Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

nabokov

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

moss-free rolling stone, dream-free sanity. one more cup of coffee for the road, one more cup of coffee 'fore i go.

come away with me in my magic doris-caravan to freewheel through thunderheads, in brace position through the star-crossed heavens, down the underside of the crescent and under the bridge to places where feral children whisper their dreams into cockle shells and where the sunshine is dew on eyelids and where we fall up into the sky and not down into the well. come away.

mute

the silences are what give it away. the missing sounds, of the splash of a pebble, or the rev of the engine. simon and garfunkel had it right. but you don't miss the silences, you just pour words into their gaping mouths and, while not filling them up, at least it disguises them momentarily, and allows you to forget them, ignore them. meanwhile they eat me up. those silences are the pulling of the wool, the unravelling of the scarf that is me. and you're too deaf to notice.

you do not do, you do not do. you bastard, i'm through.
things i would say to you if i had it in me to seize the chance, but which instead may languish here forgotten forever in cyber-gloom.

neruda for the soul

1
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

2
Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!

That is why when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine

the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.