Month: August 2015

“I want to dance, oh ye ladies who care, for I do not have much time to listen to my heart which begs to cry. I have short time, and before death comes, my mouth if even for once would have known laughter. Friends have arrived at my porch, knocking and begging for me not to die, but it’s too late, I will die today. Let them struggle, drenched in their own sweats, they cannot save someone who is not willing to be saved,” said I two days ago and indeed I died but here I am again, breathing.

It was three days ago when I received a message from my girlfriend with whom I have led myself to believe that happiness exists nowhere but in an invisible chest to which love is the only key. She wrote: “Dear love, with you I have tasted what true love could be…

Every man is weak who has not understood himself before setting out to understand the world; when he’s supposed to drink, he eats; when he’s supposed to strike, he prays; when he’s supposed to pray, he fucks; when he’s supposed to fuck, he fights; when he’s supposed to fight, he hopes, and hope, he does not know, embraces only those who are willing to run against the wind.

I am a liar if I tell you that all is well, all is not well. All is only hoping to be well but not any well. The rich man has all he desires, but unlike the struggling man, he cannot jog in the street and inhale his childhood neighbourhood air without being guarded by men in black suits and pistols, what a limitation! I also know about a rich man who doesn’t need guards while he jogs, who would dare touch…

Come here child, let me tell you a story.
A wanderer so witty went to a Land so scary,
A Land so scary made his stay so gory,
And so was provoked the wanderer’s fury.
Find a seat, you will like the story.

The name of the Land, my dear, was Derry.
Too much witches, too many bodies to bury.
Hunger spiced their food, no such thing as curry.
Ghosts punctured hymens, none in town a cherry.
Find a seat, my dear, really scary was Derry.

The king of the Land said his daughter will marry
Anyone who can indeed restore the poor Land’s glory.
Harry Potter is a fable, the wanderer was not Harry.
The princess didn’t have to be bait, the wanderer felt so sorry.
What a father will give her daughter to any mongrel to marry?

The wanderer boiled at last into his little armoury,
Grabbed odds…

Come here child, let me tell you a story.
A wanderer so witty went to a Land so scary,
A Land so scary made his stay so gory,
And so was provoked the wanderer’s poetry.
Find a seat, you will like the story.

The name of the Land, my dear, was Derry.
Too many witches, too many bodies to bury.
Hunger spiced their food, no such thing as curry.
Ghosts punctured hymens, none in town a cherry.
Find a seat, my dear, really scary was Derry.

The king of the Land said his daughter will marry
Anyone who can indeed restore the poor Land’s glory.
Harry Potter is a fable, the wanderer was not Harry.
The princess didn’t have to be bait, the wanderer felt so sorry.
What a father will give her daughter to any mongrel to marry?

The wanderer boiled at last into his little armoury,
Grabbed odds…

Sarah Helm | Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women | Nan A. Talese | March 2015 | 48 minutes (13,071 words)

Below is a chapter excerpted from Ravensbrück, by Sarah Helm, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

The child is born, all neighbours on me, to my friend’s place in eight days for the naming and celebrations! Time whizzes by though, the child grows beard, lays opposite sex, bears children, and before we count seven to ten, he’s already old and ripe to die. There was a girl I knew back in secondary school, she never buttoned her topmost buttons, and even teachers would not say “cover it up” for inarguably, the sight was food for the soul. Her dorsal view too, like abstract honey borne of corporeal perfection was a geography every surveyor would be willing to review free of charge, but what happened to those features (that were) assuredly imagined naked by all male classmates after the girl died (during a holiday)? Story for the gods!

To rise in politics you grind foetus with soap, uses albinos’ heads for cream and hunchbacks for talismans sewn…

The sun will rise, the sun will set and in hours the sun will rise again, where or how it finds you, the sun cares not; your ruination, your retrogression or your progress and conquest all depend on how determined you are in life, within you is the choice, not without. Oh my God! I said that as if I have traversed beyond the level of needing motivation myself, whereas, if every thinker is self-sufficient, he’d known not that the numeric figures count beyond the ten of his fingers and the ten of his toes. Thanks to everyone and everything around us, foolish and wise, useful and useless, what we know which makes us who and what we are, are derived from them; we’re subconscious imitators of our acquaintances.

Happiness is a slot; she mates with anyone who woos her solemnly, but she’s not a whore; she doesn’t force herself…