99% Silent

there is a bird in my heart that wants to get out -bukowski

[lifeinpoetry]

Dear terror, / I come looking and I find you everywhere.

Camille Rankine, from “Dear Enemy,” published in This is A Public Space (via lifeinpoetry)

[lifeinpoetry]

And what am I // but fear, but wanting.

Camille Rankine, from “Aubade,” published in Poem-a-Day (via lifeinpoetry)

[storiesfortheafterlife]

Sometimes I dream about living by the sea. I dream about salty air, I dream about days that are unattached to anything or anyone. The ocean would be swelling with sadness, so much so that there would be no room for mine. I could sleep with the sound of the water outside my window instead of the trees. I think I could live that way.

h.m. {dreams} (via words-in-the-wind)

[wnq-writers]

Some people can’t understand how depression can keep you bed-ridden, or when I tell them that getting up fills me with an immense sensation of “doom”. Why, you ask? When I’m in bed, I am nobody. I am this skin and these bones. The moment my feet touch the floor I am Brianna, a spun-out version of what everyone expects of me, and that’s the last person I want to be.

Brianna Pastor, You Asked Me Why (via wnq-writers)

[wnq-writers]

Happiness did not feel like I thought it would. It did not find me in a tearful exchange with my mother, or in a sunrise painted with colors so vibrant and exquisite that they seemed to be dancing across the horizon. There was no moment that transcended time and space in which I finally felt that all of my troubles had faded away into the background. Happiness was not an event. It was not a moment. It was a taxing and heartbreaking and pitiful process, but ultimately, it was magnificent, not in the sense of a Hollywood-worthy scene complete with the perfect soundtrack, but in the sense that for the first time in almost three years, I felt as if my life was getting better. In the end, happiness was not a moment or an experience or even an emotion. Happiness was hope.

nearlyglitches  (via wnq-writers)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

It’s pouring, the trees are getting greener before my eyes, I love you. I’m almost afraid of the intensity of this happiness.

Vladimir Nabokov, from Letters to Véra tr. by Olga Voronina & Brian Boyd (via violentwavesofemotion)

[wnq-writers]

I think of how you would like that certain type of tea when I’m in that tea shop, how passionately you would react to that painting in that museum, how excited you would be to listen to that new song I have discovered and try humming at just the second play, how your head would fall sleepy during the movie we always wanted to watch drunk, how you would react to the vivacious old lady in the street and I think that is how you become a part of one’s life even if you’re not still there- being the invisible companion of mundane daily things.

existpause  (via wnq-writers)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

…Such aimlessness, such depression. Can’t read, write or think. There’s no climax here. Comfort yès: but the coffee’s not so good as I expected. And my brain is extinct—literally hasn’t the power to lift a pen. I’m disoriented completely. Oh the agitation, oh the discomfort of this mood. I at the top suffer strain; suffer, as this morning, grim despair and shall suffer an intensity of anguish ineffable (the word only means one can’t express it); holding the things;—all the things—the innumerable things— together.

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. May 1933 featured in Selected Diaries (via violentwavesofemotion)

[joansdidion]

Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

Sharon Olds, from “September 2001: New York City” (Stag’s Leap)

[wnq-writers]

I love people who are nothing like the ordinary. The ones who were riding their bikes and skinny dipping and collecting pebbles while everyone else was where everyone else was. People who are raw and chaotic. They won’t know what to say in a conversation but they’ll tell you the physical properties of all nearby planets or play you an instrument or read you their favourite poem. They’ll show you versions of themselves in minute details and roll up their sleeves so you can see their scars. When they speak, they unknowingly say things that awaken an echo in you. When you look at them in the eye you can tell that they’ve been through more than most, but they’re wild and unapologetic, and they will look you in the eye. When you tell them your secret, they’ll treat it like a flower and put it behind their ear. I love people like that, and how could I not? They carry the kind of magic I’ve never seen before; they’ll untie their hair, shake it loose and make you fall in love with them. They’re so beautiful it’s impossible to believe the whole world isn’t pulled toward them the way you are, but because it isn’t so, it makes those people that much more special.

jasmin silja (via wnq-writers)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness / because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it / by kissing you again & again while neither of us / can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes / miss the mouth / altogether, a kind of kiss / I think every single dead person / in every part of the world must crave / with violent impossibility.

Chen Chen, from I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities; “Elegy for my Sadness,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[bostonpoetryslam]

I write in lines. So the lines find their way on paper whether I overhear two boys insulting each other at the gas station, or see a gull cleaning her feet, or two old men playing dominoes on a hood of a car, or two young women kissing at the fish market. They become lines on receipts, on my hands, on a water bottle, on other people’s poems. Lines collect for years, but once in a while they discover that other lines are sexy and, well, the poems may come from that sort of a relationship. If I am lucky. Which isn’t often. But one has to have faith.

Ilya Kamisnky, for The Massachusetts Review (via bostonpoetryslam)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

The phoenix flower blooms invisibly out of the white ashes of the sea.

Christine Busta, tr. by Beth Bjorklund, from “The Royal Salt Gardens,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

She never said a word about the things that really upset her, because they weren’t fit to be put into any words at all.

Ingeborg Bachmann, from Three Paths to the Lake; “Eyes to Wonder,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I’m happier now, I’m content, but I’m never going to be fixed, ever,

Florence Welch, from an interview conducted c. March 2018 (via violentwavesofemotion)

[purplebuddhaquotes]

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

Azar Nafis (via purplebuddhaquotes)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

—Come and help me. I am disappearing.

Gunnar Ekelöf, tr. by Robert Bly, from “Monologue With His Wife,” (via violentwavesofemotion)