You have a moral responsibility to leave people alone to suffer the way that they choose. All you can do is create an environment for them where if they don’t want to suffer they can come up for air. But you can’t force another human being not to suffer. - Ram Dass

WHEN YOU START TO LIKE PAIN THINGS GET INTERESTING. PAIN IS THE COMMON RESULT OF A SUBORDINATE POSITION. TRADITIONALLY, SUFFERING IS UNCOMFORTABLE AND UNDESIRABLE. PERHAPS IT IS MORE INTELLIGENT TO CULTIVATE PAIN AS A MEANS OF LIBERATION? IS IT POSSIBLE THAT ENJOYMENT OF PAIN CAN BE SUBVERSIVE? WHEN ONE DOES NOT FEAR PAIN, ONE CANNOT BE MANIPULATED. WHEN AROUSED BY SUFFERING, ONE CAN CONTROL ANY RELATIONSHIP. WHEN AGONY CEASES TO BE A BARRIER, DEATH IS NOT FORBIDDING. THE IMPLICATIONS ARE MARVELOUS. PAIN IS NOT OPPRESSIVE, BUT STRENGTHENING AND MOST SUBLIME. IT IS NECESSARY ONLY TO DENY THE PLEASURE/PAIN DICHOTOMY. -Jenny Holzer, 10 Inflammatory Essays

If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine... - Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world. - J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

The media neutralizes the potential threat that trans femininities pose to the category of “woman” by playing to the audience’s subconscious belief that femininity itself is artificial. After all, while most people assume that women are naturally feminine, they also (rather hypocritically) require them to spend an hour or two each day putting on their faces and getting all dressed up in order to meet societal standards for femininity (unlike men, whose masculinity is presumed to come directly from who he is and what he does). In fact, it’s the assumption that femininity is inherently “contrived,” “frivolous,” and “manipulative” that allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “sincere” by comparison. - Julia Serano, Whipping Girl

Finally, when shame has been completely internalized, nothing about you is okay. You feel flawed and inferior; you have the sense of being a failure. There is no way you can share your inner self because you are an object of contempt to yourself. When you are contemptible to yourself, you are no longer in you. To feel shame is to feel seen in an exposed and diminished way. When you're an object to yourself, you turn your eyes inward, watching and scrutinizing every minute detail of behavior. This internal critical observation is excruciating. It generates a tormenting self-consciousness which Kaufman describes as, "creating a binding and paralyzing effect upon the self." This paralyzing internal monitoring causes withdrawal, passivity and inaction. - John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

How to Draw a Horse - Emma Hunsinger

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. - James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Matins - Louise Gluck

You want to know how I spend my time?

I walk the front lawn, pretending

to be weeding. You ought to know

I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling

clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact

I'm looking for courage, for some evidence

my life will change, though

it takes forever, checking

each clump for the symbolic

leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already

the leaves turning, always the sick trees

going first, the dying turning

brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform

their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?

As empty now as at the first note.

Or was the point always

to continue without a sign?

Online, we easily find “company” but are exhausted by the pressures of performance. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. Digital connections may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. [They offer] just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control, [putting] people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of […] people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay. - Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Goatsong - Leila Chatti

I will survive the wrong

I've done. All the love

that didn't serve me.

My youth used up

worshipping mercurial

myopics. I've cried a lot

very briefly. This sorrow has helped

make my career. Yes,

I'm a difficult person

to endure, I hardly manage.

Oh hum, the rest of my life

keeps coming. It feels just

like I knew it would.

Not Horses - Natalie Shapero

What I adore is not horses, with their modern

domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore

is a bug that lives only one day, especially if

it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or

chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day

when no one thinks of anything else, least of all

that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been

into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s

busy, so distraught they forget to kill me,

and even that won’t keep me alive. I share

my home not with horses, but with a little dog

who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps,

makes her muscle known to every statue.

I wish she could have a single day of language,

so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid —

our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.

Value Form - Brendan Joyce

Turned that chicken into a week of meals

the way I turned that memory into ten

years of poems. Ten years of amalgams

of the rain. In cigarettes, six months rent

is a year. Fifty two to live. Mechanic says

five weeks wages to drive another day.

Yesterday, at the gas station a man said;

"water boils at 212 degrees,

steam drives trains, you don’t need gas

you want gas." Lord, boil my wages into

rain. Burn my poems into chicken. Lord,

let me eat my car, let me drink the gas,

let me swallow the asphalt that separates

me from my love.

Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down? - Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

A Meeting - Wendell Berry

In a dream I meet

my dead friend. He has,

I know, gone long and far,

and yet he is the same

for the dead are changeless.

They grow no older.

It is I who have changed,

grown strange to what I was.

Yet I, the changed one,

ask: “How you been?”

He grins and looks at me.

“I been eating peaches

off some mighty fine trees.”

The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road - Ada Limón

That we might walk out into the woods together,

and afterwards make toast

in our sock feet, still damp from the fern’s

wet grasp, the spiky needles stuck to our

legs, that’s all I wanted, the dog in the mix,

jam sometimes, but not always. But somehow,

I’ve stopped praising you. How the valley

when you first see it—the small roads back

to your youth—is so painfully pretty at first,

then, after a month of black coffee, it’s just

another place your bullish brain exists, bothered

by itself and how hurtful human life can be.

Isn’t that how it is? You wake up some days

full of crow and shine, and then someone

has put engine coolant in the medicine

on another continent and not even crying

helps cure the idea of purposeful poison.

What kind of woman am I? What kind of man?

I’m thinking of the way my stepdad got sober,

how he never told us, just stopped drinking

and sat for a long time in the low folding chair

on the Bermuda grass reading and sometimes

soaking up the sun like he was the story’s only

subject. When he drove me to school, we decided

it would be a good day, if we saw the blue heron

in the algae-covered pond next to the road,

so that if we didn’t see it, I’d be upset. Then,

he began to lie. To tell me he’d seen it when

he hadn’t, or to suppose that it had just

taken off when we rounded the corner in

the gray car that somehow still ran, and I

would lie, too, for him. I’d say I saw it.

Heard the whoosh of wings over us.

That’s the real truth. What we told each other

to help us through the day: the great blue heron

was there, even when the pond dried up,

or froze over; it was there because it had to be.

Just now, I felt like I wanted to be alone

for a long time, in a folding chair on the lawn

with all my private agonies, but then I saw you

and the way you’re hunching over your work

like a puzzle, and I think even if I fail at everything,

I still want to point out the heron like I was taught,

still want to slow the car down to see the thing

that makes it all better, the invisible gift,

what we see when we stare long enough into nothing.