a beautiful mess

"She is delightfully chaotic; a beautiful mess. Loving her is a splendid adventure."

—Steve Maraboli

mercilessly

"Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

—Anne Rice

on self judgment

"When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn't get enough light, and so it turned out that way. And you don't get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, 'You're too this, or I'm too this.' That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."

—On Self Judgment; Ram Dass

the margin

"There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books."

—George Santayana

the unrepeatables

"You are unrepeatable. There is a magic about you that is all your own."

—D.M. Dellinger

scrapsong (redux)

I saw you hang yourself to an end of a quote

some small fate that your books fall by my keep

and that smile before we spoke, almost always whispered:

I swore that the stars no longer rule.

you hold my world here, to see you writing yours

carved between stone and the length of sorrow

could I tell your greatest fear is that:

all of love is only borrowed.

the dreamers stand, on weight to move the water

or mistaken for the rust-less

secrets you won't know:

slow bird, so last, fierce.

—Ian William L.

both pursuit

"If it's both terrifying and amazing then you should definitely pursue it."

—Erada Khanmamedova

express domestic delivery

"My head swims, stupidly, drunk on a Monday morning on loose strings, spotproof and anger, a limp of silence. But for an old Asian lady, cloudily, trying to record the phrase "express domestic delivery", reading napalm on a businessman and how pretty those characters are, though, struck upon a folded page. Then the sky tasted, tarpaulin across the tips of my drifting synapses: how you become your own once-called empty armies, so long before, so you need.

So you need to do a headstand, or a crown of bone. You need an insect bite and to crush the insect between pulpy fingers and suck against acrid, acidsweet guilt. You need to sweat ice cubes, to think of rashes. You need, in scratched glass and soft lines, a message: I am so fucking wrong. All my kindness with shrapnel. All my labours of and, alien of love that, this is.

This is the morning wires, the way, one machination evenly and remote, a day, preternatural of broken timbers, skinned knees, little stones. I am gorged on the lightness."

—Ian William L.