Liberty And Fifth, Pittsburgh, Ca. 1940

Trying to tame the electricity in my veins

Trazodone, Xanax, Abels and ‘caines

I think this weekend I’ll go on an alcohol bender

But at least drinks are free when you’re the bartender.

Calypso’s Island by Herbert James Draper (1897)

I have nuked the old account that I’ve had since I was probably about 13 or 14 years old and have started a new one to keep as my personal commonplace book/journal. I cannot seem to keep up with a regular journal, and I hope that the idea of posting things publicly will hold me somewhat accountable. However, nothing that I post here is really meant for anyone else’s viewing, only my own. With that disclaimer, please note that I may speak of my own trauma and some things may be triggering to others.

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November Graveyard

by Sylvia Plath

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

Natalie Wee, Least of all

Circe by John Collier (1885)

Design

by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth -- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall? -- If design govern in a thing so small.

“Of course, she must be sleeping, sleeping deeply, wrapped in the darkness of that strange little world of hers.”

— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self - Elisa Gonzales

Sometimes you feel more intimacy with the woman who lives

in the apartment opposite—twenty years older, probably,

though she looks barely ten, devoted to evading age—

than with anyone stroked or kissed or otherwise handled.

You sit naked on the white sofa, lights on, looking into her home,

lights on.

She paints her toenails, watches a black-and-white film,

Hitchcock, maybe: there’s a woman with a platinum chignon.

She applies a green mask. A cream. A mystery ointment.

When you meet an older woman who resembles her, enough,

you do the obvious thing.

That woman says, after, Don’t ever leave me

but when you report to your friends

you change her words to Don’t ever forget me.

Typical of us, the lie and the lie.

Why couldn’t you tell the truth? That’s what I’ve come to ask.

Not to her—to your friends.

I can’t remember why it embarrassed you.

Was it that she was old enough not to bare her throat?

Or was it shame at yourself, for misunderstanding

how well you were understood?

(It always comes back to knowledge with us, doesn’t it?)

Maybe it doesn’t matter: you’ll think of this woman

so often throughout the years

that by some lights

you’ll have kept your vow.