marilyn monroe on arthur miller

my love sleeps beside me -

in the faint light - i see his manly jaw

give way - and the mouth of his

boyhood returns

with a softness softer

its sensitiveness trembling

in stillness

his eyes must have looked out

wonderously from the cave of the little

boy - when the things he did not

understand -

he forgot

but will he look like this when he is dead

oh unbearable fact inevitable

yet sooner would i rather his love die

than him?

other voices, other rooms

in recent times i have come to suspect that i probably give away too much of myself to others, because i don't know how else to make people like me. others often tell me that i come off as somewhat enigmatic initially, but the facade is soon ruined because i tell them things about myself that i probably ought to keep secret. i don't really know why.

one of my closest friends told me recently that i am really, brutally honest, if not about others then about myself. which surprised me because i never considered myself an honest person at all, but i suppose it's true. i don't really have any problem telling people i barely know all about my personal failings, about how i feel trapped by my own social ineptitude; how i have few friends and encounter difficulty making them because of my shyness. a few months ago i would have cheerfully told people that i had never had a boyfriend, and anticipated dying alone except for 30 cats. maybe i subconsciously want them to pity me, or offer solutions, or reassure me that i'm really not all that strange.

wow, most intense post i've written in a while. it sounds like i'm all mope-y and sad but i'm really not at all. i struggle to think of a time when i was happier (omitting those nice years before life became complicated, of course). everything and everyone is beautiful. even though my life is going to change in a huge way very soon, i think i'm ready.

____________________

with your silhouette as the sunlight dims

into your eyes, where the moonlight swims

hello to never

it's just as well i had already committed to a life of sin before i read the chronicles of narnia, otherwise that beautiful writing would have converted me. example, the last paragraph of the last narnia book, after it was revealed to the children that they had been killed in a train wreck as they ascend into aslan's country -

"and, for this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. but, for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. all their life in this world and all their adventures in narnia had only been the cover, and the title page: now at last they were beginning chapter one of the great story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

a brand new start

on the very first day of this year, as i sat in my best friend's living room about to watch the new year's eve fireworks on tv, i put my earphones in and pressed 'play' at the stroke of midnight. i picked a song from 2009 that i wanted to define the next year, in an uncharacteristic stroke of superstition. the first song i listened to in 2010, one of the most perfect and beautiful songs i have heard and one that i saw live just last friday, was this:

and it wasn't until recently that i realised that my wish for this song to happen to me this year, kind of came true.

a deeply superficial person

i don't understand when people say that andy warhol was a hack, that his work was meaningless. that's the idea, i thought. confronting the world with the lack of meaning, the purposelessness inherent in life itself, just its utter emptiness. you can look into marilyn's eyes but her gaze is unfocused and vague, a sort of thousand yard stare that goes on forever into complete nothingness. it's just the surface laid bare with nothing underneath. because that's what life is, isn't it? i think it's beautiful.

_______________________

"if you want to know all about andy warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there i am. there's nothing behind it."

- andy warhol