ohno-poetry - Tumblr blog

[ohno-poetry]

“I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[ohno-poetry]

graves grow no green that you can use.

gwendolyn brooks

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“Don’t give them a taste of their own medicine. They already know what it tastes like. Give them a taste of your own medicine. If they lied, let your medicine be honesty. If they played with your emotions, let your medicine be maturity. Don’t be afraid to be yourself, even if it means removing yourself from lives that you want to be in. You are, no doubt, worthy of being valued for who you are. So be who you are.”

— Najwa Zebian

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“You made flowers grow in my lungs and although they are beautiful, I can’t breathe.”

— Unknown

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picking up the slender smile

you dropped. and broke. and left.

pushing up your cheeks with sticky fingers

(you no longer hear your heartbeat. gravity sleeps in your bed and combs your hair

plants heavy kisses on the back of your neck.)

you tip your head back at the party

scrape your nails across the candy wrappers

and you’re gulping: electric blue, purple hot

like the heavens you pray to.

cinnamon caramel, ribbons of heavy chocolate (burdens) tangled lemon sweetness (a gift.) you’ll be sweet to the back of your throat — words weighted and

choked down like cinnamon.

love is choking on the act of breathing

but singing every prayer.

Really? I think you’re looking to shatter heaven

tender girl, lovely girl (you’d last

one day in the forest. don’t fool yourself).

The loudest voices were always your own.

you long to be held

but don’t want to be touched.

everything is right but you.

[ohno-poetry]

I etch myself into you like rabbits burrow deep, and reeds make lines in stones over hundreds of years. My tears, are inaugural rains at the start of each season, flooding myself with turbulence, like the wings of unsettled geese. We are new grass, buds in May, sunrays on treetops, burnt edges of fresh toast, skin rounded like comfortable corners, juice with the lid off, freesias, oh and the other night, we were a lightning storm.

[ohno-poetry]

(You Know Me)

If words are too much, try sensations - salt licking the crease by your mouth, the sky vacant of stars, all heart shored up inside.

If memories are too much, try tomorrow - you feared what never happened, so thrill, now, now, now, in the possibility of heat.

You tried to strand your ship, yet, adrift, cannot sleep tonight in the beacon glare. If silence is too much - is it? - try sensations.

[ohno-poetry]

Somewhat akin to tiredness,

this ache soaked

into my bones,

like a sponge steeped

in alcohol.

I am numb

from the lack of

sustenance,

a nice feeling,

to be emptied out.

I am elemental,

atomic,

now I am almost nothing.

Thin as a breeze,

as a nightgown barely covering,

slight like silk,

maybe even

only, a puff of air.

They describe it as gnawing,

these pains,

this deep knowing,

that I could be half

of me.

I foraged within myself,

among the new green

of budding leaves

and found the twigs of disaster

that I hung my reflection upon.

And the hoarded parts of me,

that desired more and more.

I rummaged within

and found myself

lessened like cotton candy

after one small bite.

What if I was happier to sate

this clambering hunger

with cream drunk

love.

I cannot.

My ribs rise and fall

to the beat of denial

and dissolution,

evaporation,

as though

we are

only clouds.

[ohno-poetry]

Get ready with me

On a subatomic level

Let’s follow the trail of wild flowers

Desiccated and forgotten

In the pages of time

Tearing through us

Until we get to the good bit

The end bit

Where you tell me that I’m loved

And it finally sinks in

And no longer will I be

The plastic dancer in your jewellery box

But a fully realised human being

With a backstory

And motives of my own

And I’ll start doing skin care

And I’ll start planting flowers

In the misbegotten garden

Which isn’t choked by weeds

They are holding space for me

Which is a kindness everybody deserves

When they’re moving forward slowly

Like I’m moving forward slowly

Cautious as a secret

Each day a doll step more

[ohno-poetry]

[ohno-poetry]

🫵 it is your obligation to read more poetry & create more poetry 🫵

[ohno-poetry]

Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream; “The Complex Sentence”

[ohno-poetry]

Astronomers Locate a New Planet

Matthew Olzmann

“Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.”

—Reuters, 8/24/2011

Like the universe’s largest engagement ring, it twirls

and sparkles its way through infinity.

The citizens of the new world know about luxury.

They can live for a thousand years.

Their hearts are little clocks

with silver pendulums pulsing inside,

Eyes like onyx, teeth like pearl.

But it’s not always easy. They know hunger.

They starve. A field made of diamond

is impossible to plow; shovels crumble and fold

like paper animals. So frequent is famine,

that when two people get married,

one gives the other a locket filled with dirt.

That’s the rare thing, the treasured thing, there.

It takes decades to save for,

but the ground beneath them glows,

and people find a way.

On Earth, when my wife is sleeping,

I like to look out at the sky.

I like to watch TV shows about supernovas,

and contemplate things that are endless

like the heavens and, maybe, love.

I can drink coffee and eat apples whenever I want.

Things grow everywhere, and so much is possible,

but on the news tonight: a debate about who

can love each other forever and who cannot.

There was a time when it would’ve been illegal

for my wife to be my wife. Her skin,

my household of privilege. Sometimes,

I wish I could move to another planet.

Sometimes, I wonder what worlds are out there.

I turn off the TV because the news rarely makes

the right decision on its own. But even as the room

goes blacker than the gaps between galaxies,

I can hear the echoes: who is allowed to hold

the ones they wish to hold, who can reach

into the night, who can press his or her

own ear against another’s chest and listen

to a heartbeat telling stories in the dark.

[ohno-poetry]

And if someday  the uncertainty of this world  becomes too overwhelming,  I hope you remember  that some mysteries  aren’t meant to be solved,  they’re meant  to be lived.

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The Starry Night; Vincent van Gogh, Anne Sexton

[ohno-poetry]

Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.

It’s summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn’t quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tigerstripe the light. The rays are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadows the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.

A long clinging breeze comes and goes, racing ripples across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It’s a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There’s the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.

You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lakes movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny physics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.

Now, right on that tap – stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still – think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.

Behind or inside or through the two hundred and eighteen words that make up my description, behind or inside or through those nine hundred and sixty-nine letters there is some kind of flow. A purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties to gravity of time, a stream that can only be seen if you choose to look at it from the precise angle we are looking from now, but there, nevertheless, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake into yours.

Next, try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witness events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

Now, go back to your lake, back to your gently bobbing boat. But this time, know the lake; know the place for what it is and when you’re ready, take a look over the boat’s side. The water is clear and deep. Broken sunlight cuts blue wedges down, down into the clean cold depths. Sit quietly, wait and watch. Don’t move. Be very, very still. They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say. Be very quiet. Keep looking into the water. Keep looking and keep watching.