Steven "Jesse" Bernstein > Quotes

“In the end i will forget you, I'm sorry to have to say that but, I will forget myself too”
― Steven "Jesse" Bernstein

“It has little to do
with love or not love -
It is minutes and years
and torsion.”
― Steven "Jesse" Bernstein, More Noise, Please !

“But, then it’s possible...I might find my cannibals, after all. Eating the eyes of their prey like gumdrops. There I’ll be, making tape recordings and taking photographs, laughing and snapping wishbones with the natives.”
― Steven Jesse Bernstein

“Letting go is letting your love come and go; when it brings visitors, you are gracious enough to feed them. When the visitors wish to leave, you give them something to take with them, brush their coats and hold the doors open. Birds fly in and out of the windows: if you close the shutters against them, you'll never hear them sing; if you put them in cages their songs will be songs of homesick captives.”
― Steven "Jesse" Bernstein, I Am Secretly an Important Man

“The gastric disturbances of the unnatural and bloated night bubble and smoke in our dreams. A severed limb here, a blood red crescent there. The highways glower, evaporated. The traffic exhumed and shifted backwards in its tunnels. Clouds of abandoned putrescence hanging over the pavement. The dome of air over the inhabited part of the land a sickly yellow and glowering stomach with the esophagus dimly lit, the fuller propped open with painful surgical stilts and aimed at a blank, artificial light. The fluids of digestion work on our crushed and twisted features, causing our faces and hands to ooze into the bedding. Yet, we wake with a struggling sense of identity, run to the mirror, the blank wall, actually, and say, “Yes, yes, it’s all there, still there.”
― Steven Jesse Bernstein

“I do not need
the growling
wet-brained response
to my poetry
fostered by academics
who rob the human brain
on sight”
― Steven "Jesse" Bernstein, Come Out Tonight: Selected Works of Steven Jesse Bernstein

“A nuclear war could not touch this place. Main Street U.S.A.: the Safe Zone. Great palace of Fantasy Land glowing pink and blue in the distance. At night there would be fireworks. Davy Crockett would stroll in from Frontier Land and give a talk on fire safety. I went back to the bench with my cream soda and my derby and smoked a cigar. I was getting into the spirit of the thing, now. It was coming back to me. The flag, the virgin princess, Thomas Jefferson, all the glorious wars. I’m an American: everyone in the whole world loves me. Anyone who doesn’t love me deserves to be killed.”
― Steven Jesse Bernstein