Anonymous
Like Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
Anonymous is a sound that has no physical source, a colorless force like electricity.
Forsooth! Forsythia. It must be spring. Anonymous must have been an environmentalist.
Michelle Pfeiffer wears fragrance to slip into character—to anonymize herself, the star, and disappear far into someone else.
If you happen to be a donor who wishes to remain anonymous, your money and your identity are safe with me!
Receiving an anonymous tip seems like it would feel superior to being a source speaking on the condition of anonymity.
John Doe, the traditional sham name for a plaintiff, inevitably makes me picture a humanoid deer. Richard Roe, the defendant, makes me picture fish eggs.
The internet has given people the anonymity they need to speak atrocious trash.
The trope of the anonymity of big-city life, though popular, feels imprecise. Rather than
zone among a crowd of faceless anonymites, people here make me feel more welcome than most suburbanites do.
Anonymous feedback, schmanonymous feedback—say it to my face.
Autofill thinks I want to buy an Anonymous Mask. But what good would it do to put it on and go protest “late capitalism”? The battle’s been pitched (I almost typed lost) since before I was born.
“Nameless” is not quite the same as “anonymous.” Just look at Clint Eastwood playing Uomo senza nome—The Man With No Name—in the Dollars Trilogy: a highly recognizable antihero rocking a poncho.
Their little logo—the man without a head—is cute and all, but nevertheless it galls me when the hacktivist group Anonymous says “we are doing it for the lulz.”
I have always longed to find an anonymous painting in my attic that will finally be ascribed to Pablo Picassso. The problem with this fantasy is that I haven’t got an attic.
QAnon? More like PooAnon.
This one goes out to all the Jane Does.
Anonymous will never know how much they meant to us, but does anyone ever know how much they meant to anyone?
An anonymous black car waits to take me to the airport.
See you anon.
Again
When my love goes away, I become the homesick one, calling and calling: It’s me again.
Is it my imagination, or do the skyscrapers have tear-stained faces? I want all the things that I loved about my city to come back again. Should I hold a séance for my lost metropolis, or what?
I detest switching tasks every ten or so minutes; I’d rather just finish something instead of coming back to it again and again.
I’m sorry, what was your name again?
Walking around with my arm in a sling, with every step I think, Whatever you do, don’t fall down again.
Maybe you’d be happier if you didn’t check your email 74 times a day. Then again, maybe not.
Again, I’m not criticizing is something that people who are criticizing like to claim.
This poem is a fossil of a feeling I had that I wanted to preserve and experience again.
That Big Band song that goes “Kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again” reminds me it’s possible to feel nostalgia even for times I didn’t live through.
When I do something again that I’ve done before, can we say I’m engaging in an excavation of cliché and not a participation in cliché?
Again and again can mean both continual and continuous. In continuity we trust, like day breaking constantly around the world.
A sparrow lands on a branch and pecks a peach, but it’s too hard; he’ll try again later.
Tell me again how nothing is as certain as death and as uncertain.
Every trend that fades could come back again someday. Scrunchies, for instance.
Again, don’t hoard your treasure, money is for spending. Remember, a loss can also be a gain.
What does it mean, my morbid adoration of stories that end, “And then, he vanished, never to be heard from again”?
Someday, we’ll snap the wishbone of distance and be together again.
In
Who first said, “There is another world, and it is in this one”? And what did they mean?
“That gum you like is going to come back in style”—one of the most iconic lines in the original Twin Peaks. David Lynch’s mind: what’s it like in there?
The worst part of the surgery to put two pins in my broken hand was the surgeon’s choice to include “Hey Soul Sister” in his operating room playlist. That song, in my opinion, is a crime against humanity. But hey, whatever it takes for him to get in there. In the OR. In my hand.
Which is to be preferred: coming back in style, or never leaving?
Always in good taste: a tall man in an overcoat. A person doing something heroic, then saying with modesty, “All in a day’s work.” The manager coming in before anyone else.
I hate when I want something to happen in the blink of an eye, but somebody says sagely, “All in good time.”
I’ve always aspired to kindness without expecting anything in return. I think I’ve achieved it a few times, but it’s hard to escape from a quid pro quo mindset.
Online, my friend Mattilda asks, “How many dystopias can you fit into one dystopia, the possibilities are endless.” In the replies, a fractal of dystopias. An M. C. Escher sketch of dystopias. A question about how we get into the dystopia we were promised, the one where we roam around in abandoned cities reclaimed by nature, taking whatever we need from stores and libraries.
In a New York minute, we could be in good hands.
Rich in tradition, poor in money. Rich in love, poor in money. Rich in ambition, poor in money.
In my youth, I got it in my head that I could grow up to be the first female president of the United States; now I wonder if we’ll see one even in my lifetime.
My friend Tim got a shirt that says BE KIND TO ME I’M IN MISERY and he looks really happy in it.
Do you ever get the feeling that the mob is closing in? Come on, let’s go meet them in our Sunday best.
Maybe going to hell in a handbasket isn’t so bad. It probably depends a great deal on whose hand the basket is actually in.
