Sam Sax > Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“& 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

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

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

“please tell me how am i supposed to go on knowing you are [ ]”
― Sam Sax, bury it

“Maybe what it means to belong to a city is that, if it could flee – the city, I mean – you might be one of the things it would grab in the night to carry with it so it could remember its name.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

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

“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

“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

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

“I love anything that breaks suffering down into a clean taxonomy you might look to when lost and nod your head in the performance of understanding.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

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

“Most people don’t remember their early infancy, which is a blessing. The first few months are an agony. Imagine feeling your soft wet skull still in pieces, the brain pressed directly against the skin, imagine feeling your skull bones slowly fusing into one complete object. Imagine the world inverted, a doctor in a white coat walks upon the ceiling. Imagine how there’s no language, just a collage of fractured sound, a shouting color with neither order nor meaning, no sense to temperature, food running through you like water through a busted faucet.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Maybe for the first time in my small life, I look deeply into each person's own deep pair of black pupils and think sibling, feel warmth spreading through the veins in my face. In each person, I see their whole person. I marvel how we each are meeting here, on this train below the city, somewhere between history and history. One by one they look at me, and one by one they glare, or shake their head, or pretend to look past me, or turn away—but each, in their own way, eventually smiles back.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“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