Broken When I Got Here

I write sometimes. I paint sometimes. Mostly I sit around thinking about things I should be doing but am not.

[williamtaylorjr]

Wear Your Sorrow We wake to the day at hand like another thing we never wanted but can't quite bring ourselves to give away o...

Poem of mine up at today's Winedrunk sidewalk.

[williamtaylorjr]

WILLIAM TAYLOR JR. - "THE POETRY" & "A FEW HOURS OF DAYLIGHT"

A LITERARY PLAYGROUND FOR MISFITS

Two new poems up at Philosophical Idiot.

[williamtaylorjr]

Today I'll Sing by William Taylor Jr

Today I'll sing beneath the sunlight / despite cancer and ash / and the ugliness of the world / that whines and scratches / at the door / we have......

New poem up at the latest Red Fez.

[williamtaylorjr]

Would that I at least carry, to that vast potential of the all-inclusive abyss, the glory of my disillusion like that of a great dream, and the splendor of not believing like a banner of defeat - still a banner in weak hands, but a banner dragged through mud and the blood of the feeble...raised high, however, as we vanish among the shifting sands, no one knowing if in protest, as a challenge, or as an act of desperation...No one knowing, because no one knows anything, and the sands engulf those with banners as it engulfs those without... And the sands cover everything: my life, my prose my eternity. I hear the consciousness of defeat like a victory banner.

- Fernando Pessoa

[williamtaylorjr]

The Deaths of Some People

The thing is the longer you stick around the more everything turns to ghosts and I wander the city dying of everything and nothing in particular tired of poets and the news of the world with all the headlines telling me how the deaths of some people matter more than others though I guess it's good not having to decide such things on my own and I'm tired of people who look good in suits while taking weekend getaways to beach towns in Mexico I've never heard of those with the audacity to have been born beautiful and of use and live as if death were some half-witted underling you could slip a fiver to and send on its way they're out there shopping attending yoga classes and poetry workshops doing any number of other things I've seen on big screen tvs in little bars while scribbling loneliness into tattered notebooks back home I manage to sweep the kitchen wash the dishes and take a bath, as these are all endeavors one is rarely called upon to explain I consider finding a poetry workshop so I might offer up these words and find out if they're any good until I remember I don't like poetry workshops so I just dress them up as best I can and put them on the sidewalk with a few dollars and a paperbag lunch and if they have what it takes they'll eventually make it somewhere or else they'll fall away like any other ill-born thing and that'll be the end of it.

[williamtaylorjr]

A Proclamation of Sorts

Lately it's been harder and harder to find the words and in truth I don't really mind so much as having something to say eventually becomes as tiring as everything else I've reached a point where I'm no longer too proud to proclaim my emptiness I figure we all have to cop to it eventually and now more than ever I just want to dissolve into the pretty sadness of the day the perfect gray sky above the lonely apartment buildings the glittering shards of rain and all the ghosts of the forgotten and the pretty waitress arrives at my table with a beer on the house and the kindness of her face breaks something within me and I want to fall into her arms and weep into her breast for everything good and everything lost and everything we have become and then I figure I should drink my free beer first just in case it gets weird.

[williamtaylorjr]

New watercolor.

[williamtaylorjr]

Sanesplaining 26: Finding Beauty Where You Can

Our guest this week is poet William Taylor Jr. We talk Jack Micheline, the Karate Kid, how mental health is portrayed in "Better Call Saul", heal care bills,...

I'm the special guest on the new edition of Daniel Crocker's Sanesplaining podcast. I read a poem and we talk about stuff. It was fun.

[williamtaylorjr]

New watercolor.

[williamtaylorjr]

All truths are against us. But we go on living, because we accept them in themselves, because we refuse to draw the consequences. Where is the man who has translated - in his behavior - a single conclusion of the lessons of astronomy, of biology, and who has decided to never leave his bed again out of rebellion or humility in the face of the sidereal distances or the natural phenomena? Has pride ever been conquered by the evidence of our unreality? And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity? The sciences prove our nothingness. But who has grasped their ultimate teachings? Who has become a hero of total sloth? No one folds his arms: we are busier than the ants and the bees. Yet if an ant, if a bee - by the miracle of an idea or by some temptation of singularity - were to isolate herself in the anthill or the hive, if she contemplated FROM OUTSIDE the spectacle of her labors,would she still persist in her pains?

- E.M. Cioran

[williamtaylorjr]

The day is a song Leonard Cohen didn’t have the chance to finish and I’m caught inside it like a wounded thing and sometimes my poems leave me like a woman or the hours in a day …

New poem up at Rusty Truck.

[williamtaylorjr]

The Fire by William Taylor Jr

You must feel it too / / time like a fire and all of us caught / / at the heart of it / / and how sometimes there is nothing / / but this......(full page view)

The good folks at Red Fez were kind enough to include one of my poems in the latest issue. Feel free to peruse.

[williamtaylorjr]

Recent figure study

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[williamtaylorjr]

San Francisco I still love you. (at Belle Cora)

[williamtaylorjr]

Bryon Babe 1.

[williamtaylorjr]

Spent a fair amount of the weekend rearranging my books to make a space for my newly aquired 5 volumes of Byron with really pretty engraved plates. And had a really good time of it. #Booknerdlife