@my-secretinsanity - Tumblr Blog

Only I no longer know how to speak. The speaking has scattered deer-like into the dark, where our eyes flee one by one, like grains of yellow pollen, and the wind has gone out like a candle. You look down at your wrist to find time has become a single white bone. And my bones have floated away like your bones, into massive holes above the landscape, where you cannot hear their small voices.

— C.X. Hua, from “Send Flowers,” published in The Adroit Journal

luthienne

are there any poems you have on home, if its ok to ask? i feel homesick for a home beyond my reach and thought i could come to you.

“I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

“it’s as if I had to go back home on foot, alone, barefoot not knowing where far away, everybody else went long ago”

— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic)

“[ON LOSING LOVE]: This is the model I propose. You are arriving home and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart shaped.”

— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters

— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“‘I’m homesick all the time,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I just don’t know where home is. There’s this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it’s like chasing the moon - just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again.”

— Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“Wickedness has leaked into the home I made, / and I want to burn it down. Sister, tell me / how you stand the murderous fury. You there / still singing, I crave demolishing, to eat / explosives.”

— Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things; “Home Fires”

“At the core of all sighs is a name, a stone from the body’s last lost home.”

— Karen Solie, from “Days Inn,” Short Haul Engine

“To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad?”

— Chen Chen, from “Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet”

“Feeling what we all feel: home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.”

— Richard Blanco, from “Mexican Almuerzo in New England”

— Ross Gay, from Bringing the Shovel Down; “Because”

“I want to ask was there ever one / moment when all of it relented, / when rain and ocean and their own / sense of home were revealed to them / as one and the same?”

— Eavan Boland, from In a Time of Violence

“I: Why not take the shorter way home. HT: There is no shorter way home.”

— Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours; “Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)”

snappydoodle-deactivated2022051

Sometimes you gotta make yourself drink water and sit in direct sunlight, like some kind of wilted houseplant

softhe4rted

i want a life

weltenwellen

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

lifeinpoetry

Here, trees drop black sap that bakes onto the hoods of parked cars, becoming one with their enamel until they return to the earth in a junkyard or field. I don’t know what to make of that comparison except to say I miss softness, how it once gathered at my feet, how rarely it gathers for me now.

— Curtis LeBlanc, from “Poplars,” Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation

weltenwellen

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

polkadotmotmot

Larry Rushing - Yellow Flower, 2013

lifeinpoetry

I glimpse myself in the mirror. I’ve been warned never to stare in a mirror while here. Don’t even ask why, just do it anyway. My gaze a gaping question. Pupils an abyss. The center of an inverse universe, eternal corridor of mirror reflecting deeper into some ancient beginning that is also an always and impossible future staring back. Mouth of a hungry ghost. Narcissus. Bloody

Mary. I want to see—I’m not sure what.

— Ely Shipley, from Some Animal

delta-breezes

Milli Proust | @milliproust

trulyvincent

Andrew Wyeth (American 1917-2009)

slfcare

as the colder months approach: i wish you all a healthy, calm end of the year. i wish you tasty cups of tea, comfortable clothes, warm beds, nutritious meals in safe homes, good music, new friends and unwavering health. you deserve good things now.