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Cactus Glandiflorus or Cereus

Nymph! not for thee the radiant day returns,

Nymph! not for thee the golden solstice burns,

Refulgent CEREA!-at the dusky hour

She seeks with pensive step the mountain-bower

Bright as the blush of rising morn, and warms

The dull cold eye of Midnight with her charms

There to the skies she lifts her pencill'd brows,

Opes her fair lips, and breathes her virgin vows;

Eyes the white zenith; counts the suns, that roll

Their distant fires, and blaze around the Pole;

Or marks where Jove directs his glittering car

D'er Heaven's blue vault, Herself a brighter star

-There as soft zephyrs sweep with pausing airs

Thy snowy neck, and part thy shadowy hairs,

Sweet Maid of Night! to Cynthia's sober beams

Glows thy warm cheek, polish'd bosom gleams.

In crowds around thee gaze the admiring swains,

And guard in silence the enchanted plains;

Drop the still tear, or breathe the impassion'd sigh

And drink the inebriate rapture from thine eye.

From Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1791)

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How I would like to believe in tenderness—in those symbolic unions that elicit sweet concepts :

mother and child, father and daughter, husband and wife.

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

its cheekbones flushed with an afterworld favoritism

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes;

hair waving, mouth parted in mid-speech like drowned Ophelia.

I have fallen a long way. I lie at the bottom, smashed

like a dinner plate against kitchen tile, china chips and jagged bits.

I lie at the bottom, shattered and dangerous, looking up

with a baby's stunned engrossment. I'm moving closer to Pluto and Mars.

Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars,—

It will not be quick. Death drinks me in, slow as syrup.

-excerpt from "The Moon And The Yew Tree" by Sylvia Plath

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#littlethings

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Is it the need to be understood, or is it the need to be loved? Tell me, are they the same?

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"Your dreams are here to take you for a ride."

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For your yearning for brown(s).

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"I am exhausted, can't I just free fall through this too?"

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I know, or rather I understand that the desire to be everything and nothing and to do nothing and everything at the same time can be overwhelming but you can't jump up a ladder or a set of stairs by standing at the bottom ground, you have to get moving and the way to do so, that I have come to realize, is by focusing on one step at a time. Choose, prioritize and focus. Don't sit and wait for something to take you where you want to be. The thought of learning and experiencing so many things leaves your mind in a jeopardy but tell yourself that we will get there only when we begin somewhere. You can hop and put both your feet together while moving ahead or you can let one foot guide the other. Let them know the feel and texture and all things concerned with that one step and then choose your next step. Who said the stairs lead to only one direction, look towards your right there might be the step you have been looking for. The stairs you have already climbed won't demolish and that should comfort you that if the next step you take doesn't widen enough to let you explore unlike it had promised inside your head, you will have a step to fall back into and choose and continue again.