Poetry and such

This is a side blog [icon id: a simple drawing of a streetlight with an orange glow and rays of pink light shooting out of it /end id] header is just the color purple for now

[seekingstars]

HOW’S THAT HOUSE THAT RAISED YOU? - Lev St. Valentine

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

[brenna]

[teaboot]

[wheresmyphonemp3]

[fadingponycookiedream]

[andsorrowsend]

[werefeathers]

[piecemealpoems]

[pigeonculttt]

The Trans Agenda is to Keep My F*cking Friends Alive — sol rios

published as part of the Citizen Trans* {Project} by New Words Press

[faggotisaacfloofs]

[ID: a screenshot of the poem mentioned. It reads:

At 2pm and 2am. Sleep, I remember you. Please, wait for me. I send out 7 reminders to eat a day. Like little paper lifeboats. It’s nothing. And it keeps me afloat. I forget to eat too. I need company for my shot. 3ml of Estradiol over facetime. I tell my friend I’m being a baby about it, she says woman up. Daylight savings swallows up the hour in question. I was going to sit in the bathtub until you responded. And I need you to keep you alive for me. Just until Thursday. Just through to 6 am. I can send you 14 dollars for soup. I can lend you my ears. You’ll need both hands to hold a heart. Your razor clinking against the counter. In a dream I almost slip into, I reach through the phone and hide the blade in my open palm, before you notice. Text me, I say. In the morning. I love you. I need you alive. We can figure out the rest tomorrow. With or without sleep. With or without the light of the morning.

End ID]

[spiritunwilling]

HI. FAILCHILD ZINE is a zine about your ugliest children, your unfinished poems in the corners of your Google Drive, that mortifying first-draft-gone-nowhere you planned to take to your grave. We are interested in publishing your worst works! Pieces that you decided never to send to any proper literary magazine. Stuff that you couldn’t quite wrangle into your vision for the work. Projects you started and never got back to. Bad and incomplete, or good and incomplete. Empty structures clinging to a skeleton of ambition. What you gave up on. The things that didn’t cohere, even if you really badly wanted them to. We are interested in the process and the prototype. Show us what could've been. Show us what was, and was not what you wanted anyways.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

people who write poetry are so scary literally how the fuck did you do that

[barking]

by strongerpotions on twitter

[joelletwo]

[ID: a poem formatted in a word processor. it makes the profile shape of a dog sitting with an alert tail, all of it red text with black for a nose and collar.

poem text:

please do not fault your dog for his nature. he is not privy to the human rules by which you live. when he barks he does not mean to hurt your ears; he has not your gift of speech. he cannot express himself as beautifully as you can. he cannot express himself as beautifully as you would like him to. but he will try.

he does not mean to scratch you when he jumps up to greet you. he is so happy to see you. he waited all day. he does not mean to cause you pain. he cannot know he is made of sharp edges and pointed teeth. he is too cherished to know how to use them.

so please do not fault him, scold him and scorn him, when he comes to you, tail wagging, knocking every thing off the coffee table, his only tres pass being that he does not know how to be any thing other than a dog, and his only sin being that he loves you.

the last stanza is especially fragmented around his legs and tail, which is the rising final line of "that he loves you."

end description]

[jumbleofnotes]

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— What People Really Look Like

[geryone]

I Will Destroy You, Nick Flynn

[lovewithagirl]

[image description: black text against a white background making up a poem. any italicized words are written between apostrophes for accessibility. it reads as follows:

Tomorrow, or the day after, I'll press my

mouth to your scar & run my tongue along it

so I can taste how you were once opened, so I can know where

you never closed. Each

scar's a door, we know that—I want to whisper into

yours, I want my hands

to hover over it, I want you to whisper 'please'

I want you ('please please please') to beg for it. /end description]

[c3rvida3]

You mention pressing flowers in the thick dictionary on your bookshelf and I picture us in the kitchen making my mother's dandelion jelly recipe, handfuls of yellow spilling into your mismatched bowls. Did you know you can make clay out of dried rose petals? Rosary beads the old fashioned way that stain like a nosebleed. You want to make me your lavender cake, and I think of brushing a bit of flour from your cheek, how your eyes might soften, how your lips might feel. What word were we trying to look up again?

[c3rvida3]

You mention pressing flowers in the thick dictionary on your bookshelf and I picture us in the kitchen making my mother's dandelion jelly recipe, handfuls of yellow spilling into your mismatched bowls. Did you know you can make clay out of dried rose petals? Rosary beads the old fashioned way that stain like a nosebleed. You want to make me your lavender cake, and I think of brushing a bit of flour from your cheek, how your eyes might soften, how your lips might feel. What word were we trying to look up again?

[clonist]

something I very much needed to read today

[sophaeros]

image id:

image text is in all-caps.

Your life is not on pause or delayed. Your life is still happening, so then the question is: are you fully awake to it, paying attention even if it is completely different from your idea of how it should be like in an ideal scenario?

There are no ideal scenarios, there is only the present now that is unfolding right before you with every inhale, every exhale, every inhale, every exhale.

Yumi Sakugawa

/end id

[clonist]

something I very much needed to read today

[sophaeros]

image id:

image text is in all-caps.

Your life is not on pause or delayed. Your life is still happening, so then the question is: are you fully awake to it, paying attention even if it is completely different from your idea of how it should be like in an ideal scenario?

There are no ideal scenarios, there is only the present now that is unfolding right before you with every inhale, every exhale, every inhale, every exhale.

Yumi Sakugawa

/end id

[beaft]

How to Respond to Criticism

Stop doing everything. Don’t say anything or be anything. Get as small as you possibly can without disappearing. Don’t exist. Or keep existing, but differently than before.

Remember: criticism is the same thing as wholesale condemnation and also murder, so react accordingly.

Apologize, but don’t really mean it, and plant a seed of secret resentment so deep in your own heart that years later you can’t even remember that you’re the one who nurtured it and made it grow, it seems that much like a native part of you.

Sink into a hole so deep that no one can ever find you.

No. No. No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no NO. NO.

JUST DIE. JUST GET SICK AND DIE AND THEN YOU’LL FEEL TERRIBLE YOU EVER SAID THOSE THINGS BECAUSE I’LL BE DEAD AND YOU’LL BE SO SO SO SORRY AND YOU’LL WISH YOU COULD BRING ME BACK BUT YOU CAN’T.

Give up on all of your goals immediately.

Tell everyone you know about the criticism, but in a way that makes it clear that you expect them to publicly find it ridiculous and assure you there’s not a shred of truth to it. Do this repeatedly, first while sober, then later after several glasses of wine on a Wednesday afternoon when no one else is really drinking except for you. “Can you believe it?” Ask them that repeatedly. “Can you believe that? About me?” Ask until no one will meet your eyes.

Remember that life is a rich tapestry.

Become so rich and strong and tall that you’re a giant made out of gold and nobody can hurt you and everything you do is perfect and you can use your laser diamond eyes to melt the lungs of your enemies.

Dwell on it.

You can either be perfect or the biggest piece of shit who ever existed but not both, so if the criticism is right, you are the biggest piece of shit who ever existed. If it is not right, you are perfect and everyone else is wrong.

Fall in love with whoever criticized you. Don’t walk away until you’ve ruined their marriage.

Whisper their criticism every night to yourself until you have it memorized, word for word. Remember it forever. Have the words stitched into the shroud that covers your body before you’re lowered into the tomb so you and your criticism can embrace one another for eternity.

Do not rise above it. Never rise above anything. The sky is no place for a human.

Be sure not to separate the tone of the criticism from the content. If it was said ungracefully, it cannot be true. If it was said reasonably, it cannot be false.

Send an email explaining why you don’t deserve to be criticized, then another six emails after that, each one explaining the last, like a set of Russian nesting dolls that don’t think it’s your fault.

Set fire to something that was once beautiful.

Run into a cave and break your ankle so that people have to come find you and they see you lying at the bottom of this beautiful cave and maybe there’s a waterfall and the light from the crystals makes you look really beautiful and they say “Are you okay?” and you say “I think so” and they say “oh my God have you been here alone this whole time with a broken ankle” and you say “it’s okay” and they say “you’re so brave” and you are brave and you look so beautiful surrounded by cave crystals and everyone stands over you and says “oh wow” and “you poor beautiful thing” and “I’m so sorry we let you run into the cave but I’m so glad we found you” and let them carry you home and promise to be your best friends forever and that everything’s their fault and also they named the cave after you and you’re prettier than all of your enemies and your enemies all died of jealousy while you were in the cave.

Remember that there are only two kinds of people in the world: fans and haters. No true fan would ever express a criticism of you or your work; conversely no hater could ever seek to engage in a good-faith debate about something you said or did they disagree with. Dismiss everything everyone has to say about you.

Move away.

If it’s a close friend, say “Thank you for being so honest with me,” and then never talk to them again.

Do something with your feelings right away. It doesn’t matter what. Lash out, make a sculpture, whatever.

Log into YouTube and call someone “living Hitler” and “a waste of skin” until you feel better about yourself.

Remember, if someone doesn’t like your work, that means they don’t like you, and they wish that you had never been born, so just lay down in the road and die.

Daniel Lavery, The Toast

[gatheringbones]

ronda slater, what I need is: a contemplation of bisexuality, from bi any other name: bisexual people speak out, edited by Lorraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu, 1991

[pronouncingitwang]

[ID: Two photos of a poem in a book. The poem is by Ronda Slater and titled "What I Need Is: in Contemplation of Bisexuality" and reads

What I need is / an angular man /with muscles and bones / built for thrusting / or maybe

what I need is a / satin-skinned woman / with fingers that dance / on my body / or maybe

what I need is / a Trojan Horse lover / who is really a woman / named Helen, in hiding, / or maybe

what I need is / a magical man / who grows gardens of herbs / and heals with the laying / on of his hands / or maybe

what I need is / a lyrical lady / with hair down to here / who writes poems and songs / about me for a change, / or maybe

what I need is / a sensual socialist / androgynous feminist / who doesn't smoke cigarettes / or maybe

love is like water / and when you find out / you need it, who cares / where it comes from, / or maybe

everyone is a well / just waiting for me / to send my ladle down.

/end ID]

[piecemealpoems]

Sometimes the good hurts more than the tragic ever could,

The pain of life is expected,

Familiar.

Seeing it reflected in characters,

Echoed in stories,

It feels right.

But happiness?

Gentle narratives with a slow

profound kindness that

bursts with love?

Those make something inside ache,

Something you cannot bear to look at.

Tenderness is the most foreign thing

to a soul that has never been held carefully.

It is too raw to hope for,

Unbearable in its impossibility.

To look at it head on is to

mourn a life you will never lead

[flowerytale]

Frank O'Hara, from “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)”, The Collected Poems

[pendraegon]

[ID: the moon is rising / I am always thinking of the moon rising / I am always thinking of you. END ID.]