Syit

The Best Part

" Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. 

Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. 

For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."

-Ernest Hemingway, 1954 Nobel Acceptance Speech

So You Want To Be A Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

- Charles Bukowski

" Memory is brutal because precise."

-Arkaye Kierulf, Spaces

" But love- not of Feuerbachian man, not of Moleschott's metabolisms, not of the proletariat, but love of one's darling, namely you- makes a man into a man again. In fact there are many women in the world, and some of them are beautiful. But where can I find another face in which every trait, even every wrinkle, brings back the greatest and sweetest memories of my life? Even my infinite sorrows, my irreplaceable losses I can read on your sweet countenance and I kiss my sorrows away when I kiss your sweet face. 'Buried in your arms, awoken by your kisses'- that is, in your arms and by your kisses, and the Brahmins and Pythagoreans can keep their doctrine of reincarnation and Christianity its doctrine of resurrection."

* Karl Marx to his wife, 


-KARL MARX; Interviews and recollection, ed. David McLellan

Señora

II.

She dreams of giant vines crawling
over her body & onto her face,
as though to squeeze off
her quantum reservoir of air...

Then the cats would turn
into huge tigers of night fire,
growling into her gray eyes
like she were a cruel zookeeper
& sudden interloper...

O what madness visits old age?
Is it the lamented youth
coming alive & bringing back
destruction of passion in its wake?

Everything resists her mind's command
where it used to be putty on her heart's palm!

Yes, times are fast & merciless,
The demons are still prancing out there,
devouring the children like they did
once upon a time in her own time

- Edel Garcellano