“Hush Now, Don’t Speak. I Can Read Your Thoughts In Your Eyes, Sense Them In The Way You Hold My

USS Belleau Wood aflame on her aft flight deck following a Japanese kamikaze attack on 30 October 1944.

via reddit

the hardest thing about poetry

is honesty.

how do i give words to the

interior of my soul

and then put it out for

the entire world to see?

knowing that there are

blurry faces i see everyday 

but don’t really talk to

who will remember my poems

the next time they look at

my face and think-

this is what she feels,

this is what she hides.

so, here is a confession 

as the new year is upon us:

much of what i write isn’t honest,

it isn’t me.

my poetry is not me.

if you want to find me,

if you seek what i hide,

look carefully in the spaces

between the words,

in the pauses and the hyphens.

search for me in the white in between

the black print, 

in all the unexpressed

in the midst of the art.

even at my best,

find me in the silence

bursting between the 

adjacent syllables,

then don’t just look,

hear,

listen to what one word 

whispers to the other,

how they acknowledge the unsaid

by leaving space for it on the screen

to exist

then don’t just hear,

smell,

breathe in the vaguely musky scent

of all the letters that never made it

on to the screen in front of you

because i pressed backspace,

either because they didn’t really 

say what i really wanted to 

or because they said it a little too well.

then when all this is done,

feel it.

understand

that this is why in school

you were taught four different interpretations

for a single line and although

that might exasperate you,

this is why a poem is more than

the sum of the words that

it consists of,

this is the reason why the words

you read on paper and on your screen

will never be where the 

true meaning of the poem lies.

but the truth sits there

squeezed in between all the noise,

patiently waiting,

somehow always the winner

of this game of

literary hide and seek.

but now,

if you want to,

at least you know where to find it.

Randomly hearing your song on the radio is more satisfying then playing it directly from your phone (source)

WHEN ALL MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS IN A BOOK ARE KILLED OFF

Frida Kahlo and Chavela Vargas

I didn’t know growing up would be this hard. If only giving up was one of life’s options, I could’ve chosen it for a million times. But it wasn’t and never will it be. I just hope and pray each night that when another day arrives, I’ll come to learn how to deal with life.

juanlucio (via wnq-writers)

What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds. I promise.

Katherine Mansfield (via quotemadness)

I wanna run away with someone in the middle of the night and go on adventures and see the world and eat at cheap truck stops and sit on top of our car and look at the stars and just be somewhere other than here. 

— an anonymous woman on coming to terms with being a lesbian in the 1950’s-60’s, from an interview with Deborah Goleman Wolf