i didn’t have anything to say. long time since the last poetic thought– it was easy to think of romance and squeal too close to the hand for distance to intrude, the kind of lover i longed to fall asleep to
with time, what face did that bright boy evolve for me? still a high laugh, a passionate word but not for me–for me only subdued touches, a murmur an exhale, embrace turning into embrace, night shifting into night-with-outside-lights, breezy curtains, house dust
what if i gave myself up, then, to rationale? all my life, reserved, for what eventuality? until when would i decide to cease eating words, the act of suppression so deep my mind distills nothing, a clear surface, an anti-wind, a non-existence so exquisite i settle into the future which i, in some other universe, dreamed for me?
“Ghosts are a problem for historicism precisely because they disrupt our sense of linear teleology in which the consecutive movement of history passes untroubled through the generations” (14). They continue by pointing out that ghosts signal “the appearance of something in a time in which they clearly do not belong” (14). Humans like to think of time moving in a straight, ordered line with a clear distinction between past, present, and future…the ghost disrupts this desire for a well-ordered sense of time because it refuses to go away and stay in its proper time and place. In this way, ghosts respond to our own existential anxieties about time and death, our inability to control or fully understand either, and our nagging sense that categories like past, present, and future are not easily distinguishable from one another.
“It’s summer now, and you’re craving a simpler existence. You want to read. You want to write. You want to meet strangers for dinner, and not refuse another drink at another bar. You want to dance. You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must. It’s summer now, and you’re looking forward to worrying less. You’re looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You’re looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You’re looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You’re looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You’re looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You’re looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You’re looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last. You’re looking forward.”
i’m sorry but if i don’t disappear mysteriously, causing an odd group of people who knew me to get together to solve my disappearance, all the while they find out they all knew wildly different versions of me and didn’t really know me at all, then what has this all been for?
i have not said anything
in so long. i touch your skin, blue beneath moonlight—what a marvel. i
obsess with looking at you, the high colour of your cheek, the deep
ridge of your spine. i said, for so long, don’t give me a literary love.
now, i want to scream. do i love you again? you have taken from me, you
have corrupted me—i am not who i once was, and i see myself, the
other version of me, who still lives walking down the old path. didn’t i
love her? don’t i want her? i know nothing of grief, only of envy.
under white lights i search your curls for the colour of your hair: a
dishwater brown. but your lashes shine, turning lead into gold—and
couldn’t you be beautiful if i made you? couldn’t i cease to have second
thoughts? couldn’t i perform the trick of myself, for an old friend,
frustrated and poisonous, obsessive in the way only i taught myself
to be, dismal at the thought of the future—please,
Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972 // KK Kozik, Floating (oil on linen), 2020 // Joan Didion, Blue Nights (2011) // Adonis, tr. by Khaled Mattawa, Selected Poems; “The Child Running Inside Memory” // Carol Marine // Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time // Lucy Mckenzie, Kerry, 2001 // Mitski, Working for the Knife // Holly Warburton, Night-time Solitude
plainwater - anne carson / interieur avec aline gauguin - paul gaugin / the secret history - donna tartt / eighth grade dir. bo burnham / alone - edgar allan poe / welcome to the dollhouse dir. todd solondz / look who’s inside again - bo burnham / no sleepover - soapsartstore
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