'Let's Build the Last Song and Sneak Away While Everyone is Listening' by Mike Young

Things that scare me include car dealerships at night and the fact that snow cannot live inside my mouth. Boom. That’s it. Once on Belchertown Rd. I saw a ten foot soldier with a deer rifle and a torn jerkin walk out of 1789 and into the woods. He left because he knows I will protect you. You don’t need to keep a grill skewer in the soap dish. The world is something I will gather for you and brush off like I’m cleaning a dryer filter. Let’s plant apple trees in the radio. Keep one suitcase full of bees. Listen, I like you so much that I want to steal your jokes. Though you are a hand and I am a boat, we smell like dancing. We make a new health. Dancing invented us. Dancing is just putting yourself on inside out. When you are near me, I feel as if I have caught the only bus of the day somewhere in New Mexico and you are the spy plane above us and the gingerbread factory that the driver won’t stop talking about. Except no, wait, that’s you, sitting in the aisle with your boots off. You bite my shoulder. You have a smoothie mustache. It is because your name does so much to me that I call you many things. You ask me why I’m not asleep yet. I forgot how to get there. For some reason I just hold you and float.

Absence Makes the Heart

"Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been to. Sleep alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no whenever you don't want to do something. Say yes to your instincts even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you're doing here. Believe in kissing."

--Eve Ensler

Someday my prince will come to his senses.

“Expecting the worst was the best I could do.”

--Adam Clay

“Someday I will look back on this time and think that was the spring when I started looking people in the eye.”

--Kristina S. B.

I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

Fragments of ideas float around my brain as I tirelessly try to fit them together. With so many words in my head, I am always afraid of writing them down improperly. Or forgetting them in the first place. I cannot seem to write fast enough because somehow a thought always gets lost.

"It would have been nice to send a picture of how you feel beside a picture of how I wish you could feel."

--Bob Hicok, 'The Personal Touch'

It would be peaceful to be a sail

except during the storm.

During the storm, I would like to be

the storm. If you’re the storm,

there’s nothing frightening

about the storm except when it stops,

then you’re dead and the maps

are drowned. Within my heart

is another heart, within that heart,

a man at war writes home.

--Bob Hicok, 'Absence Makes the Heart. That's it: Absence Makes the Heart'

Get a job. Walk to work. Wear a suit and brown glossy shoes. Paint your nails. Wear black. Never wear black. Lipstains on your paper cups, heavy mugs. Scribble poetry in business meetings. Whistle in the elevator. Smile on the subway (it'll scare them away). Cut your hair. Pin it in curls. Take cold showers. Never shower. Wear five dollar perfume. Stop reading magazines. Lie about politics. Change your name. Buy watercolors. Primary colors. Work in black and white. Take pictures. Stop seeing. Listen to buried records. Listen to silence. Pack your bags. Donate everything. Step into new shoes. Update your passport. Leave this city. Leave this state. Leave this country. Never look back. Learn a new language. Fall in love. Break your heart. Break a bone. Watch death. Touch old things. Lose a friend. Lose yourself. Lose 10 pounds. Lose a parent. Change. Forget. Never forget. Wear black. Never wear black. Lipstick. Night air. Tangerines and overripe plums. Touch your toes. Touch your lips. Touch your heart and break it in half. Pack your bags.
--paintedfictions

We all fall down.

"Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down."

--Charles F. Kettering

“Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”

--Emerson

"Everyone knows what their roots are, but you’ve got to explore everywhere. You’ve got to explore the sky too."

--Mick Jagger

"Let’s leave the obviously pretty women to men with no imagination."

--Proust

"Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters."

--Marageret Peters

In a city with too many people, I hope to run into you and act surprised.

“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.”

--Serge Gainsbourgh

“You’re going to meet the most extraordinary men, the sexiest, brightest, funniest men, and you’re going to fall in love with so many of them, and you won’t know until the end of your life who your greatest friends were or your greatest love was.”

--'Milk'

“…acquired tastes can be rewarding. Acquired taste jump-starts new satisfactions where I do not initially find them. Through acquired taste, I grow in my capacity to enjoy what the world has to offer.”

--NYTimes.com, 'The acquisition of taste'

“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.”

--Bill Watterson

“There is only one conclusion to every story… We all fall down.”

--'Domino'

“What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know. I felt that by walking away I was abandoning them, that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”

--Peter Cameron

“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.”

--Arthur Freed

"I saw me branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

--Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'