Her Mouth Was Hemlock

“When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death."

― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

"O"

epoxy resin, found objects

on steel frame mounted on reclaimed wood

Christmas in a dead town

“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

"I cannot tell you the compassion I have felt for all your sufferings for these weeks past that you have had so many drawbacks. Nor the gratitude I have felt for the cheerful & affectionate looks you have given me when I know you have been miserably uncomfortable."

- Emma Darwin (from her letter to Charles)

"Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me."

- Psalms 69:1-2

Bruce Lee said, be like water.

"Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. 

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” 

M: (Wrong sent text) Yeah. Monday mourn day. Life as shitty as ever. Text me when you come to mnl again. We'll have our lungs burnt and have good tea. Hi to your boyfriend.

M: That was wrong sent. Sorry. My muscle memory only knows your name on my phone book.

P: Why shitty? Take it easy.

M: Yes. I'm okay. It's just the usual stuff. And you know about my stubbornness to everything.

P: Okay. I know. Bruce Lee said be like water my friend.

M: Making it's way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object... Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. Thanks for reminding me.

P: You know even that!

M: You know it too! And sometimes I keep on forgetting I know it no matter how much I like that it says a lot.

Happy Birthday Ernest Hemingway.

“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”

- A Moveable Feast

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others…But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.”
- A Farewell to Arms

“I was so sentimental about you I’d break anyone’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer.” 

- To have And Have Not

“So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.”

- The Snows Of Kilimanjaro

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake you know."

“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual.”

“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”

— Carl Sagan

Silvered lines from The Piano Man's Daughter

• “People like me, I guess we aren’t safe anywhere. Not in this world. But you and I don’t live in this world. Do we."
• We were always escaping, you see – escaping, or standing ready to escape.
• I was struck like a match. I had no option but to burn.
• She had a look that says: beware, I kill – the look that men will die for gladly.
• Giving birth is a secret between two people only: the one being born – and the one who. . .what? The one who was giving up life of the other. Birth is a parting, a separation forever.
• She had wanted to take him so deep inside that he would never leave her.
• It did not occur to her that, in loving one, you gain a multitude of strangers who were intended to be kin.
• She hated – and always had – those moments in the service of Christian burial when the clergy held out there collective hands and reached for the souls of the living, using death of loved ones as a trick – as a trap – to gather more converts. It was despicable.
• “I wish – I only wish we had never met so we might never have to be parted.”
• Loving them excessively at first, she grew to dislike them excessively. To despise them. Which brought her to scorn them – even to ridicule them.
• She is always standing apart, stubbornly refusing to join the human race – perhaps afraid of the negative comparison between herself and its taller, thinner members.
• Clearly, Willa’s violent relationship with her dolls was nothing more than a reflection of her violent relationship with food. And her violent refusal to be loved.
• [“ I kept thinking, someone will come and I will be able to trust them. Someone – a stranger – will come and I will be able to trust them and I will be able to tell. But that person never came. Until you. And then. . .”] [“Then you didn’t trust me.”]
• “Life is a flame, but if we flame, we die.”
• “All who did not fall down, were to be cast into the midst of a fiery furnace.”
• It was then that she knew what she wanted to hear – knew it because she wanted so desperately to hear it herself. “You are not alone,” she said. “You are not alone.”
• Charming. He could be so damned charming, she thought, sitting there beside him on the train._ Charming. But still arrogant.
• She loved him, sometimes, with desperation.
• I am me – none other. I am this – nothing more. I am here – nowhere else – and here I’ll bide. Forever
• Come on, he said, it’s time you learned to fly. . .
• “That you’re going to leave. . .and that we’ll never fly again. . .”
• Older women – lonely women only want one thing: a man they won’t have to bury, but who will bury them. . .
• The time is always now, yet now holds everything that ever was.
• In January of 1936, King George V died and all hell broke loose with Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson. There were wars in Spain and Ethiopia. Hitler marched on Rhineland and the Great Depression entered in its seventh year. This was the time of our love affair and, on April 26th, 1937, we were married. That very same day the bombs fell on Guernica.
• It was the land’s departure – not the ship’s.
• If my father suddenly announced himself and said: I’m here! No matter who he was, he would still be a stranger coming for me out of the dark.
• “Don’t grow up, my darling. Be a child forever.”
• It wasn’t as if we didn’t know each other – all of us, one way or another. It wasn’t as if we weren’t emancipated.
• Why are we so afraid of one another in our skins? We are only men and women – we are only human beings – creatures, only – nothing more. And beautiful. . .
• boys dressed up in their god-damn youth and waiting for the god-damn bugle call.
• she had even developed a dainty cough, and would hold a handkerchief to her lips as though expecting blood to stain it. When the blood did not appear, the handkerchief would be crumpled and fisted in the hopes that its mere presence in her hand would tell the visiting world that she was dying.
• run until the demons could not find us.
• [“You’d have to give up dying. I suspect what I’m proposing is rather strenuous.”] [“Give up dying?”] [“Yes. Surely you must be bored with it by now.”]
• “The trouble with dying is how tiring it is.”
• The movies became her drug – her good, safe place – her world within the world, where no one could reach her – no one could harm her.
• “He seemed quite nice,” I said. And meant it. “He is,” said Lily. “Very nice. For a dead man.”
• “We are not alone here, Charlie,” Lily said to me. “It’s there world, too. But we have taken – we are taking it from them – breaking it over their heads. . .”
• I am not disabled, she would say. I am merely hampered.
• They would be part of our lives until our own were over.
• It was dreadful-tasting – but after a moment, when it began to work its magic on my nerves, I thought: yes – that was good – and drank some more.
• Their injuries were mostly to the spirit and thus invisible.
• . . .the haunted presence of those men, who often – as I witnessed – stood frozen on the grass and wept.
• That she favoured dark colours gave the impression of a genteel tragedy hovering in her background.
• There are burns where his finger held me.
• I swear their shadows were dancing.
• Cigarettes had ruined her breathing. . .
• When smiling, the boy fell dead. . .
• She was notorious for smoking openly in public – a thing that women never did.
• I thought perhaps she might have spoken to me as she passed; called me to join her before she went inside. But she was already on her way to the rest of her life.
• There had been no forgiveness. None was needed.

“You are beautiful like demolition. Just the thought of you draws my knuckles white. I don’t need a god. I have you and your beautiful mouth, your hands holding onto me, the nails leaving unfelt wounds, your hot breath on my neck. The taste of your saliva. The darkness is ours. The nights belong to us. Everything we do is secret. Nothing we do will ever be understood; we will be feared and kept well away from. It will be the stuff of legend, endless discussion and limitless inspiration for the brave of heart. It’s you and me in this room, on this floor. Beyond life, beyond morality. We are gleaming animals painted in moonlit sweat glow. Our eyes turn to jewels and everything we do is an example of spontaneous perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch. The time I annihilated while I waited like a man doing a life sentence. Now you’re here and everything we touch explodes, bursts into bloom or burns to ash. History atomizes and negates itself with our every shared breath. I need you like life needs life. I want you bad like a natural disaster. You are all I see. You are the only one I want to know.”

— Henry Rollins

We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too. 

-J.D. Salinger

"Nothing is real when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light."

- Sylvia Plath

“Have you ever had so much to say that your mouth closed up tight struggling to harness the nuclear force coalescing within your words? Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside you that you didn’t dare let them escape in case they blew you wide open? Have you ever been so angry that you couldn’t look in the mirror for fear of finding the face of evil glaring back at you?”

— Ellen Hopkins 

“Death, I need my little addiction to you.I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.”

— Anne Sexton

Vita and Virginia

"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it."

- Vita Sackville West to Virginia Woolf

"Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come."

- Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville West

I subconsciously burned the only copies of your manuscripts. I had no idea; I swear to you I am not aware. There’s “no ghost” in “the” “machine”. I don’t know what I say, much less what I mean. My futurist mind Xeroxed your cliche 500 times; made it descend a staircase. Is that brilliant? If I take a photograph of you thru this filter the twinkle in your eye becomes a supernova. I’ll snapshot your eye into a heat death. You’re my muse, so I love you. Do you love me? Did you invent me?

- Elisa Gabbert, After I Subconsciously Plagiarized You

“I envy you. Every moment. You can leave me. I cannot leave myself.”

— Anna Świrszczyńska

“I’ve decided never to fall in love again. It’s a disgusting habit. Ten minutes ago, I saw death everywhere. Now it’s just the opposite. Look at the sea, the waves, the sky. Life may be sad, but it’s always beautiful.”

—Anna Karina, Pierrot le Fou

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. But I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”

— Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“Over time, he had acquired the ability to blend into the background… into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets – to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye”

- Arundranathi Roy

“You’re plunged so deep in your whirlpool of negativism you force yourself into a rote; the simplest actions become forbidding and enormous.”

- Sylvia Plath