Home > Work > The Favorite Game
1 " Deprivation is the mother of poetry. "
― Leonard Cohen , The Favorite Game
2 " It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple "
3 " Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. "
4 " As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. "
5 " I'm planning a catastrophe. "
6 " Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else."Then let's be quiet together. "
7 " He knew that hair couldn't feel; he kissed her hair. "
8 " She was made of flesh and eyelashes. "
9 " Your body will never be familiar. "
10 " It doesn't matter how anything happens. "
11 " Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached. "
12 " I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation. I'm no life-risk. "
13 " I must go now.""Stay up the night with me! We'll go to the fish market. There are great noble monsters packed in ice. There are turtles, live ones, for famous restaurants. We'll rescue one and write messages on his shell and put him in the sea, Shell, seashell. Or we'll go to the vegetable market. They've got red-net bags full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we'll go down to Forty-second Street and see the movies and buy a mimeographed bulletin of jobs we can get in Pakistan --""I work tomorrow.""Which has nothing to do with it.""But I'd better go now.""I know this is unheard in America, but I'll walk you home.""I live on Twenty-third Street.""Exactly what I'd hoped. It's over a hundred blocks. "
14 " He never described himself as a poet or his work as poetry. The fact that the lines do not come to the edge of the page is no guarantee. Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation. He hated to argue about the techniques of verse. The poem is a dirty, bloody, burning thing that has to be grabbed first with bare hands. Once the fire celebrated Light, the dirt Humility, the blood Sacrifice. Now the poets are professional fire-eaters, freelancing at any carnival. The fire goes down easily and honours no one in particular. "
15 " Coroner's inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn't been to the sea-shore in ten years. "
16 " Dear Hitler Take away the torches I'm not guilty I had to have this "
17 " He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren't going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire. "
18 " I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios.... "
19 " Comic books, movies, radio programmes centered their entertainment around the fact of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Cavalry to Dachau. European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies. "
20 " A rat is more alive than a turtle.A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn’t count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin "
