February 2012
62 posts
4 tags
“I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to love in you that...”
– A Letter from Leo Tolstoy, to his fiancé Valeria Arsenev
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They Sing
People are always scuffling up and down my street- having conversations and not noticing me sitting on my porch twenty feet above them. They talk about their girlfriends or their nail polish or the fortune teller who they went to see last week. They’re crying over their true loves and making promises about Friends Forever. They are silently sharing a coffee and they are kicking a rock and they are...
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“So that each
is its own, now—each has fallen, blond stillness.
Closer,...”
– Some Peaches,After Storm, Carl Phillips
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“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.”
– Sylvia Plath
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Clear Feeling
Girl who waltzes with her eyes shut tight,
Boy underwater, still breathing.
Words have as many meanings as they have speakers
And the world has as many faces as it does hearts.
There are ways of feeling that do not exist anyplace but that soft space
Of skin between your eyelid and your eyebrow.
I haven’t found them since.
You know I can’t remember the facts,
But ever so...
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“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody...”
– Andy Warhol
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Look
You are what you call yourself. Everyone’s dying to take themselves away, find an alone place to call themselves human in. But that’s not what being human is- that’s not humanity. You’ve told me again and again that life’s just about saying you’re going to win. But you, you pretty baby, you spend half of your life living in guilt and the other half in fear.
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“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept...”
– John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
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“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”
– Socrates
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Don't Ask Me For Favors, Just Want Me For Life,...
Art
What they mean is,
Human on Canvas.
Humanity
Is
Please please I’ll give you all my memories!
Every bit of my love,
All of my light!
They are jealous terrors
Squealing,
Vial of me, ask for it please!
3 tags
“There is a loneliness in the world so great that you can see it in the slow...”
– Charles Bukowski
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There
I woke up too early, the sky was red and the clouds were stringy, like your eyes. Have a great day, feel better, be happy, count your body parts and learn again how lucky lucky lucky it is to be here. You can say you don’t believe in luck, but you aren’t always in control.
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“To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze...”
– John Ruskin
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Change
She had this flair for superstitions,
We sat on a rock by the lake
Our hands clenched around patches of dry grass
It was summer.
June
The Canadian Geese were back,
They were catching dragonflies.
And she said, she said:
Oh remember when excuses still had uses,
When we weren’t drowning in our dirty fables;
We used to be so thirsty,
We used to bruise the soles of our feet
Jumping off...
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Leda and the Swan, by William Butler Yeats
“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the...
7 tags
Hollowed Love
She pries her hands
From his painful fists,
Lets herself drop-
Splatter
On the sidewalk.
His heart jumps to be caught in his throat
And he can hear his own clock keeping time
Like fat raindrops pounding in his ears.
4 tags
“There were frogs there all right, thousands of them. Their voices beat the...”
– John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
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“My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.”
– André Breton
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Clogged
And there he is,
Pondering how much of a gentle soul he must be.
With his wrists hanging low,
And his spine twisted
South of her heart.
She spits regret and anger through her teeth,
Shoots pieces of herself in spirals across the room
But he dodges
And the heavy-flesh phrases hit wall and fall to the ground,
Writhing like caught fish.
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“There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.”
– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
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“We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot...”
– Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet On The Western Front
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Dawning
She doesn’t know the way she looks when she prays, but her lips pull down at the corners as if she’s about to cry. And her clenched eyelids twitch in hints of the words she sends over her head. She comes home with wet weeds stuck to her calves and foxtails woven into her socks, smelling of tree sap and river.
3 tags
“She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and...”
– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
8 tags
However You Got Here (For The Lover Unloved)
If you’re living long enough to sleep through,
you can wake up.
They told you not to think too much, or too deeply.
Well I’d laugh so hard in their faces,
My saliva would hit their cheeks. Because it’s your fault already.
Let things be flexible,
Let everything change.
You are not a rock,
I don’t care what the metaphors say or
What the mantras feed.
You are a creature of humanity
And you...
A Valentine; Edgar Allan Poe
For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines!- they hold a treasure
Divine- a talisman- an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure-
The words- the syllables! Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may...
3 tags
“Everything’s a story - You are a story -I am a story.”
– Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
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“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be...”
– William Shakespeare
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First Letter
But discovering the world’s satire has not made you happy either.
Don’t you know?
It’s death.
Death, death, not satire.
You live in uncomfortable motion,
Born a beautiful monk
Asking,
Does life kill us
Or does it just let us die
Does it even-does it see us?
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“You’re always begging things to love you as if you were a beggar for love....”
– D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
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Make-Up
Sitting on the hall floor. Used to tell me you weren’t sleeping, just resting your eyes. And that is how you died. We came home from the grocery store, it had been a happy day. My father whispered in mother’s ear and she choked, dropped the milk. We are all the same.
3 tags
“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all...”
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
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A Tickle
Life feels lovely on my skin
The word is Air,
The feeling is Fraught,
The color is Delight,
And the theory is that it never happened-
The lights, the camera, the action.
Yes it’s a play,
A theatric movement of your hands,
A great big smile-
Those custum made gums and teeth.
I’m a doll and I’m a dance.
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“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who...”
– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and...”
– John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous
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Bathe
She’s got eyes under my skin,
Cracking ribs and growing time like hair.
Some yellow-green Russian fairy tale living under my skin,
The way fireflies shine through leaves in the dark:
Muted light and a sun-down type of silence through tulip petals.
Halos around the ivy leaves.
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“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in...”
– Ezra Pound
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“Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.”
– Richard de Bury, The Love of Books: The Philobiblion of Richard de Bury
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She Doesn't Come With Claws (Life Isn't About...
The girl is blood.
Her coded carnival eyes.
She lives a ridiculous manufactured green
Sells her narrow mind under the name of strong feeling.
She’s skin and bittersweet memory
And she’s waiting.
To be one of those mysterious-beauty girls,
Whose black eyes hide themselves behind thick lashes and hoods of hair.
But she’s never really thought how.
For now she makes soap...
3 tags
“Love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
– William Shakespeare
5 tags
Nod (More Banal Love Poetry)
You step into a room and gravity changes.
Stomach floats and heart drops,
Drips down to my knees where it cools and makes my joints stick.
Self-obsession. Aggression.
The plumb-colored haze of wind
And your lips.
4 tags
“The excellence of every Art is its intensity.”
– John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats
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9 tags
Letter to a Baby
I’ve been holding this apple in my hands for I don’t know how long, but I can’t bring myself to eat it. It was made to be held. All these pretty little bumps under its skin, the lovely speckles and streaks. Photographs are not this perfect. I’ve folded body in an attempt to make myself more compact and I’m staring at this apple wondering if it would have liked to grow a little taller, a little...
7 tags
Call Me Sorry
He was always most mine when the bright lights flared and his face went suddenly wild with disconcert. That’s when we aren’t hiding in our tortise-shells. He used to tell me that the world is a beauty machine: makes it and loves it, then eats it whole. Only the ugly ones last. But I want to not be afraid the way he wanted to not be frightened.