NEW ROMANTIC.

Baby, I could build a castle out of all the bricks they threw at me.

[lipfilllers]

[anxietyproblem]

[booksquared]

[twopartsbitter]

[havingapoemwithyou]

VI. wisdom: the voice of god by Mary Karr

[firstfullmoon]

“[...] she gave a single, long, full-throated howl, as if she wanted to rid herself at once of all the cries that pain had stored up in her.”

— Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood

“I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode.”

— Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

“She’s going to scream, I thought. And it’ll be something real. Something we have to chain up in the backyard and feed with bloody steaks.”

— Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

[kafk-a]

Mary Karr

[catjoyy]

This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly... There is no gift for the beloved.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth...

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her in articulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him—the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love?

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

The sound of it opens the windows of a room like the first four notes of a hymn. Few people can say the names of their home towns with such sly affection. Perhaps because they don't have home towns, just places where they were born. But these girls soak up the juice of their home towns, and it never leaves them.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[catjoyy]

Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye