round-up: 6/06
a poem out, what i'm listening to, what i'm reading, & quotations!
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
A poem (newly out!)
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets I’ve enjoyed
I have a new (old) poem out in Split Lip Mag!
Read the full May 2026 issue here.
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
The Trouble with Being Born, E. M. Cioran
Quotations:
I am unusually generous. I’m also unusually honest. It’s just how I’m built. It’s not so much an effort to be virtuous as it is an effort to be happy, because I’ve simply found, over and over, that my life is simply better—much better—when I operate this way.
When I say writing is a metaphor for life and vice versa, I mean that being a writer is a way of living fueled by paying very close attention to the world, being ravenously curious, sustaining genuine playfulness (which is so very hard for so many people!) and surprise. Being a writer is a way of seeking truth through a process of unearthing, discovering, and openness to the unknown rather than reciting what we already think we know. Additionally, being a writer means striving to do all this through the lens of bodily experience, fueled by desire and an intention to embrace (or at least endure) uncertainty—which makes us vulnerable.
Writing saved my life because through writing I learned how to live with more attention, curiosity, playfulness, appreciation, and surprise, more generosity, openness, and an infinitely vaster sense of possibility. And the more I live this way off the page, the more these qualities bloom in my writing on the page.
This relationship to empathy has only become more fraught in the internet age, especially so in our post-lockdown era, during which the complete interiorization of everyday life has resulted in both a further burrowing of despair and an increased disavowal of social participation writ large. To cry in public ten years ago would have elicited the sympathy of others, an “Are you alright?” from the other side of the bathroom stall. But our alienation from one another has progressed to such an extent that strong emotions are increasingly viewed not as a pity nor as a sympathetic reminder of our own capacity for feeling, but as a threat — as performative, as unsafe, as suspicious. You are not allowed to feel the full brunt of your emotions — after all, today’s a work day — but, at the same time, neither is anyone else. Even worse, we often decry visible emotional expression using the language of productivity, of wasted time and energy, one of many small tyrannies we borrow from the capitalist lexicon.
Such repression has profound effects on us both personally and politically. Because it is so disorienting to watch the fall of imperial rule take place in real time, with far more ease and rapidity than one would expect, we are often forced to ask, like children: What is happening?
I, for one, think it is our duty to despair. Instead, we do everything in our power to keep ourselves from mourning the dying and poisoned earth, the small children whose universes have been snuffed out by bombs and bulldozers, our neighbors who are being terrorized, beaten, and disappeared and our own increasingly occluded futures. We are expected to remain still, to never cry nor scream nor act out in any way, to never embrace, with the full brunt of our consciousness, both our terrible and justifiable fear and our vehement hatred for those who perpetuate it. To repress our sense of injustice, to never be allowed to dream of nor commit violence even though being forced to endure this life is a violence of its own — this is an untenable state of being.
My whole life has taken place in community, in the gay community. Community saved my life. It’s the official structures, family and all that, that have been my problem.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
-E. M. Cioran
Here on the coast of Normandy, at this hour of the morning, I needed no one. The very gulls’ presence bothered me.
-E. M. Cioran
I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
-E. M. Cioran
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
-E. M. Cioran
No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we torture, unless we pulverize language.
-E. M. Cioran
‘What do you do from morning to night?’
‘I endure myself.’
-E. M. Cioran
Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
-E. M. Cioran
To walk along a stream, to pass, to flow with the water, without effort, without haste, while death continues in us its ruminations, its uninterrupted soliloquy…
-E. M. Cioran
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
-E. M. Cioran
No meditation without a tendency to repetitiveness.
-E. M. Cioran
How can you control yourself, master your behavior, when you come from a country where people howl at funerals?
-E. M. Cioran
A professor in an Eastern European country tells me that his mother, a peasant woman, was astonished to find out he was suffering from insomnia. When sleep didn’t come, all she had to do was imagine a huge wheatfield swaying in the wind and she fell asleep at once.
With the image of a city, one would not arrive at the same result. It is inexplicable and miraculous that any city-dweller ever manages to close an eye.
-E. M. Cioran
Vengeance is a need, the most intense and profound of all, and […] each man must satisfy it, if only in words.
-E. M. Cioran
I was twenty. Everything was a burden.
-E. M. Cioran
We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.
-E. M. Cioran
The right to suppress everyone that bothers us should rank first in the constitution of the ideal State.
-E. M. Cioran
The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.
-E. M. Cioran
No longer wanting to be a man…dreaming of another form of failure.
-E. M. Cioran
We’ve been driving back and forth across the country for a month, and I’m often in the car for 16 hours at a time. I’m bird-watching so hard. Today we were driving through NorCal on our way to Bend, Oregon and I saw some commotion under the lip of the overpass. Suspended from the cement were perfect little mud bird houses. Those are fuckin Cliff Swallows! I immediately registered my sighting with the Merlin App and continued on with our drive. Birding is like playing Pokemon Go, but for people who give good head.