Agon

유자차

Split like
the peel,
boiled like
the rind,
pour me
marmaladed
by dawn dressing 
herself behind
the screen
of the river’s
panting:
I will dance
with my
honey-veils
like I do 
upon tongues 
thrust deep
into winter.

"A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center if not fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its composition. Yet it is also a fixed center which, if it is genuine, displaces itself, while remaining the same and becoming always more central, more hidden, more uncertain and more imperious. He who writes the book writes it out of desire for this center and out of ignorance. The feeling of having touched it can very well be only the illusion of having reached it. When the book in question is one whose purpose is to elucidate, there is a kind of methodological good faith in stating toward what point it seems to be directed: here, toward the pages entitled “Orpheus’ Gaze."

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

"We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done. Countless well-intentioned friends, distant family members, hospital workers, and strangers I met at parties recited the famous five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was alarmed by how many people knew them, how deeply this single definition of the grieving process had permeated our cultural consciousness. Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time."

Cheryl Strayed  (via violentwavesofemotion)

(Source: poemsbydes, via violentwavesofemotion)

"As erotic language, such as we use in dalliance, is a kind of secretion, a concentrated juice that flows from the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of plaint, as this language is, in other words, the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, a language which has a perfume, an odor sui generis which belongs only to that couple…"

Jean Genet, “Miracle of the Rose” (via foxesinbreeches)

(via lifeinpoetry)

"A sexuality, therefore, that is not, at least not in the first instance, determined as hetero- or homosexual, as vaginal or anal, as human (or indeed animal) or prosthetic, not even as embracing or penetrating but which implies before all else a coupling with otherness."

David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics

"Stories are surely not innocent: they always have a message, most often so well concealed that even the teller knows not what ax he may be grinding."

Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life

High Tea.

The cold brew
tastes most winded, Mr. S.,
and I, exasperated
with simple syrup
and the silk traces
of almond milk,
labor to divine
your presence 
among kharybdis mouths 
that coquette with 
contracts to
hollow out the piths 
of blushing men.

These swirling
legions, emptied
of their breaths 
that soldier, 
march on to
the consonant moan
of your swollen,
jaundiced name.

"Speech is irreversible; that is its fatality. What has been said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it: to correct, here, is, oddly enough, to continue. In speaking, I can never erase, annul; all I can do is say “I am erasing, annulling, correcting,” in short, speak some more. This very singular annulation-by-addition I shall call “stammering.” Stammering is a message spoiled twice over: it is difficult to understand, but with an effort it can be understood all the same; it is really neither in language nor outside it: it is a noise of language comparable to the knocks by which a motor lets it be known that it is not working properly; such is precisely the meaning of the misfire, the auditory sign of a failure which appears in the functioning of the object. Stammering (of the motor or of the subject) is, in short, a fear: I am afraid the motor is going to stop."

Roland Barthes, “The Rustle of Language” (via heteroglossia)

Lovely

(via sinthematica)

(via sinthematica)

"This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be."

David Levithan (via pavorst)

"After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances."

Robert Hass

(via journalofanobody)