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Margaret Atwood, from The Tin Woodwoman Gets A Massage in “Dearly: New Poems"

“Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Reals gods require blood.”

Simone Weil, “Prologue” from La connaissance surnaturelle (my own translation)

“I am obsessive. I contain nothing but the replay. / I am blood and blood and replay.”

“I remember you saying, “you wouldn’t recognise love if it punched you right in the face.” Because that was what I did: I saw and I heard things, remembered them and couldn’t ever let them go. Here’s what happened - love did punch me right in the face and I did recognise it, but not in the way you thought. Later, I saw it in the way you looked at her. In the way you pushed back your chair to get up when she entered the room, how you tracked her movements with your eyes, how you hung onto every syllable that slipped out of her mouth. I noticed, but I kept quiet. It wasn’t my place to say anything, not when she turned you down, not when she didn’t reply to your texts and not when she eventually did. You became a we and then came that one night in late summer when you walked up to me with a too-warm beer, on your own for the first time in ages, and asked me if I was happy. I said yes, and you believed me, because it was what you wanted to hear. Because you didn’t remember our conversation from months before you’d met her and I did - I could see it clearly then. Love was punching you right in the face and you were too blind to recognise it.”

[text ID: I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.]