A wish worth repeating. Often.
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
~Neil Gaiman
One of my favourite poems about remembering and anticipating — in honour of New Years.
so sad.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.
” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions.
(via neil-gaiman)
I’m in a Donne kind of mood lately. In fact, I’d like to take a leave of absence from my life, and just sit around reading Donne for a while. I love this one because it contains two of my all time favourite metaphors.
I love this fragile little thing, despite the fact that everyone with a blog seems to cite it at some point.
“You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
Fire Graffiti Throughout those dismal months my life was only sparked alight Throughout those dismal months, my soul sat slumped and lifeless
when I made love to you.
As the firefly ignites and fades, ignites and fades, we follow the flashes
of its flight in the dark among the olive trees.
but my body walked to yours.
The night sky was lowing.
We milked the cosmos secretly, and survived.
It’s not so much that you can’t see
depth but that everything is within
reach. They sky already teaching you
limits of the hand, cloud already
an interval of believing.
It’s not so much the light you teach me
but the waste
of colour, how I have spent so much time
on concealment, the absence of white, a misreading
of cloud. Or that the sky in the puddle in the middle of the street is a girl
poking up at the soles of your feet, a girl
haloed, wide-eyed, in a second skin, sinking
And that the flame, the flame from
the other side of the yard
is a candle lapping up the
wicks of my legs, a cry, yours
mummy, mummy, hot, a tug of wax
melting, tears.
Or how the moth is a bow
flitting yellow from your hair, the steam
off my cup, a cord
winding through fingers,
a staircase
for angels, the lightfeet of anything returning to wings.
