Laila

“THIS ISN’T CHINA

Hold me close
and tell me what the world is like
I don’t want to look outside
I want to depend on your eyes
and your lips
I don’t want to feel anything
but your hand
on the old raw bumper
I don’t want to feel anything else
If you love the dead rocks
and the huge rough pine trees
Ok I like them too
Tell me if the wind
makes a pretty sound
in the billion billion needles
I’ll close my eyes and smile
Tell me if it’s a good morning
or a clear morning
Tell me what the fuck kind of morning
it is
and I’ll buy it
And get the dog
to stop whining and barking
This isn’t China
nobody’s going to eat it
It’s just going to get fed and petted
Ok where were we?
Ok go if you must.
I’ll create the cosmos
by myself
I’ll let it all stick to me
every fucking pine needle
And I’ll broadcast my affection
from this shaven dome
360 degrees
to all the dramatic vistas
to all the mists and snows
that moves across
the shining mountains
to the women bathing
in the stream
and combing their hair
on the roofs
to the voiceless ones
who have petitioned me
from their surprising silence
to the poor in the heart
(oh more and more to them)
to all the thought-forms
and leaking mental objects
that you get up here
at the end of your ghostly life”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You came into my life-not as one comes to visit (you know, “not taking one’s hat off”) but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera