To Glue The Broken Bits Together

Cuvinte-colaj

[albastru-nefiinta]

Debris The old style All those endearing. I want you to taste and smell me, want to be palpable, to get under your skin, to be an itch in your brain and in your guts that you can't scratch out and that you can't relieve, that will corrupt and destroy you and drive you mad. Who can write entirely unadulterated compassion? All prose, all poetry, to the extent that it is not compassion, Is failure. Watch it. Care. Calm. Caution. Don't try it on too much, don't exploit it. Just keep your place, just don't ask for trouble. Remember your hands have blood on them, just don't be too cheeky or too greedy. Don't puff yourself up too much. Remember your place in the hierarchy, don't try to come it, don't shout about. Don't posture, don't give yourself airs, don't think you're going to get away with it, you've had a bit of piss taken out of you, don't make excuses. Don't kick it around. Who are you trying to kid? A little humility, a fraction of love, a grain of trust, you've been told as much as you need to know, you've had quite your fare share, don't try the patience of the gods. Shut up and get on with it. Remember. There's not much time left. The flood and the fire are upon us. Yes, there are moments Sometimes there is magic Wince with a smile Nothing so becomes us That forlorn faiblesse That gentle nostalgia Ich grolle nicht Tenderness too is possible Ah tenderness Wandering Suddenly I come upon one of my many childhood's Preserved in forgetfulness For this moment when it was most required A sad little tune Its fingers so tentatively reach out towards our untouchable happiness Its very gentle smile so tactfully offers Consolation we do not ask for. SHE: My heart is full of sackcloth and ashes. HE: Do not go to far away. SHE: I shall only go into myself. You will always find me there. HE: If I loved the whole world as I love you, I would die. Forests and cataracts of intricate interstitial landscapes Cascades and waterfalls through and past elbows to promontories of fingers, Stars of nerves, arteries of champagne, Her image tingles my fingertips, Uncoils my recoiling flesh, Touches a lost nerve of courage, Entices an uncertain gesture of delight To adventure into being.

[razna]

Earth flows away from the shore where I stand,

Her trees and grasses, more and more distant, shine.

Buds of chestnuts, lights of frail birches,

I won’t see you anymore.

With worn-out people you move away,

With the sun waving like a flag you run towards the night,

I am afraid to stay here alone, I have nothing except my body - it glistens in the dark, a star with crossed hands, so that I am scared to look at myself. Earth,

Do not abandon me.

[albastru-nefiinta]

Czesław Miłosz - Woman

[razna]

“What else do you want from me? What kind of heart? What kind of emptiness in it?”

— Nikolay Punin, from a letter to Anna Akhmatova featured in Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova (via weltenwellen)

[albastru-nefiinta]

I Shoot Horses

I shoot horses. Or, I have. I have shot horses. I have stood on a hill and written you a long and involved letter regarding my feelings. I have been drunk and I have been otherwise and not once have I pondered what life would be like without either you or the shooting of horses. If you were wondering about my accomplishments I would say I have shot horses in the head and on horseback and I have ridden into sunsets that look nothing at all like sunsets and when I close my eyes I can see your face encircled in flames. It is entirely possible that I greatly misunderstand the concept of remorse. Once I shot a horse in the stomach and out of the hole in its stomach came a great feathered bird that I should have eaten but I didn’t shoot it fast enough so it flew off and that opportunity was lost to me forever. After that I went out for barbecue and it was alright but nothing to write home about. Some days I miss you so much that it feels like I am going to die but then I don’t and I have no idea what to do about that so I go out and shoot a horse in the face and eat mediocre barbecue. I have spent whole days picturing you standing in a field of amber wheat near an infinitely mountainous mountain, wearing your sundress and smiling. In the evenings I take my supper and sweep up as needed. In the middle of the night all the houseboats drowned. It was beautiful and sad and tragic and you would have loved it, I swear. In the morning I stand in front of a mirror and give myself a fine and glorious beard and compose my eyes in the manner of a man who has seen some things. What I have seen is this: I have seen you undress from your sundress and lay yourself down to sleep and I have cracked open a beer and bowed down in awe to what is placed before me and I am doing so right now. The moon is hanging so low I could piss on it. I walk myself out to the yard and I shoot some horses. After that I shoot some more and they just keep piling up until I have a mountain of shot-up horses there in front of me just bleeding and crying for miles on end like a flood or the slow progress of time or a river of blood from a mountain of shot-up horses.

Sasha Fletcher - I Shoot Horses

[albastru-nefiinta]

Megalophobia

I saw a satellite roll across the sky 

A steady light much higher than a plane 

I say saw instead of watched because I didn't go looking for it 

Instead it entered the small window of my eyes 

And I followed it as it bisected the pattern 

That emerged from the blackness as my eyes adjusted 

We were looking at the stars in early evening 

In the Florida Keys 

I lost the satellite but kept looking 

The light pollution was low enough 

For the scatterplot glow of the Milky Way to be visible 

The horizon extended wide beyond the bridges 

And the sky dragged the ocean like a dress 

Stars rising from the hem of it 

Like the pins in the metal cylinder 

Of a music box mechanism 

The sea was the comb 

That plucked each pin as it rang 

Against the emptiness of the universe 

The ringing was not audible 

It was in my recognition 

It’s just something I feel 

An enormity of feeling 

Like the soft head of some beloved 

What are you supposed to call the feeling 

When you see a star and realize that it corresponds to a map 

That it’s just one point in a huge map that extends over everything like an enormous dark skull 

And then after a while the sky itself becomes overwhelming to you 

Even though it’s a thing you live with every day 

Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror 

Says Rilke, someone who died 

There are the dead and there are the living 

And what do the dead have to tell us 

They got out of here 

They don’t have to do this 

I am terrified all the time 

I am filled with fear in the face of beautiful things 

The most beautiful thing I ever saw has made me the most afraid 

And the fear has never left me 

I walk my days choosing cans at the market

 I lay my nights listening to the cries of car alarms like melancholy dogs 

And the fear still lives in me like a bead of mercury 

Inscrutable mirrored and so very poisonous 

And when I look up at the sky 

I lose my sense of proportion 

I forget where my edges are 

I have the urge to sit down 

And catalogue what I have 

Here are my two hands 

And my forehead with its headlamp 

The basket of my ribcage holding its small bruised fruit 

And here is my husband 

Tender and freckled and warm in the dark 

One hand around my waist 

As the other points up 

To the constellation Draco

Niina Pollari - Megalophobia 

[albastru-nefiinta]

At A Reading Listening To A Poem About Motherhood

How are all these flowers always unfolding? Milk as an invention. A placid kind of darkness envelops you, and you exist in it as an ecosystem that sustains. 

I am a hurt ecosystem. My baby is not present, so she must just be a metaphor. I'm present in the darkness too and it hurts my body. I'm trapped in the planet. The moon rolls around the sky like a peeled egg, and I shrink back as quickly as possible. There, nobody ever even knew I wanted to touch it. 

But I wanted to hold it to my eye. There two are so alike, after all. Alone in the sky like that. 

I wanted to sing to it, just a little. I was sure it could hear me. 

Being in a room with other mothers is to my benefit and I take it like a prescription. It's good to realize my potential, my meaning in this life. I have to grow a third tit, and it is a ghost tit to feed my baby who is a metaphor. 

You say "I would like to be a real friend to you" and I can't tell if you are my competition.

 The darkness I am in is so full it's leaking. I have to catch it into a disposable pad I slip inside my bra. I erased the rage from this poem, but there is still rage in it. And so I failed again. 

Niina Pollari - At A Reading Listening To A Poem About Motherhood

[lifeinpoetry]

I feel like the opposite

Of the Financial District

I feel as if my foundation is solid

But everything else has been built from bodies

I feel like a mountain of discarded parts

I draw scavengers

— Niina Pollari, from “Self-Portrait as New York Geography,” Path of Totality

[golddustgal]

What do ruined people do? Weird shit. This seems to be the consensus of psychoanalysts as far back as Freud and Jung; the traumatized self creates, out of necessity, a system of self-care that is keen to avoid repeat trauma. This makes change difficult; it makes people who’ve had part of their psyches destroyed by unmanageable emotions push people and emotions away, create obstacles, generate unnecessary drama.

“Grief Magic” by Emily Rapp, The Rumpus

I dug through my entire archive to find this quote, scrolling back a few years, because this phrase stuck with me as I find myself doing “weird shit”. I needed to read this essay.

(via golddustgal)

[albastru-nefiinta]

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, no one conjures our dust. No one. Praised be your name, no one. For your sake we shall flower. Towards you. A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering; the nothing-, the no one's rose. With our pistil soul-bright with our stamen heaven-ravaged our corolla red with the crimson word which we sang over, o over the thorn.

[albastru-nefiinta]

So many constellations that are held out to us. I was, when I looked at you - when? - outside by the other worlds. O these ways, galactic. 0 this hour, that weighed nights over for us into the burden of our names. It is, 1 know, not true that we lived, there moved, blindly, no more than a breath between there and not-there, and at times our eyes whirred comet-like toward things extinguished, in chasms, and where they had burnt out, splendid with teats, stood Time on which already grew up and down and away all that is or was or will be -, I know. I know and you know, we knew, we did not know, we were there, after all, and not there and at times when only the void stood between us we got all the way to each other.

[albastru-nefiinta]

There was earth inside them, and they dug. They dug and they dug, so their day went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew all this. They dug and heard nothing more; they did not grow wise, invented no song, thought up for themselves no language, They dug. There came a stillness, and there came a storm, and all the oceans came. I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too, and that singing out there says: They dig. O one, o none, o no one, o you: Where did the way lead when it led nowhere? O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you, and on our finger the ring awakes.

[sunset-of-dissolution]

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. In the mirror it’s Sunday, in dream there is room for sleeping, our mouths speak the truth. My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one: we look at each other, we exchange dark words, we love each other like poppy and recollection, we sleep like wine in the conches, like the sea in the moon’s blood ray. We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street: it is time they knew! It is time the stone made an effort to flower, time unrest had a beating heart. It is time it were time. It is time.

[stoicremains-deactivated2017102]

When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.

Czeslaw Milosz, “I Sleep A Lot” (via stoicremains)

[golddustgal]

What do ruined people do? Weird shit. This seems to be the consensus of psychoanalysts as far back as Freud and Jung; the traumatized self creates, out of necessity, a system of self-care that is keen to avoid repeat trauma. This makes change difficult; it makes people who’ve had part of their psyches destroyed by unmanageable emotions push people and emotions away, create obstacles, generate unnecessary drama.

“Grief Magic” by Emily Rapp, The Rumpus

I dug through my entire archive to find this quote, scrolling back a few years, because this phrase stuck with me as I find myself doing “weird shit”. I needed to read this essay.

(via golddustgal)

[albastru-nefiinta]

There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road There are some dragons who were built to have and hold And some machines are dropped from great heights lovingly and some great bellies ache with many bumblebees

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“I rehearsed it all night—the absence of mercy, as a condition to you who said when I am in the same room as your body I am        in a different room.”

— Kimberly Grey, from The Opposite of Light: Poems; “We Are Mostly Merciful”

[antigonick]

Her soul is all vertigo. “And I bathe my eyes,” she tells us, “in rivers of tears…. Alas for the waves” of her life, “alas for the revolutions.” Sorrow burns her “to the bones and the marrow and the splitting” of her soul.

C. P. Cavafy, excerpt of Anna Komnina (tr. by Edmund Keeley)