Rights for soft toys

poetry sideblog this is a personal archive dont worry about it.

[wovi]

*

joy sullivan

[sawasawako]

- lighthousekeeping, jeanette winterson

[birdblogwhichisforbirds-deactiv]

My brother, listen, do not be afraid. I have descended into Hell to talk About forgiveness. Yes, Pilate, with you. With others too - with everyone who’s here. But you first. Even Judas, my old friend, Must wait a while for me. We have a while; The sempiternal agony of Hell Exists outside of human history.  Souls killed in every century are here Millennia before and after you. You stand among those millions who share An everlasting sentence for the crime Of “just doing your job.” Your job killed me. Your job ripped my skin open with a lash And drove me, bleeding, shambling up the hill Where your job drove an eight inch iron spike Through each hand and each foot, and hoisted me Towards the sky and left me there for hours To slowly suffocate. You did your job To many more like me. Their names were all Forgotten as they rotted on the cross Unburied. Hell is teeming with the souls Who did their job, who served the empire well - Not just your empire, all the ones that rose And fell, before and after your own Rome’s. You asked me once what truth is. That is it. That is the truth about your whole life’s work. You know this and it sears worse than the flames. But that is not why I descended here. I’m here about forgiveness. Listen. Please.

In the beginning was the Word of God. That’s me. Like you, I had a job to do. By me all things were made, and without me Was nothing that was made. The universe Was my life’s work, the empire that I served. My father’s will for Mankind was my law. One act of disobedience was enough To sentence every one of you to death. I did my job, and did it thoroughly: The hands that made the stars built every tomb. They sculpted tumors, planted neat rows Of plagues in human lungs and skin and guts, Conducted rousing symphonies of storms, Earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, and wrote In stone: if you survive all this, the time itself Will kill you. Yet this law, My Father’s Law, No - our law, I share blame for it - forbade The dead to die. Infinities of pain, We gave as punishments for finite crimes. My father made me judge, and I looked down On human beings. I saw their sinfulness And built sparse Heaven and a crowded Hell. I thought this law was justice ‘til the day I learned what it is like to be condemned.

Pontius, I have no right to punish you. I killed you. I killed everyone you loved. I tortured you, but this ends here. You’re free. All Hell breaks out today. I will not judge. From now on, I refuse to do my job. I am not Christ the King. I abdicate. How you repay your debt to those you killed Is your own cross to carry - they decide Whether they will forgive you when you meet In Paradise. And Pontius, I forgive You for my death, of course. How could I not? But I’m not here to tell you that, I’m here To ask, to plead, for what I don’t deserve From everyone in Hell, but first from you. Brother, when we last met I said to you That you would have no power over me Were it not given from above, but now I bow my head, give power from below. I beg you for the one gift only you Can give me: I have sinned against you, please Brother, can you - will you - forgive my sins?

[auntiefragile]

“Memory and Delusion” by Shirley Jackson

[literarymiscellany]

“We know through hearsay that love exists. Seated on a rock or under a red parasol, lying in the field buzzing with insects, our hands clasped behind our necks, kneeling in the cool darkness of a church, or settled on a straw chair within the four walls of the bedroom, head lowered, eyes fixed on a rectangle of white paper, we dream of estuaries, tumultuous surf, clearing weather and tides. We listen to the inexhaustible chant of the sea within us, as it rises and falls in our heads, like the approach and retreat of the strange desire we have for heaven, for love, and all that we cannot touch with our hands. • Within us the sea tries out sentences. From time immemorial, the same voice spells the same alphabet in the same child’s brain. It mutters words which quickly fly off, snagged on the sea grasses, on the bathers’ browned skin, on the bows of boats, on the masts. Ordinary words, for nothing and no one in particular. It is only about love. This is why we hardly know what to say and we suffer when someone’s gaze fixes on our face, when we would like it to look into our heart. Our lips are so awkward, our body invisible in the opaque night, and our hands inept, yet lightening flashes or wings are at our fingertips.”

— Jean-Michel Maulpoix, from Une Histoire de Bleu / From A Story of Blue

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

Coming to Writing, Hélène Cixous

[sashayed]

from "The Monastery of Work and Love"

WELCOME If you believe nothing is always what's left after a while, as I did, If you believe you have this collection of ungiven gifts, as I do (right here behind the silence and the averted eyes) If you believe an afternoon can collapse into strange privacies, which it has— how in your backyard, for example, the shyness of flowers can be suddenly overwhelming, and in the distance the clear goddamn of thunder personal, like a voice If you believe there's no correct response to death, as I do, If you believe that in grief there are small corners of joy (where I have sat making plans) If your body sometimes is a light switch in a house of insomniacs, If you can feel yourself straining to be yourself every waking minute, If, as I am, you are almost smiling...

Stephen Dunn (1939-2021) Work and Love, 1981

[thesparrow1996]

Like I said, I don’t blame anyone. I was dealt my cards and I played them. Nobody forced me. I have no regrets. Sometimes I think about how my life would have been if that morning when it all started it hadn’t been raining or I’d had money and all the rest in my pocket, but I can’t imagine anything in particular. What I do think about is my city, our city. I think about the trees along the river and the summits of the churches against the sky. I think about Graziano’s movie and the notes that Arianna stuck to the door in the hope of giving her days some structure, I think about my youth, now ended, and the old age I won’t have. I think about all the things unrealized, the children stillborn, the angels, the loves only imagined, the dreams crushed by the dawn, and I think about the things that are dead forever, the genocides, the trees felled, the whales exterminated, all the species that are extinct. I think about the first fish that survived being abandoned by the waters, that struggled and gave birth to us. I think that everything leads to the sea. The sea that welcomes everything, all the things that have never succeeded in being born and those that have died forever. I think about the day when the sky will open and, for the first time or once again, they will regain their legitimacy.

Gianfranco Calligarich, Last Summer in the City

[sagewraith]

The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind, and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

[ololygas]

Crackerbell, Mary Ruefle

[apoemaday]

Jessica gives me a chill pill

by Angie Sijun Lou

I keep waking up in different beds and in this same body. I have to say this right away so you know it didn't start with limbs slackened, hair oily, a cruelty towards the sun. It started in the backseat of Jessica's Pepto-dismal truck. She tied my hair back with rubber bands when the freeway passed clean through us. Jessica says I can feel like a cherry blossom tree wobbling under lightning. Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else. That night we lose the 7/11 lottery but I draw my lucky number, no quarters so we scratch our tickets with fingernails. Jessica says that's the sanctity of ritual — a ceaselessness in how I look at every drop of rain before it touches ground, the way Jessica mouths my name in her sleep eating each syllable like a minor god. I'm coming out as someone who loves things unevenly, my theologies strewn out in the dark, this iPhone an almost oracle. Jessica forces me to watch every sunset even when I am full. She puts her fingers in my mouth and says open your eyes. Open them. You see the small-town girls on big billboards? One day that's us.

[slowlikehoney1996]

If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

[clayloam]

"upon leaving my labyrinth", gustav parker hibbett

[apoemaday]

Morning

by Frank O’Hara

I’ve got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem mine although I never weep and hold you in my heart with a very real humor you’d be proud of the parking lot is crowded and I stand rattling my keys the car is empty as a bicycle what are you doing now where did you eat your lunch and were there lots of anchovies it is difficult to think of you without me in the sentence you depress me when you are alone Last night the stars were numerous and today snow is their calling card I’ll not be cordial there is nothing that distracts me music is only a crossword puzzle do you know how it is when you are the only passenger if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go

[hangsawoman]

i hope that when i die there will be an apartment with everyone i’ve ever loved in it and we are together always

[choysum]

[quietasides]

“Love doesn’t use a fist. Love never calls you fat or lazy or ugly. Love doesn’t laugh at you in front of your friends. It is not in Love’s interest for your self-esteem to be low. Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road. Love does not make you beg. Love does not make you deposit your paycheck into its bank account. Love certainly never, never, never brings the children into it. Love does not ask or even want you to change. But if you change, Love is as excited about this change as you are, if not more so. And if you go back to the way you were before you changed, Love will go back with you. Love does not maintain a list of your flaws and weaknesses. Love believes you. Love is patient; Love does not make a point of showing you how patient it is. …Patience is exhibited only by a lack of pressure. This is how you know it’s there.”

— Augusten Burroughs, This is How

[rohie-deactivated20191102]

https://www.instagram.com/p/ButqAc5FdB-/?igshid=nwl0jrc73xub