I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from Underground
Etikett: poetry
Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
“I’ve always had a terrible weakness for beautiful but sad things.”
— Sylvia Plath.
“I exaggerate everything I fear.”
— Anne Sexton, from a letter to Linda Gray Sexton wr. c. July 1967
On a hot summer day in Cannes, where the sea flatters your eye and sand flatters your pure heart, we swayed to the rhythm of French 1960’s music while our souls embraced each other and birds sang winsome sonnets. And as the beams of sunlight that revives brown leafs in the spring, you warmed my heart and delighted my soul.
to get rid of myself / layer
by layer by layer by(e)—
Caitlin Baird, from “Sofabed,” published in Vagabond City
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
I keep fading away, and the light in my eyes trembles with anguish,
Miklós Radnóti, from All That Still Matters At All; “You Wonder, My Dear,”
Everything is leaving me, my life, my life.
Marguerite Duras, from “The Ravishing of Lol Stein,” published c. 1964
“The sky turns pink and there is no one to cry with, to reminisce with.”
— Anna Akhmatova, tr. by Judith Hemschemeyer, from “Northern Elegies,”
beberequin 