The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing. - Saeed Jones

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

...and because you’re young and don’t know the difference between abandoned and alone just like your mother’s heart won’t know the difference between beat and attack.

a current come to carry me in its arms through the streets,