Nicky Ackermann

“Railways, by days and by night. The flowers in the cuttings with their sooty blossoms, the birds on the wires with their sooty voices, they are their friends and long remember them.

And we also stand still, with astonished eyes, when-already from the far distant distance- there's the cry of promise. And we stand, with hair streaming, when it's there like thunder and as though it had rolled round heaven knows what worlds. And we're still standing, with sooty cheeks, when-already from the far distant distance-it cries. Cries, far, far away. Cries.

Really it was nothing. Or everything. Like us.

And they beat, beyond the windows of prisons, sweet dangerous, promising rhythms. You are all ears then, poor prisoner, all hearing, for the clattering, oncoming trains in the night and their cry and their whistle shiver the soft dark of your cell with pain and desire.

Or they crash bellowing over the bed, when at night you're harboring fever. And your veins, the moon-blue, vibrate and take up the song, the song of the freight trains: Under way-under way-under way- And your ear's an abyss, that swallows the world.

Under way. But ever and again you are spat out at stations, abandoned to farewell and departure.

And the stations raise up their pale signboards like brows beside your dark road. And they have names, those furrowed-brown signs, names, which are the world: bed, they mean, hunger and women. Ulla or Carola. And frozen feet and tears. And they mean tobacco, the stations, or lipstick or schnapps. Or God or bread. And the pale brows of the stations, the signboards, have names, that mean: women.

You are yourself a railway track, rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain. And you are divided into sections and bound between stations. And they have signboards whereon is written women, or murder, or moon. And then that is the world.

You are a railway- rumbled over, cried over- you are the track- on you everything happens and makes you rust blind and silver bright.

You are human, your brain giraffe-lonely somewhere above on your endless neck. And no one quite knows your heart.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. It may get tough, but it's a small price to pay for living a dream.”
― Peter McWilliams

“Then you are lost. For the darkness has a terrible voice. You cannot escape it and in a flash it has overwhelmed you. It assails you with memory-of the murder you committed yesterday. And it attacks you with the foreknowledge-of the murder you'll commit tomorrow. And it presses up a cry in you: unheard fish-cry of the solitary animal, overwhelmed by its own sea. And the cry tears up your face and makes hollows in it full of fear and past danger, that terrify others. So silent is the dreadful darkness-cry of the solitary animal in its own sea.

And it mounts like a flood and rushes on, dark-winged, threatening, like breakers. And hisses wickedly, like foam.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“Laughter is the only truly free emotion. Even love can be compelled, if someone feels bound to someone else, practically captive. But no one can compel laughter. It’s the ultimate proof of freedom. That’s why we as women need to laugh and why we need to know that women can make us all laugh, men as well as women.”
― Kathy Griffin, Kathy Griffin's Celebrity Run-Ins: My A–Z Index