GOD, GET A GRIP

[omar-little]

when richard siken said “and no one can ever figure out what you want, and you won’t tell them”

[smakkabagms]

“the desire before the desire, the lick of beginning to know you don’t know.”

— Anne Carson, Bakkhai (via persephomia)

[weltenwellen]

bell hooks, All About Love

[typodescript]

[ID text: We are all wounded at times. A great many of us remain wounded in the place where we would know love. We carry that wound from childhood into adulthood and on into old age. end ID]

[lispectorisms-deactivated202301]

Vladimir Nabokov, from an interview for “BBC-2 (1969)”, Strong Opinions (1973)

[weltenwellen]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting

[sunsounds]

[text ID:

We, afflicted by ourselves, gladly afflicting, gladly needing to be afflicted.  We, who sleep with our anger laid beside us like a knife.

end ID]

[exhaled-spirals]

« What do cats remember of days? They remember the ways in from the cold, The warmest spot, the place of food. They remember the places of pain, their enemies, the irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil, the usefulness of dust. They remember the creak of a bed, the sound of their owner´s footsteps, the taste of fish, the loveliness of cream. Cats remember what is essential of days. Letting all other memories go as of no worth they sleep sounder than we, whose hearts break remembering so many inessential things. »

— Brian Patten, “Inessential Things”

[facinaoris]

Registers of Illuminated Villages, Tarfia Faizullah

[moggiepillar]

When I was about 11, my father was listening to NPR in the car and I was the captive audience in the back seat with no choice but to listen. It was some gardening and/or food themed show and the host was talking about how carrots grown in the winter produce more sugar. This is an evolutionary tactic on the carrot’s part to survive harsh conditions. And that was when this man dropped the most banger line I’ve ever heard. “When you bite into a carrot and it tastes sweet, that’s the carrot saying ‘I don’t want to die.’” I was floored, changed as a person forever. This line haunts me. The poetry. The emotion. NPR made me the sappy garden idiot I am today, romanticizing senescence and over analyzing the science behind vegetables.

[joanofdirt]

from siri hustvedt’s notes on seeing

[lifeinpoetry]

“The horror of myself / and the meanness of myself.”

— — Elaine Kahn, from “Negative Desire,” Women in Public

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“absence never moves, / still, it abrades a heart blue, / this glacier of grief”

— Greg Sellers, haiku journal entry (19 January 2018)

[heartcountry]

“I should have known but the water never told me. It sealed its blue lips after swallowing you, it licked my ankles like a dog. I won’t lie and say the ocean begged for forgiveness; it gleams unchanged in the sun. Some things are so big they take and take and remain exactly the same size.”

— Leila Chatti, “upon realizing there are ghosts in the water,” shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (via bostonpoetryslam)

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

An excerpt from ‘Etcetera,’ by E.E. Cummings 

[theshatterednotes]

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”

— Don DeLillo, White Noise

[slaughtervoid]

“just this once I hope you’ll forgive me for writing a somewhat didactic poem I just didn’t know how else to say that we live in a time of sightseers standing on the bridge of history watching the water go by and there are bodies in the water and the water has been dirty for so long and the sightseers still drink from it they buy special filters and they smile they have nice glasses and teacups they put sugar in the dirty water that has our bodies in it”

— Eve L. Ewing, “sightseers,” from 1919 (via bostonpoetryslam)

[villaincousland]

Due to personal reasons I am drowning, there is no sign of land. You are coming down with me. Hand in unlovable hand and I hope you die. I hope we both die

[6thlovelanguage-deactivated2020]

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds