Sam Sax > Quotes

“there's a theory
that says you don't exist
unless someone calls
and you respond”
― Sam Sax

“i only want the world
to end when i'm done
with it”
― Sam Sax, bury it

“you either love the world or you live in it”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“what does it mean to be descendant
of something monstrous?

to still love the monster?”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“BESTIARY "

charybdis:

when i suck in / i make deadly / whirlpools / ask anyone
who’s managed / to climb out / alive

dragon:

patrol or pillage / he exhales and a whole village / burns / iron scaled
sentry / guardian of the ivory / tower i wrap my legs around / everyone
thinks / he’s a brute / but for me / he lifts his breast plate / for me
he welcome the quiver / and the arrow’s teeth.

golem:

take his hair in your hands / his dead / skin cells / his discarded
undergarments / take them / and make of them a new boy
this effigy / his likeness and nothing / like him / breathe life
into its clenched carapace // my god / i think i saw it / move

medusa:

when i saw / my face / reflected in terror / in his eyes / i turned
to stone / or a pillar of salt watching my village burn / he was the village
burning / maybe that’s a different story / maybe in the end
only the snakes wept

siren:

he cries / and i / lashed to the mast of a ship / steer my body
toward the sound / sheets bound around wrists and ankles
tears make grief / a lighthouse you wear / when i hear him
a huge wood wheel turns in my stomach / and i break / open
on / his jagged coast

werewolf:

there are many words for transformation / metamorphosis
metaphor / medication / go to sleep / beside the man you love
wake up next to a dog / maybe the moon brought it out of him
hound hungry for blood / maybe its your fault / or maybe
it was there inside him / howling all along”
― Sam Sax

“my hands love to make war of love.”
― Sam Sax, A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters

“love at first sight
is only possible
if the government

hasn't first
taken your eyes”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“i’d lash myself to any new mast”
― Sam Sax, bury it

“& he watches each muscle
volt into place. the surgeon
became the surgeon after
years of opening
books & making sense
of their contents”
― sam sax, Madness

“you have to wonder how a boy or the shape of a boy wound up here in this unstable field.”
― Sam Sax, bury it

“there must be something else worth praising besides pleasure & destruction”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“anything can be a drug if you love it.”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“i carry much nostalgia for the times i don’t remember”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“God, please notice me. Only, dear god, please not too closely.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“i know everyone i love who’s dead didn’t actually become the poem i wrote about them.”
― Sam Sax, bury it

“of course i know i’m going to die. until then i’m attempting only to stave off the flies. i’m trading what’s left of my youth for a glass tube to cast a quiet spell inside.”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“What I know for sure is any word repeated enough ends up meaning nothing.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Anywhere can be a home, so long as it feeds you.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“We are learning to control fire, to take a burning thing inside us, and then let it go.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“What’s the cost of living—although never, Why does it cost to live?”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“We light the fire and watch it spread at first like a yawn and then like an infection and finally, a religion.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“if you look close at the process of fermentation you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body until it’s transformed into something more volatile”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“All I want to do is leave a little more room for what good people are left to do their feral blooming.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“can you believe there’s freedom in being so out of control”
― Sam Sax, Madness

“But what else is life? Besides blood, what ties us? Sometimes miracle is just another word for naming precisely what already exists.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“I can’t even bring myself to do the chanting. Whenever I do, all I hear is my own voice, alone next to everyone else’s. Here I am singing along to the radio while the rest of the world is somehow inside the radio singing together.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“I'm a writer, the writer replied, I can't speak back to you what was as if it is, but rather can only record it for you once it is gone, to offer an isness that isn't anymore, do you understand?”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“though when the old men find us, they scold me with one outstretched finger, the same one I use to reinvent the world.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“[The lord, with their seven heads,] deemed, in their infinite wisdom and cruelty, that we must be punished for our gluttony, this invented sin, and a flipped a great switch that requires us to take the world inside us in order to survive it, and so it was, and so it has ever since been.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“God, someone please notice me. Only, dear god, please not too closely.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead