It’s a lot better than I say. But it’s not as good as you can do.
Source: lettersofnote.com
Poets and rain and death were meant for each other
Megan, when you drive, leave more space than usual. The roads are wet, and the night is dark. Watch yourself.
Okay, mumbled. If I must.
Door closes. Car drives off. Only the blond hair visible through the streaked window.
The steady rhythm of the windshield wipers. Back and forth. Back and forth.
The light in the kitchen the only one still on. The dishes still drying on the rack on the counter.
A red light is smeared across the windshield. The green lights aging ghosts that smother the eyes for a briefest moment.
The vastness of the cars so far down the road the lights so bright the children so tired and whining a soft whimper.
In the shop an old man with his chess game and green army pants and memories and a bottle.
It will bring them together the sudden despair of the old man, the freshness of the night’s wind in the creases of his skin, the father prowling in the house looking for a day when the camera was new and the children were young, and the blond girl in the car driving under the watchful green and red eyes of the traffic lights.
He foretold it, the father, and when the blue Prius halted before the old man in the headlights, and the Black suburban with the girl braked too suddenly, the sirens and the gawkers came quickly, and the father was roused from staring at himself in the mirror, looking for an earlier version.
The man in the army pants and the bottle cried and hiccoughed and no one told him that silence was the only acceptable answer right now. The police chief took off his cap and wiped his bare and wet head, and wrote words down on the white pad he was holding, and was conscious of his pot belly and thought that he needed to exercise more. The first cop on the scene was blond and pimply and he did nothing until the captain stuffed the soggy notepad into his hands and told him, go.
One girl, from one of the cars, stood at the corner, near the closed restaurant where hundreds of people ate brunch each day with aged wine and french pressed coffee, but now the windows yawned black, and there were no silver tables or chairs, and she stood there and smiled.
The cop with the pad came to her. She smiled and offered him a smoke.
He apologized.
She said things to him then about angels and energies and fate and life meeting at this corner with death and how she wanted to learn how to surf and that she lived in Los Angeles but never saw the beach, and that poets and death and rain were meant for each other. Then she started to cry and the cop lifted an orphaned hand to her and then turned his back to her and walked under the awning to escape the rain.
What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
Andy Warhol made a statement by repeating famous icons until they became meaningless.
Banksy on Advertising
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Source: twitter.com
I’m glad I look like my reflection
It’s what I saw in the window of the coffee shop as I entered.
Inside I was shredded, I was yesterday and tomorrow, I was stungunned by blue eyes, and guilty and broke, but not so broke to have hit bottom. I was something to some people, but nothing to myself. The things that mattered couldn’t matter, and every music note was so sharp that I couldn’t tell it apart from beauty, and more than anything, I wanted there to be someway to make it stop.
But the reflection had short brown hair and a face that was both innocent and honorable. The lips were naturally pink, the eyes soft brown and intelligent and curious.
“One tall coffee,” I told the girl behind the counter. She saw the girl in the window, and I wasn’t her. She talked for me. I waited for my drink, I was invisible. The people moved through me. Their faces and their hair color and the books they read and the short black dress and the carefully chosen boots.
The boy on the couch opposite me sighed. Another in an artfully ripped wife-beater and tired military high-tops walked with shoulders rolling in swag.
Even the coffee couldn’t reach me. I was stashed away in trees, in closets, under bangs, under covers, somewhere where being human wasn’t so desperately isolating.
There is far more to feel in this alternate reality where I am right now. The music isn’t louder but I hear it more vividly.
3/4
Like morning, or like the danger of empty rooms, the days flow like an angry river, thrashing the shore where fallen trees and mossy debris lie in drunken piles, waiting only to be soothed by the water’s desperate hiccups.
Strips of foam leap in scattered places where the invisible wind twists its lips into a crude kiss, blowing and blowing, again and again, and the water is never exhausted but always puckers its many lips in kind, expelling white froth into the frigid morning air.
It happens all the way down the miles of the river, as long as the wind won’t let up and the trees won’t stop stuttering, begging for mercy maybe, or singing in morbid praise of the wind’s tireless flogging.
But that’s far, out where the hours are raw, and tomorrow is long gone, and the only reason to keep breathing is because each moment is a war between silence and death. Here, where it’s just lamplight and dirty coffee and there is no comfort nor passion, the emptiness, that’s what there is. Only that. And the faces, and the questions. They are not of this planet. Or you are not.
If you stay up late enough, and the night time is reminiscent of ancient stars, and down below, here and there, the creatures of the night pray for morning, and the deep snores of angry children are music, and loneliness is the only melody the stars think to share.
The mountains are guardians, not walls. They carry houses and roads and lights in the night that draw a mural on the horizon, and give you more world in a minute than one heart can take. You stay away from windows, full as they are of both promise and confinement, and remain in the only place the escape is not larger than you.
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!… Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy!
Serendipity
There are so many syllables in that word that in the amount of time it takes to say it, maybe something will change.
I keep waiting for it.
Wise people have advised that to awaken creativity, it is necessary to break with routine, play with children, take the bus, let possibility in.
But what if that’s the only thing you have? The chance that something could happen. You stay open, unattached, uncommitted. Scattered and alone, watching the eyes of each passerby to see if they are the one. Today you will meet your savior, your mentor, your lover.
Is it a societal phenomenon? Can it explained by post-modernity or consumerism or is it simply the living in Los Angeles where everyone is well schooled in dreams?
The days come and go. Shadows, and darkness, and sunlight, and shadows again. He is not coming, you realize. He will never come. All the strangers you’ve met on Twitter, at the bar, in the airport, at the coffee shop. They’re just whispers, and now they have long since passed.
What’s left of this hope then, but the naive foolishness of it?
There’s only a hole now, where the possibility used to be.
