wtv

just a lil collection of poetry and quotes that make me feel like my heart's been ripped out of my chest. side blog.

[charlotte--ford]

1. I wasn’t in love with you anymore, but god, this knocked the wind out of me. 2. You were just here. 3. You were just here. 4. Do you remember? The frozen food pressed to your shoulder, the way you shook with the knowledge of a barely avoided death? 5. My mouth. Yours. 6. I had been struggling with my old poems about you. You know, you were the first one I ever wrote. I had some questions for you, Cleveland. I suppose I don’t have them anymore. 7. It isn’t even seeing you kiss her that’s the problem. It’s that you share a table. 8. Maybe “wife” bothers me, too. I know how that word sounds, coming from you. Remember? Those long drives? Perhaps I still exist as your heart when you hit the road. 9. You still exist as mine when I hit the words. 10. I couldn’t read them aloud anymore, the poems. That old pain. It didn’t exist. We had chased it away with chocolate and cherries. Still, you occupy a shelf in the bright. In the cold . 11. You always have been impossibly careless with my heart. With my new lives, all of them. 12. There’s a Smiths song – if you were reading my texts I would send you it – it goes: and I’m not happy / and I’m not sad. I’m not sad, seeing you happy. She looks as full of light as I used to when you kissed me. I am glad for her. I know what you have to give. 13. It’s the loss of our friendship. More a removal. A reopened scar, from the last time. Remember, how we were friends? We’ve been so good at it. I can’t believe you won’t hear from me now. I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t hear from me, then. You know the words.  14. I just wanted to wish you well. I just. I just wanted to be what I always have been. Yours, in whatever form we decide. 15. Nearly two years since we met and you still find new ways to let me down. I think it impresses me more than it wounds. 16. You told me all about her, remember? We discovered we had both loved ghosts, since the last time you cried on my couch. Do you remember? The things that we allow to haunt us take root in the end. I need to change my sheets. 17. I wonder if I am the ghost now. The woman you never had the courage to keep. Do I haunt you, darling? I can hear your voice saying yes. Feel the reach of your arms as I spin out of them, laughing. Do I echo? 18. You kissed me like you used to, the last time. You will again, the next. You always do. 19. In a poem I never got the chance to read you, I said that you exist suspended in time. In flashes of white sheets. Bathed in orange light on the Golden Gate Bridge. Spinning me around on a cold February evening. One year ago today. 20. One year ago today, you laid next to me. We cried about something that doesn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter then, either. 21. Do you remember the words? Of that last song at what we thought was the last breakfast. You sat me on your knee. 22. Your hands shook as you held me tight. I put my lips to your ear. Do you remember? The words. Say them with me. 23. In my own sick way / I’ll always stay true to you.

Upon Seeing Your New Girlfriend For The First Time. Charlotte Ford. (via charlotte–ford)

[22621]

[adderalldust]

We were silent. Poised. Proud. No use in causing chaos when it was everywhere. I can’t apologize for my hypocrisy until you do for your absence from reality. In a photo of us from the last time we were together - I am thinner than you. I never want to see you again.

“The 5 People Who Didn’t Wish Me Happy Birthday This Year”  (via 22621)

[22621]

Richard Siken, “Wishbone”

“You saved my life, he says, I owe you everything. You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just get gone, but he’s           relentless, keeps saying I owe you, says Your shoes are filling with your own damn blood, you must want something, just tell me, and it’s yours.          But I can’t look at him, can hardly speak, I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I’d just as soon kill you myself, I say. You keep saying I owe you, I owe…but you say the same thing every time.          Let’s not talk about it, let’s just not talk. Not because I don’t believe it, not because I want it any different, but I’m always saving and you’re always owing and I’m tired of asking to settle the debt.          Don’t bother. You never mean it anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed. There’s only one thing I want, don’t make me say it, just get me bandages, I’m bleeding,          I’m not just making conversation. There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western, Henry, it’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard out of the bone white afternoon.          It’s another wrong-man-dies scenario and we keep doing it, Henry, keep saying until we get it right… but we always win and we never quit, see, we’ve won again, here we are at the place          where I get to beg for it where I get to say Please, for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up?          or will I say Roll over and let me fuck you till you puke, Henry, you owe me this much, you can indulge me this at least, can’t you? but we both know how it goes. I say I want you inside me           and you hold my head underwater, I say  I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife. I’m battling monsters, half-monkey, half-tarantula, I’m pulling you out of the burning buildings and you say I’ll give you anything.          But you never come through. Give me bullet power. Give me power over angels. Even when you’re standing up you look like you’re lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby? Do I have to          tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary like it’s just another petty theft? It makes me tired, Henry. Do you see what I mean?          Do you see what I’m getting at? You swallowing matches and suddenly I’m yelling Strike me. Strike anywhere. I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search          my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in? I know you want me to say it, Henry, it’s in the script, you want me to say Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted          and worth dying for too but I think I’d rather keep the bullet this time. It’s mine, you can’t have it, see, I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s          as good as anything. 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 slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this          bullet inside me ‘cause I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth. Don’t you see, it’s like I’ve swallowed your house keys, and it feels so natural, like the bullet was already there,          like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time. Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands?          If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand. Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home now? There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet          staring up at us like we’re something interesting. This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Keep reading

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Before you, I didn’t know anything about suffering. I thought I knew, but I knew nothing. It’s the pain I’m in love with. I don’t love you anymore.

Marguerite Duras, from The North China Lover: A Novel (via violentwavesofemotion)

[tinyghosthands]

Marie Howe

[lifeinpoetry]

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing.

Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (via lifeinpoetry)

[bostonpoetryslam]

I’m competent enough at my job that now I can think of you AND break a french press at the same time. I tell Danny I should wear its teeth around my neck as a warning to all other french presses and he just takes the broom away from me. Now I can think of you AND not clean broken glass at the same time.

Jess Rizkallah, “8-10 Seconds For Bone-Dry Cappuccinos,” from If You’re Reading This I’m Probably Still Yelling (via bostonpoetryslam)

[24hoursinthelifeofawoman]

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” ― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Doesn’t that astonish you. You did want me. Say it again.

Gertrude Stein, from Poems Between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship and Desire; “Lifting Belly (II)” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[22621]

Long ago, I was wounded. I learned to exist, in reaction, out of touch with the world: I'll tell you what I meant to be- a device that listened. Not inert: still. A piece of wood. A stone.

Louise Glück, from “Parodos”

[allloversbetray]

I remember when you said being with me is like being alone with company. 
My friend Sarah wrote a poem about pink ponies.
 I’m scared you’re my pink pony. Hers is dead. It is really sad. You’re not dead. You live in Ohio, or Washington, or Wherever. You are a shadow my body leaves on other girls.

Jon Sands, excerpt from A Working List of Things I Will Never Tell You (via allloversbetray)

[lifeinpoetry]

“You talk crazy anymore and I’ll leave.”

“Leave. For Christ’s sake leave.”

She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. “All right.”

“Don’t,” he would say then. “Don’t.”

“Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.“

He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. “To find out if you’re alive.”

— Joan Didion, from Play It as It Lays

[antigonick]

And I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth because you are all that’s wrong with my life and I need you and I claim you.

Louise Glück, excerpt of Purple Bathing Suit (via antigonick)

[lifeinpoetry]

In my dream, I built a funeral pyre. For myself, you understand. I thought I had suffered enough. I thought this was the end of my body: fire seemed the right end for hunger; they were the same thing.

Louise Glück, from “Inferno,” Poems 1962-2012 (via mercurieux)

[merulae]

Frank O’Hara, from Meditations in an Emergency