ephemeral

No real words are said out loud enough here except in the head. ("Esteban Abada Street," Lawrence Lacambra Ypil)

[apieceofsilver-deactivated20190]

TEN LOVE LETTERS BY CLEMENTINE VON RADICS

ONE

The difference between being loved and being fucked is I can’t remember how the first feels. I have a body like an open door. I have a body like an open hand. It is too easy to hold me.

Find me a boy with a heart more hopeful than spun sugar on a hot day, I will teach him to render me meaningless. The whole time, every moment, wishing he’d crack me open, rib by rib, to see how I work. How I bleed.

TWO

Here is the bitter truth: that mouthful of thorns you called our last kiss still lingers after so many others.

THREE

Darlings, sometimes love will come to you like a fire to a forest. When it does, be braver than I was. Just leave. Take only what you can carry. No tears, no second thoughts. You have hands like tinder boxes, the smallest spark will kill you.

Get in the car. Take water to the maps. Avoid gas stations. Don’t look at the flames dancing in the rear view mirror. Go to new cities, climb on the rooftops and slow dance with your coldest memories. Wallpaper your new home with every dusty, desperate love letter you swore you’d never send.

Find a stranger with sharp edges and uncharted hips. Press your stories into their skin and forget you ever knew his name. Just promise you won’t think of embers or smoke. Even when there is ash in your hair. Even when there is soot in your lungs.

FOUR

It’s 11 am and I’m sitting in a restaurant 3 beers in. Believe me, even I’m surprised I’m still alive sometimes. I have been drinking about you for 2 days. Lately you remind me of a wild thing chewing through its foot. But you are already free and I don’t know what to do except trace the rough line of your jaw and try not to place blame. Here is the truth: It is hard to be in love with someone who is in love someone else. I don’t know how to turn that into poetry.

FIVE

I am 15 and he is my first boyfriend. He is 18 and 6’4” and his hands are the size of thick textbooks. He says he has a lot to teach me. He is drowning in his sadness. Drowning people often believe if they grab hold of someone else they can be saved, but it just makes you both sink faster.

I am 17 and she is my first girlfriend. The only thing we do more often than fight is fuck each other. I tell her about the boy’s hands and she tries to stretch her fingers wide to mimic them. I say stop it. I say I love you as you are.

I am 19 and in the first of many dirty rooms with books strewn everywhere and a mattress in one corner. These rooms always belong to boys with unshaved faces and tender hearts. Boys like this are a dime a dozen, but I don’t know that yet because tonight I’m with the first one. He hands me a beer. He says he thinks I’m smart. He orders me to take off my clothes.

I am 20 and in love with someone who tells a lot of lies. The punishment for telling lies is that I become cruel. The punishment for being cruel is being abandoned.

I am 20 and it is not sex because I don’t say yes. I say stop but that doesn’t make it stop. I am 20 and crying because my friend Aaron wants to kiss me, and I know if he does I’ll still taste like betrayal.

SIX

The Ways I Didn’t Leave You:

Even though I knew how it felt to love someone with a heart like the sharp edge of a knife, I pulled out the whetstone.

I asked you to bend, to be small enough to close my fist around. I wanted to be certain you could never get away.

I knew there was someone else, but I started looking through your pockets for proof I was wrong.

I threw a wine glass across the kitchen like a fastball, we both stood and stared at the shattered glass, proof that good people do terrible things.

I said “I love you” when I meant something much more specific, I should have said “Please don’t leave me, I’m afraid to sleep alone.”

SEVEN

I thought leaving you would be easy, just walking out the door. But I keep getting pinned against it with my legs around your waist. It’s like my lips want you like my lungs want air, it’s just what they were born to do.

So I am sitting at work thinking of you cutting vegetables in my kitchen. Your hair in my shower drain. Your fingers on my spine in the morning while we listen to Muddy Waters. I don’t know why I’ve got so much hope pinned to someone who will never call me home, but the way you talk about poems like Marxists talk of revolution it makes me want to keep trying. In the mornings, in my shower drain, in the music, I am looking for reasons to love you. I am looking for proof that you love me.

EIGHT

Here is what I know: You drink your coffee black and we are afraid of each other. Once you kissed my neck in front of your friends and it made me very shy. Once you kissed my stomach and I started crying. I see the tender way you touch things and want to kiss your nose but I keep my mouth to myself. Your collarbones are craters big enough to fit my fist into. You are the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in months. I was not good to the last person I loved so I punished my heart (I let it break and bleed out then roughly sewed it back together.) It is hard to write poems when I only know how to fuck you. I am always trying. I am thinking of Somedays. I am saying goodbye. You asked why I never write anything honest so I am writing you this.

NINE

You told me mornings were the best time to break your own heart. So here I am smoking your brand of cigarettes for the scent. I wonder if you still sing Beatles songs while you make coffee. You said your mother sang them to you when you couldn’t sleep, 19 years before we met and 20 before you moved your clothes out of our closet while I was at work. By the way I hate you for leaving all the photographs on the fridge, taking them down felt like peeling off new scabs, felt like slapping a sunburn. I spent so many nights carving your body into pillows I can promise you nothing feels like sleeping with your arm slung over me and your breath in my ear. Still, it’s comforting to know we sleep under the same moon, even if she’s so much older when she gets to me. I like to imagine she’s seen you sleeping, and wants me to know you’re doing well.

TEN

I know you and I are not about poems or other sentimental bullshit, but I have to tell you even the way you drink your coffee just knocks me the fuck out.

::

About the Author: Clementine von Radics is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. She is a spoken word poet and the author of the book “As Often As Miracles.” You can find more of her writing and art at clementinevonradics.tumblr.com

[beatriceeye]

(bringing back two things: first, Mark Strand; second, the poem from the first photo I ever posted on Instagram, perhaps relevant at two in the morning)

[quesadillasandweed]

[coffeeandthenewspaper]

[markmcevoy]

My love

[beatriceeye]

from “Café” (The Collapse of What Separates Us, Vincenz Serrano)

[beatriceeye]

Eyedress - Everything We Touch Turns Into Gold

I never lost control I'm still here

I still think of you

[thekhooll-deactivated20210705]

Cityscapes

By Kal Gajoum

[furrylittlepeach]

[shinji--moon-deactivated2017123]

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely. During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go round with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me. If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love   (via highwayaisle)

[hellanne]

She was extending a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

Jonathan Safran Foer  (via creatingaquietmind)

[nevver]

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

[beatriceeye]

at Planet Dive, Anilao

[itscolossal]

Wonderful Conceptual Photo-manipulations by 14-Year-Old Photographer Fiddle Oak

[4mbivalent-deactivated20130424]

“I exist in two places, here and where you are”

Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems (1965-1975)

[performativelyspeaking-deactiva]

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

Foucault, Madness & Civilization (via heteroglossia)

[jannnnny]

[beatriceeye]

Contra Adscape by Matthew Gidley