The Moon In Paintings. X

“I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.”

Maybe we’ll meet again, when we are slightly older and our minds less hectic, I’ll be right for you and you’ll be right for me. But right now I’m chaos to your thoughts and you are poison to my heart.”

“The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.”

— Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Emilio Gola - In the Study (n.d.)

Ulf Andersen Charles Bukowski 1978

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe? there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

-- Charles Bukowski, "Bluebird" 1992

“I’ve lived on this earth as if out of place,”

— Maria Polydouri, tr. by Manolis Aligizakis, from “A Cold Breath Froze,”

“Loving you was like going to war, I never came back the same.”

— Warsan Shire

“I put my hand on my chest and closed my eyes. I have a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. And I have a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered… There was a ping. To my surprise, it had developed a minute crack, nearly invisible. But it was there, and it hurt.”

— Louise Erdrich, The Sentence