How do you live with your self?
How could you possibly hurt someone like myself?
The saddest part, though, is I would take you back.
You've turned me into some spineless hypochondriac.
I am just a fashion accessory
People send postcards
And they all hope I'm feeling well
I retreat into self-pity, it's so easy
Where they patronise my misery.
You're tender and you're tired
You can't be bothered to decide
Whether you live or die
Or just forget about your life
Drift away and die
Never say goodbye.
Kate and Kristin and kit kat.
All things I like looking at.
Too weak to fuss, too weak to die.
Choice is skeletal in everybody's life.
I choose, my choice, I starve to frenzy.
Hunger soon passes and sickness soon tires.
Legs bend, stockinged I am twiggy.
And I don't mind the horror that surrounds me.
Self-worth scatters, self esteem's a bore.
I long since moved to a higher plateau.
This discipline's so rare so please applaud.
Just look at the fat scum who pamper me.
Yeh 4st 7, an epilogue of youth.
Such beautiful dignity in self-abuse.
I've finally come to understand life.
Through staring blankly at my navel.
For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself. Very often, those who conceal this possession from the world do so only from the fear that the beloved object may be taken from them. And their happiness is diminished by this prudent reticence.
The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there's a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It's the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down.
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next--if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions--you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Drowned now--the tree as well, the sky, the wind, the clouds. All she has left is the picture. Also the story of it. Read more »
The serious part is their bodies. I sit in the hall with the cradled telephone, and what I hear is their bodies. I don't listen much to the words but to the silences, and in the silences these bodies re-create themselves, are created by me, take form. When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that. Let me have that. What power they have over me is held through the eyes, and when I'm tired of them it's an exhaustion partly physical, but also partly visual. Read more »
