I Still Believe

And I still believe in the need, For guitars and drums and desperate poetry.

[wordsnquotes]

apologize to your body. maybe, that’s where the healing begins.

Nayyirah Waheed, “Starting” (via wordsnquotes)

[nocturnalreapers]

[blossomfully]

You say: ‘just stay for one more night okay? We can make this work.’ She sits there quietly. ‘Okay,’ she says, letting her head rest on your chest. Tomorrow she will leave you with the taste of blood oranges between your teeth, but for now she curls up in your arms and kisses your neck before falling asleep. ‘We could make this work,’ you whisper softly, as if trying to pervade her dreams, ‘I promise, we really could.’ You want to hold onto her forever. Tomorrow she will pack her bags and say goodbye. It will be like the two of you never shared a thing. ‘I have to go,’ she will say, ‘please understand.’ You worry that one day she will see you as a stranger. You hold a ticking time bomb in your arms but you’ve never felt safer or more at home. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. ‘Let’s not worry about that’. Somewhere somehow you have always known: she may have been yours temporarily, but she has always been her own.

S.Z. // Excerpt from a book I’ll never write #141 (via blossomfully)

[out-of-spite]

Visit Original Link

But boys will be boys, and girls have those eyes that will cut you to ribbons sometimes.

[metaphorformetaphor]

Through your lens the sequoia swallowed me   like a dryad. The camera flashed & forgot. I, on the other hand, must practice my absent- mindedness, memory being awkward as a touch   that goes unloved. Lately your eyes have shut down to a shade more durable than skin’s. I know you   love distance, how it smooths. You choose an aerial view,   the city angled to abstraction, while I go for the close   exposures: poorly-mounted countenances along Broadway,   the pigweed cracking each hardscrabble backlot.   It’s a matter of perspective: yours is to love me   from a block away & mine is to praise the grain- iness that weaves expressively: your face.

— Alice Fulton, “Yours & Mine,” Dance Script with Electric Ballerina (University of Illinois Press, 1983)

[mayeeware]

[clementinevonradics]

Clementine von Radics

[alonesomes]

You write shitty poetry that makes me feel nothing, but maybe that’s just because none of it is about me. That’s all I wanted to say. Sorry. You don’t deserve this, but I want to be spiteful and you’re my favorite person to bring back from the dead. So now that you’re here, I’ll take my mouth and bury it next to yours, pretend that there wasn’t already dirt in my teeth from the last time I did this. I don’t know what lonely is, but it tastes like you.

Caitlyn Siehl, Bury (via alonesomes)

[olmstedkeepmybones-blog]

Love Is Not an Emergency

more like weather, that is ubiquitous, true

    or false spring: the ambivalence we have for any picnic—

flies ass-up in the Jell-O;    the soft bulge of thunderheads.

Right now, the man in the booth next to me    at the Nautilus Diner,        Madison, New Jersey,

is crying, but looks up    to order the famous disco fries.

So the world’s saddest thing shakes you    like a Magic 8 Ball;

and before him, the minstrel    who smeared on love’s blackface, rattling

his damage like a tambourine.

I have been the deadest nag    limping circles around

the paddock, have flown to beady pieces,

sick as the tongue of mercury    at the thermometer’s tip.

But let’s admit there’s a pleasure, too, in living as we do,

   like two-strike felons who smile for the security cameras,

like love’s first responders, stuffing our kits with enhancement    pills, Zig Zags, and Power Ball cards. I read: to greet is the cognate for

   regret, to weep, but welcome        our weeping,

because “we grant the name of love        to something less than love”;

   because we all have to eat.

                       —For A. C.

-Erin Belieu

[cleaningvenus-deactivated201904]

[olmstedkeepmybones-blog]

Heat Denis Johnson, 1949

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth. It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin, Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover, streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones, and such a last light—full of spheres and zones. August,         you’re just an erotic hallucination, just so much feverishly produced kazoo music, are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night, this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion, the bogus moon of tenderness and magic you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

[forgottengenres]

I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.

Charles Bukowski (via thatlitsite)

[literarymiscellany]

A hole is nothing but what remains around it. My brother stood in the refrigerator light drinking milk that poured out of his head through thick black curls down his back into a puddle growing larger around him. My body stood between the living room and kitchen one foot on worn carpet one on cold linoleum. He couldn’t hear his name clouding from my mouth settling in the fluorescent air. I wanted to put my finger into the hole feel the smooth channel he escaped through stop the milk so he could swallow it but my body held as if driven into place. The milk on the floor reflected the light then became it. Floated upward and outward filling every shadow blowing the dark open.

Matt Rasmussen, “After Suicide [A hole is nothing]” from Black Aperture.  (via literarymiscellany)

[thelittlemerlemaid-deactivated2]

the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there’s no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.

Alone With Everybody, Charles Bukowski (via thelittlemerlemaid)

[olmstedkeepmybones-blog]

[hikingdyke-deactivated20170912]

did you forget scratching off your skin on the floor of your parents’ shower, home from a chilly vacation with a warm girl? a text at three am: “I’ve peeled all my skin off do you still love me? can you still love a mess of bloody muscle, viscous trails, teeth, teeth, teeth?? things on the outside that should not be? should be packed away behind layers of flesh?” a text the next morning: “wtf.” quit droning. she doesn’t love you. she only held your hand that time you cried in the hallways so that you would shut up she only kissed you, perched on your hips like a pixie (long hair and mirage lips and clementine vodka) only kissed you so that you would shut up shut up shut up shut up about tiny girls with too-big eyes and too-red lips who write badly about snowflakes swirling swirling swirling and boys with bad hands trying to romanticize his dirt brown eyes and skinny meanness and the ingrained sadness of teenaged heterosexuality stop. remember riding bikes at night in northern california remember kissing on various couches but never alone. remember our almost-summer almost-romance remember fluorescent lights and bad skin economics class and crying in the bathroom texts late at night: “don’t say that, you’re beautiful you’re beautiful you’re beautiful you’re beautiful”and don’t love girls who love boys who hate themselves don’t love girls who won’t scoop up your organs when they spill on summer driveways queezy girls, uneasy girls girls who have never read an anatomy book they just stand there staring at your kidneys on the ground, your intestines your pancreas maybe and even though she’s swollen with superiority and sanity you still want to take her little face in your hands but your fingers are bloody you’ve misplaced all your skin, sent it swimming down the drain and now even now, months later, you can see her when you close your eyes you can see her standing there in the dark your bloody fingers have left streaks down her cheeks and she is laughing and she is going to kiss you even though she is sober and you are only a simple viscous mass of tissue, writhing in her driveway

California (via porn4smartgirls)

[olmstedkeepmybones-blog]

[alovher]

i am full of anxiety and daydreams. i am built from bad poetry and diet pills. i am a puddle of liquid fire. i am my own worst enemy. i am weighed down by words i’ll never say and calories i shouldn’t have eaten. i am either too clingy or too detached, too loud or too quiet, too serious or too blithe. i am a paradox with skin and bones and i’m trying to be okay with that.

someone asked me to describe myself i didn’t know what to say // c.u.t (via vaffancculo)