Classics Archives - Sensitive Skin Magazine

The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and ...

Snail Poem

Peter Orlovsky

Snail Poem Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired & handsome felt, Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wigle at blown up clowd. Ear turnes close to underlayer of green felt moss & sound o...

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Harlan Ellison

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung ...

The Big Space Fuck

Kurt Vonnegut

The Big Space Fuck KURT VONNEGUT / AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS, HARLAN ELLISON, ED., 1972 “What was the dirtiest story I ever wrote?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in Palm Sunday, his 1981 “autobiographical collage.” “Surel...

I Sing the Body Electric

Walt Whitman

I Sing the Body Electric —1— I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge ...

The Twilight of Freedom, a poem by Osip Mandelstam

Jenny Wade

Let us praise, brothers, freedom’s twilight, The great diminishing year! A heavy forest of nets is lowered Into the turbulent waters of night. You are ascending in desolate years, Oh sun, judge, people. Let us prai...

The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams

"The Red Wheelbarrow," a classic poem by the great William Carlos Williams. You don't need to say much to say a lot.

Hay For the Horses

Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night From far down San Joaquin Through Mariposa, up the Dangerous Mountain roads, And pulled in at eight a.m. With his big truckload of hay behind the barn. With winch and ropes and hooks We s...

The World Is A Beautiful Place

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The World Is A Beautiful Place - Lawrence Ferlinghetti The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then jus...

October in the Railroad Earth

Jack Kerouac

October in the Railroad Earth is a long, flowing prose poem recounting Jack Kerouac’s memories of his experiences as a “student brakeman” on the Southern Pacific Railroad in California. In his interview with Paris Revi...

The First Surrealist Manifesto

André Breton

The First Surrealist Manifesto So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his des...

The Joan Anderson Letter

Neal Cassady

In December 1950, Jack Kerouac received the so-called "Joan Anderson letter" from Neal Cassady. Kerouac later said the letter inspired his new writing style in On The Road. Kerouac thought the letter was lost when somebody d...

The Night I Fucked My Alarm Clock

Charles Bukowski

starving in philadelphia i had a small room it was evening going into night and i stood at my window on the 3rd floor in the dark and looked down into a kitchen across the way on the 2nd floor and i saw a beautiful blo...

William S. Burroughs Fan Letter to Truman Capote, 1970

William S. Burroughs

Truman Capote once famously said of the work of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." A decade or so later, William S. Burroughs returned the favor with this epistolary riposte. July 23, 1970 My Dear Mr. T...

The World of Wrestling

Roland Barthes

The grandiloquent truth of gestures on life's great occasions. --Baudelaire The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient th...