Category: language

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Whatever I care for, someone else loves it
more, deserves it more: the doe with her
whole mouth crushing the phlox or the seer
who adores my future, whereas I could
take it or leave it. I know I’ll disappear.
It won’t be glamorous. It won’t be like when
the Mona Lisa was stolen and the tourists all
lined up to pay their respects at the empty
spot on the wall of the Louvre.
I’ve never actually even seen the sky.
I’ve only ever seen effluents, seen wattage.
The only night I remember is the dinner
of neighbors at which a man I never
had met before said I don’t fear dying—
look at the past, people have been dying forever, and—
then he stopped and shook his head—
I drank too much. I was almost saying
that people have died forever and all
of them survived, but of course—he made
a hard laugh—God, of course they didn’t survive.

The Sky, Natalie Shapero

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Some people say the devil is beating
his wife. Some people say the devil
is pawing his wife. Some people say
the devil is doubling down on an overall
attitude of entitlement toward
the body of his wife. Some people
say the devil won’t need to be sorry,
as the devil believes that nothing
comes after this life. Some people say
that in spite of the devil’s public,
long-standing, and meticulously
logged disdain for the health
and wholeness of his wife, the devil
spends all day, every day, insisting
grandly and gleefully on his general
pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly
considers himself to be an unswayed
crusader: effortlessly magnetic,
scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of
the devil’s several advanced degrees,
a luminous autodidact. Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.

Sunshower, Natalie Shapero

I am ashamed to keep thinking of death
as a chute that connects to the garbage. I know
I should picture it more like the pneumatic tubes

at banks of the past: you put in your name
and your paper and up you go. I know a bank

should be the operative metaphor
for every facet of existence, every time. I’m sorry

I haven’t more regularly made reference
to a bank. When I fail to liken something to a bank,
that’s how I can tell I’m tired. That’s not me,

I assure everybody. That’s the long week talking. Time
for bed. Time for the window, the hectoring sky,

the streetlight bright as the bright saved people
see before they die, but I don’t die.

Long Week Talking, Natalie Shapero

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I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses.

The man who fears losing has already lost. Fear cuts deeper than swords.

(GRRM)