Sujit Phatak

“How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“The time came to put Iris Duarte back on the plane.
It was a morning flight which made it difficult. I was
used to rising at noon; it was a fine cure for hangovers
and would add 5 years to my life. I felt no sadness
while driving her to L.A. International. The sex had
been fine; there had been laughter. I could hardly
remember a more civilized time, neither of us making
any demands, yet there had been warmth, it had not
been without feeling, dead meat coupled with dead
meat. I detested that type of swinging, the Los
Angeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beach
kind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers when
you part—a gymnasium of bodies namelessly
masturbating each other. People with no morals often
considered themselves more free, but mostly they
lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became
swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no
gamble or humor in their game—it was corpse
fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were
grounded on human experience down through the
centuries. Some morals tended to keep people
slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State.
Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a
garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You
had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave
alone.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters.
Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this?
Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your
life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again
and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“You used to be the best to make life be real to me,
and I hope that you're still out there and you're like you used to be”
― Warren Zevon, Reconsider Me: The Love Songs