for emma, forever ago.

for my best friend.

[pigmenting]

You will be standing in the market, sorting through avocados when the band Kansas “Dust in the Wind” will come pumping through the ceiling, and you’ll think “Jesus…this song is gonna out live me”. There are few things that getting really sick illuminates: One. Dieting? Is ridiculous. The way you look is beside the point, the biggest you bring to any room is your heart.  Two. You will ask anyone for money. Will get on your knees to beg your enemy for help and because you know that, way down under all that animosity, is a deep and abiding love, for why else would she hate you with such loyalty?  Three. Things that used to taste bitter suddenly turn to maple sugar in your mouth; what you wouldn’t give for another year to grieve that man you thoughtyou loved more than your own bone marrow. Four. Suddenly, everything will be so beautiful. The halfhearted sunset, the rotting leaves, the way a rind hugs a lime, your own age spots—what you wouldn’t do to earn more of them.  Five. Yes, you will drink liquid seaweed. You’d stand on your head in a mini-skirt wearing no underpants in front of your ex’s new girlfriend if you thought it would make a difference but you won’t—not ever—be the same again. This is neither good nor bad, it just is, and, anyway, too much suffering is caused by trying to hold onto things. There goes your youth, there goes your lover, there goes your health, your wealth, your beauty, all of them useful when they werearound but there are other tools with which to cherish yourself now.  Six. The first thing you give up is the means of comforting yourself with thoughts of suicide. Seven. The second thing you give up is pride. And as you do, the world will come rushing forward. It is fucking hard to ask for help, but if you don’t, you willnever know how much you matter, or the fact that the only person who didn’tlove you enough is huddled inside your skin.Eight.Your skin - Your skin is the biggest gift you were ever given. When the doctors first said I might die—soon—what surprised me is that I didn’t wish I had written more poems, or even told people I loved them, because if I love you, you know! What I wished is that I’d seen more of the world. Let it’s salt stick to me. I’ve spent so much time in my head and  in my heart that I forgot to live in my body! Maybe that’s why she’s in trouble now. I have been obsessed with achieving immortality through poetry. But when I was told in no uncertain terms that this rickety container has an actual expiration date, I knew that immortality is bullshit! So I left that hospital with a horse’s dose of right fucking now. We don’t get to take anything with us! And anything we leave behind is not one foot still in life because once we are dust we are literally for the wind. So on my agenda, for whatever time I haveleft, is joy. Because number nine. Anticipatory grief is absurd. When I’m dead, I won’t behere to miss anything, and engaging in premising seems like an indulgence. It’s not that there isn’t pleasure in weeping—why else would we do it so much?!—but I’ve got oceans to float, I’ve got lava to peep, I’ve got a balcony in the south of France upon which to slow dance with a lover who I love down to the spaces between your eye-lashes! Poems will happen because that is how I process life, but I will no longer mistake them for living! If there is any advice I would have to give to my formerly non-sick self, or maybe you, would be this: Eat the avocados. Love yourself down to the marrow and out past the rind. Make enemies out of good people who will hate you with their whole hearts, make it mutual and unconditional and this way you will never be alone with love. I don’t want to finite, but the fact that we are is what makes even the terror exquisite! So step out from behind your walls, let the world rush forward—rise to meet it! Turn your precious attention towards God’s most tangible gift, this physical world and while you’ve still got the chance let your beloved skin salt in the wind.

Tara Hardy, “Bone Marrow” (via escient)

[fleurishes]

I keep writing about sex. I think, I mean— all I want is the after of it, after you took my skirt off with your teeth, after I was so clumsy with the buttons on your shirt that I ripped them open because I was so fucking frustrated and they bounced around my feet like pearls, rolled under the bed. You thought it was sexy and fucked me against the wall with my bra still on. I felt like a queen. Saw, in the unforgiving morning light, where your mouth had been. And your nails. Your sweat. Now all I want is tenderness. I hold eggs in my hand at the grocery store, check them for cracks and leaks. I try to do the same to myself. When I go to restaurants I stay for hours, ordering nothing except wine and tracing my finger around the glass rim until it sings. When you said, Your skin is holding you in nicely, I cried. So now you know. Don’t leave.

Kristina Haynes, “When I Opened My Hips” (via ghostprint)

[hellanne]

All of this is to say I’m having the kind of day where I break a dish and stand over the kitchen sink staring at the two irreparable halves. Willing myself to feel anything other than this. There is no longer a woman in my body. Just this screaming child Who does not listen. She only wants. And wants. And wants. Stubborn in her devotion. And he is still gone. And grief is a swamp that sinks much deeper than you’d expect. And I’m still here. I still remember him.

Clementine von Radics, Swamp  (via ghostprint)

[irynka]

And kid, you’ve got to love yourself. You’ve got wake up at four in the morning, brew black coffee, and stare at the birds drowning in the darkness of the dawn. You’ve got to sit next to the man at the train station who’s reading your favorite book and start a conversation. You’ve got to come home after a bad day and burn your skin from a shower. Then you’ve got to wash all your sheets until they smell of lemon detergent you bought for four dollars at the local grocery store. You’ve got to stop taking everything so goddam personally. You are not the moon kissing the black sky. You’ve got to compliment someones crooked brows at an art fair and tell them that their eyes remind you of green swimming pools in mid July. You’ve got to stop letting yourself get upset about things that won’t matter in two years. Sleep in on Saturday mornings and wake yourself up early on Sunday. You’ve got to stop worrying about what you’re going to tell her when she finds out. You’ve got to stop over thinking why he stopped caring about you over six months ago. You’ve got to stop asking everyone for their opinions. Fuck it. Love yourself, kiddo. You’ve got to love yourself.

Unknown (via kimlundgren)

[musingsofmyliking-blog]

Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.

Charles Bukowski (via musingsofmyliking)

[killingtimewithwords]

It’s two a.m. The emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard with eyes paid to care and asks me if I see people who aren’t really there. I say, “I see people how the hell am I supposed to know if they’re real or not?” He doesn’t laugh neither do I. The math’s not on my side ten stitches and one lie. I swear I wasn’t trying to die. I just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the inside. Fast forward one year. I’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone reading a poem to four hundred latino high school kids who live with the breath of the INS crawling up their mother’s backbones and I am frantically hiding my scars ‘cause the last thing I want these kids to know is that I ever thought that my life was too hard. I’ve never seen a bomb drop. I’ve never felt hunger. I’ve also never seen lightning strike but we’ve all heard thunder and it doesn’t take a genius to tell something’s burning. The smoke rises between us, forming walls so high they split the sky like slit wrists and then the stars fall like blood. We’re all left with nothing, but a death wish. He said, “call me by my true name I am the child in uganda all skin and bone” Do you remember the rest? how about this one… Jesus wept. America, Jesus wept but look at your eyes dry as the desert sand dusting the edges of your soldier’s wedding bans. Look at your soul playing dead because your ribcage is abu ghraib is san quintin is guantanamo bay and your heart had beaten them so many times they bleed the moon. Do you know children in Palestine fly kites to prove that they are still free? Can you imagine how that string must feel between their fingers as they kneel in the cinders of our missile heads I wonder what the dead in warsaw would say about the taxes we pay without thought of funding another holocaust. The bough is breaking. The cradle is falling. Right now a six-year old girl is crutched in a ditch in Lebanon wishing on falling bombs. Right now our government is recording the test scores of black and Latino 4th graders to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2015. Right now there’s a man on the street outside that door with outstretched hands full of heart beats no one can hear. He has cheeks like torn sheet music, Every tear a broken crescendo falling on deaf ears. At his side there’s a girl with eyes like an anthem that no one stands up for. Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there. It’s that we ignore the ones who are. Till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed walking into emergency rooms at two a.m. flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain because we are bleeding from the outside in. Skin is not impervious. Cultures built on greed and war do not pick and choose who they kill. We all fill the graves. Do we really believe our need for Prozac has nothing to do with Baghdad, with Kabul, with the Mexican border with the thousands of US school kids bleeding through budget cuts that will never heal to fuel war tanks? Thank god for denial. Thank god we can afford the makeup to pile upon the face of it all. Look at the pretty world. Look at all the pretty people and the sky with a missile between her teeth and a steeple through her heart and not a single star left to hold her And the voices of a thousand broken nations saying “wake me, wake me, when the American dream is over”

When The Bough Breaks by Andrea Gibson

[hellanne]

“Every mouth you’ve ever kissed was just practice. All the bodies you’ve ever undressed and ploughed into were preparing you for me. I don’t mind tasting them in the memory of your mouth. Was it a long journey? Did it take you long to find me? You’re here now, welcome home.”

Warsan Shire (via prevarila)

[writingsforwinter]

The Paradox

When a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, a woman

with red hair was standing on a building getting ready

to crash into the pavement from seven stories up.

She was just another death that day, and her suicide note

was a wing of flame bursting from the North Tower.

As a pair of lungs opens for the first time, another door closes

on the face of an undocumented immigrant

who was taught that human beings themselves can be crimes.

When Polaris shines its eyes directly down on earth,

another light somewhere else is going out

in the living room of a family that considers togetherness

to be eating frozen dinners in separate rooms of the house.

While you were busy throwing left hooks in Wii boxing,

a Guantanamo Bay detainee is being left hooked to the wall

dressed in nothing but shackles and his slowly

smearing sense of dignity and self-respect.

As the sky is caking on clouds like concealer, a teenage girl

in Chicago is selling her body to afford lipstick

to impress men who want to slice her shadow like kite strings

so they can be the only thing that follows her home.

While you were sleeping, someone else is dying,

and the explosions of the last stars behind their eyes

echo in your dreams like REM grenades.

Whenever a bride picks out her wedding dress,

a divorced couple kisses in front of their child

just to keep the secret hidden for one more night.

Seconds after you were born, someone somewhere in the universe

wished they hadn’t been.

[she-hulk-smash]

There are always more important things: the people you love, the way you feel about yourself in those brief seconds before you go to sleep and who you are when you wake up in the morning, the things that make you laugh, the moments that make you smile, how kind you are, how generous and full of love you are to those who deserve it and maybe those who don’t, the knowledge that you, at the very least, are making this world a little better than it would have been without you in it.

If you know that, if you hold onto that, you will be ok.

[therestofyourstory]

Sehnsucht

[industrialcracks-deactivated201]

“Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling. Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately. If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love … we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling.”

Robert Johnson, Fisher King  (via strangersapproval)

[oofpoetry]

how far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps? how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short? why do you find the unavailable so alluring? where did it begin? what went wrong? and who made you feel so worthless? if they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you? all this time, you were begging for love silently, thinking they couldn’t hear you, but they smelt it on you, you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin? and what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it? how are you both of these women, both flighty and needful? where did you learn this, to want what does not want you? where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?

Warsan Shire, “Questions for the Woman I was Last Night”  (via ghostprint)

[notclarissa]

"If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness."

A phrase that was carved on the walls of a concentration camp cell during WWII by a Jewish prisoner. (via synthetic-synaesthesia)

[weltenwellen]

You, quiet and alone in your kitchen, cigaretteless. Me, left tapping on your rain-streaked window, wanting you to know that everything is going to get better, and really hoping that it does.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz  (via synthetic-synaesthesia)

[clementinevonradics]

For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap it’s knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows. The joy. The poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff, you have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again. You rare girl, once again, you have a body that belongs to no lover, to no father, belongs to no one but you. Wear your sorrow like the lines on your palm. Like a shawl to keep you warm at night. Don’t mourn the love that is lost to you now. It is a book of poems whose meters worked their way into your pulse. Even if it has slipped from your hands, it will stay in your body. You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god. He tried to sweeten you, to water you down. So you left. And now you have your heart all to yourself again. A heart like a stone cottage. Heart like a lover’s diary. Hope like an ocean.

Letter From Anais Nin to Clementine von Radics  (via ghostprint)

[oofpoetry]

People always say that it hurts at night and apparently screaming into your pillow at 3am is the romantic equivalent of being heartbroken. But sometimes it’s 9am on a tuesday morning and you’re standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up And the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss him so much you don’t know what to do with your hands.

Rosie Scanlan, “On Missing Them” (via heatherlhayes)

[fleurishes]

I don’t mind that you’ve got the ghosts of girls you’ve kissed still living in the lines between your teeth. That when we fight you tell me often how you never want to come back but that your body doesn’t allow you to leave. That looking at you makes me feel distinctly sick, like I’ve been on a boat for too long. That instinct has taught you how to spell my name before meeting me. That you worry about not being perfect or that you’re not ‘deep’ enough. Baby, I don’t require an ocean to swim in. I just need to be able to tread water and lay on my back to shape the clouds with my hands. I need to be able to float. Because the ghosts will eventually tire and go home. Your mind will catch up with your body. I am practicing breathing through the dizzy. While we wait, chew on my name until the consonants get stuck, until you taste me everywhere.

Kristina Haynes, “Love is a Thing That Needs Practice” (via cerealboxshakespeare)