MIKE FAIST As Art Donaldson InCHALLENGERS (2024) Dir. Luca Guadagnino

MIKE FAIST as Art Donaldson in CHALLENGERS (2024) dir. Luca Guadagnino

[to be his hands or to have his hands]

richard siken lines that make me lose my fucking mind -

look at the light through the windowpane. that means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable.

can we love nature for what it really is: predatory? we do not walk through a passive landscape.

someone has to leave first. this is a very old story. there is no other version of this story.

tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

i hope it’s love. i’m trying really hard to make it love.

there are many names in history but none of them are ours.

so it’s summer, so it’s suicide, so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.

what holds it together? glue. some kind of glue. the image remains as a body would. i turned the image over like a rock, but then the worms.

i clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. i’d rather quit. i’d rather be sad. it’s too much work.

the prayer of going nowhere going nowhere

words too small for any hope or promise, not really soothing, but soothing nonetheless.

and the eyes that remained eyes and not the doorways we had hoped for.

paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything.

we collide with place, which is another name for god, and limp away with a permanent injury.

but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.

to make something beautiful should be enough. it isn’t. it should be.

i prefer to blame others, it’s easier.

we’ve made a graveyard out of a bone white afternoon.

i made this place for you. a place for you to love me.

i wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way.

i want to tell you this story without having to confess anything.

i want to tell you this story without having to be in it.

sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how i ruined everything by saying it out loud.

we deduce backward into first causes - stone in the pond of things.

are you there, sweetheart? do you know me? is this microphone live?

you see, i take the parts that i remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what i say or love me back.

every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out you will be alone always and then you will die.

we clutch our bellies and roll on the floor… when i say this, it should mean laughter, not poison.

the dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.

a man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. a man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.

i will turn myself into a gun, because i’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. i’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue.

as everything is a metaphor for itself.

something’s not right about what i’m doing but i’m still doing it - living in the worst parts, ruining myself.

if the window is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing river water.

you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn’t do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.

what is a ghost? something dead that seems to be alive. something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.

you try to warn him, you tell him you will want to get inside him, and ruin him, but he doesn’t listen. you do this, you do. you take things you love and tear them apart.

do you love yourself? i don’t have to answer that. it should matter.

things happen all the time, things happen every minute that have nothing to do with us.

the boy on the bridge. the boy who always keeps me from jumping off the bridge. oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.

i am singing now while rome burns. we are all just trying to be holy.

the best part of spirituality is reverence. there are other parts. some people like to hear the sound of their own voice.

you are a fever i am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

you need it for the moment you need it, then you bless it.

there’s a black dog and there’s a white dog, depends on which you feed. depends on which damn dog you live with.

desire, like a monster, crawls up out of the lake.

there’s a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly.

evidence of evil but not proof.

a hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail. a hammer is not a hammer when it’s sleeping. i woke up tired of being the hammer.

the maiden flees or prays, depending.

this is the testimony of the deer: solitude, the long corridors, love from a distance.

if it hurts, we’re doing it to ourselves.

cut me open and the light streams out. stitch me up and the light keeps streaming out between the stitches.

take the light inside you like a blessing, like a knee in the chest.

he knows that when you snap a mast it’s time to get a set of oars or learn to breathe underwater.

if you don’t believe in god or fate you still must believe in narrative.

two brothers: one of them wants to take you apart. two brothers: one of them wants to put you back together. it’s time to choose sides now. the stitches or the devouring mouth?

he took the gods and made them human.

is that too much to expect? that i would name the stars for you?

in the wrong light anyone can look like a darkness.

god is the space between two men and the devil is the space between two men.

i make up things that i would never say. i say them very quietly.

the body of life is a nightmare.

she existed enough to be painted. she could have been an idea, but that’s another kind of existing.

we have not touched the stars nor are we forgiven.

a gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

this is the saddest fucking thing. wheres that post about when you cant even write a poem about it because its just there already

"you loved me once."

lidia yuknavitch/unsent project/rosamund hodge