@theartofmadeline
Love Begins
#extradirty
YOU ARE THE REASON
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Sweet Seals For You, Always
𓃗
noise dept.
Three Goblin Art
Kaledo Art
$LAYYYTER
titsay
Janaina Medeiros
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
★
Not today Justin
cherry valley forever
wallacepolsom
Product Placement
we're not kids anymore.
seen from Brazil
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seen from Canada
seen from Mexico
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seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Germany
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seen from France
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@broodtxt
“what do i want? i want to tell strangers that they are beautiful and strong i want women to never again need protection i want smiles bubbling laughter the easy cottony feeling of comfort hands on my shoulders or trapping mine sweat on palms intermingling but we don’t ever mind i want to say i love you and not have it only means kisses and “i do” i want to be liberated and in my freedom, find the goodness of everyone. what do i want? i want to love you”
—
“the wolf at your door savage and ravaging, or so you suppose. because i have teeth. is that all it takes? if so, what would it mean should i pry out every single one spit out the blood from the empty spaces? no, I’ll not. I’ll smile in a way that shows every single enameled shine glinting in the pale light. I’ll snarl, if that’s all you can imagine me doing. I’ll prove you right, since it’s not in my interest to prove you wrong.”
—
“correlations of compassion moments of memory, ghost of your breath at my back not sure if you’re a presence or a poltergeist. suppose it’s whether i want you back.”
— – kissing ghosts
“i swallow nails not to sting but because in my youth i read that we’re built of metallic strength and i was never the biggest kid. chewed them for breakfast, chaser to cheerios snuck several at lunch, hidden in my oatmeal tossed a few down for dinner, between unpleasant broccoli never told a soul. when i started bleeding, i took it as a test for the strength I’d built not as a warning. caught it in time, x-rays demonstrate the route of my conviction blood tests showed elevated iron and i couldnt have been prouder. im grown now, no longer sneaking nails and i know better now: iron supplements come in pills but i never lost the conviction that my metallic count is what made me strong indomitable powerful. now when i wear my rings or clasped chainlink gracing my neck i sometimes stop to think of the metal sinking in and i feel i understand diana prince for my bracelets strengthen me, too. and I’ve grown to always carry a nail in my bag to remind me. swallowing every nail built a strength I’d never expected not from iron count, no. from conviction. and from willingness to learn my lesson.”
—
“as a girl-child, i felt the gaze of strangers and when a grown man i didn’t know kissed my cheek i didnt want to tell: i didnt want their fury, even directed at him instead of me. i remember coming home with shaking hands i remember washing and reflecting that i couldnt get the pedophilic lips off of me that i couldn’t erase his sin. now i stand, here a boy, and the stares have changed and it’s women in restrooms who i alarm because they don’t know me and the hair on my face speaks my deceit. pass all the bathroom laws you might it won’t matter none to me because by the urinals I’ll feel the men who’ve hurt me who’ve taken from me irreplaceable parts. and by the stalls I’ll feel like im one of the thieves a man, in ways i never meant to be.”
—
“wring from a dry mouth a damp lament wet with tears unshed and find in the cloistered nighttime the age-old echos of birdsong caught in the whorled bark of old birch, a pressure built up in the cracks sonic vibratory memory, a dirge for many and a song of rising for all. press my face into the cracks open-mouthed and hungrily desperate sap sticking my lips and pulling my teeth but I’m obliged to taste whether memory is sweet or sour, or each, as often it seems.”
—
“the hill is is. is. slanted, sloping; perpendicular versus parallelism gravitys exerted force newtonian apple -of my eye, would-be decline of modern society’s hubris, of our obsessive compulsive needs, picking at our skin peeling because we were too long bathed in the uv radiation of a baby, bone, tooth; of life and death is inevitable and crashing, circling, like vultures come to prey, we prey on the weak, we’re all carnivores- and the hill is is. is.”
—
“found receipt a john doe, or is it jane purchase: one heart $5.95 USD and immediately your chest contracts; questioning, demanding: this muscle in my breast must be worth more than that! deep breath, nostrils burnt with cold and your heart’s ratcheting protest soothed canted back to regular rthymn, you continue looking and find it’s a receipt for a toy-store.”
—
“a lifetime lasts, what, 10 years? 90? happenstance, luck… fate, if you believe it and others still; but regardless of the length or outline of a life lived end of day, end of time, I know only mine twenty-three and change being some kinda daughter, sister, girl… a woman. now I see what’s in me like peering between my ribs, prying them open for a quick, deliberate peek at the workings. but voila! truth revealed! does not subtract or derail twenty-three and change. you put it in brackets of semantics, some end-all, be-all like if I’m a boy ‘now’ I was something lost, then. in my dresses or in torn jeans, know what I was? a child, an intellect, a daredevil, a caregiver. it’s naive and, frankly, a bit silly, to trip over yourself choosing between past-tense he vs. she. let me see that now, when I ask and need, that you respect this change in me. but I? don’t come divorced of my own damn history.”
—
“to your fourth I say let’s a toast, raise: I’ll commend your soldier’s naive front-line bravery and credit your founder’s intended democracy, I’ll smile for the way we explode the sky (only victimless explosion we’ve managed, it seems to me) I’ll applaud whatever successes we’ve together dredged up from the abysses. but ask me, am I patriotic? oh, I’m patriotic, alright. lemme hold tight to that proud flag lemme grab it, just a second– got a refugee here shivering, they need these stars and stripes.”
— (via radhccd)
“train of thought, cut off disconnected with the delicacy of a lobotomy. burning, burning, am I a supernova, or am I being thrown to one? swallowed whole, jesus it aches the searing flames. my bones are blisteringly bright hurting my eyes regeneration comes with a steep price: go on, douse me once more, I’ll not rest until you’ve mortally felt this unblessed. arrow in my eye? darling, set your sights a hair lower punch out my heart with your bolt’s stinging singing, gut my chest, let ribs collapse onto empty space; a vacuum pressure swallowing me all up all at once. maybe then, I’ll actually stay buried. maybe then, I won’t have to spend time watching myself coming back together, lacking the eyelids to close myself away to the sight. daddy dearest, sister mine, mortal man, twisted by fate and by preference. I’m not sure which I’d prefer – here existing, or clenching that supernova and burying it deep inside me. I’ll bloom in fire.”
— daken akihiro
“one in the hand is worth a thousand in the head, or anything at all in the heart. chronically messy, ribs poking holes slowly determined to tear us apart. got no trigger on me except in my tongue and the routes my fingers know to run, got no patience left except in the decay familiar piecemeal moments of existing. brutal in my isolating nature, wanting to tear off friendly faces pull out the broken wires I can’t help but suspect are the only reasons they still smile at me. battling my demons quietly, no fucking cacophony just me breathing, breathing, breathing.”
—
“walking home, steps uneven - this time not with inebriation, but distraction - glancing at the sky, staring at the ground all my mind fixed on the things that so thrive that stick out. kneeling down, arthritic creaking complaint, to stare at a nightcrawlers shy retreat. life can be tumultuous, often is; but sometimes dreamy, too, in its simplistic, lively bliss”
—
“it’s dissonance a ringing– or irregular clanging. war drums, with orchestral harmonies. FIGHT some yell FLEE others scream; newly, the cry to FORGE to FREE… but it’s a dissonance, arhythmic disharmony inherently that implies that it’s no singular, linear thing; our dissonance exists to serve a purpose, as a conversation. as a point of origin. as a destiny. there’s only and never truth– no one truth is true for all. and there’s only and never love– no one love can solve all. and there’s only and never fury– no one fury can smother it all. and there’s only and never despair– no one despair can drown it all. but our shape is not fixed rigidity a weakness, not indicative of sturdiness rather that this dissonance is integral to the existence of our movement. without the friction built up within us, without voices bouncing around us, without our peers constantly refining us, we’d have no momentum and eventually, no more our salient purpose.”
— j.f.
Let’s not pretend my survivor’s guilt is empathy, and let’s not see the soft places as points of landing, where sharp heels can dig in and ignore my wincing – I have, after all, winced so often before. I don’t strive to breathe my own ash and I don’t aspire to breathe yours, either, but I want after a simple truth, and as the simplest solution is often told to be surest so too are the simplest wants often the hardest. You believe in it, after all, those soft parts of you, landings for those more inured to disgrace than you, and you think it achievable, don’t you, all this simple movie-time glory-happy easy-life. It isn’t, strictly, true. Not to imply it is untrue, either. It is – it is as things are, as air can kill you if too much inhaled, as water can give you life but also drown you, it is, and it holds no remorse or joy in your suffering, no mercy and no means of appeasement, and sometimes the It is a storm we must bunker down and weather and sometimes the It is sailing so smooth we forget our instincts, where our strong grip comes from, but It remains, untouched by our reaction, and do not say to me that I amaze in survival nor that I disappoint in my doubt, my suspicion of calm waters – I, as all, know that sometimes, something can lurk underneath. And sometimes not.
It makes sense, to me, to be haunted by could-have-beens, not by may-be’s, but still, it is my throatclenching my handsfisting my tonguehalting when I think of future years, and can’t comprehend beyond this moment; I’m so stuck, feet glued by some child’s cruel prank (is it not agreed that children are cruel, that their cruelty is simple and keen, sharp enough to cut with– simple enough to be wielded effectively) air floods my lungs; releases, a gathering of the sense’s senses a one-two-three-four of my heartbeat’s score along the vessel of my rib cage and I cannot answer your five-years-from-now questionnaire because who can tell what their pulse will spell five years from now?
I am eight-hundred and one small breaths, inhales stealing the strength of a sigh, eight-hundred and one tiny refusals to give in to let it win to do anything but; breathe, and breathe in.
I am seventy-two times that water splashed a sore back, didn’t make it better, didn’t make it bad, but I’ve seventy-two times of drowning my hurt in too much sensory input. Seventy-two tiny beads of relief.
I am not my sore body and I am not my Diseased Parts, I am not Jack’s mental instability, and I am not a vomiting of art.
I’m just what I am, the composite of what I see in the mirror and what breezes across my 3am-weak sense of self, what ruffles the leaves and forces me to lift my nose to the air, scenting animal-deep.
I am two-thousand times of trying and I chose long ago to not count failures or successes among my many number-games– found out they don’t matter so much.
I am two-thousand times of trying.
Two-thousand and one.
