A lesson in forgetting: the past always heals faster when you’re not looking. The way we try and hold onto memories like they are more than water. The way we look into the pools of our past searching for minnows, searching for fish. A lesson in remembering: the water is always smoother in retrospect. Where are the waves? Where are the currents? The way in which we tell ourselves we could do it again. Dive in again. Make it out alive. Last night, your voice touched me in my sleep; I woke up thinking about waterfalls.
Kelsey Danielle, “A Lesson in Forgetting” (via pigmenting)
Reading list for my travels through Italy: - War of the Foxes by Richard Siken - Life On Mars by Tracy K Smith (rereading it <3) - The New Testament by Jericho Brown - A Season In Hell by Arthur Rimbaud any suggestions?!!!
I confess I loved you more than I let on but you weren't ready for it. And I wasn't going to pour myself into hands that couldn't hold me.
Lauren Eden (via: skinthepoet)
Lost to be found
So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.
Jeanette Winterson, from The PowerBook (via lifeinpoetry)
but how Great would it feel to be someone’s first choice
Overlook by Rob Hauer
note to self: don’t stop fighting
Her fingers moving fast & brutal as if mapping blue edges of the unseen sky.
This is what it means to really want something. Her open mouth an iris ringed
with desperation deeper than shame. You’ll forsake everything if only to be real—
— Natalie Wee, from “Mirror,” Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines
A short pitstop in the South Island one morning.
New Zealand
I am fueled by foggy mornings, moonlight, and starry skies.
Di Drago (via exospecies)
If you love somebody they turn into a God. But you can’t control what kind of God they turn into.
Emery Allen, Holy Things in This World (via larmoyante)
“we saw the edges of all there is — so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back” Tracy K. Smith, My God It’s Full of Stars (via: skinthepoet)
Messier 78: a reflection nebula in Orion js
You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike.
L⚜ Louise Glück, Persephone the Wanderer ( via: the-l-o-o-k-b-o-o-k )
Sometimes I wish I can go back in life. Not to change things, just to feel a couple of things twice We’ll be together on the same page, on the same line Hands over hands, reliving the moments, reliving the time..
there are some stains only a dark rain can make.
Stacey Waite, from “when someone asks if you believe what you just said,” the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010)
We want so much, when perhaps we live best in the spaces between loves. That unconscious roving, the heart its own animal.
Tracy K. Smith, A Hunger So Honed (via: skinthepoet)
Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air
Sylvia Plath, 1962 (via: skinthepoet)
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure that someone was out there, squinting through the dust, saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only to be wanted back badly enough?
excerpt from Don’t you wonder, sometimes? by Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars (via: skinthepoet)
skin open the poet to find out how books have been deceiving you: not all hearts pump blood; some, expand in rhymes & contract in line breaks.
skin open the poet to confirm the rumor that between the liver & the spleen lives a tiny being; an imp, absent in daydreams -a social drinker- & a lover of the sax.
1.- take the poet’s arm, & rip off a tear of skin. behold a waterfall of metaphors soak your shoes in summer’s breeze.
2.- on a surgical table, lay your poet down in such way that his pointy nose threats to drill into the ground. & with the help of a sharp knife, split the meadow on his back into two nations that might have lost it all in war. proceed then to spread open these lands, & discover that a poet’s spine abides as marble columns once did in falling rome: oh the burn or the glory? 3.- light a match & heat the poet’s earlobes to 95 °. careful, the smoky smell of blue winter shades might stupefy your brains whilst the poet’s head gets caught in flames. if so: no stress, your poet’s mouth muscles might stretch into a smile, but do keep in mind it’s just an involuntary contraction. or not.
4.- once the fire’s out & the buzzcut’s ready, grab your baseball bat & crack the poet’s tibia by the half. hollow bones & secret chambers. see that rolled up paper hidden in there? take it out & read it to the skies; correct, it is nothing but the transcripts of the poet’s conversations with the moon. tally marks for bleeding hearts.
5.- as a final act of this medical extravaganza, severe the poet’s head & hold it between your hands. do you feel it slowly floating, as if being drawn toward the clouds? stitch the head back in place using a silver needle & a thread of slurred speech. remember poets heal on empty illusions & broken things.
that is all for poetic anatomy 101… …now wake up the poet.
- @skinthepoet