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The Difficulty that is Marriage

Paul Durcan

We disagree to disagree, we divide, we differ;

Yet each night as I lie in bed beside you

And you are faraway curled up in sleep

I array the moonlit ceiling with a mosaic of question-marks;

How was it I was so lucky to have ever met you?

I am no brave pagan proud of my mortality

Yet gladly on this changeling earth I should live for ever

If it were with you, my sleeping friend.

I have my troubles and I shall always have them

But I should rather live with you for ever

Than exchange my troubles for a changeless kingdom.

But I do not put you on a pedestal or a throne;

You must have your faults but I do not see them.

If it were with you, I should live for ever.

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texts for nothing - samuel beckett

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bertold brecht

bertold brecht

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- hans magnus enzensberger

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bertold brecht

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authorship of the self

René Descartes - I think, therefore I am // Vivian Maier - "Self Portrait" // Samuel Beckett - Words for Nothing // Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia // Oskar Schlemmer - "Nude, Woman, and Approaching Man" // Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author // The Wonder (2022) // Maryse Condé - The Role of the Author // Mark Halliday - Poetry Failure // Hannah Hoch - "Self Portrait".

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poems to drive you insane

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Pitchblende

Róisín Tierney

How could Maria Skłodowska, as she was then known when she first stepped from the Flying University

onto the streets of Paris, have guessed, that her findings would one day set her lab aglow,

electrify the air, thin her blood fatally as she lined her pockets with them:

radium, polonium? (This last named after her country). How could she ever have guessed

that the burn from these would be so rare that they would not only cauterise

my mother-in-law’s bladder, my father’s throat, but so douse her manuscripts, her precious notes

that they would have to lie softly at the heart of the great Bibliothèque Nationale

in a lead lined-chamber, for a half-life of approximately

one-thousand-six-hundred years?

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Whose?

- Eavan Boland

Beautiful land the patriot said and rinsed it with his blood. And the sun rose. And the river burned. The earth leaned towards him. Shadows grew long. Ran red.

Beautiful land I whispered. But the roads stayed put. Stars froze over the suburb. Shadows iced up. Nothing moved. Except my hand across the page. And these words.

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Brendan Kennelly

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Brendan Kennelly

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"living creatures coming and going on a habitable earth crammed with the dead"

-samuel beckett

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texts for nothing - samuel beckett (1966) // chamomiles - irina danenova (2003) // sunbleached flies - ethel cain (2022)

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this is exactly how the text sounds to me as im reading it

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[Image ID: A picture of a piece of underlined text which says "See what's happening here, where there's no one, where nothing happens, get something to happen here, someone to be here, then put an end to it, have silence, or another sound, a sound of other voices than those of life and death, of lives and deaths everyone's but mine, get into my story in order to get out of it, no, that's all meaningless. /.End ID]

texts for nothing - samuel beckett