#you don't know what love is

[apoemaday]

You Don't Know What Love Is

by Kim Addonizio but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up with an ache she can’t locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

[greater-grief]

to z,

it wasn't your fault.

it never was. nor will it ever be.

you were a kid.

kids deserve happiness and love yet you got none of that.

still, here you stand.

i know that hurt little child still lives inside you and no matter how much you try to push him away, you can't.

because he is you.

you are him.

and i know you hate that but with time you'll love him too.

you are not the monster you think you are.

in fact, you aren't even close to it.

you give so much to the world and the people you care endlessly for and ask for nothing in return.

it pains me to see because you think you are so simply replaceable,

so easily forgotten.

but i think for the rest of my days i will remember you and the time we've spent together.

i've never met anyone like you and i don't think i ever will again.

unfortunately i think i could scream this all off the highest peak and you still wouldn't understand it.

but i pray someday you do.

even if we aren't in each others lives when you do.

you are light.

you are love.

you are all that is good in the world and much more.

you just have to see it.

because everyone else already does.

[randomberlinchick]

Watch "Cassandra Wilson - You Don't Know What Love Is (Later With Jools Holland 1994)" on YouTube

You don't know what love is / Until you've learned the meaning of the blues / Until you've lost a love you had to lose / You don't know what love is

You don't know how lips hurt / Until you've kissed and had to pay the cost / Until you've flipped your heart and you have lost / You don't know what love is

Do you know how a lost heart fears / The thought of reminiscing / And how lips that taste of tears / Will lose the taste for kissing

You don't know how hearts burn / For love that cannot live, yet never dies / Until you've faced each dawn with sleepless eyes / You don't know what love is

You don't know how hearts burn / For love that cannot live, yet never dies / Until you've faced each dawn with sleepless eyes / How could you know what love is, what love is / What love is

Good night y'all 💋

[jt1674]

[rastronomicals]

8:41 AM EST January 16, 2023:

Sonny Rollins - "You Don't Know What Love Is" From the album Saxophone Colossus (1956)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: Hard Bop

[kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate]

YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS by Kim Addonizio

But you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she's headed, you know she'll wake up with an ache she can't locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

[secondbeatsongs]

source

[coolerdracula]

saying “visual style" because, for example, if you would swap your current wardrobe for an identical, ethically made counterpart, there would be no visible change

[muppetfreak]

Mr. Riordan, it is truly a pleasure getting to experience your second draft.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[greater-grief]

"i love you!"

no. you don't.

you love the version of me you've created in your head.

the version that is endlessly devoted to you, and only you.

the version who's only purpose in life is to love and care for you.

that isn't me.

it never was.

we were never meant to be.

we were simply the universe's matchmaking mistake.

so leave.

take your words of love and admiration to someone else.

someone who will appreciate them.

someone who deserves them.

someone who isn't me.

[glorious-spoon]

i know we all laugh (mostly fondly) about the paper-thin plots in porn that only exist to make the sex happen, but i was reading some old stargate fic over the weekend, and i really think we're sleeping on the paper-thin hurt/comfort plot that only exists to force the characters to FEEL THINGS.

like, is this scenario realistic? no. does it make any rational sense? no. does it provide a built-in excuse for a character to collapse, bloody and disoriented, into the arms of his beloved/friend/partner? obviously, that's the whole point of this exercise.

i love it. it's my favorite thing in the world.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

going through my old journals as part of therapy homework and i'm reading a section written in the emotional wreckage of a full-on breakdown when i get hit with this line:

There is never a satisfying answer to ‘Why didn’t they love me?’

like wow babe. good fucking point

[egophiliac]

You can’t pick Lilia for this. But who is your other favorite short character in Twst?

I like the angry little king boy 🌹

[time-to-write-and-suffer]

I love how on Tumblr, "media literacy" has become "Um, just because someone writes about this doesn't mean they're endorsing this. I hate all these media puritans ruining everything."

I'm sad to inform you that knowing when and whether an author is endorsing something, implying something, saying something, is also part of media literacy. Knowing when they are doing this and when they're not is part of media literacy. Assuming that no author has ever endorsed a bad thing is how you fall for proper gander. It's not media literacy to always assume that nobody ever has agreed with the morally reprehensible ideas in their work.

Sometimes, authors are endorsing something, and you need to be aware when that happens, and you also need to be aware when you're doing it as an author. All media isn't horny dubcon fanfic where you and the author know it's problematic IRL but you get off to it in the privacy of your brain. Sometimes very smart people can convince you of something that'll hurt others in the real world. Sometimes very dumb people will romanticize something without realizing they're doing it and you'll be caught up in it without realizing that you are.

Being aware of this is also media literacy. Being aware of the narrative tools used to affect your thinking is media literacy. Deciding on your own whether you agree with an author or not is media literacy. Enjoying characters doing bad things and allowing authors to create flawed or cruel characters for the sake of a story is perfectly fine, but it is not the same as being media literate. Being smug about how you never think an author has bad intentions tells me you're edgy, not that you're media literate. You can't use one rule to apply to all media. That's not how media literacy works. Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Aheem heem. Anyway.

[astralightning]

Me walking out of Across the Spider-verse like