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[Image: “only you can touch me this way,” by user kygp (Elisa Dudnikova) on Flickr<\/a>. (Used under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) That thing which looks like an aerial? I believe it’s called a “snow lance,” used for making snow. (See the stuff spraying from the tip?\u00a0Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0has\u00a0more information, including a photo of another one.)]<\/em><\/p>\n From\u00a0whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful, and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clich\u00e9s, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Zadie Smith [source<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(in slightly different words)])<\/p>\n …and<\/a>:<\/p>\n It Took Time<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a poem about how time twines around your neck, its thorns This is my reflection in the mirror. This stanza You can’t even possess yourself; let alone the person The moon <\/span> Time is falling through the holes in my pocket. January He’ll still write her love letters. He’ll send her but it’s that time of the year again, and (Shinji Moon [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not from\u00a0whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n The Journey<\/strong><\/p>\n One day you finally knew (Mary Oliver [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n The Night Country<\/em> should be taken as a message, but to decipher it in its entirety would be, even for its author, to decipher a rune. Its meaning is mingled with the falling rain, and with the dust drifting over forgotten excavations. Already my memories are cloudy, swirling, and indistinct. Doubtless they will march away at last, following the mammoth hunters over the horizon. But here I have spoken pleasurably to myself for some divided hours as in youth I would have placed the clay heads in Hagerty’s barn, or attempted other little mementos against the future.<\/p>\n Call this compulsive if you will. It is the night country of the mind, and I can assert that it exists only by stirring the dust of yesterday sufficiently to becloud momentarily the present. Not every man enjoys the lifting of such wraiths, but in age they sometimes return more forcibly than when one is young, as though the final light were to be used to cast a shaft into darkness. A man whose lifetime has been spent in crevices, whether of caves or libraries, is inevitably more than a little inured to these last glimpses of his world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nhow you never get the kiss you want
\nwhen you want it,<\/p>\n
\ndigging into your skin so you can never forget
\nhow clinging to a string of hope, threading it
\nbetween your spine, and having it unravel before you
\nin the span of an hour
\nis worse than any metaphor on nakedness
\nthat you poets will ever write.<\/p>\n
\nis the small gap where my fingers try to touch against
\nthe glass.<\/p>\n
\nyou see standing before you.<\/p>\n
\nhasn’t come back from the cleaners yet
\nand I have nothing to slip into tonight that makes my reflection feel
\nbeautiful.<\/p>\n
\nis coming soon, and I have a feeling he’s never going to fall
\nout of love with December.<\/p>\n
\nwhite orchids on every lonely holiday and pretend that love too
\nis a place you can cross state lines to get back to,<\/p>\n
\ncalendar sales keep reminding us all that we can never get back
\nto where we once wanted so bad to lose ourselves in
\nfor good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nwhat you had to do, and began,
\nthough the voices around you
\nkept shouting
\ntheir bad advice—
\nthough the whole house
\nbegan to tremble
\nand you felt the old tug
\nat your ankles.
\n“Mend my life!”
\neach voice cried.
\nBut you didn’t stop.
\nYou knew what you had to do,
\nthough the wind pried
\nwith its stiff fingers
\nat the very foundations,
\nthough their melancholy
\nwas terrible.
\nIt was already late
\nenough, and a wild night,
\nand the road full of fallen
\nbranches and stones.
\nBut little by little,
\nas you left their voices behind,
\nthe stars began to burn
\nthrough the sheets of clouds,
\nand there was a new voice
\nwhich you slowly
\nrecognized as your own,
\nthat kept you company
\nas you strode deeper and deeper
\ninto the world
\ndetermined to do
\nthe only thing you could do—
\ndetermined to save
\nthe only life you could save.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n