never stop writing about love

if this was all I had
to tell the story of my life
which isn’t so interesting, but the difficulties of telling it are interesting, like why it’s not worth the time
to be known
to try and edit how you present the stream of information
given our constant surroundment with information streams
fighting to get into our cognition
that sacred space of the actually experienced

reality cannot be copyrighted
it’s always your choice to make sense

oof
https://twitter.com/madeofpoems/status/1103477649849155586
ā€œthere is gentle violence
in his eyes,
savage yet serene
he chews on my innocence
wild as a beast
until I am nothing but
Lust, bare as bonesā€

another beautiful thing about love
strangely, what I have to say next is that my body and life have mastered love: rather, I have a permanent understanding of how difficult it is and how heroic we are
(and how lucky we are to be here and attempt it again)
to try and sit with someone else for hours and let the wall dissolve,
see if acid is stronger than
iron or oak
strong covalent bonds it takes high heat to melt apart

I will never read this — any of this — the same way again. The expanse always grows. Any time we look, the walls have expanded outward.

A book is written one line at a time. The past is compressed, abandoned. Writing is an act of compression of a mental state into a form one can read. The words cross their inner plane. Do they get it? Do they care? How important can it be?

I understand now that to love radically is to always
be willing to be banished to some disfigured island of stone
in the middle of the sea, a small sacrifice, really.
I, too, might have sacrificed a few men
to preserve the whole idea of a voyage.
Or even a nation. Both false beloveds.
That’s the thing.
Our hero didn’t really want to go down with the ship.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/scylla-and-charybdis

She will blossom under the sun of your interest & shade of your presence.
https://psiloveyou.xyz/why-women-lose-interest-its-two-things-afdf9bce098

LOVE is the thing in the graveyard box that won’t decompose, a clock you can’t rip the battery out of — melt it in the fire and it still ticks; it’s a thing you can’t break down

LOVE is the thing that can’t be divided

Erin Rose, what a beautiful name
https://theamericanroad.tumblr.com/post/184747907829/cutting-10-single-spaced-pages-circa-july-2017

flailing in a void big enough for two
https://medium.com/ascended-masculine/the-root-of-masculine-damnation-and-the-path-to-his-salvation-89c5ba78255d

I need not drag you through my growth. Thank God it’s deleted. Thank God I have control. Thank God for editing.

Perfection
https://medium.com/s/story/the-good-guy-a-story-from-the-author-of-cat-person-59e5bfe9322f
^ pair with this song at the 22:20 mark
https://open.spotify.com/track/5CLs0uFRmU0U9VcnsI6jwv
https://genius.com/7676968

I never meant to cause you pain
My burden is the weight of a feather
I never meant to lead you on
I only meant to please me, however

And then you tell me, boy, we can do much more
Boy, we can do much more
Boy, we can do much more together
Boy, we can do much more together

I’m nothing but a selfish man
I’m nothing but a privileged peddler
And did you think I’d stay the night?
And did you think I’d love you forever?

In her essay ā€œGrand Unified Theory of Female Pain,ā€ Leslie Jamison writes of having an ambivalent relationship to female pain — the twinned desires of wanting to dwell in the wound, to make art about it, from it, while also not wanting to be perceived as a woman who lingers in her own suffering.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/01/the-art-of-the-bruise/

work is satisfying until you remember you want sex
The pleasures and sorrows of every piece of life align
Ah, the carnal allure of a balanced life!
The thought of savory dinner
Like mom and your culture used to make
all needs met — a warm blanket, a night of television, nothing to do later that’s unexpected or uncomfortable
But no! The internet blew that nice life up. Now it’s always work-time and we’re never doing enough. Society and democracy are fucked. Teachers are sleeping in cars — and this isn’t just about my poetry or career or bylines or tweets about what I’m doing. God damnit. Why must I be so absorbed in being my own champion; why can’t I lift budgets with the lift of a finger. Why can’t I rub out of the equation every shitty person.
Because I too am shitty and need to be talked to.

cheek to cheek, love never changes

[redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted, might hit her up actually]
[redacted]
[redacted]
the essential
The line is getting longer
but it might be ended
I can punt on dating if I want
I can form what I’ve got into what I need
let it grow slowly over time, year in, year out
[candidate]
[candidate]
[candidate]

How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/09/how-picasso-bled-the-women-in-his-life-for-art/

anyone can write about love; everyone talks and everyone suffers
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/books/review/jonah-lehrer-a-book-about-love.html

In many ways, our lives are just a nexus of contracts — employment contracts, mortgage contracts and marriage contracts. How and with whom we write those contracts determines the quality of our lives.
https://twitter.com/TaylorPearsonMe/status/1039625632660041729

you are very much a subject of shared reality
but I am no longer interested in writing about
what we don’t have
because we have enough
this stupid/selfish record here is just a reminder of what we both have
humans of a certain age
we carry it all in us
anything that can be written down
is outnumbered by what we are today
and the writing mechanism isn’t as important as talking
yet we will never be bold enough to say all we can
so we start from a distance
maybe this is enough
maybe you’ll say something
but this has to be a gift
I can’t need anything from you
if I’ve learned anything from who I’ve already disappointed and wounded
but everybody heals
the body is pretty incredible
which is why I keep coming back

We loved and cared for each other as best as we could. Unfortunately, neither of us was very good at it.
https://thewalrus.ca/private-lives/

Our issues were adult, complex, and ultimately impossible for us to resolve.

ā€œShe said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.ā€
― Edna O’Brien, Saints and Sinners
https://twitter.com/gplewis/status/1160352972649328641

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
https://twitter.com/RCdeWinter/status/1041057753303855104

this on mute
https://twitter.com/largottes/status/1104056928429268992
plus
Air — Alone in Kyoto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUjAtYQkFm8

Domenichino, The Virgin and a Unicorn (1602)
https://twitter.com/romepix/status/1040380398684041216

time, as Rilke stresses over and over, cannot properly console but only ā€˜put things in order’
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/09/06/rainer-maria-rilkes-letters-on-grief/

ā€œThe purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.ā€
— Rainer Maria Rilke

ā€œTo love is also good: for love is difficult. Fondness between human beings: that is perhaps the most difficult task that is set us, the ultimate thing, the final trial and test, the work for which all other work is only preparation. Therefore young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot know love yet: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their strength gathered about their lonely, fearful, upward beating heart, they must learn to love. But apprenticeship is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving is for a long while, far into life — solitude, heightened and deepened aloneness for him who loves. Loving in the first instance is nothing that can be called losing, surrendering and uniting oneself to another (for what would a union be, of something unclarified and unready, still inferior — ?), it is a sublime occasion for the individual to mature, to grow into something in himself, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him and summons him to a distant goal.ā€
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet

being defeated is actually good
being defeated is actually the most authentic start to whatever comes next for you

humility is the best place to start

ā€œLove consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.ā€
— Rainer Maria Rilke

ā€œMonogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.ā€
― Adam Phillips, Monogamy

eventually you stop dreading and loathing taxes and paperwork; eventually you accept living in a stupid country — you accept the world runs the way it does; you vote; you post online about the government and politicians and schools and infrastructure; you vote; you become boring and predictable — you get older, and staying militantly revolutionary is tiring — let the younger generation do it and keep letting yourself be taxed — be grateful, not greedy

surrender because love is too hard. I mean God, look what love did to me? I’m almost 32, have barely any money, have spent my life and heart looking at these pages. Words have been my home; looking alone has been my God. And there is nowhere to be but where in the ground I’ve dug to. I’ve gone deep and this is my home now — and I realize all these women have moved on and so have I, even if I’ve only just begun and the current person I’m involved with (9 months, you’d be proud of me) could exit my life unexpectedly for financial reasons because I still haven’t managed to get paid for the work I have been doing. I’m not complaining. I’m willing to die having done my best, done all I could. Every hour I’m pushing forward, opening up a cavern, sweeping a road I might go down, polishing the lens so I can see a way forward. Maybe I’m waiting for something lucky to happen. I have to make myself not an asshole first. I have to cure my misperceptions and assumptions about other people and work, identity, momentum, motivation, fear, laziness, stupidity. I’m judgmental as FUCK, man. I study others’ movements and try to understand the underlying machinations: why do they do what they do? What are they afraid of? What are they trying to get?

is this just the heartache pile?

January 1, 2014

My love,

You are at the end of 2013 and this book, and yet, the end of nothing, and, as with each new day that we are blessed with, the beginning of everything. Times of peace must always come from times of turmoil, and we have both emerged from trying times to see this page.

What is to follow?

All we know is that there will be more joy, more sorrow, more pride, more humility, more strength, more weakness, more despair and more peace boxed in by more faith, more questions…

It seems fitting to end this note, this book, this chapter with words we spoke a lot at the beginning, which was like billions of beginnings before:

Always Come Back To This.

six years is how long it takes

TK guernica magazine bad sense of time six months to go

Steve Toltz: Writers and Bad People
https://www.guernicamag.com/steve-toltz-writers-and-bad-people/

oh, well if we’re gonna talk about that…

The Neurological Similarities Between Successful Writers And The Mentally Ill
https://thoughtcatalog.com/cody-delistraty/2014/03/the-neurological-similarities-between-successful-writers-and-the-mentally-ill/

ā€œWriters can be rather awful people, and their blend of depression, isolation, and desire to control not only their own characters but the ā€˜characters’ of their real lives has been a relationship killer for centuries. Writers are continually making associations between the external world and their internal experiences. They can’t ā€˜just focus on one thing’ like the other person may wish them to. Their stream of ideas is always running; the tap does not shut off, and as a result, writers show schizophrenic, borderline manic-depressive tendencies.ā€

but let’s get back to being nice

Now he’s reading ā€œData Science from Scratchā€ and he’s gazing stone-faced out the window ā€œGet people to look at somethingā€ — is data more than that? We’ve already lost a generation of engineers who never learned how to love, how to hurt, how to be a person who loves and loses every time ā€œI have so many emails to sendā€ is sweep my ambition into bits of content with magnetism that sit at the top of others’ inboxes who in turn feel an obligation per their identity to do something meaningful with it — of course this whole enterprise depends on each of us knowing what these words mean and having a rhythm about what should be done. God, it’s so complex and fragile and unfathomable — lol both it out there in inboxes and on phones and in meetings every day, ongoing at this very moment, hundreds and hundreds forever — both that fact and you comprehending this explanation of it — the fact that we’re both here, rather, we’re both on this earth under the same sun in our bodies looking out as members of the world with a disaster’s worth of plans and obligations in the next two days and seconds and months and years — that we’re both here and it’s a disaster and I love you — and it could all fall down and I love you — that the train broke down and the baby died and the flood knocked out power and I love you — that I feel all this and you have your own ā€œall thisā€ that you feel and we both exhale and we’re the same and we’re complete — don’t let it reset just yet — stay with me here in this dream, we’re holding hands looking at a painting and both know this will always mark time. We can measure time by looking at this painting and we’ll know where we’ve been; we’ll know it’s the same place we still are, that we are always here in this space where we can talk to each other without talking to each other because I love you and you love me and we both know it and it’s the greatest thing
https://www.instagram.com/p/BaRrk4ylynD/

two years is a long time when measured by the shadow of unmaterialized love — a life that could have been, now relegated to a painting to look at, and to you it will mean something you can never share with anyone, but it gives you the imprint of what can be shared…in that way it can be earned anew, but the origin is never publicized; it’s one of those things that you know that no one else can — and perhaps an unknowable, inarticulate solitude you just trust by feel is a place we can both call home — and maybe we can make a word for it (ā€œsaudadeā€ is a good word) and so we can look in each other’s eyes on the rare occasion we’ll see each other, and we can both know, and smile, and know…and then of course we walk away to live in our lives again, but this secret we share…it’s almost like the world was made for it, like every atom conspires and chronology shrinks so that we can be here and recognize this, transcending our humanity and becoming more: divine, timeless, shapeless; we are beyond adjective or noun or verb, beyond construct, beyond visibility, and for that I thank you. (9/25/19 reflecting on that October 2017 was marked forever in my mind as the time she told me she was getting married and that we loved each other) it was a beautiful, a beautiful phone call I couldn’t have missed; that interaction wanted to happen like bees pollinating flowers — the season called for it; there would be no earth without it

the hours are calling us different places
we were never destined to be together
but we were destined to love each other
and maybe we all need someone we love who we aren’t with
it’s kinda nice to have a secret world
and gives us something to lean poetry against
since poets always talk about what they don’t have (since all they have is the intimacy of writing, of maybe being understood sometime later, of maybe being believed and admired, something love promises but never quite delivers)
unfortunately my last move is always to be sad alone
even if I have a wonderful life! Oh God, I wish I could share it!
and without something like Christ to bond around
we are lost
and back to kaleidoscope days
where blue and ugly and bleeding and bruised
float as oceans next to each other
adjacent bodies of water
mixing like paint or oil and water
I wish I could transfer all I see
but the space you have for me is limited
I wish I was more loving and less cognitive

there is more heartbreak to endure
disappointments happen every weekend

All this text can be replaced with ā€œno one caresā€

[She] told me she’s getting married on a phone call October 2017
the time before and after has collapsed
I am already well on my way to becoming a diamond compressed by those sheets of earth

We talked on the phone for an hour. It was amazing. Beautiful. True. Honest. Authentic.
All the best words in life. The best any of us will ever have or could ever have
before death

ā€œOften, in an emotional relationship, to be articulate is to be in some degree destructive.ā€
— Betty Miller, On the Side of the Angels

ā€œThe urge to destroy is also a creative urge.ā€
— Pablo Picasso

ā€œ[She has] so many levels of rage, guilt, the whole thing … if she was a New Yorker she would have gone to therapy and blabbed her head off and joined a support groupā€
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/18/charlotte-wood-were-told-female-anger-is-finding-its-moment-but-i-cant-trust-it

the thing is, women are horrible to each other
they’re jealous
especially when they turn 40
they’re nasty, brutish, entitled, bitter, mad they don’t get men’s attention
it’s a horrible way to live
being American over 40
being female
it’s awful
I can’t imagine
it must be terrible
it must be terrible being over 40 in this country
yet there is no other option but to be it, to be what you are
and it’s horribly difficult, it’s harder every day

the only easy day was yesterday

British colonists used to tattoo the crimes of the colonized onto their bodies in order to ensure they could not be forgotten.

as if we need a reminder of our penance

ā€œI’m in my mid-thirties now, and I should be farther along somehow,ā€ he said. Each was frustrated by the faltering progress of the other. She wanted stability. He wanted support. Watching them go on like this, in a weary, embittered, and yet still affectionate and hopeful way, for more than an hour, I recalled Gonzaga saying that incompatibility can often be imperceptible until a couple is subjected to some kind of difficulty of the world’s devising: problems involving health, money, children, or work.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/07/04/looking-for-someone

Deleting the beautiful ā€œIā€
only to have it come roaring back
once I belong to something more permanent lol
no, nothing is permanent, it’s always just being
I don’t have it made; I have to make it
any man who ā€œhas it madeā€ is worried about The Wall Street Journal
and young people who deserve housing, health care and meaningful work
which might mean his wealth is gonna get redistributed and you’ll have to learn to live without nice things for a while
but wealth is always inner, it’s always in the breath and the simple awareness of abundance that will persist no matter how many skies fall, investments fail, projects grind to a halt, people die or houses fall of a cliff

ā€œMy body is the record of those I have loved. I feel their bones as my bones. This record is autonomous. Its power is independent of time. The love is fixed, instantly accessible to memory, somehow stained into my body as color into cloth.ā€
— Anne Truitt
https://twitter.com/Rubynola82/status/1176586533715005440

The smashers of Mary’s images are acting more against statues than against her
http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2017/11/mary-idolatry-and-donald-trump

ā€œThey’re in love. Fuck the war.ā€
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

to hold someone is not a simple or easy thing. It is to contain all the grief in them
https://umairhaque.com/the-three-prices-of-love-19667711cb78

Winter plan: hunker over the wildebeests of failed love and scrape bloody meat off the bone by dragging my teeth down the chalky cliff, chewing and tasting the aroma as darkness blots out the sun

I did it and now every line is the same, or there are so many lines, and lines aren’t enough, and yet I go on making more — and the thing is to lose yourself, be prolific you don’t recognize yourself; become the writing impulse, and all your life shall be about it, and any lover will have to be shoehorned in to the powerful paradigm which will not be denied air, water or sunshine — it is a plant, an oak, fierce

kinda anticlimactic

ā€œthe creator’s craving for a climax far bigger than the climaxes life has to offerā€
— AnaĆÆs Nin, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study

at least now I can admit my limits and give the outline away
at least the shadow has some competition
I don’t know how this’ll land

Written by

The Blinking Cursor/San Francisco, CA

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