raw;

d, 19, leo, she/her. writer. apathy & dramatics make for a strange pair.

[luthienne]

“Grief and rage - you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you - may cleanse you of your darkness.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Give me blood and rage and / a heart for horror; teach me to be / tough enough to face this world / still standing. Make a Fury of me.”

Elizabeth Hewer, from “Finding Ariadne” in Wishing for Birds

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Mumford & Sons, “Lover’s Eyes”

“A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself,”

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“…is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?”

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“We, hurt by ourselves, keen / to be hurters and keen / to be hurt back deep inside. / We, like weapons laid / beside anger asleep.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke; “Antistrophes” (tr. Edward Snow)

“…she did not allow herself tears. When she did cry, she would explain her tears in this way: ‘I am not weeping, I am bursting with rage.’”

Gabriella Fiori, from Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography

“Isn’t all that rage so ugly? / And isn’t it mine, still? / Good god, isn’t it mine?”

Ashe Vernon, from “Buried,” Not a Girl

Ada Limón, from “The Good Fight”

“What are we made of but hunger and rage?”

Anne Carson, excerpt of To Compostela

[luthienne]

“Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.”

Mary Oliver, from Devotions; “Thirst”

“And I long for goodness—to live by what is permanent in the soul.”

Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to J.M. Murry, dated October 1920

“My soul may be straight and good, / but my heart, my hopelessly bent blood, / all that keeps hurting me inside, / it can’t hold upright.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke; “The Voices: Nine leaves with a title leaf” (tr. Edward Snow)

Ashe, “Save Myself”

“I felt as if the sky was torn off my life. / I had no home in goodness anymore.”

Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”

“My difficulty of contacting my anger (when it’s aimed at people I love) is that it directly contradicts my notion of how to deserve love:—being good.”

Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

“…but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.”

Margaret Atwood, from Alias Grace

Camille Rankine, “Emergency Management”

“Behind ‘I’m so good that it hurts’ lies: 'I’m trying to be good. Don’t you see how hard it is. Be patient with me.'”

Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963

“Be good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.”

Lucie Brock-Broido, from Stay, Illusion; “A Cage Goes in Search of a Bird”

“I’m tired of forgetting / everything. I want my details: why shouldn’t I have them? / I want not to have been on the margin, pretending to be good.”

Alice Notley, from Culture of One: Poems; “Swimming in Sacred Water,”

“Because I know twelve ways to be wrong / & two to be good,”

Yusef Komunyakaa, from The Chameleon Couch

“I am so distant from the hope of myself, / in which I have goodness, and discernment, / and never hurry through the world / but walk slowly, and bow often.”

Mary Oliver, from Devotions; “When I Am Among The Trees”

Keaton Henson, “How Could I Have Known?”

“Does a good person / think this way? I deserve / credit for my courage—”

Louise Glück, from The Meadowlands

“I am not good, I do not strive / for it. I am quiet, unmerited / bleak. I am tragic and the sky / appears red.”

Camille Rankine, from Incorrect Merciful Impulses

[firstfullmoon]

hi what are your favorite love poems/letters?

I have a compilation of my absolute favourite love letters

as for poems:

“Having a Coke with You” “For Grace, After a Party” and “Morning Poem” by Frank O’Hara

“Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks” by Christopher Citro

“Elegy for My Sadness” and “Song of the Anti-Sisyphus” by Chen Chen

“Intifada Incantation: Poem 38 for b.b.L.” “Poem for My Love” and various poems for Haruko by June Jordan

“One Last Poem for Richard” by Sandra Cisneros

“Snow and Dirty Rain” by Richard Siken

“Wish” and “In Time” by W. S. Merwin

“A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention” by Yehuda Amichai

“Like a Small Café, That’s Love” by Mahmoud Darwish

“Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally A Love Poem” by Bob Hicok

“For M” by Mikko Harvey

“To Kiss a Forehead” by Marina Tsvetaeva

“When I Tell My Husband I Miss The Sun, He Knows” by Paige Lewis

“The Quiet World” by Jeffrey McDaniel

“Morning Love Poem” by Tara Skurtu

“[Of all the things I have done, I am most proud of our relationship]” and “Aubade” by Yanyi

some French ones:  “J’ai tant rêvé de toi” “Les espaces du sommeil” by Robert Desnos, “Les yeux d’Elsa” “Les mains d’Elsa” by Louis Aragon, “La courbe de tes yeux” “Ma morte vivante” “J’ai fermé les yeux” by Paul Eluard

[endless-unfolding]

If my heart had knees those knees would fold;

Nate Pritts, from “Tulip”  (via weltenwellen)

[shisasan]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Chapter 4: A Hymn and a Secret (1880)

[lifeinpoetry]

There are days when I give up on my body

but not the world. I am alive. I know this. Alive now

to see the world, to see the river rupture everything with its light.

— Hieu Minh Nguyen, from “Heavy,” published in Poem-a-Day

[pregnantsid]

Vincent & Theo Van Gogh 

Hannah Gadsby in Nanette (2018) // At Eternity’s Gate dir. Julian Schnabel (2018) // Loving Vincent dir. Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman (2017) // Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to Theo Van Gogh (1880) // Almond Blossoms by Vincent Van Gogh (1890); painted as a gift for the birth of his brother Theo’s son named after him

[thelionscave]

[thelionscave]

a dream from some time ago

This is a dream, I realize, and I am right. I look around myself, and I am somewhere where the dirt is red, and the sky is a sickly green, as if the Sun somehow changed hues and temperature enough for the heavens to become algae-filled shore waves. There are plants here, however, trees and shrubs and flowers, and it looks as if I’m on Mars, but Earth, but not either one. It’s a strange in-between, and though I am confused, I am certain of something, in the same way almost-lucid dreamers are whenever they wake in a different world.

There is no sea, and for a reason I can’t pinpoint, this is highly disturbing.

No people surround me, now. But then, there are too many to count. I am speaking now, with someone who vaguely resembles who I think should be my mother. Familiarity seeps into my words and theirs, and the conversation is pleasant, and it is kind, and nothing feels out of place. This world without seas is, for a moment of impossible brevity, calm.

And then, I am reminded of something, in a way I do not remember, a something so big and strange that it seems too far from me, but it is close, and it finally registers in my mind, and my heart races. Perhaps my body, the real one, the Universe-I-belong-to one, is experiencing the same thing.

I shake, but I say nothing. The conversation carries on as usual, and then I am standing in a desert. No plants, not anymore. I am alone, now, and I think back, and find death registries signed by me alone, metal graves I had to build, corpses I don’t think my mind allows me to see, and unintentional genocide. Somehow, I also know, it is something I did, something I had the authority but not the foresight to do, that lead me to stand here, alone and lonely and everything that describes the worst parts of forced solitude.

I am stranded. And then, I am not me, and I have no body or eyes or ears, or any nerves in my body, and yet I am watching as our galaxy and Andromeda collide, but as they do, it is nothing like scientists in either world described. Rather, it is a pull, gravitational and something else, and it tugs at all planets—there are no stars in sight, least of all our measly, unimpressive Sun—until they reach the end, until they are swallowed by a hole that is neither black nor void, but filled to the brim and golden. Perhaps there it is, our Sun. Perhaps I am selfish and self-centered even in my dreams.

There are no explosions, no burning, only the swallowing of every planet we know and do not know of, and they look natural and almost-elegant as they meet their demise, as if this is not a catastrophe. I see, and I hear the buzz, the hum, the suction sound of planets being gulped down unchewed. Our Pluto is last in line, and it feels fitting, for someone as bitter yet resigned as I am about its status, to dream of something like this.

I come back to my body. A spaceship is still untouched. I no longer know what planet I am on, or if there is or was a record of its existence before. I think of it, but don’t act on anything other than instinct and an impending desperation that has not yet settled in. I am feeling strange, and estranged, and resigned. Perhaps this is a metaphor, perhaps it is not. I do not like to think about my own mind more than I need to in order to visit the psychiatrist and feel confident enough to take my meds in the morning when my mother wakes me.

I drop myself on Pluto, and I hope, foolishly. I know how this ends, and yet I hope. There is a metaphor, here, too. I refuse to acknowledge even this one.

Pluto gets five planets close to this almost-Sun, and I believe for a moment, in an entity I know to be fair in only the way nature can be. I only believe in the Universe, for a blissful ending.

I wake up then, and I can only think of what I dreamt, not able to sense anything around me, only that which is inside my skull—or, at the very least, I believe that is where thoughts hide when you wish to find them but are too aware and scare them away in your attempts to flip through them.

I died on Pluto, and felt nothing other than what I can’t allow myself to feel in this world, I think, as the pale blue of the walls hit by the morning sun comes into view.

How fitting, I think, as my mother opens the door to wake me up.

[thelionscave]

the stars, love

For a moment significant enough to stay with you for a little longer, I beg of you to look at the world not with the eyes of a person, but with the eyes of something far removed from these not-so-small wars. Ignore the way your voice shakes when you speak of your father, ignore the trembling of your hands when you hold a cigarette between your fingers. Ignore your body, for however grand it is, it is a weight you don’t need now. It is an anchor, but this moment’s waters are calm. I promise you, the calm is here.

Imagine, now, the stars, and how easy it would be to fit yourself between them. Your soul, be it small or a giant, shivering against the emptiness, not because of the cold, but because of the neutral strangeness of such a feeling. You feel nothing, for this moment. There is only you, lost among stars and nebulae and asteroids that somehow remind you of your childhood best friend’s callousness, his sarcastic dismissal. Only, now, here, it feels nothing like it did then. It does not hurt. It simply is.

Look into the invisible eye of the black hole that cannot touch you. Walk closer, dance on its event horizon. It will leave you be, it will never attempt to harm you. It hungers for information, for atoms and for data, not for souls seeking perspective. Dance, darling. Your movements are never odd when you have no body to chain you to the scrutiny of strangers you know you shouldn’t care about but still do. There is no clumsiness, no awkward shuffle of your feet. There is no form, no glow, no shine, nothing but nothing, and— 

Imagine being anywhere but anywhere, and imagine, I beg, how wonderful that feeling must be, to be free of anything but yourself. No thoughts brought about by a mind that does not hate but harms nonetheless. Oh, how beautiful! If only such irregularities would bring you back to yourself the way you wish you could be able to.

Something passes by you as you move towards the edge, towards a place no one but you know. There are no sins here, there is no law or order; chaos is beautiful when it is free to do as it pleases. Lay your hand against that white dwarf. You do not feel a thing, do you? But it isn’t numbness, it isn’t apathy, it is a choice made before you began.

This, my love, is what fate is.

It is not paths crossing, it is not tangents, it is not almosts-then-nevers, it is not forevers. It is not what could be, or what is, or what will be, but something that quells the thirst and waits and loves and gives and you don’t feel it. There is no guilt or pain. Even happiness! It is not something you know, here.

It’s the stars, and it’s the planets, and it’s the journey or the trip, or whatever you choose to call it. It is something, and nothing, and it is everything. Nihilism and faith, hatred and love, they do not cancel each other out, but they do not complement each other, they—

Well, there are no words for such things.

Gently, now, careful not to disturb yourself, come back. It is alright, I assure you. Nothing will hurt you now that you have smiled at what people once believed were gods, now that you have not-tasted the freedom of falling upwards. Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the legends and the books and the poems and everything, they are here to explain, now, not to incite, not to bring about a broken sob or a wistful smile.

You, beautiful, are now as you should have been before. The cigarettes, you can throw away, and the scrutiny, you can ignore, and your father’s pain, it is just that, now— 

Judgement, however we may look at it, is not something that exists.

We are here, aren’t we? Whatever that might mean, whatever it may not. Be prideful, and be selfish, and sin without causing pain, and you will find moments, despite the not-so-small wars, where you almost remember the feeling of the star imploding without sound before your eyes, the way you never changed despite the gravity’s uncertainty.

What have you learned?

If it is nothing, or if it is everything, or if it is only one or a few or more things, you are correct in your conclusions.

You are sinless, and your soul, without and with form or vessel, is of a grandeur you can only believe when you are freed of this useless anchor.

But, remember: it is only those who carry, those who push and those who rebel, in whichever way they can allow themselves to, that get to breathe with time wrapped around them.

[thelionscave]

the sea & a stray thought

You are on the pier, and you wonder, for a moment so brief it becomes inconsequential, why things must change. There is something cruel in the way we long for constants and praise permanence, but also love the sound of waves crashing against stones and that of the seagulls announcing their untethered and untameable freedom.

There is cruelty in time, and perhaps no one intended it to be so. No one intended, at all. But it is, and it hurts, to see the cracked concrete and the walls, and the too-obvious dips in the stone. It hurts, not because of a long-passed fondness, or a memory, or a happiness, but because it is the way things are. In this moment, as you stare into the shifting almost-green of the water and remind yourself of graves and crosses and a kiss stolen under the thirteenth streetlamp lining the port, you are powerless and have nothing to keep you, but too much to leave. It’s sobering more than anything, but it also brings about something you haven’t felt in a while.

Some would call it infinity. You call it a broken, incomprehensible sense of grandeur. What it actually is, you will see at one point in time, is life.

There is life inside of you, however ugly or wretched you perceive it to be. There is life, you must know. Perhaps it will be gone by sundown, or you will have it taken away by the girl with the wide smile and sharp canines, or not. Whatever may follow, now, as you stare at the way the clouds pass and try to find something to relate it to, something to help you scrutinize their speed, the seagulls still scream and the waves still brush against the sand, and somewhere, there used to be a stone you sunbathed on, despite your mother’s warnings.

It’s gone now.

You must deal with it, you know?

Cruelty breeds freedom, at the best of times. Remember that.

[thelionscave]

perhaps, courage

You land before the king and lower your head as if you are lesser than the gold atop his head, as if the marks wrapped around your flesh are a failure of sorts, and there is no one courageous enough to tell you otherwise, because the king is watching, and he is waiting, and you never wish to irritate him. He has much too short a fuse, and you’ve been on the painful end of each and every one of his bouts of rage; remember this, and keep your eyes lowered, and don’t flinch when he asks you of where you spent your night. That space before the sea is sacred. A single believer is enough to power a god for a lifetime.

Lips move before thoughts gather. There’s a storm, but the skies are clear.

A hand comes to push you lower. Your back was too straight, they say. The pressure against your bones was not enough, they say. Your eyes weren’t respectful enough, they say.

You aren’t the only thoughtless fool in the kingdom.

A shadow, somewhere. A whisper, somewhere else. A powerless royal, here.

If your mother saw you now, he says, as if he is untouchable and not just a medium for some untrained artist with too many plain thoughts.

Add some blue, add some red, add some pride, they must’ve said. Oh, there isn’t any good left, they must’ve said. At the very least, there’s a crown, they must’ve said, royalty is only in blood and name and symbol, after all.

You’re dismissed much too late, and there’s much too dense a crowd for you to forgive yourself. The pier awaits. Once again, you are guilty. Once again, your sins are greater in number than your scars, and your artist has left you unfinished, and promptly forgotten of your existence, until a speck of dust made them feel some vague sense of uncertainty.

Perhaps they realized, much too late, when you were already stacked against thousands like you, with only the sea in your chest and the sand in your shoes. They realized, perhaps. They regretted, perhaps.

Oh, how courage would’ve added value.