On Love — Neil Gaiman

A striking quote by Neil Gaiman regarding love — from The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

Leaving Chelsea

It's one of those nights where you walk out of a movie with two completely platonic friends, and get smacked square in the face. One of those films about youth — where it begins, where it ends, what it looks like when it clashes with love, but never does it tell you where it goes. So, walking into the tepid summer breathe of the city, with a backpack continually growing heavier with the worry of my mortality, was quite like jumping — naked — into the ocean in a storm.


And then, before I knew it, I was underground and on a train; I saw a young man — late twenties, maybe — with flowers on his lap, and I might have mentioned how no one likes sunflowers. Then another man, also on the younger side, coughed from across the train, and I saw that he was carrying flowers, too. Where do these men come from? It's a perfectly mundane Wednesday in the summertime, so why should two men in the same train car both be carrying flowers? The assumption is that they both have someone special at home — my immediate thought is a lover, or maybe a fiancé, if their fear of commitment has already dissolved. And this digs some kind of hole in my stomach, for a few reasons that I am fairly certain of, and probably several more I am not: 1) I'm jealous; jealous of a concept whose existence makes me feel both trapped by its infinite nature, and elated that it might actually be real, all at the same time — knowing it could very well happen for me, while also fearing that I am past my prime and have already put up too many walls to fall in love again. 2) is the constant, gnawing sensation of panic in every part of me, feeling as though I am wasting my youth, and I am not even gaining the frame of mind that many folks look back on fondly, claiming it shaped them and gave them a direction to follow. 3) the anger or apathetic frustration that even romance has become convoluted due to the sheer numbers of people falling in love every day in this city — and a dark, possibly defeated amusement that it has all been shoved into the gears of the most functional machine on the planet and somehow survives.


And yet — underground, on the subway, in the most sought-after city in the world, I find myself smiling when I see these men and their gifts for their trophies waiting at home.

"Keeping Things Whole" — Mark Strand

Keeping Things Whole


In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in   
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.







Mark Strand, "Keeping Things Whole" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.

"Meaningful Love" — John Ashbery

Meaningful Love


What the bad news was
became apparent too late
for us to do anything good about it.

I was offered no urgent dreaming,
didn't need a name or anything.
Everything was taken care of.

In the medium-size city of my awareness
voles are building colossi.
The blue room is over there.

He put out no feelers.
The day was all as one to him.
Some days he never leaves his room
and those are the best days,
by far.

There were morose gardens farther down the slope,
anthills that looked like they belonged there.
The sausages were undercooked, 
the wine too cold, the bread molten.
Who said to bring sweaters?
The climate's not that dependable.

The Atlantic crawled slowly to the left
pinning a message on the unbound golden hair of sleeping maidens,
a ruse for next time,

where fire and water are rampant in the streets,
the gate closed—no visitors today
or any evident heartbeat.

I got rid of the book of fairy tales,
pawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,
found myself back here at six o'clock,
pondering "possible side effects."

There was no harm in loving then,
no certain good either. But love was loving servants
or bosses. No straight road issuing from it.
Leaves around the door are penciled losses.
Twenty years to fix it.
Asters bloom one way or another.







Copyright © 2005 by John Ashbery. From Where Shall I Wander: New Poems.

Postmodernism (An Exercise)

This was one of the first pieces that I wrote for a Postmodernist poetry class in college, and if it makes little sense to you — no, you aren’t crazy. I believe it was more of an exercise, and a way of explaining the idea behind Postmodernism; the idea that meaning can be born from an association of words as  words, and the use of space, or empty space. The idea that sounds can have meaning, too — that the words themselves offer more than just the restricting meaning prescribed in them by society. I liked that idea, and though this is admittedly not very meaningful on its own, I like to remember that this is how I expressed the idea of detaching from the prescribed meaning of writing.

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