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Love Poem #7 - Alison Prine

The peony buds swelled for days as the ants unfastened the blooms now a shower has left them lying open in the grass.

If I buy you a card with a picture of a door will you understand?

I am trying to think of a hundred words for this summer wind against my skin.

So far, the card is blank inside. A white sheet hanging in a rainstorm.

The door with no lock no handles. No hands.

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I open up my body, whole and spit-shined eager and inside there is only a mouth. The mouth says You are not an easy person to love. Curious, I reach into this mouth and pull out the tongue. I make the tongue say it again, and again.You are not an easy person… You are not an easy person to… And it’s so silly looking. This little flip-flopping thing in the palm of my hand. I show it to everyone. My friends. The guy at 7-11. On the morning you leave I hold it right up to your face. So close you practically choke on it. So close that it practically becomes your tongue. And everyone I show it to just looks at me and laughs.Of course, they say,of course this is true

Excerpt from “A Bad Weekend in Three Parts” by Clementine von Radics, published by Drunk In A Midnight Choir (via clementinevonradics)

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[Songbirds]

Songbirds. Leaves steeped till sour. Juniper. First in the water but no generation. What do I begin? A terrific mass, like a star, invisible, immeasurable, impossibly remote, containing every length and resource. Time and the remainder.

I am gathering against—myself, notyou,notanyone,but

                                   I’m leaving, how else to hum with what is about me the occasion to endure

Aaron McCollough

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Kid - Simon Armitage

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order to grow up, then let me loose to wander leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather, in the gutter ... well, I turned the corner. Now I've scotched that 'he was like a father to me' rumour, sacked it, blown the cover on that 'he was like an elder brother' story, let the cat out on that caper with the married woman, how you took her downtown on expenses in the motor. Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker! Holy roll-me-over-in the-clover, I'm not playing ball boy any longer Batman, now I've doffed that off-the-shoulder Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper; now I'm taller, harder, stronger, older. Batman, it makes a marvellous picture: you without a shadow, stewing over chicken giblets in the pressure cooker, next to nothing in the walk-in larder, punching the palm of your hand all winter, you baby, now I'm the real boy wonder.

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October arrived, spreading a damp chill over the grounds and into the castle. Madam Pomfrey, the nurse, was kept busy by a sudden spate of colds among the staff and students. Raindrops the size of bullets thundered on the castle windows for days on end; the lake rose, the flower beds turned into muddy streams, and Hagrid’s pumpkins swelled to the size of garden sheds.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (via cardigansandcocktails)

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Utopia is a combination of three greek words; Eu (good), Ou (not), and Topos (place). Utopia translated is “good not place”. It is important to remember, as a “not place,” it is impossible to arrive at utopia. The reason we imagine utopias is to provide a point on the compass that orients us on our travels. Without utopia, we’re lost – we are traveling without direction, guessing and hoping that we are moving forward. The purpose of utopia is not a destination, it is to give us direction so we can progress.

Steve Lambert

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Madness and witchery… are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. Consider how many female celebrities of classical mythology, literature and cult make themselves objectionable by the way they use their voice. For example there is the heartchilling groan of the Gorgon, whose name is derived from a Sanskrit word garg meaning “a guttural animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth.” There are the Furies whose highpitched and horrendous voices are compared by Aiskhylos to howling dogs or sounds of people being tortured in hell. There is the deadly voice of the Sirens and the dangerous ventriloquism of Helen and the incredible babbling of Kassandra and the fearsome hullabaloo of Artemis as she charges through the woods. There is the seductive discourse of Aphrodite which is so concrete an aspect of her power that she can wear it on her belt as a physical object or lend it to other women. There is the old woman of Eleusinian legend Iambe who shrieks and throws her skirt up over her head to expose her genitalia. There is the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo (daughter of Iambe in Athenian legend) who is described by Sophokles as “the girl with no door on her mouth.” Putting a door on the female mouth as been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

The Gender of Sound, Anne Carson (via hagiographiies)

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My Child’s Instructions

You’re going to walk around the corner.

When you see me, look surprised

and throw down your suitcases, like this.

Run with arms open, yes.

Right here we’ll hug. No, not yet.

You will look very happy, like this.

But also a little crazy. Like that.

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- Ross Poldark, Winston Graham

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Love Poems for People Who Hate Themselves - Christopher Kennedy

Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Folk Tale

I ran down the highway’s yellow lines in my sleep last night. When I woke up, your skin was a desert with no oasis. When I was a boy, the crack of the barber strap used to wake me up, but someone stole it and threw it on the roof of the Brown & Jewel. My mother said my father lost his paycheck in a poker game and came home and cried at her feet. I colored eggs that Easter like a fool. I fed a horse some grass and another boy lost his finger. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but it all adds up. Once I dreamed the ace of spades was a dagger. -- Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Like Any Other Planet

I knew your zip code. I saw Austin and I liked it. I stood outside the 7-11, shirtless, drinking alone. I could go as far as any other man, though my conveyances were limited to public means of transportation. Sometimes it was light and sometimes it was dark. You know, good days, bad days. I saw the desert through the window of a Greyhound bus. It looked like any other planet where pain is the only feeling, but there were cacti blooming some kind of flower that may have been pink. Do you believe me? I opened a book to make an impression, but no one took a glance. The seat beside me was always empty. The driver never stopped. I always thought he was headed your way. --

Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: The Ruckus

I saw the ghost and the ghost’s shadow, but never did I see the dead man who made them. I didn’t believe in the family curse or the vengeful God. I knew my way past the swamp at night with my eyes closed. I was chased by the one they call The Ruckus, but I’ve never been caught yet. I rode my bike when I heard the siren and saw a man lifted up by a front loader from his accidental grave. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a soul, but he didn’t have one. I walked through long grasses with Ronnie and watched his brother shoot him with a flaming arrow. You could grow potatoes in his ears, they said. He learned to play the drums and drowned in the reservoir at sixteen. Now he’s throwing snowballs at cars in Hell. The Ruckus beats his ass for eternity. Can’t say about Heaven. That place caters to a different sort.

--

Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Quarantine

I grieve the hours we spent in a shadow-strewn room where silk scarves dangled from the bedposts. I launched my body against yours in an amphetamine frenzy, passionate and useless, as the basement filled with rain, and the smell of dampness told us our fate was mold, our future toxic, triggering the slow dissolve, the aperture reduction, the merciful fade into reason. Now our bodies sleep apart as if quarantined on different ships, our fevers the same, their sources separate. Every moment is a trespass of the past, a circus of want in a barren wilderness of need. And though I will die this way in a cheap suit of regret and failure, I think of those abandoned hours with fondness, though our expressions were not the expressions of the creatures we wished to be, our animal hearts thrumming inside us, as we lay beneath the bone-white seriousness of the moon.

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In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden - Matthea Harvey

Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart

Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and

Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves

That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and

Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down   

I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence

And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that

They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense

In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear

She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without

It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when

You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of   

A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets

So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds

With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter

About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on   

The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp

I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry

If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire

So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them

To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

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Ephemeral Stream - Elizabeth Willis

This is the way water thinks about the desert. The way the thought of water gives you something to stumble on. A ghost river. A sentence trailing off toward lower ground. A finger pointing at the rest of the show. I wanted to read it. I wanted to write a poem and call it “Ephemeral Stream” because you made of this imaginary creek a hole so deep it looked like a green eye taking in the storm, a poem interrupted by forgiveness. It’s not over yet. A dream can spend all night fighting off the morning. Let me start again. A stream may be a branch or a beck, a crick or kill or lick, a syke, a runnel. It pours through a corridor. The door is open. The keys are on the dashboard.

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I said something, hoping to placate him. Perhaps I said that, ah well, it had all worked out in the end, and it hadn’t been the end of the world, and suggested it was time to not be angry any more.

Terry looked at me. He said: “Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.” I thought of the driven way that Terry wrote, and of the way that he drove the rest of us with him, and I knew that he was right.

There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld. It’s also the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the 11-plus; anger at pompous critics, and at those who think serious is the opposite of funny; anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.

The anger is always there, an engine that drives. By the time Terry learned he had a rare, early onset form of Alzheimer’s, the targets of his fury changed: he was angry with his brain and his genetics and, more than these, furious at a country that would not permit him (or others in a similarly intolerable situation) to choose the manner and the time of their passing.

And that anger, it seems to me, is about Terry’s underlying sense of what is fair and what is not. It is that sense of fairness that underlies Terry’s work and his writing, and it’s what drove him from school to journalism to the press office of the SouthWestern Electricity Board to the position of being one of the best-loved and bestselling writers in the world.

...

Terry’s authorial voice is always Terry’s: genial, informed, sensible, drily amused. I suppose that, if you look quickly and are not paying attention, you might, perhaps, mistake it for jolly. But beneath any jollity there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise.

He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.

Or to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or better yet for all of us, the orangutans.

- Neil Gaiman

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The first day I was a little journalist I was sent out with a real journalist and I saw my first dead body, and it was an extremely dead dead body. When you are a journalist, you see the world, the nasty bits and the good things. You see democracy in progress or no progress whatsoever. You learn about people and get into people's worlds which you'd never get into otherwise. It turns a boy into a man, and it grew me up.

Terry Pratchett

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Cheese--it's milk gone off big-time stylie.

Stephen Fry on QI

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There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.

Khalil Gibran (via rumplestitlskin)