May 2012
18 posts
cosmo tip #249
expertcosmotips:
when hes having sex with you, shout out your own name instead of his.
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts, Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Magda. But she was jealous of Magda. A thin girl of fourteen, too small, with thin breasts of her own, Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby, a round infant in arms....
2 tags
1 tag
Symbiosis
You scratch my back I’ll suck yours, I say, when you try some line like Girl scout,
don’t be catching feelings, better off getting off as catch can. If I wasn’t so
intent upon upending myself before midnight, I’d be gone but
I decide it’s best to beat you at your own game, which is to say, one of us
always comes when we’re in the same room and...
Ecstasy In Public
My brother told me it’s not a tough-guy thing, it’s that tears are so important that he can’t walk around acting like they grow on trees. I remember the man who boxed in the old prose-ring with Hemingway for years, two stout fighters circling and hissing at each other instead of throwing a punch. The day he finally stood up out of his book and said Wait, Ernest wasn’t his father and pointed a...
2 tags
cosmo tip #240
expertcosmotips:
when he least expects it take off all your clothes to reveal that you are actually a rat king
IF I HAD A NICKEL FOR EVERY TIME I’D DONE THAT…
I wanted home in your heart
I WANTED TO COME HOME to your heart, in the all-night diner sense, where I just walk in like John Wayne out of a storm and the counter-tops are piously clean, and you cook your eggs in bacon fat and remember what it is you loved about a wild man like me,
and the man down the way orders over- easy, but I say I want everything cooked all thoroughly and through so I can trust you when I eat you...
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved...”
– Maurice Sendak
2 tags
“Fuck them. I hate those ebooks. They cannot be the future. They may well be. ...”
– Maurice Sendak
4 tags
What's a mile
You tell me I forget everything you’ve told me, but I remember: You said, I used to think anyone who wasn’t hit had no right to complain. You told me too that you didn’t really believe I liked girls, which I thought might be some kind of challenge. It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of you—the constant on the scene, brown hair curling to match mine, the men around us a series...
A friend tells me I know what other things but...
Yesterday, I saw the man who belies everything that you’re saying—namely that I don’t know how to look for love, and just what it looks like covered in a layer of film meant to render it nondescript. All things you’ve once known become eternally recognizable, even if they resemble in no way their original selves. He put down his stand-up bass to come over and hug me, his arms sadly triumphant,...
Recognition
I’m walking by a bus stop wondering how one night below freezing can void the air’s right to smell like spring (which is what we say when we don’t want to admit ornamental pears all carry the scent of the semen from which we’re convinced all life
comes) when a man twice my age says hello and I’m midway through smiling at him, when he cuts my face down with the question, So, you, me,...
it'd be really funny
if, when presidential candidates dropped out of the race, instead of pussing out and pledging their support for the other person from their party, they totally used all their inside information and negative campaigning skills to diminish their fellow party members’ reputation, and then nobody supported anybody and so no one voted and we had no president and we collapsed like the Roman empire...
“For the people is just as big a danger as the government. I mean, if you let it...”
– Joyce Cary, from The Horse’s Mouth
2 tags
April 2012
25 posts
1 tag
2 tags
“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understand the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There...
2 tags
“You cannot kill or steal from a man while he is asleep and heartbroken. While...”
– Salvador Plascencia, from The People of Paper
“Hickson is a business man. And I’m a painting man. He makes money for...”
– Joyce Cary, from The Horse’s Mouth
2 tags
interruption during Frank O'Hara's reading at the...
Jack Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
Frank O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac.
“We all know what the world is. Free for all. And the winner is the chap who...”
– Joyce Cary, from The Horse’s Mouth
“What you’re doing is acting out your lives. And it’s really...”
– My father, on young artists
“For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a...”
– Virginia Woolf, from Mrs. Dalloway
cosmo tip #221
expertcosmotips:
shit on everything he loves
4 tags
“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”
– Samuel Beckett
“But love—as the male novelists define it—and who,after all,speak...”
– Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Frodo: But in the meantime what course am I to take?
Gandalf: Towards danger; but not too rashly, nor too straight.
Revision
I’m still scanning the first page of results to my question, What is the most painless way to commit suicide, panning for some divine death no one’s ever mentioned, so no one could possibly fear, and thinking all things considered, it’s still one of the least embarrassing queries lodged in my computer’s ancient history, when my father calls for the third time today, as is common among men with bad...
March 2012
38 posts
THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED
Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine—tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come— the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there— the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth— your touch...
3 tags
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It's Raining In Love (by Richard Brautigan)
I don't know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
a lot.
It makes me nervous.
I don't say the right things
or perhaps I start
to examine,
evaluate,
compute
what I am saying.
If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?"
and she says, "I don't know,"
I start thinking : Does she really like me?
In other words
I get a little creepy.
A...