Linguistically Speaking

In my leisure time, I like to sit on my computer.

(maybe because it's nice and warm up there?)
(Also, you know you REALLY should stop correcting and get some sleep when stuff like this makes you laugh like crazy...)

"When I finish my studies, I will go to Serbia for a year. [...]
And than I'll search there my dream man. With 25 years I will marry him. I want children when I'm 27 years old.
Me and work? I don't know. I think I will work only when my children are going to go in the kindergarten. I hope my husband will have a good job. [...]"

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.


From: Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time (1993)

Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried.

7 April 1852.
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him -
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

From: Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife (1999)

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