October 2009
September 2009
headlines: proud to live in the bay
Berkeley agrees to U.N. rights treaties
Berkeley becomes the first city in the United States, and possibly the world, to agree to international human rights treaties.
“
Alice came to a fork in the road.
‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire cat.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered.
‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
” —Lewis Carroll
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Lovedrunk-Anouk
headlines: I need to start having babies
Mom attempts to sell her son for gas money
Elm
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.
_________________________
Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
_________________________
Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
_________________________
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing.
_________________________
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
_________________________
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
_________________________
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
_________________________
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
_________________________
I let her go. I let her go Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
_________________________
I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
_________________________
I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
_________________________
Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?
_________________________
I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
_________________________
Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.
_________________________
Sylvia Plath
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Worried Shoes- Karen O and the Kids
headlines: why bearing arms is for the south
Candidate raffles off AK-47 at campaign rally
A candidate to be South Carolina’s next National Guard leader skipped the fiery speeches for firepower, launching his campaign with what he called a “machine-gun social.”
musings on fucking myself
procrastination.
what is this anxiety,
this fucking sticky web
I find myself, day after day, caught in—
when will I be thrown?
kicked from the saddle into mid-air?
sense slammed with an asteroid into my skull?
they’re only words, not a pact with the devil.
relax. take a pill. sleep it off.
just do it.
“What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.” —Sylvia Plath
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.” —Sylvia Plath
Listen
This Love is Fucking Right-The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
headlines: dogs are stupid
Pomeranian ordered to leave Colo. resort town
A Pomeranian has been kicked out of a Colorado resort town by a judge after getting in trouble for biting and other bad behavior.
imaginings of a day when it didn't hurt
to be held:
last time i saw you
your hair was long and dark,
now you,
are held by someone else.
I pretend
her angel face
doesn’t faze
what lies,
her closed hand,
hugging disinterest.
black panties singing:
(I’m numb.
you wanted to touch.
a glass chest.
I had stories to tell,)
like you cared,
we were torn
we were begging for the best
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Sick Muse-Metric
“Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words “Dear God, life is hell.” Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, “Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is Hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
—J.D. Salinger
headlines: oh michael
MICHAEL JACKSON HAILS HITLER AS A ‘GENIUS’ IN LOST TAPE
Play
“she went over to his apartment
clutching her decision
and he said, did you come here to tell me goodbye?
so she built a skyscraper of procrastination
and then she leaned out the twenty-fifth floor window
of her reply
and she felt like an actress
just reading her lines
when she finally said
yes. it’s really goodbye this time
and far below was the blacktop
and the tiny toy cars
and it all fell so fast
and it all fell so far
and she said:
you are a miracle but that is not all
you are also a stiff drink and i am on call
you are a party and i am a school night
and i’m lookin’ for my door key
but you are my porch light” —Ani Difranco
clutching her decision
and he said, did you come here to tell me goodbye?
so she built a skyscraper of procrastination
and then she leaned out the twenty-fifth floor window
of her reply
and she felt like an actress
just reading her lines
when she finally said
yes. it’s really goodbye this time
and far below was the blacktop
and the tiny toy cars
and it all fell so fast
and it all fell so far
and she said:
you are a miracle but that is not all
you are also a stiff drink and i am on call
you are a party and i am a school night
and i’m lookin’ for my door key
but you are my porch light” —Ani Difranco
Listen
Forevermore-Katie Herzig
headlines: clever
UK prison bans gel inmates used to get high
A British prison says a bunch of inmates have been caught with their hands clean — using hand sanitizing gel to get drunk.
mouth to shed
you don’t love me
and so i give
diamonds
drip off my back,
you scramble to collect,
I am an undressed wedding cake
using your teeth,
you scrape off
the best parts.
what am I?
skin
to shrug?
Listen
Their Cell- Girl in a Coma
if you don't hold my heart like a grenade
you don’t know.
I try, I break.
I want, I restrain.
I love, I lie.
headlines: because cats need body jewelry
‘Gothic’ pierced cats sold online
WOMAN faces animal cruelty charges for sale of kittens with ear, neck and tail piercings
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up to discover what is already there.”
—Henry Miller
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Leave!- VV Brown
