Tag: suicide

The seas of pity lie/ Locked and frozen in each eye//

foreplay for love

❝
If wild my breast and sore my pride
I bask in dreams of suicide
If cool my heart and high my head
I think, “How lucky are the dead.”
❞
— Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell at their farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 1937
Dorothy Parker was very famous in the interwar years for her talent with words. She had, it is said, a stinging repartee and the ability to churn out — at high velocity — endlessly quotable one-liners.
Dorothy Parker
Beneath Dorothy Parker’s sharp wit and acidic humour, was a writer who expressed well the deep vulnerability of a troubled, self-destructive soul who, in the words of philosopher Irwin Edman, was a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack.”

Susanna Kaysen (1994, p. 48) writes in her memoir that certain hospitals, “had housed many great poets” and wondered if such hospitals specialise in poets, or was it that poets specialised in madness? She went on to ponder, “what is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”

life, y’know, just erupted…

❝
A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
❞
— Kafka wrote,
— Sexton quoted,
— Auden would’ve approved.

REFERENCES

Kaysen, S. (1993). Girl, interrupted. Private Idaho: Turtle Bay Books.

Parker, D. (2001). The Collected Dorothy Parker. London: Penguin Classics.

Can you tell heaven from hell

How I wish, how I wish you were here

Wish_You_Were_Here
~~~ Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
~~ Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky

❝
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell
Blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
.
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
.
How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
And how we found
The same old fears
Wish you were here

❞
— Gilmour & Waters (emphasis is mine)

Jump to 6:06 in the video below to get to the purported point of poem. Yet, I am really asking and really wondering, is there merit in analysing every-fucking-thing? I mean to say, therapeutically speaking, is it not oftentimes best to stick to our own imagination and interpretation of a given poem’s point rather than to seek out it’s actual point (if indeed the poet’s stated this in a non-cryptic and unambiguous preface or footnote)…

I’ll give you my penny’s worth without writing another word: