"
After the war is over the suicide bomber
who never got the chance to detonate himself
unpacks the explosives from his special vest.
He feels the sadness of someone whose big moment
has passed without a sound,
but the vest goes into the closet,
the dynamite goes to his cousin,
who gives it to her friend the engineer.
He knows a use for it: Kaboom,
and water runs unleashed into
the onion field. Then crops
turn green, and flocks of birds float
over them in swirls. Boys in shorts
are given work as scarecrows, singing
“Bird, Don’t Poop On Me,”
and “Shimmy Shmalla Wallah Balla Boo.”
At a table in the yard, men curse
the mysterious prejudice of cards,
and a woman wearing black
turns the pages of a magazine.
Cutting out the pictures, carefully
- “The Rest of Life,” Tony Hoagland (via clavicola)
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” —James Nicoll"
- (via theloudmouthmudblood)
"I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."
- Markus Zusak - The Book Thief (via longmolaredmudblood)
"There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (via standinglikeaguiltyschoolboy)
At the Funeral
Pick your spoon up out of the
dirt and clean it with your
tongue. Eyes shut. Taste the
coldness and the sweetness
and the soil. Scoop up another
glop of ice cream and watch
the white dribble make its
way down your pant leg. You
don’t know why everyone
is matching, today; you don’t
know why the chairs are lined
up with an aisle in between and
a priest at the front, like
in a wedding. You also
don’t know that some things
can survive a fire, make their
homes in soft beds of mucus,
have children in there, take turns
swishing around in your blood.
You couldn’t know why later,
there is the stink of vomit, you,
shivering in the dark, the places
where your muscles were,
burning. So you
wait, and wait, and wait,
and no one is coming.
