All My Friends Are Fictional > Recent Status Updates

“Potato (a biography)
[…]

DEPENDENCE
Skibbereen, County Cork, 1815

God's gift. You can't blame us for loving a sun
that pounds inside the earth. […]
So out of nowhere, this
new protuberance, this hunk of luck, fattened
to our particular moisture. The foodstuff we deserve.
How could we not love it? It could usurp the grain, rape
this land of all variety, and we would say thank you.”

“Before enlightenment, black people in Irish were an cine gorm,
the blue folk.
History is not the only thing written by victors.
[…]
Saudade, the Atlantic-coloured knot of longing, is untranslatable.
[…]
Religion is belief; atheism still belief.
[…]
Ignorance is wasted on the dumb.
It is fair that the price of one eye should be another eye.
[…]
Brecht said: 'Eating comes first; then morals.'”

“some hold funerals for their dead, some undertake

to divvy up the dead one's blue things; some would call you snowflake
if you flinched at this, since some are so inured to death that death
is déjà vu;
[…]

some consume as performance: whatever bread there is to break,
they break,
[…]
for some creatures; some creatures would sooner bite the hand
than bear the handshake”

“Advice for earth in apprenticeship: keep your head down;
sleep only in the abstract, not in winter; don't light up
and don't extinguish; practice all your vices: smoke,
drink, use, gorge, hoard, covet, fuck, get fucked;
don't you breathe a single word of this to anyone; shoulder your lot like a Catholic; […]
leave their claims of greenery in tact;
forget you're nature.”

“A Butterfly Struggles Against Coastal Winds,
5 Metres Offshore

(Did one of those circling seagulls
pluck it out of clean
air when we weren't looking?
Did it stop beating its wings
briefly enough to thud like
a closed book on the ceiling of the sea?
[…]
in spite of all that fucking wind,
and in spite of an ocean
the sound of shredding pages)
we made it hold its place in the sky
just by wanting it to.”

“It suddenly became vital to me to steal a peacock feather for you, on first thought because I figured it would make me seem more butch, and on second because if the first thought failed, then at least the feather would be a memento of the day, of me inside the day, its gas-flame eye unblinking and and absolutely disallowing oblivion.
I couldn't get close enough to the peacock.”

“Things have got to the point with pigeons where their presence in the city is popularly resented but privately ignored, like daylight savings or another country's war. The reason for this is ubiquity. Pigeons in your day are punctuations in a block of text […]; and of course it's the words of the day that call your attention, not the commas that fuss between them.”

“These are the colours a river can be: blue; black; off-blue; universe blue; the colour of an orange; rain black; rain brown; home-, love-, folksong blue.

The river doesn't laugh from the mouth. It laughs from the mountain.

[…]

By the dam on the river they purify water. Think: to bring water back to itself; every day to say water, and write water. Not just to imply it.”

“What's left to be desired:
the slap of wet shorts on rock,
more unprotected skin than
we know what to do with.
Humans at the beach are animal
in the best way — all movement is
the least effort for the most reward,
and from hunger to fullness
is as the crow flies. The poster is right
to show words and not grammar.
At the beach there's no grammar, no restraint.”

“das badewasser, das ich ausschütte
nach seinem körper glänzend nass läuft er
davon
ins wohnzimmer

hier im schatten meines alters
gib mir ein gänseblümchen, denn ich kann
es in der hand halten

das gedicht heilt
die wunde, die die vernunft verursachte

ein lochmuster in den rüschen
entlang des ausschnitts seines pullovers

die nähmaschine, die man mir gab
die fäden im inneren des auges”

“nicht hinter dem schrank
nicht hinter den schubladen
nicht im mehl oder getreide oder grieß
wohnen sie
und trotzdem
tag für tag
flattert eine
motte durchs zimmer
wo uns langsam
die sonne erfüllt
tag für tag
der frühling”

“Die Blicke der anderen verließen mich, sie richteten sich auf das Kind. Sie hoben es hoch, nahmen es in ihre Arme. Ich liege noch immer auf der Geburtsliege. Ich kann nicht raus. Obwohl seitdem mehrere Jahre vergangen sind, hat niemand entdeckt, dass ich an dem Abend, als sie das Kind hochhoben, verschied, das, was jetzt unter ihnen wandelt, ist kein Mensch, sondern der abgelegte Ankunftskanal eines Kindes.”

“Und falls in der Nacht zu träumen auch bedeutet, am Leben zu sein, falls es Teil der Erfahrung ist und falls Schreiben auch Träumen ist, dann ist Schreiben genauso sehr Leben wie alles andere.
Aber das Leben verdoppelt sich in diesem Fall, weil das Geschriebene bestehen bleibt, nachdem es geschrieben wurde. Es geht als ein eigenes Leben weiter. Ist dieses Leben ein echtes, lebendiges Leben? Eine Lebensform?”

“The pages were true, and they did not belong in the book that we had written together. Had she been there, she would not have faulted me. She would have taken my hand in hers and held it, as she had so many times before. But the fingers on the armrest next to me belonged to a stranger. All I had were her words, the stories she had collected and that had been entrusted to me.”

“At the end of a long day, when I permitted myself to think about him, I opened the notebook I had saved for myself, took out my pen, and tried again to take my own history, as I had taken the histories of others. Have you ever been haunted by propaganda? It can be a kind of ghost. I longed for the real and imperfect person I had known. […] I wanted the life on the other side of the war's looking-glass…”

“Trying to answer those questions stopped me cold. It was easier to sort out others' blurriness than my own, easier to probe their wounds than mine. [..] What did people say about the brutality of the Sri Lankan Army and the presence of the newly arrived Indian peacekeepers? [..] We were trying to return our history to its place, to call it by its name, to see the mistakes of others, and to reckon with our own.”

“I was not K's doctor, and I was not his lover, but I could have put my thumbs into his elbows and cupped my hands around their edges, which were sharper than his bones as I had previously known them. I could have drawn the last outline of his body. I had always suspected that my head would fit into a perfect place his joints made for me. […] Tall as I was, there was almost no difference between us.”

“For these and other reasons

I don't get, snow
won't fall in
my part of this
country. I

see these ersatz
flowers now like hangovers,
above ground but still
ground-facing,

pangs of light,
like those pre-sleep
alarm-bells
that sometimes

ring: what might have
been, what might
have been, what
might have been.”

“When they scroll past on long bus journeys, I can translate them into any caliber of metaphor —
cardiograph of the country, cloud-scourers, bird-botherers, nature's cuneiform, village gossips, barcode of the sky —
but never into English. I forget and I'm stumped — I wish there was another word for it.”

“Things have to develop, it takes time, you can't expect change overnight, they have to educate themselves, we are sympathetic, but — ! This was, I suddenly understood, a very patient, middle-class way to talk about change.
[…]
"If you only work to improve things within the existing framework, then you can't question the existing framework. That seems obvious enough."”

“Things have to develop, it takes time, you can't expect change overnight, they have to educate themselves, we are sympathetic, but — ! This was, I suddenly understood, a very patient, middle-class way to talk about change.
"The general patterns of subordination," Bhavani repeated, dragging out each word. "That's very accurate.”

"I grew up idolising him [Gandhi], because my father did," I said. "But I didn't know the nuances of some of his views. Jayawardena's critiques of Gandhi seem very persuasive. I hate the idea that women are better suited for nonviolent action because they are better at withstanding suffering. I don't want to suffer. Why should that be my role?"

“Before the war, we had no frequent cause to mourn the young. Hindu Saivite rituals for the dead are for the old. […] When the war began, and the young began to die, we had no words for it. Our customs did not give us a way to say their names. You must understand: our children light their parents' funeral pyres. What, then, for those who have no children? What, then, for the parents who outlive their sons?”

“…we stood under the streetlamps outside the Jaffna Teaching Hospital to study. The area around there had been designated a safety zone to preserve it from aerial attack, and the lamps had tube bulbs that faced the sky and emanated a precious and unnatural brightness. Every night, a hundred or so people would cycle with their books to crowd under those lamps until they went out.”

“A hundred per cent
I would like
a century
a tree
grows slow
a crack
of light
hits my palm
while I'm
reading
I grab
to take
a picture
& the crack
is gone
branches
pouring
out of my
hands
days has made
its mark
I have
wind
swept
hair I think
of my step
brother
who I knew
more
like this
his face
a photo
graph
on a beach
on a
book &
when he died
I was
family
watching
a tree in
the wind
& I wanted
to speak
to him”

“Hören wir nie auf zu suchen, was wir waren,
um zu werden, was wir träumen.
In einer Bewegung weg von der Grenze,
diesem Ort zwischen Leben und Tod,
wo ein rechter Abgeordneter die Polizei umarmt.
Europa, in ihren Ländern schießt du auf sie,
in deinen Kolonien schießt du auf sie,
im Wasser schießt du auf sie,
an den Grenzen schießt du auf sie, […]
du schießt in ihr Herz.”