“Thought, sunshine, flowers: they wanted intangible as well as tangible goods, pleasures as well as necessities, and the time to pursue them, the time to have an inner life and freedom to roam the outer world.” (Solnit, Orwell’s Roses)
“And if a glass of ice tea and an anthology of seventeen century devotional poetry with a dark blue cover are available, then the picture can hardly be improved
All I wanted was to be a pea of being at rest inside the pod of time”
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud.”
“… did not need much To make us laugh instead, and touch,”
-A.E. Stallings, “Recitative,” from Poetry (April 2005).
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night, The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes? Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
Tar babies are not the children of tar people. It is far worse. The tar baby occurs spontaneously nor do we adhere at first. There is an especially unperverse attractiveness to the tar baby– although currently she is a little sick. When you start to help her is when she start to stick.
