“i have promises to break.”

- michael robbins

atonement.

newspaperblackout: Newspaper Blackout Horoscopes for February 2012 by Austin Kleon

Not your sign? Read yours→

keep going.

newspaperblackout: A blackout by shakethesky

sent to me today by an old friend. prefect timing. thank you.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save.

dream seed:

every night a house collapses
in my chest the sink
upstairs falls into the tub
downstairs floorboards erupt
into a riot of matchsticks

thanks, blue crane standing, for reminding me of this.

of all the things
I have been long without
tonight

a pair of needle-nosed pliers
would solve
99% of my problems

what I took for granted
as de facto
turns out was privilege

the physical tactile
precision
of the workshop

a level pencil T-Rule
pencil mark hammer
hammer hammer nails straight

craft
is perfection
not ideology

- Mogolodi Bond

Burning

There is a hidden kind
Of humble goodness
I love in others

Only an aeon
Of refining fire
Could make it mine

But sometimes it’s as if
I were already burning.

   - Anne Porter

cc: @mogolodi

Charles Bukowski - How Is Your Heart?

during my worst times
 on the park benches
 in the jails
 or living with
 whores
 I always had this certain
 contentment-
 I wouldn’t call it
 happiness-
 it was more of an inner
 balance 
 that settled for
 whatever was occuring
 and it helped in the
 factories
 and when relationships 
 went wrong
 with the 
 girls. 
 it helped 
 through the
 wars and the
 hangovers
 the backalley fights
 the 
 hospitals. 
 to awaken in a cheap room
 in a strange city and
 pull up the shade-
 this was the craziest kind of
 contentment

 and to walk across the floor
 to an old dresser with a 
 cracked mirror- 
 see myself, ugly,
 grinning at it all. 
 what matters most is
 how well you 
 walk through the
 fire.

picture from hypebeast.

When I was twelve I sat by myself in the steamliner
with a shoebox of sandwiches and deviled eggs
my mother made, and ate everything right away
as the train headed north by the Sound where trestles
of derelict trolley lines roosted nations of seagulls.
From South Station I took a taxi across Boston
to a shabby, black locomotive with coal car
that pulled two rickety coaches. It puffed past
long lines of empty commuter trains, past
suburbs thick with houses, past the milltowns
of Lawrence and Lowell, until the track curved
into New Hampshire’s pastures of Holstein cattle.
My grandfather waited in his overalls at the depot
with horse and buggy to carry me to the farmhouse,
to fricasseed chicken, corn on the cob, and potatoes.
At nine o’clock, after shutting up the chickens
from skunk and fox, we sat by the cabinet radio
for Gabriel Heatter booming news of the war.
I slept through the night on my goosefeather bed.

“Goosefeathers” by Donald Hall, from The Back Chamber.

“his old home grows snow ghosts.”