breathy nightloves

"On your best days, this is the best thing I could tell you. All in racehorses around your bones. All of everything, and barricades. But on your worst days, I am trying to ruin you with beauty, with calcium, with streetlights and astronauts and smoke. And I am to trip over love for your shoulders, your paper envelopes, your bit lip, your brace."

—Ian William L.

midnight in paris

"The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence. You have a clear and lovely voice. Don't be such a defeatist."

—Midnight In Paris; Woody Allen

an end of summer

summer stung with its last purple skies and smoke-bit moons

dragonflies brimming beneath your skin

the ways we slip back to our youth

dusk through the gapped smiles

remember how we were here.

—Ian William L.

blessed are the wingless

"Blessed all the debris that waits inside of monuments."

—The Wingless; Cecilia Llompart

this star won't go out

“I feel very lucky to know you—and as far as I have seen, to know you is literally to love you.”

—This Star Won't Go Out; Esther Earl

tiderays

today gave us a head full of smoke. time to wash it all away, so beautifully.

in adequate

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”

—Marianne Williamson

bodies of stars (redux)

"Carry your passions, no matter of ugly glow. Hold them for stars."

—Ian William L.

vapour trail

the others in static (redux)

"I cannot speak it, picking gingerly at static honeycomb. This is licking the television screen switched off, breathing out—heat strings, chemical jars, asphalt beaches. This is a scrap of paper with the secret of everything. This is Mona Lisa's grimace, cold headaches, staring into midnight, trying to conjure a dead rabbit. This is advertisement space. This is meat. It is a wrong, whoreish bell—pale contraception—an engine of colour to wet along your palms. This is a gap tooth wonderland, appendices not correctly attached, ugly math. This is something. This is a feeling. This is not a word. This is only left with a paper aeroplane, bowel cancer, apocryphal, home."

—Ian William L.