love kills.

when i think of all the things he did because he loved me--what people visit on each other out of something like love. it's enough for all the world's woe. you don't even need hate to have a perfectly miserable time.

--richard bausch

totem.

the engine is killing the track, the track is silver,
it stretches into the distance. it will be eaten nevertheless.

its running is useless.
at nightfall there is the beauty of drowned fields,

dawn gilds the farmers like pigs,
swaying slightly in their thick suits,

white towers of Smithfield ahead,
fat haunches and blood on their minds.

there is no mercy in the glitter of cleavers,
the butcher's guillotine that whispers: 'how's this, how's this?'

in the bowl the hare is aborted,
its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spice,

flayed of fur and humanity.
let us eat it like Plato's afterbirth,

let us eat it like Christ.
these are the people that were important---

their round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces
on a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake.

shall the hood of the cobra appall me---
the loneliness of its eye, the eye of the mountains

through which the sky eternally threads itself?
the world is blood-hot and personal

dawn says, with its blood-flush.
there is no terminus, only suitcases

out of which the same self unfolds like a suit
bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,

notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors.
i am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms.

and in truth it is terrible,
multiplied in the eyes of the flies.

they buzz like blue children
in nets of the infinite,

roped in at the end by the one
death with its many sticks.

--sylvia plath

on depression.

i have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word madness to describe my condition. now and again, the word slips out, but i hate it. madness is too glamorous a term to conver what happens to most who are losing their minds. that word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression. madness is delightful to the beholder, scary in its way, but still fun to watch, a sport for spectators and rubberneckers who can't avert their eyes from the awfulness that they know they shouldn't be seeing.

but depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going hope and killing yourself.

a sweet little bullet from a pretty blue gun.

now it's raining it's pouring
the old man is snoring
now i lay me down to sleep
i hear the sirens in the street
all my dreams are made of chrome
i have no way to get back home
i'd rather die before i wake
like marilyn monroe
and throw my dreams out in
the street and the
rain make 'em grow

--tow waits

christmas gifts.

holidays is getting closer and yet i still can't feel the gist of it. my christmas gifts are not of the material kind but of my own reality of christmas.

my gifts this christmas are dedicated to the people who believe that santa doesn't grant wishes and looks at holidays as solitude. my gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. my gifts are unspecific.

i am an artist manqué, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it. i am like the lead character in a korean horror film where the woman who is so full of... so full of... so full of something or other--it is unclear what, but a definite energy that can't find its medium--who pokes her own eyes out with a fork and is murdered by her lover in an insane asylum in the end.

she is, and i am becoming, a complete waste.

melancholic.

it was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry--school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general--but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.

--the dead girl

i am down.

i am walking barefoot on broken glass in a very dark night. i am collapsing and i am collapsing on myself. i am shards of glass, and i am the person being wounded by the glass. i am killing myself. i am remember a little child and crying when my mother left me at nursery school. i am crying so hard, gasping for breath, i am incoherent and i know it.

broken.

if you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistently, then they have nothing left, except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming round the gut, but so far down, so hidden, its impossible to find.

--david edgar