wild limbs and mermaid gills

Always keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don’t think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year. It is the season of reversals, when the birds no longer sing in the morning and the evenings are made up of equal parts golden light and black clouds. The rock-solid and the tenuous can easily exchange places until everything you know can be questioned and put into doubt.

Pinned by the sun between solstice And equinox, drowsy and tangled together We drifted for months and woke With the bitter taste of land on our lips

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

Don’t clap too loudly—it’s a very old world.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of Miracles

i might even show you my photograph album. you might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. you might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others, turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which might remind you of others, whom once you knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance, if you can face the good ghost. allow the love of the good ghost. they possess all that emotion … trapped. bow to it. it will assuredly never release them, but who knows … what relief … it may give them … who knows how they may quicken … in their chains, in their glass jars. you think it cruel … to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? no … no. deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy … is unbounded. and so i say to you, tender the dead, as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.