Across the lake
wind ripples
choppy waves
like goose bumps
thrilling over
my skin.
On shore
ducks flap wings
in a feathery applause.
Aspen leaves giggle,
like children
supposed to be asleep,
and a cricket chirps
the sunset
into basic black
trailing like a whiff
of lilac before closure.
Diane Webster
No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Drowning Girl
via (xiv temperance)
via (xiii death)
A great poem.
I don’t like those good boys
Fresh faced, bright eyes
Chewing on their white lies
I like the rough lips
Rugged on his cheek bones
Who would have known
I don’t belong to anyone
I held him captive
In my skin
My whiskey lips
Held him in
And exhaled his ghost
Where’d you go?
You’re somewhere in the body sleeping next to me
But the left side of the bed is cold
Who would have known
I’d break the bad boy
Boy, you should have known
When you saw me drinking straight out of the bottle
When I smoked all your cigarettes
I’m nothing but bad news
When we first met
You asked for my name
I said it was trouble
It wasn’t a challenge
It was a warning
That you didn’t heed
And now look at us
Broken and bent
Shattered pieces on the bathroom floor
But I’ll get…
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In the 21st century, the novel is no more than blog entries. Short stories strung together to make a whole unit.
As more than one critic has noted, today’s novelists tend not to write exposition as fully as novelists of the 19th century. Where the first chapter of Stendahl’s “Red and the Black” (1830) is given over to the leisurely description of a provincial French town, its topographic features, the basis of its economy, the person of its mayor, the mayor’s mansion, the mansion’s terraced gardens and so on, Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” (1931) begins this way: “From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking.”
The 20th-century novel minimizes discourse that dwells on settings, characters’ CVs and the like. The writer finds it preferable to incorporate all necessary information in the action, to carry it along in the current of the narrative, as is done in movies.
Of course there are 19th-century works, Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” for example (” ‘Tom?’ No answer.”), that jump right…
View original post 128 more words
Seriously cool.
via (xi justice)
silverapplequeen 