[narcissistcookbook]

if you want to create but feel intimidated and overwhelmed, you're forgetting something: good art doesn't exist. all art is terrible. every story and song and movie and picture is worse than the one before it and all artists should be in prisom

[wormontwostrings]

🌠

[apoemaday]

Simple

by Raymond Carver

A break in the clouds. The blue outline of the mountains. Dark yellow of the fields. Black river. What am I doing here, lonely and filled with remorse?

I go on casually eating from the bowl of raspberries. If I were dead, I remind myself, I wouldn’t be eating them. It’s not so simple. It is that simple.

[apoemaday]

Naming the Stars

by Joyce Sutphen

This present tragedy will eventually turn into myth, and in the mist of that later telling the bell tolling now will be a symbol, or, at least, a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those loose changes, the rearrangement of hearts, just parts of old lives patched together, gathered into a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see the outline there: her fingertips touching his, the faint fusion of two bodies breaking into light.

[apoemaday]

To Hold

by Li-Young Lee

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky, she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up. One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize what we love, and what it takes to tend what isn’t for our having. So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time. But for the moment, I’ll listen to her dream, and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping.

[apoemaday]

December

by Alex Dimitrov

Who would miss the year at this hour? Like headlights circling suburbia. And since there aren’t directions to the afterlife, we must put on our coats and smile. We must be children pressing our hands to the ice, without apology for our awe–the same kind we keep trying to find in churches and cheap hotels. The kind we can’t buy in malls or airport bars. I have said so many things I don’t mean it would take lives I’ve yet to imagine, stepping onto another train, a lost pair of kites hurrying, many drinks, less expectations – surely you know the feeling of having to walk through the cold without music or stars.

[ferncloud]

stuck in a dream

[apoemaday]

A Travel Diary

by Louise Glück

I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn’t remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me, a beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea. How casually you accepted the room that would have been ours, and, later, how merrily you stood on the balcony, pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates. The next day you resumed the journey we would have taken together.

The concierge procured an old blanket for me. By day, I sat outside the kitchen. By night, I spread my blanket among the orange trees. Every day the same, except for the weather.

After a time, the staff took pity on me. The busboy would bring me food from the evening meal, the odd potato or bit of lamb. Sometimes a postcard arrived. On the front, glossy landmarks and works or art. Once, a mountain covered in snow. After a month or so, there was a postscript: X sends regards.

I say a month, but really I had no idea of time. The busboy disappeared. There was a new busboy, then one more, I believe. From time to time, one would join me on my blanket.

I loved those days! each one exactly like its predecessor. There were the stone steps we climbed together and the little town where we breakfasted. Very far away, I could see the cove where we used to swim, but not hear anymore the children calling out to one another, nor hear you anymore, asking me if I would like a cold drink, which I always would.

When the postcards stopped, I read the old ones again. I saw myself standing under the balcony in that rain of foil-covered kisses, unable to believe you would abandon me, begging you, of course, though not in words –

The concierge, I realized, had been standing beside me. Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey, not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories. As they fall away, perhaps you will attain that enviable emptiness into which all things flow, like the empty cup in the Daodejing –

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away – We watched you walk away. Down the stone steps and into the little town. I felt something true had been spoken and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself I was glad at least to have heard it.

[ying-an-sanren]

In the shrine of the Scrap Immortal and Crimson Rain Sought Flower, the Ghost King and the god are worshipped together.

[morv403]

❣️

[fucca02]

[portablesleep]

Some more art practice that I liked. featuring OG!NYY

[apoemaday]

How Lucky We Are That You Can't Sell a Poem

by Gregory Orr

How lucky we are That you can’t sell A poem, that it has No value. Might As well Give it away.

That poem you love, That saved your life, Wasn’t it given to you?

[schinako]

Rabbits and triangles🐇

[portablesleep]

It sucks to be alone

[inknose]

slip up

[petaltexturedskies]

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

Mary Oliver, "Dogfish" in New and Selected Poems