[Image: “Itinerantes #4: Satisfaction,” by Jon Díez Supat; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I wanted to know what product/service/event the poster advertised, and in what language, but Google Translate wasn’t much help: it said the caption in the center translates from Basque as “Bring your payroll now and bring this exclusive Lotus watch.” (Actually, eraman seems to translate more accurately — especially in context — as “take away” or “get,” rather than a second “bring.”)]

From whiskey river:

beasts bounding through time —

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly

(Charles Bukowski [source])

…and:

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Cherries

Fireweed loves the yard
and the fire that conjured it
into the light.

And the scarlet elderberry
loves the old junkpile
it leans against.

The morning glory smothers everything
in an embrace: the fence,
the wood workbench,
the rusted steel.

Here’s a summer day that’s so slow
even the light
moves like honey;

Daisies jump fences
and then just mill around.

Here’s a cherry tree that’s so rich
when it offers its heart to the birds,

every cherry
is a year of cherries.

(Barbara LaMorticella [source: nothing canonical, but found it here and elsewhere])

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