Too Much Tact

[toomuchtact]

To Change the World Enough Alice Walker

To change the world enough you must cease to be afraid of the poor. We experience your fear as the least pardonable of humiliations; in the past it has sent us scurrying off daunted and ashamed into the shadows. Now, the world ending the only one all of us have known we seek the same fresh light you do: the same high place and ample table. The poor always believe there is room enough for all of us; the very rich never seem to have heard of this. In us there is wisdom of how to share loaves and fishes however few; we do this everyday. Learn from us, we ask you. We enter now the dreaded location of Earth's reckoning; no longer far off or hidden in books that claim to disclose revelations; it is here. We must walk together without fear. There is no path without us

[inkskinned]

HOW TO BE THE GIRL HE WANTS: the first time someone tells you these words I hope you stick out your hand and catch the letters in the air I hope you crunch them in your fist I hope you shove them back into the mouth they flew out of I hope and pray you are not eight years old and hanging off of a shopping cart and groaning about how bored you are, I hope you were not young like I was the first time I read a magazine on a shelf underneath the candy I hope you weren’t young because I still thought everything I read had to be true - but better yet, I hope these words never find you. They tell you to be strong but it’s the little things like this that sit on our hips and tangle in our hair and feel like bees when the night gets dark. It’s the little things we could never ever shake off because the minute we tried, we discovered there were more waiting for us. HOW TO LOOK GOOD FOR SUMMER: smile more often. I hope the first time someone calls you fat, you shimmy your shoulders and wink and feel like a goddess and take it as a compliment. I hope you are not the new kid in a fifth-grade class, glasses on your nose and your hair in tangles. I hope nobody ever touched your tummy and asked if you were embarrassed by the way it jiggles. I hope if you ever hear those words, you reach out your beautiful fingers and touch the temple of the person talking and ask, “Are you embarrassed your brain works like that?” See, I have not gained weight since the eight grade and I’m twenty. I have had about four hundred people tell me I’m skinny but it’s only the two or three voices about the thickness of my thighs and the fat on my hips - these are the only voices that stick. Don’t give them that satisfaction. Take a bath. Stare at your reflection. Count the flecks beside your iris. Promise yourself you’re not going to ruin your life - you won’t let them win. Don’t let that moment cause ripples. Yank out the cruelty from your system. HOW TO HAVE BETTER SEX: stop faking it. Stop engineering your body to be a call-and-response of bruises and shots. I hope you are not fifteen the first time a boy kisses you hard. I hope you do not go home with a bloody mouth and spend the rest of your life thinking love is stained with iron. I hope you are not swallowing your sanity to be with somebody. I hope the first time you let someone touch you, they are someone worthy of your trust - I hope that nobody tries to force you into a label like “frigid” or “slut.” In the animal world, most males have bright plumage so they can attract mates. In humans, we expect ladies to look a certain way. When you break out of the norm, suddenly you’re rattling chains. How dare you not want sex and still look this way. Maybe people are scared of admitting your body has power - it can turn heads in a baggy sweatshirt. Your body doesn’t need a magazine’s confirmation. Your body’s been through hell and still keeps on living. Put on your heels and stalk down the sidewalk. Take off your makeup. Do what you need to feel awesome. HOW TO BE COMFORTABLE IN YOUR OWN SKIN: ignore everything they tell you. Don’t let them in.

Maybe one day I’ll make a list of every single terrible magazine I’ve read. I think I’m gonna start an advice column called “If it makes them money, it’s probably not good.” /// r.i.d (via inkskinned)

[toomuchtact]

Philip Glass - Prophecies

[toomuchtact]

Sixty Stephen Dunn

Because in my family the heart goes first and hardly anybody makes it out of his fifties, I think I’ll stay up late with a few bandits of my choice and resist good advice. I’ll invent a secret scroll lost by Egyptians and reveal its contents: the directions to your house, recipes for forgiveness. History says that my ventricles are stone alleys, my heart itself a city with a terrorist holed up in the mayor’s office. I’m in the mood to punctuate only with that maker of promises, the colon: next, next, next, it says, God bless it. As Garcia Lorca may have written: some people forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster could fall on their heads at any moment. My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow. Come, play poker with me, I want to be taken to the cleaners. I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent. As for me, I’ll share my mulcher with anyone who needs to mulch. It’s time to give up search for the invisible. On the best of days there’s little more than the faintest intimations. The millenium, my dear, is sure to disappoint us. I think I’ll keep on describing things to ensure that they really happened.

[toomuchtact]

Wait Galway Kinnell 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 lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And 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 while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. 

[toomuchtact]

Equinox Elizabeth Alexander

Now is the time of year when bees are wild and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. I have found their dried husks in my clothes.

They are dervishes because they are dying, one last sting, a warm place to squeeze a drop of venom or of honey. After the stroke we thought would be her last my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped

a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, walked outside, and lay down in the snow. Two years later there is no other way to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light as an empty hive, and she is breathing.

[boggletheowl]

[toomuchtact]

boggletheowl

[toomuchtact]

A Brief for the Defense Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

[toomuchtact]

A break from the rarely-updated poetry blog because this is important to me.

[dangolding]

Today, videogames are for everyone. I mean this in an almost destructive way. Videogames, to read the other side of the same statement, are not for you. You do not get to own videogames. No one gets to own videogames when they are for everyone. They add up to more than any one group.

[poetryandimages-blog-blog]

In loving memory of Robin Williams (July 1951 - August 2014)

[toomuchtact]

Do Not Be Ashamed Wendell Berry

You will be walking some night in the comfortable dark of your yard and suddenly a great light will shine round about you, and behind you will be a wall you never saw before. It will be clear to you suddenly that you were about to escape, and that you are guilty: you misread the complex instructions, you are not a member, you lost your card or never had one. And you will know that they have been there all along, their eyes on your letters and books, their hands in your pockets, their ears wired to your bed. Though you have done nothing shameful, they will want you to be ashamed. They will want you to kneel and weep and say you should have been like them. And once you say you are ashamed, reading the page they hold out to you, then such light as you have made in your history will leave you. They will no longer need to pursue you. You will pursue them, begging forgiveness. They will not forgive you. There is no power against them. It is only candor that is aloof from them, only an inward clarity, unashamed, that they cannot reach. Be ready. When their light has picked you out and their questions are asked, say to them: "I am not ashamed." A sure horizon will come around you. The heron will begin his evening flight from the hilltop.

[toomuchtact]

Simple Raymond Carver

A break in the clouds. The blue outline of the mountains. Dark yellow of the fields. Black river. What am I doing here, lonely and filled with remorse?

I go on casually eating from the bowl of raspberries. If I were dead, I remind myself, I wouldn’t be eating them. It’s not so simple. It is that simple.

[toomuchtact]

You Fit Into Me Margaret Atwood

you fit into me like a hook into an eye

a fish hook an open eye

[toomuchtact]

My Skeleton Jane Hirshfield

My skeleton, you who once ached with your own growing larger

are now, each year imperceptibly smaller, lighter, absorbed by your own concentration.

When I danced, you danced. When you broke, I.

And so it was lying down, walking, climbing the tiring stairs. Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you, what is left of you, will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone's arthritis, cracked harp of ribcage, blunt of heel, opened bowl of the skull, twin platters of pelvis— each of you will leave me behind, at last serene.

What did I know of your days, your nights, I who held you all my life inside my hands and thought they were empty?

You who held me all my life inside your hands as a new mother holds her own unblanketed child, not thinking at all.

[toomuchtact]

Low - Nothing But Heart

Saw them on Monday and they opened with this.  So, so good.

[toomuchtact]

Colin Stetson & Laurie Anderson - A Dream of Water There were those who didnt run, there were those who couldnt take it, there were those who stayed in the city. What was it? Where did it go? There were those who laid their bodies down, there were those who took our knifes, there were those who kissed the grey skies. There were those who only knew only the sound of their own voices, there were those who knew the rules. There were those who freed their bodies, there were those who couldnt take it, there were others on their own. What was it? What was it? There were strangers and conmen, there were those who lived in the cross space, there were people lighting candles, there were people going crazy, there were those who walked the beach. What war is that? What war is that? What time could this be?