Jill Alexander Essbaum, "Easter"
josrian
“Take a walk in the shadows. Open your eyes and allow me to show you the reason people like me worship the darkness. It is not that we are wicked, but that in shade even our darkest sins can disappear.”
— (via lukelf)
“The death they fear is subtraction, that moment when the smut of their decay ceases to sing, when it is sucked to the bone and silent dust. Happy to live in rot forever they pray that they may be allowed to keep the noise, and the noisier their prayers the deeper that collective expiration can be felt.”
— Necrology. Gary J. Shipley & Kenji Siratori. Schism press. 2013. (via criminal-delirium)
“You, a blue animal that silently trembles; you, the pale priest who sacrifices it upon the black altar. 0 your smile in the dark, sad and evil, such that a child blanches in its sleep. A red flame sprang from your hand and a night moth was burnt in it. 0 flute of light; 0 flute of death. What compelled you to stand still on the derelict stairs in the house of your ancestors? Below an angel is knocking at the gate with crystal finger.”
— Georg Trakl, “Transformation of Evil” (Trans. Alexander Stillmark)
“All wicked things once cried - Once wept and wept. Until the sound of their own weeping came to be too much to endure.”
“How soft is the blackness as it falls. It falls in silence and yet it is deafening, for no other sound except the blackness falling can be heard. The blackness falls like soot from a lamp with an untrimmed wick. The blackness is visible and yet it is invisible, for I see that I cannot see it. The blackness fills up a small room, a large field, an island, my own being. The blackness cannot bring me joy but often I am made glad in it. The blackness cannot be separated from me but often I can stand outside it. The blackness is not the air, though I breathe it. The blackness is not the earth, though I walk on it. The blackness is not water or food, though I drink and eat it. The blackness is not my blood, though it flows through my veins.”
— Jamaica Kincaid, “Blackness,” At the Bottom of the River (via sadladypoetssociety)
Everyone wants a rock bottom. Some Icarus shit. But the truth is some holes keep going, yawning, heady, one mistake becomes three: there’s always a dark darker than the dark you know.
— Hala Alyan, from “You’re Not a Girl in a Movie,” The Twenty-Ninth Year
But on my forehead stars – take note! – are burning. In my right hand – heaven, in my left hand – hell.
— Marina Tsvetaeva, tr. Christopher Whyte, written July 1919, Moscow in the Plague Year
“From distance, I swallow the rain down to its slowest blade and still can’t / tell if I am the thinned silver of God’s fallen tongue or its bloody song.”
— Scherezade Siobhan, from “Sifar,” published in jubilat
Source: jubilat.org
THIS IS NOT TEXTBOOK PTSD
THIS IS THE END OF THE CANON & AN ATTEMPT TO ADAPT IN A
WORLD THAT CONSTANTLY FAILS ME
THIS IS THE END OF A PERSON & THE BEGINNING OF A
MALF(X)ING CYBORG
AN IRREVERSIBLE DETACHMENT FROM MY BODY
A WALKING GHOST.
— Andrea Abi-Karam, from DECREATION, EXTRATRANSMISSION
glorytobabalon-deactivated20220
From Awakening Osiris; a new translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Horus speaks:
I am life rushing on, born of the egg of the world, from the belly of a magic woman, born of my father’s dreams. I am the screech of wind, the rush of falcon wings, talons sharp as knives. I came after you. I stand before you. I am with you always. I am the power that dispels darkness. Look upon the face of my father, Osiris. He is nothing. Embrace him. Even nothing cannot last. The seed laid into the void must grow. The candle’s only purpose is to shine in the darkness. Bread is meant to be ground to pulp in the teeth. The function of life is to have something to offer death. Ah, but the spirit lies always between, coming and going in and out of heaven, filling and leaving the houses of earth. A man forgets, but his heart remembers - the love and the terror, the weeping, the beating of wings.
Normandi Ellis
violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
Arthur Rimbaud, from The Selected Poems and Prose of A. R.; “Lives // Vies,”
are you here to pick the bones
of the years I laid waste to like I never loved a thing? So be it.
— Emily Skaja, from “Self-Portrait With Hawk & Armada,” Brute
Once your songs endure
inside my bones, they will consume the loneliness, yours and mine.
— Saddiq Dzukogi, from “Quenching,” published in DIAGRAM
Source: thediagram.com
“Hadit dissolves into Nuit, some thing into no thing, object into subject, and subject - finally - into that absolute subjectivity which, being free of both objectivity and subjectivity, remains indescribable.”
— Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time (via astranemus)
Get out of my walled infinity
Of the star circle round my heart
Of my mouthful of sun
Get out of the comic sea of my blood
Of my flow of my ebb
Get out of my stranded silence
Get out I said get out[…]
how long must I cry get out
Vasko Popa, from ‘Give Me Back My Rags’, Collected Poems, 1943-1976 (trans. Anne Pennington)
“The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it.”
— Brené Brown (via fyp-psychology)
Source: fyp-psychology
“Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy,”
— Virginia Woolf, from The Complete Works; “Jacob’s Room,” wr. c. 1922
Lp cover art: Horizonless by Loss (r. 2017) - Adam Burke (Illustrator)