aimless in wonder
But for now we are young, let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see
Richard Siken
I love Richard Siken and love this.
(via travels-with-charley)
a woman is a weapon a man will use to kill himself
so grit yr teeth and cock one back
let fly the buckshot into yr oreish heartlight the fuse deep in the mine of yr chest
feel the pressure of an ocean swelling
happily capsizing all in its path(and this means you
means me)pull the trigger
spark the wickgo ahead
drownjust remember to smile
that’s all peter wants to see
Love, Forgive Me
My sister told me a soul mate is not the person
who makes you the happiest but the one who
makes you feel the most, who conducts your heartto bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling
with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in.
It has always been you. You are…
to caution you, to prepare you.
Earth will seduce you, slowly, imperceptibly,
subtly, not to say with connivance.
I was not prepared: I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen,
holding out my glass. Stewed plums, stewed apricots—
the juice poured off into the glass of ice.
And the water added, patiently, in small increments,
the various cousins discriminating, tasting
with each addition—
aroma of summer fruit, intensity of concentration:
the colored liquid turning gradually lighter, more radiant,
more light passing through it.
Delight, then solace. My grandmother waiting,
to see if more was wanted. Solace, then deep immersion.
I loved nothing more: deep privacy of the sensual life,
the self disappearing into it or inseparable from it,
somehow suspended, floating, its needs
fully exposed, awakened, fully alive—
Deep immersion, and with it
mysterious safety. Far away, the fruit glowing in its glass bowls.
Outside the kitchen, the sun setting.
I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations
of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end,
not a suspension; the senses wouldn’t protect me.
I caution you as I was never cautioned:
you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.
Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth—
Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.
Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.
(via poetbabble)
(via poetbabble)
into a temple where it is
held prisoner, where the god
of blame resides. I love
slopes & peaks, the secret
paths that make me selfish.
I love my crooked feet
shaped by vanity & work
shoes made to outlast
belief. The hardness
coupling milk it can’t
fashion. I love the lips,
salt & honeycomb on the tongue.
The hair holding off rain
& snow. The white moons
on my fingernails. I love
how everything begs
blood into song & prayer
inside an egg. A ghost
hums through my bones
like Pan’s midnight flute
shaping internal laws
beside a troubled river.
I love this body
made to weather the storm
in the brain, raised
out of the deep smell
of fish & water hyacinth,
out of rapture & the first
regret. I love my big hands.
I love it clear down to the soft
quick motor of each breath,
the liver’s ten kinds of desire
& the kidney’s lust for sugar.
This skin, this sac of dung
& joy, this spleen floating
like a compass needle inside
nighttime, always divining
West Africa’s dusty horizon.
I love the birthmark
posed like a fighting cock
on my right shoulder blade.
I love this body, this
solo & ragtime jubilee
behind the left nipple,
because I know I was born
to wear out at least
one hundred angels.
It’s true, you spend the years after thirty turning over
the suggestion that you have been an imbecile,
hearing finally all the words that passed you like air,
like so much fun, or all the words that must have
existed while you were listening to others. What
would I want with this sentence you say flinging it
aside… and then again sometimes you were duped,
poems placed deliberately in your way. At eleven, the
strophe of a yellow dress sat me crosslegged in my
sex. It was a boy’s abrupt birthday party. A yellow
dress for a tomboy, the ritual stab of womanly gathers
at the waist. She look like a boy in a dress, my big
sister say, a lyric and feminine correction from a
watchful aunt, don’t say that, she look nice and pretty.
Nice and pretty, laid out to splinter you, so that never,
until it is almost so late as not to matter do you grasp
some part, something missing like a wing, some
fragment of your real self.
(via poetbabble)
(via adventures-in-iron)
I never quite got it, what they meant,
but now I do,
Waking each morning at dawn,
Or before, some shapeless, unfingerprintable dread
On me like cold-crossed humidity,
Extinction shouldering, like a season, in from my dreamscape.
Without my glasses, the light around the window shade
Throbs like an aura, so faint
At first, then luminous with it’s broken promises—
Feckless icon, dark reliquary.
Mortality hunches, like fine furniture, crowding the room.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.Into unfathomable life.
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
“It’s a clown suitcase: the clown flips open the suitcase and pulls out a ton of stuff. A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit emptying.”
— Kay Ryan (via)
Honestly, who can stand to sit and watch
another dusty western? Who can stand to suffer
an umpteenth posse of wide-brimmed bullshit
riding into town to swing open the saloon doors
of our 21st century lives? Who in these parts can stomach more
howdy partner okey dokey I reckon yessum yonder spit?
Or stand the laissez-faire foreplay of player-piano men
squinting through close-ups
whether the fat sun burns high noon or not?
Yee-haw. It’s the outhouse gang:
infested with tough guys clad in denim and chaps
who take ten-gallon, tough-guy craps on entire towns
that genuflect to sinners then cast out their saints.
Memo to two guys who stare into each other’s eyes,
twitching dirty fingers, itching to draw—
wake us up when you are dead,
when the dadgum curtain drops
on this comme-ci comme-ça corral,
on the good, the bad, and the unbearably boring,
when us adults can finally sweep Silly the Kid
and his tumbleweed credos into our great cultural compost.
Looky here, four-of-a-kind is just four dipshits
playing cards. And you know what beats a Royal Flush?
A Flying Fuck, if we care enough to at last lay down our bluff.Can we finally walk out of this film,
even when the cowboys outnumber us?
Will they stick up every stagecoach
packed tight with anti-macho cargo?
Will they rustle us range cattle hoofing
toward the horizon? Toward the warm world (no stanza break)
beyond men, beyond six-shooter logic,
beyond slapped sunsets that swing from a rope?
Know that before we take one step
a man with steely blue eyes will hang
a welcoming star on our chest. We’ll be deputized
and lawfully stride in the rhythmic ring of spurs.
Ain’t that something—we’re moving up.
He’ll hand us the keys to the jail,
a toothpick for our mouths, a desk for our feet.
Take a load off, partners.
Forget the bridge, the rails, the dynamite.
The plunger sits unmanned, its hot wires
disconnected from the projector’s blazing bulb.
The western locomotive powers on,
twenty-four frames a pop,
through the propped façades of freedom.