in shoe boxes

"I multiplied myself to feel myself,
To feel myself I had to feel everything,
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,
I undressed, I yielded,
And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god."

Fernando Pessoa

"That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow."

Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters  (via heatheavy)

(Source: violentwavesofemotion, via twoatheistsinlust)

"It’s about misunderstandings between people and places, being disconnected and looking for moments of connection. There are so many moments in life when people don’t say what they mean, when they are just missing each other, waiting to run into each other in a hallway."

Sofia Coppola (on Lost in Translation)

(Source: seabois, via lesbian-a-la-mode)

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘Consume me.’"

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via dulcetdecember)

(Source: larmoyante, via hamletandcheese)

"Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air."

Gary Snyder, Mid-August At Sourdough Mountain Lookout  (via the-sun-snarer)

"I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk."

Scott Spencer, from Endless Love.

"Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined
future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or
a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced
that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was
charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and
one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-
loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the
high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so
many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies
in the perfumed heat of summer night."

Mark Strand, from Almost Invisible: Poems.

"Making love was never about you and me in a bed. We made love whenever we held hands."

Ian Thomas, from I Wrote This For You (via coffeeurlgirl)

(Source: awdray, via coffeeurlgirl)

"Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning."

Pablo Neruda, from It is Born (via kayrawan)

"Last night, the dream of you standing
in the doorway like a lighthouse
calling for your hands to come back
home, & from a great distance."

Aracelis Girmay (via bricks-and-wolf-dust)

"Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I’m getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal."

Richard Siken, from Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

"But my heart is an old house
(the kind my mother
grew up in)
hell to heat and cool
and faulty in the wiring
and though it’s nice to look at
I have no business
inviting lovers in."

Clementine von Radics (via azucarcult)

(Source: clementinevonradics, via reveur-solitaire)

"I have so much of you in my heart."

John Keats (via perfect)

(Source: arpeggia, via twoatheistsinlust)

"To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are– painful, impermanent, open, imperfect–and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us."

Gary Snyder (via cubrnnr)

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

Jack Kerouac, the Dharma Bums (via winedarkseas)

(via twoatheistsinlust)