With no one
can our innermost
thoughts
be shared.
With what is
most important
in the world
we are alone.
It is a
lasting burden
it is a
subtle joy
that here no one
can reach you
and no one
can be let in.
— Tove Ditlevsen (1969)
trans. Cynthia Graae and Michael Favala Goldman
Fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.
— David Simon
Even if I now saw you
only once,
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.
— Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, from The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Onono Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.
— Kobayashi Issa (trans. Robert Hass)
The cruelty of ages past affects us now
Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life
Each door has locks designed for keys unknown
Our living room was once somebody’s home
Our bedroom, someone’s only room
Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door.
Door to a kitchen?
And our lives are hasped and boundaried
Because of ancient locks and madnesses
Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies
Which one is madness? Depends on who you are.
We find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room
Dance, like electrons, out of each other’s way.
The cruelties of ages past affect us now
— Lorenzo Thomas (1979)