fatal-flaws-aflame

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

I am asking you to endure it.

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

by Akhil Katyal

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

“Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte’s life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind’s thousand small accesses to pleasure.”

— Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks (b. 20 April 1953)

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best

in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin

unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge

lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin

membrane between us, the exquisite orange,

tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,

the way he pushed me up against the fridge—

Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss

that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin

flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s

merciless, the way it travels in

and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove

we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers

on the table. And we still had hours.

Kim Addonizio, Stolen Moments

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep, when we give up the attempt altogether we die.

from The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

WHAT is that one poem (?), abt a modern worker contemplating the numerous forgotten who were actually responsible for all the ‘great’ deeds of history

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Numbers do not lie. Politics, poetry, promises, these are lies, but numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God.

Gottlieb, Pacific Rim

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Sonnet XXX

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

The straight, the swift, the debonair, Are targets on the thoroughfare For every kind appraising eye; Sweet words are said as they pass by. But such a strange contrary thing My heart is, it will never cling To any bright unblemished thing. Such have their own security, And little need to lean on me. The limb that falters on its course, And cries, "Not yet!" to waning force; The orb that may not brave the sun; The bitter mouth, its kissing done; The loving heart that must deny The very love it travels by; What most has need to bend and pray, These magnets draw my heart their way. 

 - “Magnets,” Countee Cullen

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Sonnet XXX

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Your soul mate is your complement, not your missing piece.

Garnet, Steven Universe Future

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs’s heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, might raise up his head, listen, and think, What’s that? and decide, Only a woodchuck, surely, beating on a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was most surely the heart of Lavinia Nebbs.

"The Whole Town's Sleeping," Ray Bradbury

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Then fear no mortal arm; if Heaven destroy,/ We must resign: for man is born to die.

from the Odyssey, tr. Alexander Pope

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When  the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had  driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

- Robert Hayden

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

To tread the walks of death he stood prepared;/ And what he greatly thought, he nobly dared.

from The Odyssey, tr. Alexander Pope

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Charlotte Brontë

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,      Either hand On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace      Of my face, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech      Each on each.

from Love Among the Ruins, Robert Browning