A Myth in Creation

I have written a lot of bad poetry over the years; I still do. The blog is a witness to that.   Although I recognize the poems to be of relatively low literary value... they have been and are of therapeutic value for me. One may ask... why not keep them private then? I feel there is something emotionally different about a poem that is kept private (for instance, in a diary) versus a poem that is made public. Perhaps it has something with allowing the world to see one's vulnerability. The poems do not serve the same function for me if they are not shared. (Possibly, in some sense, this applies to my blogging in general as well.)   I also feel an obligation to myself to become the best poet I have the potential to be. Even if at best I am still a shitty poet, it doesn't matter, because to aspire for the perfection of this art form holds some intrinsic value.   So, I continue, not out of narcissism or some mistaken belief in my literary prowess. I persist because I c

"I'm a good officer. But in this world that's not enough. In this world, you have to be able to nod and smile and drink a pint, and say, 'How was your day?' In this world no one can be different or strange or damaged."  River, #1.2

"Nostalgia, to me, is not the emotion that follows a longing for something you lost, or for something you never had to begin with, or that never really existed at all. It’s not even, not really, the feeling that arises when you realize that you missed out on a chance to see something, to know someone, to be a part of some adventure or enterprise or milieu that will never come again. Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing, of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios. It’s the feeling that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored, whether summoned by art or by the accidental enchantment of a painted advertisement for Sen-Sen, say, or Bromo-Seltzer, hidden for decades, then suddenly revealed on a brick wall when a neighboring building is t

A quantum prayer for our superposition: may this wave function never collapse.

'The truth is I am a toy That people enjoy 'Til all of the tricks don't work anymore And then they are bored of me I know that it's exciting Running through the night, but Every perfect summer's Eating me alive until you're gone Better on my own They say, "You're a little much for me You're a liability You're a little much for me"' Lorde , Liability

Ember: Gosh, I cannot possibly think of infatuation as love. Too much like a drug. An obsession. A destructive force. And I can't view love as something that dissipates without rational reason. Love should be stable. Lead to happiness. And not make you feel as if you are going to crawl out of your skin secondary to inability to think of anything else. I cannot imagine love being so fleeting or unsettling... But I guess it's all just semantics. Me: An analogy just came to my mind. So, you know, there are monotheistic religions - with all powerful, essentially good God (like Christianity) - and there are dualistic religions - in which they are good as well as evil divine forces (like Manichaeism). Believers who are monotheistic at heart cannot conceive of divinity as anything but good. It is not merely semantics for them: evil may exist in the form of Satan or devil, but it is not divine. Those who are dualistic, on the other hand, see no problem in ascribing evil to divi

"At that age, we all want to be loved, but we all hate ourselves too, and are full of self-doubt. We want love that is deep and will last forever, but we fall in love with people at the smallest of things. It's a conflicted vulnerability. We want love to be urgent , risky, impossible, soul-shattering, eternal, immediate, intuitive... like a flash of lightening, a minor miracle from the gods. It's beautiful and poetic, and like the rarest of elements in nature, extremely unstable. Despite its aspirations, it doesn't last. A beautiful cocktail of desire, set on fire, burning itself out."

'At the time, I interviewed the siblings [the Wachowskis] for the Los Angeles Times, and Lana told me she saw the industry’s drive toward remakes as a sad byproduct of an anxious world. “Originality has inherent in it an uncertainty,” Lana said, in a part of the interview I didn’t end up using in that story. “[Movie audiences] went from hungering for that to being afraid of that, or suspicious of that. Now we crave, as an audience, the same story over and over. I think about, where have I seen that kind of audience before? Children. Children want the same bedtime story over and over and over. And if you change something in the middle they freak out and they’re like, ‘You skipped that part!,’ and that’s how audiences are with relationship to known stories right now. Children like it because it’s comforting, it makes you feel secure. And that’s what we want from movies right now, a sense of security, and original stories will never give you that.”' Vanity Fair

"I'm the lonely voyager standing on deck, and she's the sea. The sky is a blanket of gray, merging with the gray sea off the horizon. It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky. Between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart." Haruki Murakami , Kafka on the Shore

Delayed Delta Connection, DTW to CLE Awais Aftab It has a weary, androgynous beauty tonight This yellow, jaundiced moon Hovering hazily with the clouds A little smudgy and inebriated, through the foggy window Struggling to find its balance Over the tightrope of horizon Afraid of falling down into a city of broken, ambivalent hearts A tinge of blood lingers in the West On this eve, I imagine Evens the gods are unsure of their place  in Existence

"It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet." Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

"History is the lies of the victors," I replied, a little too quickly. "Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated." Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

"Courtship is, in part, about validation of the self. To woo is to seek corroboration, that I can be the subject of an aching admiration, that my flaws and weaknesses are not unredeemable but serve to make me human and endearing, that I am desirable and desired."

"Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream It's one of those compact, beautiful, mysterious poems that you struggle to comprehend and yet it always stays with you and comes back to you at the oddest times. This poem was on my mind today as I roamed the streets of San Francisco, perhaps in response to recently learning about the intriguing story of Emperor Norton I .

"Margaret used to say that there were two sorts of women: those with clear edges to them, and those who implied mystery. And that this was the first thing a man sensed, and the first thing that attracted him, or not." Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

From the rooftops of my heart My lungs will scream your name out Into the darkness of the world (My modification to Tyler Knott Gregson's original: 'And From these Rooftops I'll Scream your Name From My Lungs Bravely to the Dark.')

"Invent me a word that can encompass this ache" tyler knott gregson, haiku on love