Nico

“The patient, genderless, bodiless, will tell me of its anguish: I feel like an old, opaque secret. I keep asking to be renewed. I suck on every fad, like mushrooms on a cemetery slab. Everyone’s better than I am; I’m the imprisoned best. No one loves another except as a mirror to a musty guest, to take stingy control. We are all failing, masterfully, because we desire it. Want to see civilizations ruined, want to see our species’ death, our psychic embroidery unraveled. We want to find out who’s left, the impossible perceiver of our demise. I’m hungry, I’m sick, I’m wounded. No shirt. So tired. I want to go home. They’re killing us; can’t remember childhood. The animal, bloodied, fails to hunt again. Our genocides are a cliché, repeated, but there’s no satiety, and further horror is willed. Who will save you? Who wants to be saved . . . I didn’t mean to say . . . I didn’t mean to be born.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“Is it a matter of coincidence that the poets who invented Eros, making of him a divinity and a literary obsession, were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their poems in written form? To put the question more pungently, what is erotic about alphabetization?”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

“I am the being that heals by being incontrovertible. The one who is joyous. I am the one here, the very one. I am the being you can’t go back on; I am the being who fills your death; the one you have no obligation to. I am the being you, the healed, have become. The patient says, I see my past drifting away.”
― Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts

“Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants