Stolen Words V16

To be a woman

Is to live at a time of war.

(stolen words v15)
by Joi Barrios

No moment is without danger.
In one’s own home,
To speak, to defy
Is to challenge violence itself.
In the streets,
Walking at nightfall
Is to invite a stranger’s attack.
In my country
To fight against oppression
Is to lay down one’s life for the struggle.

I seek to know this war.
To be a woman is a never ceasing battle
To live and be free.

photo from Azadi Zan's FB

Raise your fists for the revolutionary women of Egypt!

Stolen Words V13

"Until I feared I would lose it,
I never loved to read.
One does not love breathing."
- Harper Lee

three penises from kiri

"I have wanted to give you
the impossible, the gigantic,
the inhuman."
- Anaïs Nin
(Stolen Words V12)

resolutions in reverse

"When you're finished changing,
you're finished."

-Benjamin Franklin
(Stolen Words v11)



2010 vs 2011
what i'll try not to do this year:

i will not go after what i want.
i will not let my heart take risks.
i will not be strong, i will be fragile.
i will not be alone, i will need people.
i will not rest.
i will not be comfortable.
i will not settle.
i will not move.
i will not burn out.
i will not fade away.
i will not make stories happen, i will let them happen to me.

Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman

stolen words v10

"Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that.

The river does not dry up, we block it.

If we want to allow it its freedom,

we have to allow our ideational lives

to be let loose, to stream,

letting anything come, initially censoring nothing.

That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox.

To create one must be willing to be stone stupid,

to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass

and spill rubies from one’s mouth.

Then the river will flow,

then we can stand in the stream of it raining down." 

- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

(Women Who Run with the Wolves)

Doomsday

Stolen Words v8

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Out painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.
Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.
The monkey's wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

- Sylvia Plath

Dearest,

 (Stolen Words V4)

although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.

- Anne Sexton
(Nov. 09, 1928 - Oct. 04, 1974)

Happy 82nd Birthday.

"Tell me how could you say such a thing,"

(Stolen Words V3)
she said, staring at the ground beneath her feet. "You're not telling me anything I don't know already. 'Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.' What's the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back.


I'd go to pieces, and the pieces

would

be


blown
away.

Why can't you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can't see that?"

I said nothing.


...


"I want you always to remember me, will you remember that I existed,
and that I stood next to you here like this?"


"Always," I said. "I'll always remember."


- Norwegian Wood
  Haruki Murakami

Stolen Words v1

"We bruise easily now
        and the wind rubs us raw,

    but we need to live on the edge of our skin like this,
             to be closer


                                  to the world
                                     - and one another."