#poets.org

[mortalpractice]

Eros the Contagion

Soft as a Claude painting, the yellow sky tonight— trees in the parking lot still thick, though the air, yes, has an edge, the honey was solid in the jar when I opened it this morning, found a single ant frozen in the dunes, stunned by sweetness. Can you really die of sweetness? Hard to say yes, though I want to, looking up at these clouds that make my heart jump: oh joy in seeing though I can’t touch, like the girl repeating persimmon as the waitress in the diner tells her about a tree at the top of the hill she used to see, how beautiful that vivid orange fruit was all at once. Can’t touch them, but I see them in her eyes as she remembers persimmons. Maybe that was my mistake: thinking every love was different, a fruit inside its own clear mason jar—my love, her love, his, all separate as the trees they fell from. Maybe love is more contagion, bubbles in a bathtub slowly swelling, all the little circles drifting, gliding gently into each other until they burst, until nothing’s left but foam, the sound of rushing water.

—Annie Kim, in poets.org

[slateblueearthbelow]

Acceptance

by Kerry Hardie

Yesterday it was still January and I drove home and the roads were wet and the fields were wet and a palette knife

had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill. A splashed white van appeared from a side road then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning

which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain

the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life, only my car tyres swishing the lying water, and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.

[bostonpoetryslam]

How desire is a thing I might die for. Longing a well, a long dark throat. Enter any body of water and you give yourself up to be swallowed. Even the stones know that.

Leila Chatti, “After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning,” via the Academy of American Poets

[semaokoko]

The back of an old note has your name

Written in writings that symbolizes the

Drawings of a cartoonish character.

And the designs I have doodled have

Never, once, surpassed a pencil or paper.

These two instruments, the pencil and paper,

Are what I have used to remember and re-live again

You and an old love each time I sit and regret

And think and wonder and compare and reason

How I could have lost it all.

— The Pencil And Paper.

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become interesting. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again; their memories are what give them the need for other hands. The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a little and listen: music of hair, music of pain, music of looms weaving our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Wait by Galway Kindle

[kwibukilla]

There are some people who don't know how to love. These people are often mistaken to be toxic, but in reality, they are just a few steps away from mastering it. Society blames them for failing to master such an easy thing. People tell them that they are not responsible for the programming they received in childhood, but as adults, they are 100% responsible for fixing it. However, who will tell them that? Who has the audacity to do so? It is those who were raised on love, those who were given direction, those who witnessed how love looks like from birth, childhood to adulthood, those who never cried while taking their meals, those who were hugged every time they felt sad or cried, those who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

Love is a beautiful thing, but what about those who were raised in the absence of it? How easily will they figure out what to do with it? Those who were raised on survival know how hard it is to pick up their lost parts, let go of the past, love themselves once again, and open their doors to receiving love from others. Some were able to do it on their own, but most got lucky to have someone on their side, someone who was committed enough and promised to never leave. These people need help, but they can't say it out loud. They listen more and talk less, rarely about themselves. To understand them, you need to question them a little more. The help they need is your presence, just to be there while they are fighting their demons.

These people need therapy, a lot of physical exercise, and they need to be provided, poured and surrounded with love, a lot of it. And when they win out, these people are a mysterious kind, brave, hard-working with no excuse why something important shouldn't be done. When they are out, their life is full of possibilities, and the world will be safe in their presence as they know the black and white of life. However, sadly, there are others who fail to make it out of the mess and fall on the other part of the world, the darker one, ending up being toxic. It is one out of ten for them to win out because it's already too late. Those who failed to make it out mark that they grow in pain, live in pain, and die slowly in pain. Their life was nothing but more pain.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from my files]

* * * *

Instructions on Not Giving Up More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. Ada Limón (Source: poets.org)

[likespunglass]

The Conditional

Say tomorrow doesn't come. Say the moon becomes an icy pit. Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified. Say the sun's a foul black tire fire. Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks. Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain. Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter. Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse. Say we never get to see it: bright future, stuck like a bum star, never coming close, never dazzling. Say we never meet her. Never him. Say we spend our last moments staring at each other, hands knotted together, clutching the dog, watching the sky burn. Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive, right here, feeling lucky.

–Ada Limón