reality, almost. And then I looked at you and thought

"?"

And then everything that would ever happen, happened.


--I wrote this for you.
8.16.10

"morning is not optional,
but waking is bravery."
--marty mcconnell

I have spent my entire morning reading religious texts, starting with the Bible. It is disgustingly violence- and sex-filled, which I knew prior to reading but not to the full extent. For comparison's sake, I read large portions of the Quran and the Book of Mormon, and they are all really quite similar in that aspect. Really disgusting disgusting books.

The morals that we extract for children as a guideline for life are fine, but it is unfair to call what we teach as the "Bible" or the "Quran" a true summary of the text itself. We extract the morals that our society currently accepts and call it ancient law, where in reality the ancient law is long outdated and ignored.

But it is too late to change because God apparently no longer speaks to us anymore.
It is time to write our own versions.

--My wonderfully brilliant friend Julia

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
~Philip K. Dick

* * * * * * * * * * *

Indeed.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
--Gustave Flaubert

I have always loved Calvin and Hobbes.

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
who grinned at life in empty joy,
slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
and whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
with crumps and lice and lack of rum,
he put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
who cheer when soldier lads march by,
sneak home and pray you'll never know
the hell where youth and laughter go.

--Siegfried Sassoon

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I'm not one for strict rhyme schemes, but I've got chills after stumbling on this.

FOUND Magazine

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 116, my dear Shakespeare

“Some things, however, are true no matter how hard you might try to block them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told. Some doors, once they’re opened, can never be closed again, just as some trust, once it’s been lost, can never be won back.”
--Alice Hoffman

"So I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache."

--Pablo Neruda
That beautiful, beautiful man.

Because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.
--Unknown.

"When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."

-Herman Hesse

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

--Douglas Adams

Teach them politics and war so their sons may study medicine and mathematics in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music and architecture.

— John Adams

"And if there is one universal truth about people, it is that lots of us are kind of gross."
--Tiger Beatdown, The Edward Cullen Underpants Conundrum

I just find this really funny, probably because I watch too much Intervention.

"The first 11 steps are pure b.s. and the 12th step is quitting."
--Dr. O'keefe

(Just found it in a friend's facebook status, but can't find the source)

Eve Ensler

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

--Chuck Palahniuk

Without music, life would be a mistake.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Faults

They came to tell your faults to me,

They named them over one by one;

I laughed aloud when they were done,

I knew them all so well before, —

Oh, they were blind, too blind to see

Your faults had made me love you more.

--Sara Teasdale

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
--Amadeus Mozart

"I might say to you 'Darwin was the greatest man who has ever lived,' and you might say 'No, Newton was,' but I hope we would not prolong the argument. The point is that no conclusion of substance would be affected whichever way our argument was resolved. The facts of the lives and achievements of Newton and Darwin remain totally unchanged whether we label them 'great' or not. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools of our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world."

--Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

--Barbara Bloom

All smiley today

I've been so angry at men lately. So:

"Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off."

Coco Chanel

“This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches,
give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Walt Whitman

I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.

"Quiet Girl" --Langston Hughes

I remember.

I remember how much rock and roll music can hurt. It can be so free and sexy when you are not.
--Joe Brainard, I Remember

* * * * *
Reading this "I remember" series today, poetry brought me to tears for the first time in a long time, and it was quite lovely.

Life Lesson:

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

Joyce Carol Oates, “Death Mother”

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.

Richard Siken
* * * * *
This has absolutely happened to me before, except it was where the ceiling meets the wall.

It is no surprise to me that hardly anyone tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep themselves to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that’s dear to you? Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer-than-close to them? It’s so painful to be next to someone you feel strongly about and know you can’t say the things you want to.

Henry Rollins