Friday, January 24, 2014

Soaked in Soul

Alienation: the crippling conviction that one is a minority of one.
Ambiguity: the bastard child of Creativity and Cowardice.
Aphorism: what is worth quoting from the soul's dialogue with itself.
Arrogance: the vain, younger sister of confidence.
Art: the trail of breadcrumbs left by artists, to remember the way.
Awakening: to see the old with new eyes.
Contradictions: the curse of the clever.
Crime: a sort of art made ugly.
Despair: an early surrender, where the spirit dies before the body does.
Discipline: the backbone without which potential cannot stand.
Dreams: what get us through the night, and oftentimes the day.
Eros: our last defense against the dust.
Existence: a caste system.
Idealist: lawyer who cannot see client, Life, confessing her guilt.
Ideals: maps that omit practical details — like mountain ranges.
Imagination: the invisible hand that masturbates.
Intensity: vast emotions condensed.
Intuition: generous deposits made to our account by an unknown benefactor.
Liar: one who claims to tell the truth, always.
Life: a midway point between two unknowns.
Morality: only permitting others to behave as we behave, when we behave.
Nostalgia: the familiar pinch of that outgrown garment.
Physiognomy: the art that says, yes, you may judge a book by its cover.
Romantic: one who professes to prefer the thorns to the rose.
Sarcasm: a wolf in sheep's skin.
Self: that invisible chain that snaps tight whenever we stray.
Self-consciousness: a weed in the garden of self-awareness.
Self-image: self-deception.
Solitude: the imprisoned soul's imprisonment of the body.
Spiritual Asthma: yearning tempered by shortage of breath.
Suicide: the desperate attempt to assume responsibility for what one is not responsible for.
Swear Words: discomfort regarding our sex organs, and their functions.
Temptation: seeds we're forbidden to water that are showered with rain.
Uncertainty: the starting and ending point of Knowledge.
Waking: waiting at the platform of existence for one's particular train of consciousness to arrive from strange, far-away lands.
Wit: the pounce of a restless insight.


Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Buzzcut Season

I wish I wrote the way I thought;
Obsessively,
Incessantly,
With maddening hunger.
I'd write to the point of suffocation.
I'd write myself into nervous breakdowns,
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing.
And I'd write about you
a lot more
than I should.

— Benedict Smith