1
" I ask the impossible: love me forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
and all that you hold sacred advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.
When each step from your door to our job tires you--
love me; and from job to home again, love me, love me.
Love me when you're bored--
when every woman you see is more beautiful than the last,
or more pathetic, love me as you always have:
not as admirer or judge, but with
the compassion you save for yourself
in your solitude.
Love me as you relish your loneliness,
the anticipation of your death,
mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.
Love me as your most treasured childhood memory--
and if there is none to recall--
imagine one, place me there with you.
Love me withered as you loved me new.
Love me as if I were forever--
and I, will make the impossible
a simple act,
by loving you, loving you as I do "
― Ana Castillo , I Ask the Impossible
3
" Mathematicians still don’t understand
the ball our hands made, or how
your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.
It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice
and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,
on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out
over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:
Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I’m that driver. All night
I’ve swallowed you in the bar.
Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried
raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d know
where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I’ll never return to.
The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you
away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and
blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body
with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidents
they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding. "
― Jeffrey McDaniel
7
" Imagine for a moment that you are the proud owner of a large house which you have spent years of your life painting and decorating and filling with everything you love. It's your home. It's something you've made your own, something for you to be remembered by, something that, perhaps years later, your children and grandchildren can visit and get a view of your life in. It's part of your creativity, your hard work... it's your property.Now suppose you decide to go camping for a couple of weeks. You lock your door and assume that nobody is going to break in... but they do, and when you return home, to your horror you find that not only do these trespassers break in, but they also have quite uniquely imaginative ways of disrespecting, vandalizing and corrupting everything within your property. They light fires on your lawn, your topiary hedges are in heaps of black ashes. There's some blatantly obscene graffiti splattered across your front door, offensive images and rude words splashed on the walls and windows. Your television has been tipped over. Your photographs of family and friends have had the heads cut out of them. There's mold growing in the refrigerator, bottles of booze tipped over on the table, and cigarette smoke embedded into the carpeting. Your beloved houseplants are dead, your furniture has been stripped down and ruined. Basically, the thing you've spent years working for and creating within your lifetime has been tampered with to the point where it is just a grim joke.So, I feel terrible for poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll, who must be spinning in their graves since they have no rights to their own works of fiction anymore. I'm all for readers being able to read books for free once and only when the deceased author's copyright eventually ends. Still though, did Doyle ever think in a million years that his wonderful characters would be dragged through the mud of every pervy fanfiction that the sick internet geek can think of to create? Did Carroll ever suspect that Alice and the Hatter would become freakish clown-like goth caricatures in Tim Burton's CGI-infested films? Would Austen really want her writing to be sold as badly-formatted ebooks?The sharing of this Public Domain content isn't really an issue. Stories are meant to be told, meant to echo onward forever. That's what makes them magical. That being said, in the Information Age, there's a real lack of respect towards the creators of this original content. If, when I've been dead for 70 years and I then no longer have the rights to my novels, somebody gets the bright idea of doing anything funny with any of those novels, my ghost is going to rise from the grave and do some serious ass-kicking. "
15
" Look here, Mrs. Bradley," he said. " I feel a pretty frightful bounder telling you all this about the poor girl, but I think some woman ought to know about it. On Wednesday night, yes, last night, Eleanor came into my bedroom at about half-past twelve and--and wanted to stay there! I thought it was a ghost at first. I had terrible difficulty in getting rid of her. In fact, I had to get out of bed and shove her outside and lock the door. Choice, isn't it?" ..." Of course you will lock your door tonight," she said." You bet I shall," Bertie said fervently, " and nothing short of the house catching fire is going to persuade me to open it. "