His Hands

I don’t know when the obsession began.

Perhaps two days into the start of school,
when he said hello to me for the
second time this year

and I realized that it’s not his mouth
or his eyes or even his hair.

Instead,
it’s his hands.

Long, pale, elegant things.
Wispy limbs that induce within me
the kind of longing that belongs
in a harlequin romance.

I’m not trying to be poetic,
but these hands, God, these hands.

They deserve a poem.
They deserve fifty.

The star extending outward
from the wrist bone,
empty bowls clenched around air,
oh, God.

Did I mention he plays the piano?
It would be too easy to say
“How I’d love for him to play me.”

I find myself jealous of the pianos
in the music hall, all three of them.

He can’t pass by them without touching them
and the sheer yearning on his face when he sees them
and how he steps around me if I’m closer to them
so that he can trail his fingers along the ivory keys,
play a glissando that ends on a high, clear C—

Oh, God, to be that piano.

To feel him love me: all seven octaves,
all eighty-eight keys.

— Kristina H.

Postiljonen

Sunday Nights

Under a canopy of night sky and green foliage I close my eyes, my fingertips touching the wet leaves as I walk my path home, the earth smelling of petricher.
How I love the quiescent beauty of Sunday nights when all the cars are alined in their place, construction sites deserted, restaurants with their lamps still lit in the windows as if waiting with tables set for phantom guests while all my neighbors are safe tucked in bed dreaming.
Bliss to be alone, amid this autumn scenery of fallen leaves and discarded paraphernalia traveling down the street, rustling in the wind. The city abandoned but for the sparking ghost trams, empty taxi cabs and paper carriers. I pause along the dark gated football field encircling an oasis of stars, looking up to the North Star, Big Dipper, Orion.
I remember in hospital opening my beginners guide to astronomy and tracing my fingers over the stars mapping the constellations in my mind, feeling the same light years of isolation like a lost astronaut in an alien world and wanting to go home but the dark endless space was so vast.

Its been a year long journey, I don't know yet what will become of me or if I will be cured but I am home again.

Les Misérables

"They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.”

— Victor Hugo

Here’s What Our Parents Never Taught Us

You will stay up on your rooftop until sunlight peels away the husk of the moon,
chainsmoking cigarettes and reading Baudelaire, and
you will learn that you only ever want to fall in love with someone
who will stay up to watch the sun rise with you.

You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you will
realize that nowhere seems like home anymore.

A woman will kiss you and you’ll think her lips are two petals
rubbing against your mouth.

You will not tell anyone that you liked it.
It’s okay.
It is beautiful to love humans in a world where love is a metaphor for lust.

You can leave if you want, with only your skin as a carry-on.

All you need is a twenty in your pocket and a bus ticket.
All you need is someone on the other end of the map, thinking about the supple
curves of your body, to guide you to a home that stretches out for miles
and miles on end.

You will lie to everyone you love.
They will love you anyways.

One day you’ll wake up and realize that you are too big for your own skin.

Molt.
Don’t be afraid.

Your body is a house where the shutters blow in and out
against the windowpane.

You are a hurricane-prone area.
The glass will break through often.

But it’s okay. I promise.

Remember,
a stranger once told you that the breeze
here is something worth writing poems about.

-Shinji Moon

Dennis

Ask

"Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to. So, if there's something you'd like to try, if there's something you'd like to try, ask me, I won't say no... How could I?

Harvest Moon

Jonathan Johansson - Stockholm

Katija Mayer

The History of One Tough Motherfucker

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,"not much
chance...give him these pills...his backbone
is crushed, but it was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he'll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he's been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there...also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off..."

I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn't go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn't work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I'd had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough...

one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.

"you can make it," I said to him.

he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn't want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.

you know the rest: now he's better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left...

and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look
at this!"

but they don't understand, they say something like,"you
say you've been influenced by Celine?"

"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!"

I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he's relaxed he knows...

it's then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.

he too knows it's bullshit but that somehow it all helps.

-Charles Bukowski

Hedi Slimane

True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, then it’s the most beautiful lie we have.
– John Green

Ephemeral

Trapped in hell and given the chance of escape, most would take the ticket out.

Few would stay behind to hold your hand or to hold to their promises. Most you would see slowly leave, fading from the scene over time, till all you're left with is a dial tone. Others you will watch turn and wave goodbye at the end of the street, smile at you as they open the door to the drivers seat or look back a last time before they board a bus and you know from those polite gestures you'll never see them again.
You'll know from those tears in the hall, the eyes that don't meet yours, that kiss on your forehead what betrayal means.
Its nothing personal.
Those who left did so out of self preservation, not because you are unworthy or unlovable but because cruelty is merely weakness, love a matter of convenience. Our lives are ruled not by heroic novels, our impulses not by altruism but by natural selection.
Some evolve while others are left behind.

So it was with the elderly and the demented who were my constant companions through the underworld I was left in, they were an oracle to a future most of us one day will experience.
Face to face with your own mortality is a very lonely, desolate terrain. Polarized from the ones you loved, exiled from the past, tied to a future on the horizon: images of chronic disease and disability. An existence serving an indefinite sentence one of solitude and isolation.
Left to depend on the kindness of others knowing the more vulnerable the more abused and exploited. 

I will never forget those left behind, the dead, the chronically ill, the psychologically distressed and disturbed, the demented; tied to beds, drugged, ignored, punished in cold tiled bathrooms, electrocuted; the humiliation, degradation, the ambient loneliness. Treated without respect to human dignity as if the infirmed are void of human emotions or sensibilities.
I remember the same miserable condition of wings being clipped indefinitely. I know the same almost childish fear and powerlessness like the lights in a house shutting off one by one and not wanting to be left alone in the dark.

Between convalescence and deteriorating health, I remember helplessly watching the same small sphere of stolen moments of happiness diminish in the absence of friends, lovers, family. And it remained a mystery to me how quickly fortune can change hands, how the bond of friendships, of love are made redundant. How forgetting came so easy.
It shattered my heart how the value of a human life could become insignificant.
How consigned in a small cell of a room life could go by, the seasons come and go not knowing you ever existed.

But there Darwin took my hand and his sand walk became my only comfort.
Together we walked the same path: from an embryonic cell to a creature intrinsic to the experience of pain, along the struggle of our existence. He too had lost dearly to the survival of the fittest but understood that natures savagery is necessary to our species evolution.
Its nothing personal. Some thrive, while others are left behind
But I know left on that precipice nothing seems worse than abandonment, despondent staring out the window from a wheelchair, confined to bed, living from painkiller to painkiller, imprisoned in a biological atrocity but with Darwin there was no longer any need to ask why or search for meaning once I understood that despite whims, pleas, bargains, and compromises fate is ultimately out of our hands.

Yet it was in loosing meaning, in existential crisis that I could begin to rebuild my concept of the world. To find beauty even in the most deprived of circumstances by realizing the essence of meaning is found in each moment of existence, in the wonder that we exist on this plant at all; a species, alive, pulsating, breathing. Able to evolve from cosmic dust, a molecule, to be given the chance to love and be loved in return.


From the future I have seen I can promise you, you will be alone in the end but I can also promise your survival instinct, hope and imagination will fight for you. They will become your courage, your secret strength, your new best friends and they wont leave you till its your time to go. They will replace those dear to you whom in a novel world would be sitting on your bedside telling you to be brave, making you laugh, making you forget how ill you are.
When you're left in that deserters dust, in the debris  that was once a life I promise you hope's hand will intertwine yours. Imagination will turn a mausoleum of pain into a sanctuary; warm arms to cradle you when abandoned to the eery calm of crisp white hospital sheets. And your will to survive will use the last breath in your body to keep you from disappearing into a void, into the darkness, into an existence that no longer matters.

Courage will remind you life is ephemeral nothing lasts forever; not love, not friendship, not life, not even pain..simply some are marked for death others marked for life.
It is nothing personal.

My Weekend With Marilyn

Ryan Kenny

True Romance

Home

Lars Musschoot

Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind

"Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders."

I remember the landscape of those windswept autumn evenings as I sat alone, terrified. The same view in spring from my hospital bed. I remember the longing; longing for the the place you told me you would take me when I recovered. Though the lights of the amusement park sparkled in my horizon it was always across the world for me, always out of reach. Like an enchanted world in a glass globe I could only dream about.

But a miracle was granted, a year later in September slowly I began to recover.

At first I was hesitant, afraid to go back there, alone; without you. But I was determined my life would not be ruled by fear. That it would not be terrorized by illness or medical institutions and not by heartbreak.

I wanted to go back because it would mean I never gave up, I never gave up despite everything I lost, the dream to live again.

I wondered half amazed through the grounds of the amusement park. The rides had been closed but the gift shops and cafes though nearly deserted were open.
With the cool shadow of the roller coaster and space shuttle at my back I sat at at the cafe's terrace still illuminated by the warm rays of autumn, an order of hot chocolate and cinnamon roll shared absentmindedly with the unabashed sparrows ruffled on my table.

I knew where you would have taken me the picture was always a postcard in my mind; the late afternoon sun still golden on that rocky hill outside the fair, far above the distant city in our view. Just as beautiful as you had said.

I would have sat with your hand in mine snuggled up to your duffle coat.

Now I had to be content with having survived the year, without you.

Don't Say

Swept Out to Sea

Worlds Beyound

If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads."

-Rosemarie Urquico

Brighton Rock

Thank You

Explosions In The Sky - Postcard From 1952

August

I dont like

the memories
becauses the tears
come easily,
and once again
I break my promise
to myself for this day.

                      Its a constant battle.

A war between
remembering      and forgetting.

-

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬♩ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬♩

I do Not Possess Any Understanding of This World

I have said this before: I do not possess a superior understanding of the world. In fact, I do not possess any understanding of this world, let alone a superior one. I do not understand the world. That is why I write, because I do not understand. As for the price, it was not worth anything. A person's suffering, life itself, is the most precious thing there is. Nothing justifies the degradation of another, nothing justifies someone wanting to look at a zoo, to stand in front of a cage and think "I am more sensitive and have an extraordinary mind and I watch the common people to see how they behave." I haven't a clue. I belong among those in the cage, I am not standing outside the bars watching. I don't even understand what I have done. When I was in Romania, if I started every night to think about what had happened during the day, I couldn't get my head round it. I couldn't even afford to think within a wider time span. The exact, tiny things which kept accumulating were enough for me. I couldn't think, I had to cope, and this absorbed everything I could come up with in my head. I think literature too is a way of searching. What is this existence of ours? We are all a mystery, even in our own body: we do not know how long we will live, which body organs will fail us, when our mind will go. So this is enough. That is why it was so tragic, because alongside all these existential problems, which automatically concern us all, the dictatorship introduced the political surveillance that you had to fight against. I didn't understand a thing. That's why I keep trying to ask myself: what happened back then? All I have understood is that freedom is important.

Herta Müller

Just Saying...

We Walk

Madam Bovary

Images of beauty that never existed, these things she loved.
-Gustave Flaubert

Destiny

Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
—Andrew Boy

The National - About Today

Phi

It is late afternoon, the hospital is a still and quiet void. I am alone in a room of muted colors nude and green. It smells of lilacs picked fresh still wet with rain and left in my metal water jug.
The room is dim except for the faint streams of light coming through the shutters of the only window. I can hear the seagulls, sirens, the noise of traffic, a whole world continuing to exist in another summer blooming beyond the terror of my reality.
I feel like a moth trapped in a glass I so want my world back.
I realize now the horror of last year was merely a dark harbinger to a fate I cannnot escape, my only wish is to wake up from this nightmare.
If love was still here to hold my hand I could feel anchored but now I am drifting in the middle of an open sea and I can't find my way back home.
When the pain becomes unbearable I try to find a safe place to hide in the good memories I once had, but as the illness progresses and my memory fades like a scared child I can only cry under a pile of blankets.
I am still being filmed kepted alone under surveillance.
I never had to question what it is to be brave till now. I always believed myself to be fearless that I lived life with courage but this year, these past few days in emergency and hospital wards my strenght is crumbling. Being sick wears you down, it strips you down of of your pride, your image, your dignity of everything you held to, of everyone you loved.
This disease is destroying my body from the inside out and slowly I am now begining to loose my cognitive faculties. I want to write this while I still have the mind to-
To my dear friends who supported, cared, defended and held me through the worst days, you girls were my guardian angels. Thank you.
To the brothers who I could rely on to protect me, to make me laugh inspite of circumstance, you were my knights in shinning armour. Thank you.
To my sister who has been a tower of strenght, you are a saint. Thank you.
To my mother who always forgives me, thank you for your prayers.
To the lost friends who returned to bring me comfort, company and flowers, it meant the world. Thank you.
To J. who's affection and humour helped me survive those early months and gave me a reason to be brave, dream and hope, thank you.
Dont worry, I understand now.
I hope though some summer lightning storm you'll think of me and know where ever I am, whatever happens to me I'll remember you with love.

Dreamer

I ripped out the endings from novels and slept among the words.

Star Light

"I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend…"
— Neil Gaiman