shagging-shakespeare

[shagging-shakespeare]

There are times when the voice in my head screams ‘this will always be it! You will never get better!’ And sometimes I give in to that pessimism. When my friends are cruel or my mother is angry with me or I am angry with myself, it is easy to decide that the pain I feel now is all I’ll ever be able to feel.

But then I see my father walk through the door, six months sober, calling out to ask my mum about what’s happened at work. He takes a seat at the kitchen table and they are chatting, gossiping like friends with the hatred once felt absent in this moment. I open instagram and see that the girl who left my school years ago has a girlfriend and is excited to graduate. I send a stupid video to the guy I’ve only been friends with for a months, a guy who went through hell and came out of it and now sends me stupid memes he finds in the hopes it’ll make me laugh.

Everything is changing and I don’t want to be too sad to see the beauty within the sunsets anymore.

[shagging-shakespeare]

Corruption

I spend hours thinking over the rot

That has corrupted my skin to the point

That no one will touch it.

Even my friends flinch at my fingers brushing theirs.

They tell me that the love I seek

Will be painful and futile

But they can’t understand that being held

By a bad man is still being held;

That his affection is a sign that I could be desired.

The rot within might yet be loved.

I might still become beautiful.

The hope for beauty remains inside me.

[shagging-shakespeare]

Sleepless Company

As a child, I lay in bed refusing to

Shut my eyes in case I missed

A moment, a second, of the world I knew

To be vivid and happy and unkissed.

It burst, it bulged with life,

With joy (my daily expectation)

Married with hope: it’s naive wife.

To be awake was adulation

And sleep no more than the tedious consultation.

But too soon bones start to ache,

Eyes dry, limbs slow and smiles falter.

And sleep becomes preferable to being awake

When days feel like an empty alter.

Colour is drained from mature eyes.

The mind can not live on this melancholy

When old and cynical I begin to realise

The deceit of decorative, plastic holly.

She must look at me and feel sorry.

But you, my friend, are a shot of caffeine.

And Tonight is not for sleep.

I am numb from joy. Bliss that’s like codine.

[shagging-shakespeare]

Love lost

I am posed like a Michelangelo

Stagnant with suggestions of movement

Your eyes hold me in position, staring

I am unable to beg for undeserved forgiveness.

Words clog my throat, rot in the drains of my body

Hollow, meaning escapes me when confronted

With my own disloyalty.

You have the chisel in your hand, but the artist is disgusted

By her work. I am grotesque

[shagging-shakespeare]

Judgement Day

I love you both in spite and because.

You have convinced me of the truth

Truth of souls linked, the poetry

Of you and I, intertwined.

My friend, if judgement day comes

And an eternity from now I rise

Out of my grave, soul bearded like an open hand

I will see you standing there

Effervescent in your funeral cloths

And I will recognise you still.

My friend, I will smile when I see you

And I hope as you make your assent you will

Look down at me for a moment

And smile back.

[shagging-shakespeare]

The Poetry of Michelangelo (no.239)

(An Annotated Translation by James M. Saslow)

[shagging-shakespeare]

Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense?

- Ruby Francisco

[shagging-shakespeare]

You cannot make everyone think and feel as deeply as you do. This is your tragedy … because you understand them, and they do not understand you.

Daniel Saint

[shagging-shakespeare]

When you found God it seemed like He was your perfect escape.

God forgives and so should I. But God has no father, God has never experienced the betrayal of the man who was built to love you casting you aside

Issac seethed, Abraham’s piety came at a cost.

Bind me in your holy chains, they offer more comfort than your arms.

My forgiveness is rooted in an older deity.

I flood the earth, I cut the strings of fate, I dole out punishment

As I see fit.

Fear my biblical wrath. Fear the divine retribution I wield!

I may have been soft once

But as the fat was starved off my bones I realised

How good it feels to be sharp.

- a rather unoriginal poem that I wrote when I was angry

[shagging-shakespeare]

dante and virgil in hell, by william-adolphe bouguereau // the song of achilles, by madeline miller

[shagging-shakespeare]

"So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world."

– Vincent van Gogh, Letters to Theo

[shagging-shakespeare]

Duchess: Farewell, Cariola.

In my last will I have not much to give:

A-many hungry guests have fed upon me.

Thine will be a poor reversion.

Cariola: I will die with her!

Duchess: I pray thee, look thou giv’st my little boy

Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl

Say her prayers ere she sleep.

- The Duchess of Malfi. Act 4, scene 2

[shagging-shakespeare]

“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling”

—Oscar Wilde

[shagging-shakespeare]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God [originally published 1905]