A Few Words of Poetry

Mainly writing with the occasional political post

[poemswords]

[quotemadness]

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath (via quotemadness)

[quotemadness]

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

Jodi Picoult (via quotemadness)

[crossingburningbridges]

“Careful,” they whispered with acid on their breath, “sometimes leaving is the same thing as running.”

[crossingburningbridges]

A reoccurring trend

Pepper my body in sighs of the bereft; melancholy runs like lightning through my chest. 

Sadness whispers to me like a long forgotten nursery rhyme, I mumble along just in time.

 I can feel it now lurking just behind; if I only just hold my breath perhaps it’ll move away from what was mine. 

[yvesolade]

& THERE’S AN ACHE IN MY CHEST WHERE SUMMER USED TO BE

andrew & I passed a dead finch by the riverbank & ached to disbelieve its mortality / & wanted to fake ignorance of our own. I dreamt of death like something you could leave. a lover you could run from if you had the sense to start early enough.

& andrew said, careful not to get too close. as if like longing, losing distance from death can be fatal. he said, what if you’re dead by 35? I think, God, what if I’m not? & that night he turned in on himself as an orchid does in snow; folding himself

into something different; rearranging his body into something new. something that can’t be killed by speeding cars or the space between the sky & the earth, which is a euphemism for desire if you’re in love & paying attention. & twitching in sleep, he

was shaking like he jumped & his wings refused to open. & I wanted to hold him, but even in sleep he wouldn’t let me. we passed the finch & I wondered if it hit the ground dead like leaves in autumn; or if like icarus, he found a second death in drowning.

[quotemadness]

The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.

Lemony Snicket (via quotemadness)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I’ll adore you, as a drowned person does the sea.

Renée Vivien, tr. by Mary Ann Caws, from “The Ransom,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[lifeinpoetry]

Can you teach us how to make grief a swarm that stings, that sings?

— Krysten Hill, from “Are You There, Plath? It’s Me,” How Her Spirit Got Out

[crossingburningbridges]

Mother.

Capricious in nature, her words burrowed into your skin like a parasite. One second sickening sweet endearments ringing in your ears then the next she’s spitting vitriol at your face like it’s second nature. They spread from your fingertips to your core until they drummed in your head again and again. Now those words define you, they make up your precarious being as you attempt to build a life out of the pieces that she shattered until all anyone could see was her pain reflected back in your eyes. 

[quotemadness]

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

Thomas Huxley (via quotemadness)

[buttonpoetry]

Youth promises us immortality, but doesn’t have the means to uphold its end of the bargain.

Rudy Francisco, from Helium (via buttonpoetry)

[buttonpoetry]

There is a revolution on its way and there is no time to shove our women into corners.

Nayeli Hernandez - “Ellos Dicen” (via buttonpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

I am a ruin birthed from other ruins—

Jari Bradley, from “Monstrous Intimacy,” published in Drunk In A Midnight Choir (via lifeinpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

i thought if i said the right words in a certain order it would break a spell, but all it did was burn a bridge

— Amy Saul-Zerby, from “if you want to make it stop, then stop,” published in The Rumpus

[esnifandosentimientos]

Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

The garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway (via esnifandosentimientos)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again,

Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Works; “The Garden of Eden,” (via violentwavesofemotion)