Sweat, chills, nausea. Pain and craving. A need like nothing else I've ever known will soon take hold of me. It's on its way.

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Gavlyn What I Do

One of those March days

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold; when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?” - Ernest J. Gaines

Something within her refused to grow. Something endless, eternal.

The Most Important Things

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

- Stephen King

“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” - Lao Tzu

Venus

Low-keyed and perpetual,
a whirling sylph
whose white robe stripes
around her; taffeta
wimpled like a nun’s headcloth;
a buxom floozy with a pink boa;
mummy, whose black
sediment desiccates within; wasp-star
to Mayan Galileos;
an outpatient
wrapped in post-operative gauze;
Cleopatra in high August–
her flesh curling
in a heat mirage
lightyears
from Alexandria;
tacky white pulp
spigoted
through the belly of a larva;
the perfect courtesan:
obliging, thick-skinned,
and pleated with riddles,
Venus quietly mutates
in her ivory tower.
Deep within that
libidinous albedo
temperatures are hot enough
to boil led,
pressures
90 times more unyielding
than Earth’s.
And though layered cloud-decks
and haze strata
seem to breathe
like a giant bellows,
heaving and sighing
every 4 days,
the Venerean cocoon
is no cheery chrysalis
brewing a damselfly
or coaxing life
into a reticent grub,
but a sniffling atmosphere
40 miles thick
of sulphuric, hydrochloric,
and hydrofluoric acids
all sweating
like a global terrarium,
cutthroat, tart, and self-absorbed.
No sphagnum moss
or polypody fern here,
where blistering vapors
and rosy bile
hint at the arson
with which the Universe began.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” - Rumi

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, Or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” - William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew