crashsites

in deep end

Up A Tree (Went This Heart I Have)

“Who knows how to make love stay?


Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

----

a storm swim. a moon tan. a sleep bath. these may lead to bouts of public displays of affection, and half running out of bed in the morning. my cat just looked at me like he really wanted me dead, or at least hurt. aw, now he is purr-singing. singing kitty purrs are just the best. your heart cannot help but warm up a few degrees, and this little thing rises into your throat, realizing the sheer genius and utter fragility of this creature serenading you from their tiny guts.

I got tired of the holidays
I made them fly by
in such a haze of
smoke and smoke and water and smoke
and smoke and smoke and fog and pills and
alarm clocks going off while I sleep through them
alarm clocks going off and I sleep through them

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

hemingway

I'M CALMER THAN CREAM

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and loss is too empty to share...

mark danielewski





max dupain