Letter To A Lost Friend, Barbara Hamby

well guess who took a lot of money to destroy oneself

“learned a lot. in the end though, i kind of screwed it up."

"i called over there for a reference, left word with some snooty girl. next thing you know, i got a fax from miranda priestly herself... saying that of all the assistants she's ever had... you were, by far, her biggest disappointment. and, if i don't hire you, i am an idiot. you must have done something right." | the devil wears prada (2006)

"Have you ever had that feeling—that you'd like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?"

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan

Sufjan Stevens | Futile Devices

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve memorized your face It’s been four hours now since I’ve wandered through your place And when I sleep on your couch I feel very safe And when you bring the blankets I cover up my face I do love you And when you play guitar I listen to the strings buzz The metal vibrates underneath your fingers And when you crochet I feel mesmerized and proud And I would say I love you, but saying it out loud It’s hard so I won’t say it at all, and I won’t stay very long But you are the life I needed all along I think of you as my brother, although that sounds dumb And words are futile devices

“Summer arrives in a strawberry, sweet, juicy. As long as you feel its flesh on your tongue you’re unaware how. One minute inches into the next. But how could you observe awareness anyway? Or, for that matter, a thought? It grows in you, not as a sensation. (Nor like a baby or tumor.) An experience that you can’t hold on to. Any more than to the smell of lilac. Though it soothes emptiness.”

— Rosmarie Waldrop, from “Asymmetry (2)”, The Nick of Time: Poems

i pick at memories like scabs on juvenile knees

and i bleed when i could be change,

but i am both the bird and the tarnished cage.

i think some people are steel-toe boots and some of them are sidewalks;

some people live and learn the names of humans, of streets just to run away,

and some of them are cities forged and born to always stay.

and if life is a tree, i have to say, some days i want to leave,

but i think my birthmark is a footprint, and i'm bona fide concrete.

— concrete // melancholy galaxies (t.e.t.)