February 2012
5 posts
Mixed Emotions | Travis Montez
readpoems:
[one] dehumanized reduced to a sexuality a preference a passage from Leviticus like my existence begins and ends with who is in my bed [two] father forgive me for i have sinned with choir boys and preacher’s sons and teen-aged fathers and felons and professors and revolutionaries and poets and porn directors and porn stars and married men and go go boys and i have loved not one...
“On mornings when I hope you forget my name,
I walk through the high wet weeds...”
– Dean Young, from “Selected Recent and New Errors” (via proustitute)
I Have These Echoes
kodistes:
Just as that honeybee goes through his day busy, as they say collecting his nectar He has no idea that his real purpose is spreading the pollination of an entire world. This then is how you are going through your day busy, as they say Running your errands having no idea the effect you are having on people like me. I should have been a motorcycle man you know, full time. And I could...
Postman Cheval
surrealism:
We the birds that you always charm from atop those lookouts
And who each night merge into a single flowering branch from your shoulders to the arms of your beloved wheelbarrow
Who tear ourselves away from your wrist more vividly than sparks
We are the sighs of the glass statue that raises itself on its elbow when man sleeps
And may glowing gaps open up in his bed
Gaps through...
“‘No,’ she said. ‘Some things you don’t understand, of course.’
‘Of course,’...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (via hauntingcontradiction)
January 2012
9 posts
“She said, I love you.
He said, Nothing.
(As if there were just one of each...”
– “The Primer,” Christina Davis (via clavicola)
“I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.
I was in a kind...”
– Louise Glück, “Eros” (The Seven Ages, Ecco, 2001)
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
– William James (via justbesplendid) (via scooterjinx) (via booklover) (via rememo)
“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.”
– Maya Angelou (via reluctantbuddha) (via quote-book) (via simplyadreamer) (via booklover) (via rememo)
“the snow doesn’t give a soft white
damn Whom it touches”
– e.e. cummings, from “XIX”, from ViVa (via liquidnight)
fluttering-slips:
Valentine Behind Door Number Two
Here lies the starlit heart housed in scarlet shingles. Blood-bright, the socket. White piano of ribs. For you a lightbox to hold them. Pry it open and the panorama leaks out, twinkles too.
Joni Wallace, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine
“Henry:
I did not mean to burn you yesterday—I was lying as in a dream—and so...”
– Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller (mitochondria)
Stef Pixner, "Intimacy"
sharingpoetry:
my love has white arms and many faces I deal a tricky pack of hearts and aces we smile and wave but do not find us all our rubies glitter to blind us (submitted by lademarche)
grammatolatry:
“I looked up the word I think you are in the dictionary. It was the Internet dictionary and not the one on my desk an arm’s reach away. That would’ve been too easy. Things are never easy with you. I typed the word in wrong. I used a U when it should’ve been an A and an I where it should’ve been a Y. It’s one of those ‘hard words,’ as I call them, something used by fancy pants...
December 2011
2 posts
everything blooms coldly: from "Wishbone" by... →
earlyfrost:
You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because it’s all I have, because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your …
“In a haze of sunshine—sunshine projecting in vaporous shafts between the white...”
–
Nabokov, Pnin
(via leopoldgursky)
November 2011
1 post
“Driving home a little lit last night
(God protects drunks and Irish girls,...”
– Moira Egan, excerpt from Questions Midway (via holdonmagnolia)
October 2011
1 post
“so I have no problem telling you
why you cried over the third lost
metal or...”
– Brenda Shaughnessy - I’m Perfect At Feelings
(via grammatolatry)
September 2011
19 posts
“Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when...”
– Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay,” in The Garden Party, 1922 (via proustitute)
“I feel as if I’m always on the verge of waking up.”
– Fernando Pessoa (via euchrid)
The Murder Mile: Nick Flynn, "Hive" →
airwalker:
What would you do inside me? You would be utterly
lost, labyrinthine
comb, each corridor identical, a funhouse, there, a bridge, worker
knit to worker, a span you can’t cross. On the other side
the queen, a fortune of honey.
Once we filled an entire house with it, built the comb…
“Southern romantic that you always
were, what fallacy recalls you better
than...”
– Erin Belieu, The Last of the Gentlemen Heartbreakers (via holdonmagnolia)
“This is when you realize –
you should have kept his number,
should have stayed...”
– Rachel McKibbens, excerpt from Reading All the Ads in the Back of Magazines (via holdonmagnolia)
Figuratives: The Untrustworthy Speaker, Louise... →
figuratives:
Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. I don’t see anything objectively. I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that’s when I’m least to be trusted. It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language,…
Figuratives: A Gray Day, Elena Shvartz →
figuratives:
I spoke in a hurry, in a nervous hush, Because the time was short— The lightning was shuddering, Slowing down, running. Or was that my blood, The quiet diminishing of daily life? It’s time for me to go forth Into Your tiny mustard seed. In the house of my Father, everything is fading, In the…
Figuratives: Mebuyen, Mikael de Lara Co →
figuratives:
I live in a country without vineyards. We nail crosses to the trunks of coconut trees as we wait for the sap to ferment. At night the bats swoop down from their canopies as the many words for fear rest heavy on our tongues. Mangoes dangle from trees like tusks and one summer out of every century a…
Wikipedia Has the Kinkiest Sting Descriptions →
vulturechow:
1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy....
a moveable feast.: allmylovesinvain: “I do not... →
allmylovesinvain:
“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself…
“But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language....”
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
via hoodoothatvoodoo (via frenchtwist)
Quis ut Deus: The World Wakes Up →
blutetragen:
(via rabbit-light:
So we stop at the side of the road, and there is the largest tree and a long kiss with the hazard lights flashing. Everything is the beginning of something. A sycamore seed, a windshield fogging up. The first fist of rain pounding down. Come closer. Let’s get our arms…
Solitary by Eavan Boland →
serpentskirts:
:
Night: An oratory of dark, a chapel of unreason. Here in the shrubbery the shrine. I am its votary, its season. Flames single to my fingers expert to pick out their heart, the sacred heat none may violate. You could die for this. The gods could make you blind. I defy them. I know, only I know these incendiary and frenzied ways: I am alone no one’s here, no one sees my...
“The places we knew not to go as children
we went anyway. Something in the jag...”
– Gabriel Fried: The Places We Knew Not to Go as Children (via grammatolatry)
“you want to change something about your life
but your lover took both pairs of...”
– Marty McConnell, “the fidelity of epitaphs (20 days later)” (via grammatolatry)
“We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands...”
– Wallace Stevens, from “Man Carrying Thing” (via proustitute)
“For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to...”
– Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (via bookoasis)
1 tag
weisse wiese: prologue, epilogue, by steve gehrke →
weissewiese:
for my daughter
when you were vaulted, embargoed, tapping out messages on the walls, when you were translucent, opalescent, a hieroglyph coming to life in its cave, when your body was a glowing aquarium of cells, when you were reptilian, mammalian, quick-changing behind the curtain’s folds,…
You Are Tired (I Think) - e.e. cummings →
siximpossiblethings:
You are tired, (I think) Of the always puzzle of living and doing; And so am I. Come with me, then, And we’ll leave it far and far away— (Only you and I, understand!) You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I. But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight, And knock with a...
August 2011
4 posts
Quis ut Deus: star magnitude and afterglow - Lise... →
blutetragen:
After our brightness is measured, watching you sleep, soft sighs, I don’t think of changing flowers on my son’s grave
consider painful words or how I will pay utility bills.
I don’t measure weight I’ve gained, plan elaborate healthy diets.
Your eyelashes are stray feathers against…
Quis ut Deus: overhearing the confession of a... →
blutetragen:
Please Father, you got to understand me. You ever see an ocean wave rise up and hurl Itself forward until it exhausts itself In the sands and finally retreat with what’s left? That’s me, A deliberate moon wielding gravity’s pull; That’s the way it is when God plays God, When the…
A Writer's Ruminations: Anne Michaels, "The Weight... →
awritersruminations:
My cup’s the same sand colour as bread. Rain’s the same colour of a building across the street, its torn red dahlias and ruined a book propped on the sill. Rain articulates the skins of everything, pink of bricks from the fire they baked in, lizard green leaves, the wrinkled tongues of…
Sharing Poetry: Gerald Fleming, "Bone & Silence" →
sharingpoetry:
A long time passes—long even in the understanding of stone—and at last Bone feels entitled to speak to Silence. There are prerequisites: proper depth, aridity, desiccation, ph balance, density, and a kind of confidence. No loam: say salt, say dust, say southwest Utah. And when the conversation…
May 2011
3 posts
Les Amours de Cassandre: CXCII →
frenchtwist:
It was hot, and sleep, gently flowing,
Was trickling through my dreaming soul,
When the vague form of a vibrant ghost
Arrived to disturb my dreaming, softly
Leaning down to me, pure ivory teeth,
And offering me her flickering tongue,
Her lips were kissing me, sweet and long,
Mouth on mouth, thigh on thigh beneath.
Pierre de Ronsard
goodpoetry:
I always thought death would be like traveling in a car, moving through the desert, the earth a little darker than sky at the horizon, that your life would settle like the end of a day and you would think of everyone you ever met, that you would be the invisible passenger, quiet in the car, moving through the night, forever, with the beautiful thought of home.
Carl Adamshick
from “Drawn Curtains”
septembrist:
“Hope: the following page. Do not close the book.” ”I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope.” ”Perhaps hope is the book.
Edmond Jabes
CLAY COUNTY
Just past Kellie Mae’s Klip ‘n’ Dip Beauty Salon
and the cement slab, cinder blocks, and rusty tin roof
of the Lawtey Grace Community Evangelical Church,
and behind the saw grass and scrub brush along Pitchkettle Road,
a young black girl stands dawdling with one foot behind the other,
her toe digging rhythmically into the red clay of her driveway,
her heel wagging cozily...
“Believe what you want to. Believe that I wove,
If you wish, twenty years, and...”
– A.E. Stallings, The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles (via yesyes)
April 2011
16 posts
henrycharlesbukowski:
“the horriffic violent failure of any one of us to live properly says to me that we are all equally guilty for every human crime, there are no innocents.
and if there is no hell, those who coldly judge these unfortunates will create one for us all.”
The Flash of Lightning Behind The Mountain: New Poems Charles Bukowski
“You will not be saved by what was left
written by the ones your fear implores;...”
– Jorge Luis Borges. The Speck. (via seeyoulateraggregator)
“Divine love is reached through carnal love.”
– Saint Bernard (via sex-death-rebirth)
The Murder Mile: Stephen Dunn, "Tenderness" →
airwalker:
Back then when so much was clear and I hadn’t learned young men learn from women what it feels like to feel just right, I was twenty-three, she thirty-four, two children, and husband in prison for breaking someone’s head. Yelled at, slapped around, all she knew of tenderness was how much…