[lawfuljude]

Thinking about this poem again by Tony Harrison

[conscious-love]

You are the alchemist of your loneliness. You can create anything in its place.

Warsan Shire, Today My Horoscope Read

[allmymicro-obsessions]

happy is how I look, and that’s all

- Fleur Adcock

[allmymicro-obsessions]

That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be Proportioned to the groove.

- Emily Dickinson, Part Five: The Single Hound CXII

[allmymicro-obsessions]

I know not how it falls on me, This summer evening, hushed and lone; Yet the faint wind comes soothingly With something of an olden tone.

Forgive me if I’ve shunned so long Your gentle greeting, earth and air! But sorrow withers even the strong, And who can fight against despair?

- Emily Brontë, ‘I know not how it falls on me’.

[allmymicro-obsessions]

Text

I tend the mobile now like an injured bird

We text, text, text our significant words.

I re-read your first, your second, your third,

look for your small xx, feeling absurd.

The codes we send arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands, their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press will ever be heard.

- Carol Ann Duffy

[writingwell]

“That the deepest wound is the least unique surprises nobody but the living. Secretly, and with what feels like good reason, we’re the pain the people we love put the people they no longer love in.”

— Graham Foust, “Star Turn”

[allmymicro-obsessions]

Flowers

Some men never think of it

You did. You’d come along

And say you’d nearly brought me flowers

But something had gone wrong

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts -

The sort that minds like ours

Dream up incessantly. You thought

I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.

Now I can only smile.

But, look, the flowers you nearly brought

Have lasted all this while.

- Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns

[faithhopeloveandtherapy]

My therapist told me to imagine neural pathways are built from jenga blocks. Every time we do something differently, such as choosing a different response or behaviour, it’s like taking a jenga block from the old pathway and putting it on the new pathway. The old pathway gets slightly weaker and the new pathway gets slightly stronger.

Our ability to literally alter the way our brains work blows my mind.

[deadly-academic]

~Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult children of emotionally immature parents

[allmymicro-obsessions]

Today the night sky is all adoring and obsequious With my heart that has no limits You pull me up, hesitating lightly, you’re afraid to love In full majesty I wonder how much you’ve learned from your parents. Wandering into the moonlight, How much your push and pull was taught to you— How humans don’t really know how to love Not fully with devotion that’s not circumstantial - it’s all love

[allmymicro-obsessions]

and maybe we only shared what was chemical for a few moments, simply because we were bound together for the longing of something. who knows what it was. but, again, je ne suis pas folle

[allmymicro-obsessions]

my greed for love, for my own perfection, reeks of desperation, but it is me and i am holy in my unholiness, so wonderfully messy, that i can’t help but begin to win myself over.

[metamorphesque]

What the Living Do, Marie Howe

[allmymicro-obsessions]

Camomile Tea Outside the sky is light with stars; There’s a hollow roaring from the sea. And, alas! for the little almond flowers, The wind is shaking the almond tree.

How little I thought, a year ago, In the horrible cottage upon the Lee, That he and I should be sitting so And sipping a cup of camomile tea.

Light as feathers the witches fly, The horn of the moon is plain to see; By a firefly under a jonquil flower A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.

We might be fifty, we might be five, So snug, so compact, so wise are we! Under the kitchen-table leg My knee is pressing against his knee. -Katherine Mansfield

[allmymicro-obsessions]

…and we are falling into something we will soon mistake for love anyway, ‘home’ is a problem. There are the bills and there are the mice plus there is that feeling you get when you catch up with yourself

- I like to hide in not-quite love because it’s easier than admitting … that it’s not quite. You know? You know.

[colonel-clucker]

“I’m sure there are many like me who question how unloveable they are. am I entirely, wholly, unequivocally unloveable? how did I become like this? sopping up every moment of betrayal, feeding it into a narrative of self-loathing. but how about good enough for me? why isn’t that an option?”

— Fariha Róisín, Under the Golden Hour