February 2012
14 posts
4 tags
“Your body is the house you grew up in.
How dare you try to burn it to the...”
– Sierra DeMulder (via sealfeathers)
2 tags
“I drew the word surrender in the mist of your breath, waving a white sheet around your body. ‘Dear, in the morning let me put on your make-up for you. I’ll be loading your gems with mascara then I’ll tell you the truth…’ I watched black ropes and tears ramble down your face. Lady war paint. A squad of tiny men rappels down those snaking lines and you say; “Thank you for releasing all those...
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
pillowstars:
Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.
— H. Murakami
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
– Franz Kafka (via kafkaesque-world)
2 tags
3 tags
“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I...”
– W.S. Merwin, Separation. (via askios)
5 tags
For Grace, After A Party
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t...
5 tags
Mayakovsky
1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!
then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.
2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your...
5 tags
“You too have your gentle
moments, you too have eyelashes,
each of your eyes...”
– Margaret Atwood (from her poem, “Small Tactics”)
Anonymous asked: Will anyone ever be truly okay?
January 2012
17 posts
5 tags
"The Madness Vase," Andrea Gibson
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man...
7 tags
“He does not speak of these things to people, there is nobody to speak them to...”
– Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
6 tags
“you are a mystery I promise I will never try to solve.
what science calls...”
– An excerpt from Stay by Andrea Gibson (via sincerelylean)
6 tags
“He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will...”
– Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake)
6 tags
“She wanted to reach out and grab Calvin’s hand, but it seemed that ever since...”
– A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’engle (via check-your-pockets-chimney-child)
4 tags
“We cannot continue to turn ourselves in for the mess we left when we tried...”
– Buddy Wakefield (via pressley)
4 tags
“Now it’s your turn.
Pretend you’re just being yourselves.
Pretend you live for...”
– Buddy Wakefield (via lostinoblivionn)
4 tags
"The Thing Is," Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body...
4 tags
not-here-any-more:
There is this Icelandic word skúffuskáld, which means someone who’s secretly a poet. It literally means “drawer poet”: someone who writes poetry but chugs it all into his desk drawer instead of showing it to people.
3 tags
“Hey man, don’t ruin love by wanting it so bad.
Don’t ruin love by wanting it so...”
– Derrick Brown, excerpt from The Long Outstanding Saltation into Wild Open Air (via holdonmagnolia)
4 tags
"Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk-",...
Here is a soul, accepting nothing.
Obstinate as a small child
refusing tapioca, peaches, toast.
The cheeks are streaked, but dry.
The mouth is firmly closed in both directions.
Ask, if you like,
if it is merely sulking, or holding out for better.
The soup grows cold in the question.
The ice cream pools in its dish.
Not this, is all it knows. Not this.
As certain cut flowers refuse to...
5 tags
“Nobody knows you.
You don’t know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with...”
– D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence.
7 tags
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will...”
– Margaret Atwood
5 tags
3 tags
“What did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer (via r00tlesstree)
9 tags
7 tags
"January First," Octavio Paz
The doors of the year open,
like the doors of language,
onto the unknown.
Last night you said:
tomorrow
we must draw signs,
sketch a landscape, hatch a plot
on the unfolded page
of paper and the day.
Tomorrow we must invent,
anew,
the reality of this world.
When I opened my eyes it was late.
For a second of a second
I felt like the Aztec
on the...
December 2011
23 posts
5 tags
“So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray,
go throw your TV set away
and in its...”
– Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
3 tags
3 tags
“and I’ve been running for home
through the windpipe of a man who sings
while...”
– Andrea Gibson - Birthday (via hellosoulshine)
4 tags
“Our poetry is the technique of intimacy, two lovers that hold each other not to...”
– Ken Chen, “Poetry and the Humans.” Pleiades 24:2.
2 tags
trente-trois
xerophytic:
i’m staring at fragments of my life falling apart right in front of my eyes, but i can’t find anything inside that cares enough to reach out and stop them.
6 tags
“The mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards...”
– Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (via fuckyeahbeatgeneration)
9 tags
6 tags
excerpt, "a part of the thousand ways to say...
... the bare train tracks
rusting under the moon
who are you really
eyes
arch down as if from a tremendous height
yet I've seen you small
hunched
in mottled woods
goodbye
to the swords we carried bright
or chipped & stained
against
cobalt sky the last
brown apricots of summer
filling our mouths the
brocade of
the saddle blankets frayed
wind
plucking the cords
3 tags
“that guests no longer come unannounced
or that the photo album contains...”
– Denver Butson, Never Mind (via yesyes)
2 tags
4 tags
“And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
– Walt Whitman (via escolma)
4 tags
4 tags
"On Turning Ten"
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the...
5 tags
Susannah reflected that Roland seemed different now, and she didn’t think it was simply because the voices in his mind had ceased. This is the way he was when he still had wars to fight and men to lead and his old friends around him, she thought. How he was before the world moved on and he moved on with it, chasing that man Walter. This is how he was before the Big Empty turned him inward on...
5 tags
“Are your voices gone?”
Roland nodded. “All gone. Yours?”
“Gone. I’m all together again. We both are.”
They looked at the same instant, with the same impulse. As Roland swept Jake into his arms, the boy’s unnatural self-possession broke and he began to cry— it was the exhausted, relieved weeping of a child who has been lost long, suffered...
2 tags
“Do not remember me
as disaster
nor as the keeper of secrets
I am a fellow...”
– Audre Lorde
4 tags
“And now each night, I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number....”
– Leroi Jones
3 tags
drpridemore:
Words
by Hettie Jones
are keys
or stanchions
or stones
I give you my word
You pocket it
and keep the change
Here is a word on
the tip of my tounge:love
I hold it close
though it dreams of leaving
5 tags
“Birds sang cheerily in the trees. A light breeze blew along the road. Eddie and...”
– The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, by Stephen King (via skulllduggery)