#theme: loss

[wordlydelights]

Richard Siken, from "Glue", War of the Foxes

[seasunandstar]

Maybe we don't bear the unbearable. Maybe we die with it. And in our place some larger, less impatient shape may then be granted space but I don't want it. I want my mother. Sometimes beside her in the bed while trying to tell her I'm okay, I start to weep. She watches me. Her eyes are distant now, gone deep inside some gravely gentle place where, with a stranger's curiosity, she seems to ask What can I do with your sadness? She has no use for it. We will lose what we love, and our suffering is useless, and by dusk all the crickets will thrum their one absence of warning. That trace of light against the hills will spread through trees, undo the ends of evergreen, then fall to fields. It will not hold. As if it means to urge us, look. Love's body must be manifold. Black cricket shell, new summer air, late light. The landscape's all ablaze with gentle strangers. Look. We're standing in a field.

-- From "On Joy", Taije Silverman

[seasunandstar]

As from a Quiver of Arrows

What do we do with the body, do we burn it, do we set it in dirt or in stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey, oil, and then gauze and tip it onto and trust it to a raft and to water?

What will happen to the memory of his body, if one of us doesn't hurry now and write it down fast? Will it be salt or late light that it melts like? Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap

to a pen elsewhere —how are we to regard his effects, do we throw them or use them away, do we say they are relics and so treat them like relics? Does his soiled linen count? If so,

would we be wrong then, to wash it? There are no instructions whether it should go to where are those with no linen, or whether by night we should memorially wear it ourselves, by day

reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty. Here, on the floor behind his bed is a bent photo—why? Were the two of them lovers? Does it mean, where we found it, that he forgot it or lost it

or intended a safekeeping? Should we attempt to make contact? What if this other man too is dead? Or alive, but doesn't want to remember, is human? Is it okay to be human, and fall away

from oblation and memory, if we forget, and can't sometimes help it and sometimes it is all that we want? How long, in dawns or new cocks, does that take? What if it is rest and nothing else that

we want? Is it a findable thing, small? In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe, a country? Will a guide be required who will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we swim? What will I do now, with my hands?

-- Carl Phillips, from From the Devotions. 

[expiravitae]

Bring Me The Horizon, True friends

E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake, Ojistoh

[para-dust]

丧父 (Loss of a father)

I was fifteen when I lost a father

Drunk on attention, having it ripped away

Only to fill shoes several sizes larger

I lost him, yet we had to move on

Keep going, keep growing

But were we really growing

Or were we just children in a trench coat

Hems dragging against the floor?

And he wasn't there to fix my collar or pat my head

To mend things and teach me not to break them again

To give me strength and courage, to be my stars and my sky

But I lost a father when I was 15

And from then on, all I knew was running

Written for a father figure in my life, who was there for 3 short years. He had his struggles and his faults but I miss him all the same, and I still wonder how different I would be if he never left.

[flohrativity]

2016, august

your footsteps weave poetry in the dust my corpse left behind.

- not all stories have happy endings. 

[araekniarchive]

hello! may i request time travel and love? like themes of 13 Going on 30 (2004) and About Time (2013). thank you ^_^

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife

Robert F. Young, The Dandelion Girl

Outlander (2014–), 1x01: Sassenach

Wonder Woman (2017), dir. Patty Jenkins

John Lewis advert (2012) (x)

Stephen King, 11/23/63

Misfits (2009–2013), 2x04

Michael Crichton, Timeline

The Good Place (2016–2020), 3x12: Pandemonium

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lovers

Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

[araekniarchive]

hi i wanted to request something related to relationships which break but you can't really mourn the loss bc you weren't officially together in the first place, something along the lines of "you weren't mine to lose" (august, taylor swift)

Taylor Swift, august

A Fine Frenzy, Almost Lover

Kevin Can F**k Himself (2021–), 1x03: We’re Selling Washing Machines

Brandy, Almost Doesn’t Count