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Quote by Karl Kristian Flores

“It is to change a life. That’s why you do it. An enormous urge for change is the only reason to suffer. They can call your mission cliché, but someone needs to be hideous, otherwise we’ll all believe we’re perfect. It’s important that your work is important. There’s not enough time for anything less. Not that your life span is short, but the world’s life span is short. It is being destroyed every day. Sprint your nervous legs towards the finish line of language! And we’re not so good at capturing ourselves, but thank God, because if humans were fluent in human, new art would cease.”

Quote by Karl Kristian Flores

Work

The Goodbye Song

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Karl Kristian Flores

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“There will always be more exciting things. Casinos will blink with avenues of exhilaration and offers to be devilish. The shelf of alcohol behind the bar looks like it may have a good read for you. A Chinese restaurant will buzz with customers and ticket orders. A booming concert may scream it has an extra spot, with strobe lights to hide your human. Partying people do not look like people who weep. You’ll think literature has no relevance to them. But eventually, the light will die down and the world will need to return home again. The fire will give out and the coals will glow and when the rising smoke clouds our vision, we will look for what we need: hearth. And there, the ignored is seen again. Asked for. There are exciting days, but the moment our flames die and we shiver honestly in our freezing universe, we will return to our homes, coming to what we need to, like mothers, like old love poems, like stringed instruments, like heroes.”

“He clutched the handle of the knife with the same strength the gang members used to kick him. He was worthless, like a crumpled bit of trash thrown, but not worth picking up, that doesn’t even deserve a courteous foot nudge to hide. He was unseen, like the skin beneath the toga of a female statue made of stone. He was ugly, like the damaged face of the deformed stranger you try not to look at because you don’t want it in your memory. He was as soft as the pull-tab of a soda can, as easily broken as a straw wrapper, and as close to death as a baby slug crawling next to a group of kids at summer camp.”

“My skin yields acne in double digits—a mountainous domain of genetic misfortune. Sometimes in the morning, the pimples get so bad that if I rinse my face towards the showerhead, the water breaks the pustule and I start to bleed. So I shower the same way I behave in public: with my head down. At bedtime, I get stiff because as soon as I turn to one side and sleep, I’ll wake up with a bloody pillowcase.”

“And then there were his eyes. I couldn’t see him anymore. When I looked at Mitchell, at his black pupils that I swear are brown, there seems to be an emptiness, as if they are eyeballs with no person behind them. It’s like some part of him is lost in sin, or the thousands of parties he has attended, shrooms, or some evil act no soul could recover from.”

“We have to be careful how we treat others. The human brain is a sensitive flesh that can be punctured by a single event. Based on your sentence, you can leave someone an insult they’ll never forget. You can sometimes hear this frailty when shy voices ask things like: “Can I have another bite?”, “Please call me back” or “What days do you work?”

“Soldiers were shot outside a poet’s door and a bomber plane was on its way. So he took his manuscript, folded it, and locked it into a tin chest. There was a place east of town where it could be safely buried and found by another someday. He ran out during battle, was shot multiple times in his legs, slithered his way in a swamp of gushing muscle, and alas, could not make it. So, in desperation, he opened up the holes in his stomach and inserted the tin chest where his poems lie safe and died there. One day, a medic will read about birds that chirped on emerald trees.”