Monterey Bay Aquarium
Keni
if i look back, i am lost
JVL
hello vonnie
Peter Solarz
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Andulka
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
NASA
⁂
KIROKAZE
DEAR READER
untitled
blake kathryn
art blog(derogatory)
sheepfilms
★
Stranger Things
Cosmic Funnies
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@darlienne
Just finished the first poem that I've written this year. It's surreal. I've been so stressed with study and university and editing other people's work that I'd completely forgotten about my own.
It feels great to be writing again.
“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.”
Gustave Flaubert
Pretension
You were always deft with words.
I used to turn to clay under your knowing phrases, used to wet and shape myself around your fingers. But in this two-cigarette bar I’ve become sick of your verbal farce; what used to press me into your second-hand embrace now drives my eyes heaven-ward, finding the flickering low-lights more meaningful than the cheap baubles from your lips.
Love, you insist through gin-soaked complacency, is merely the sum of circumstance: the greatest artistic form there is. We don’t seek to understand it, for the very act of comprehension destroys the beauty of the work. We must instead lose ourselves in the maelstrom of simply being, ripening under the touch of experience like apricots underneath the sun. You say this with your head leaned in close, the coal pit passages of your eyes impenetrable as you boldly press your leg against the bare skin of my thigh.
I press back with urgency, a bite of impulsivity placing my hand under the dull sheen of the dark wood table, digging my fingers into the unforgiving flesh of your leg. Your pretentious turns of phrase no longer send a frisson of anticipation up my spine and I am bored, so bored with the ringing cacophony of your useless syllables. A wolf’s grin spreads toward the sharp cheekbones of your handsome face. I slip my hand further into the shadows of the bar and your eyes turn half-mast, but still there is nothing and I press harder.
I am a living piece of art, you breathe into the shell of my ear, a living, breathing, firm piece of earthly art that arose from the soil for mankind to come to know; the ripest fruit of Eden that ever tempted Adam. You take but a slice for yourself, the yielding white flesh of my earlobe disappearing between your hunter teeth, whilst I disconnect completely. I catch a sight of myself in the scratched bar mirror and feel laughter catch in my throat: I am a Roman bust, my features cold and hard and set, my breath still, my blood stagnant.
Retreating into the recesses of memory I find only disgust.
The clock whose hands don’t quite strike on time sidles past 2am and in the haze of the late-night, early-morning crowd I want to pluck the cigarette from your cobweb hands and brand you with its dying embers. I want to make you feel something worldly like pain; I want you to know something real and solid and true. I want you to know that you are ugly, that I am a twisted, broken, off-white porcelain vase and that I was never art, we were never art and this whole scene was an epilogue to a farce. I want to tell you that you make Joyce turn in his Zurich grave, smear charcoal over Ophelia’s drowning countenance and butcher everything you hold fast as definition.
If you drag your thumb across my lower lip again and tell me that beauty brings you to your knees, I will draw blood from your empty veins and scream.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thane
And all the while, that viscous buzz sets a tumbling to my rhymes: she seems smaller now, a peach-faced child whose slack lips smack and smear into the ground
as I become my own Macbeth, who only sees the stains upon her hands.
It's hard to describe to people the reason why you write. There's the love of reading, the love of words, the love of characters and plots and symbolic meaning--but, deeper down, there's the need to understand yourself and the place from which you came. There are a thousand stories to tell, but how do you write them when you don't even know your own? And so we write for personal meaning more than personal escape; because, deep down, it's our way of discovering ourselves as characters and how the past is linked to our current storyline.
This spoken word poem by Shane Koyczan, To This Day, is deeply affecting on many levels. It's highly recommended that you watch it, because it reaches into that part of you that is hardly ever explored. It brings into light the memories we've repressed and the feelings we've tried to forget. In short, it's beautiful.
This video is not about writing, but it's about people. And it's helped me understand why I do what I do: to prove them wrong.
Riverbed
And when the night did chance to hold its breath, the crowd contained us in its arms: two figures bent in faceless silhouette, watching the faster fish swim by.
To explain my terrible absence: university is adept at consuming all of my time, energy and headspace. It was only after exams finished that I realised that not only had I significantly slowed in terms of personal writing, but also that I'd read a total of 5 books all year. Now, however, it's summer break and I've passed my second year of medical school. I've already devoured 3 books in the space of a week and have written a few online articles.
More importantly, as November was completely missed due to study and then post-study celebrations (almost equally as exhausting), I've decided to set the NaNoWriMo challenge for myself in December, starting today on the 1st.
I have the most horrible commitment to writing projects so this will likely not end well, but a girl has to try. The characters and basic plot were outlined months ago--now it's time to put them to paper.
Hopefully your own projects went well last month! I'd love to hear from you if they did. Any tips and advice for continued motivation would be greatly appreciated.
Keep writing. x
Mortis
A hundred rosebuds unfurling in the apex of my navel.
Tight and precise in their spiral, they wind, like my pliant desires around the very thought of you, the very afternoon of your presence— hopes raised en-pointe and spinning, anti-clockwise, down the passage of time
till I sour like cherries left too long in the sun.
You grip me firm around my china collarbones, like my mother grasped our mock-Ming plates, bird-bones on lacquer on shattered fragments by the wall.
Summer. The first signs of mortis.
The first signs that I think of you when receding from the grey: the carriage lost in its to-and-fro as it shudders north, the city lights growing smaller and dimmer into memory.
The first signs that you occupy the sinews of my limbs the space between my thighs and the ache between my ribs.
Let summer be eternal as I search, a tragic Demeter, in the warrens of my mind;
let me play Sophocles, and pen the greatest modern tragedy— that which I name, our love.
Keep a diary, but don’t just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end — as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It’s great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.
John Berendt
You write beautifully. - Another Victorian medical student.
Thank you, that means a lot to me. I really appreciate it.
Lately, I've been so caught up in study and placements and life in general that I haven't had much time to myself, let alone time to write. It's a little disappointing.
Nocturne
Sometimes I walk alone in the city, through the well-heeled crowds and hesitant rain, and the stark contrast of bright lights upon ruthless black will throw me off balance: the bustle of life at a time meant to be preternaturally still; the tides of laughter against the fabric of solemnity. In moments like these, I feel like I am no longer myself. There is a peculiar sense of disconnect; a firm belief that this is not me, that this is some stranger, living her life of different values, different circles, different thresholds of courage and patience and ambition. It's as if I am watching a surreal play that takes place in reality, where who I am plays understudy to who I could be. There are no emotions to cloud my judgment, no human lapses in bravery, no uncertainties to be held: there is a track, upon which this last train runs, steady and sure and to the end of the line.
And when I return home, and turn off the lights, and lay my head to sleep, I leave that all behind.
How the road less travelled often seems.
The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I marked the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
-
Sometimes I feel as if there is no other path besides the one that I'm already on. Sometimes I know that there is, but the obstacles seem insurmountable. Sometimes I take a chance and venture forth, only to find myself scratched and bruised and disheartened, left to wander back to the fork and find myself pondering these choices again.
As cliché as it is, and as over-used for inspiration it may be, but Frost's poem reminds me that there is another way. That there is still a road not taken, and that it is up to me to find another way through the woods.
So, Voiceworks is currently hiring new EdComm members.
Pros:
Loving it an immeasurable amount
Fantastic experience for future publications and editorial positions
Meet great people from the writing community
Can probably manage the workload, given the fact that I haven’t died (yet) from the three roles I took on this year
Cons:
Will be in third year med, undergoing clinical training at a hospital
May not be placed anywhere near the CBD, making it difficult to attend weekly meetings
May still have other commitments
Time, time, time
Stress and mental wellbeing
Dilemma. What to decide?
The Best of The Smiths, by James Franco
The Summer 2012 issue of 113 Crickets features the first published collection of poems by the actor/writer James Franco. Each poem in the collection takes its inspiration from a well known song by cult 1980s band, The Smiths. The first poem in the collection, “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” is reproduced here, with permission.
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