i will listen to your favourite band:
wear a sweater from your school
bless the bruises you left behind
proof you existed
with me:morning rituals
salt circles in showers
your name in my laughtermethods of
bringing you back to
me
forgive me when i forget to tell you
i am sixty five percent second chances
and i will give away more of myself
than i can afford
forgive me when i forget to tell you
the bruises on my jawline are not the fading kind
and i am running out of room
to keep them hidden
forgive me when i forget to tell you
that the way my ribs ache in the morning
comes from swallowing my pride at 2 am
with a handful of sleeping pills
and chasing it all down with a glass half empty
forgive me when i forget to tell you
i will not always be this visible
i will not always be this soft
forgive me when i forget to tell you
tomorrow will bring a thunderstorm
because i spent tonight clutching clouds
and pouring tears into them
to drown out the way it feels to keep saying
“i will be fine,
i will be fine”
forgive me when i forget to tell you
i have been planting roses in my mouth
that i might speak softly
that i might speak sweetly
forgive me when i forget to tell you
that the petals have wilted and fallen
to the back of my throat
and now my lungs are laced with poems
of “he loves me, he loves me not”
forgive me when i forget to tell you
the thorns will dig into my tongue
and make me spit out blood
but you will not hear me ask for help
forgive me when i forget to tell you
someday you will try to find me to apologize
and i will not be there
i will not be there
but i have already forgiven you
-when i forget (via scarceleigh)
II. On my worst days, the sky was a festering wound that wouldn’t heal. I didn’t want to be that to you.
III. On my worst days, you were the only word I could say without clenching my fists.
IV. I really did love you, I just couldn’t claw my way out of the ground to do it properly.
V. None of this was your fault.
VI. I’m sorry I was your lighthouse. I’m sorry you couldn’t see the wall of rocks on my shore."
I love incorrectly
There is a solemnity in hands,
the way a palm will curve in
accordance to a contour of skin,
the way it will release a story.
This should be the pilgrimage.
The touching of a source.
This is what sanctifies.
This pleading. This mercy.
I want to be a pilgrim to everyone,
close to the inaccuracies, the astringent
dislikes, the wayward peace, the private
words. I want to be close to the telling.
I want to feel everyone whisper.
After the blossoming I hang.
The encyclical that has come
through the branches
instructs us to root, to become
the design encapsulated within.
Flesh helping stone turn tree.
I do not want to hold life
at my extremities, see it prepare
itself for my own perpetuation.
I want to touch and be touched
by things similar in this world.
I want to know a few secular days
of perfection. Late in this one great season
the diffused morning light
hides the horizon of sea. Everything
the color of slate, a soft tablet
to press a philosophy to.
-“The Confession of an Apricot,” Carl Adamshick (via commovente)
1. There will be several days that you daydream about stepping in front of a city bus. Don’t. It will not be beautiful. It will not be brave. It will be selfish. It will be broken. Your mother will cry.
2. Don’t write for him. Write for you. Write for others like you. Write so the girl that thinks about stepping in front of public transportation doesn’t. Don’t be selfish.
3. When you will yourself to sleep and it doesn’t come- get up. It doesn’t matter that it’s 3 am. There will be other 3 am’s. Take a shower. Take two. Wash him out of your hair. Write a poem. Read the same book you’ve read 202 times again. The 203rd time might tell you something different. Don’t stay in bed- you will think about the bus again.
4. Don’t kiss him because he’s broken. Don’t kiss him because his laughter never reaches his eyes. Don’t try and fix him. Fix yourself first. Be selfish. He can’t save you.
5. Date yourself. Take yourself out to eat. Don’t share your popcorn at the movies with anyone. Stroll around an art museum alone. Fall in love with canvases. Fall in love with yourself.
6. Dress up and wear red lipstick and get drunk with your friends. They’re the ones that will pick you up. Don’t kiss him. Or him. Don’t fall asleep on strange couches with strange boys. When his hand slides up your dress walk away. Hit him. Don’t kiss him. He can’t save you.
7. Get another tattoo. Get five more. Get another hole in your ear. Don’t listen to your dad. You will still be able to get a job. Did you really want to be employed by someone like your father? Haven’t you had enough of judgmental old white men anyway? Get fuck you tattooed in tiny letters on your hip.
8. When you feel the yearning for a new city- start over. Take 200 bucks and a three suitcases. Work anywhere that will have you. Meet strange people and forget your name. Call yourself Ruby. No one will know the difference. Remember to call your mother. Don’t be selfish. Come home when you find yourself in the strangers and the small one bedroom apartment.
9. Don’t whisper evil things into your own ear. Other people are going to shout them at you. Be your own hero. Keep a sword on your key ring.
10. Don’t step in front of a city bus. It will not be beautiful. Live. Stay up all night with a boy that promises you everything and means it. Live. See shitty local bands with a friend. Wear a different band’s t-shirt. No one will care. Live. Have a baby girl with tiny fingers and tiny toes someday. Pour love into her until it’s overflowing. Live. Wake up. Staying in bed all day is not poetic.
Live. Live.
Live.
Do you hear that? It’s me. It’s your life. Wake up.
"-(via theworldisnotenough)
-Rumi (via creatingaquietmind)
Inflammatory Essays (series)
c. 1982
the breathtaking certainty,
that comes when you’re loved."
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
-Her Kind - Anne Sexton
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn’t half bad
if it isn’t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
‘living it up’
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
"-The World Is a Beautiful Place - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
call a taxi to take you as far as fifty bucks will get you
change out of his clothes at the laundromat so that
you don’t smell like home anymore
tell everyone it was a fire that burned your house down
they won’t question it
when he calls don’t answer
get a new phone
drag your bags into a new place
empty them out
find somewhere to store your heart until
you can catch up to it and its hunger
don’t sleep with anyone else
your body hasn’t gotten rid of him yet
and there is no room in the bed, anyway
cry as loud as you want to, as hard as you need to
but don’t you dare let him be the reason you
wrap your bloody knuckles and fix the hole in the wall
don’t listen to them when they say you’ll get over it
and don’t apologize after you tell them to go fuck themselves
only you know the sound of your own heartbreak
the way it has deafened you to everything except the sound
of the train leaving
always leaving
no one knows the life you’ve left
the pride you’ve swallowed
the mountains you’ve moved
it has been one hell of a climb
always will be"
deLeted
i want to write like she does, freely, confidently,
cutting a bold swathe of meaning from the amorphous
tin can echoey shit floating either in our individual brains
or in the vast emptiness of The Void (what the fuck
is The Void, people are always talking about it as if
they had half a clue, don’t play these games with me),
or in our collective consciousness or whatever recycled
Whitman bullshit you want to vomit back up today for
brownie points. why does the white dude get capitalized?
every third poem i wrote was for You, the almost-ex
fratboy-type implied audience who never listened to me
at the time, much less seven months later when we’re at
opposite points of an L-shaped track, Arizona-California,
with the whole web of the thumb between us. everything
is L-shaped when i think about it, Ashby station to Downtown
Berkeley, west and then north, moving both Closer To and
Further From a different You, the star-crossed intellectual
liberal arts-type implied audience, who always listened to me, especially at the time:
“Why do you feel like all of these different things?” “Do you want to talk about it?” no, buddy, i
Don’t. not to your bleary drunken fondness, not to the oddly attentive nearby You, the You at the
other tip of a smaller L, L for “local”, L for “like” when it’s convenient, L for let it go, you’re n-
ever going to be at the same point again in your Life and there’s rocks to be examined, i think, or
whatever it is you do with rocks, who cares about those puny hard ass things anyway, and there’s
Literature to pore over and vodka to hypothetically drink, supposing you had some, with your
friends maybe, supposing you had some of those too, but never text or call or bring it up again
because California-New York is too big a gap to bridge. i want You to get the fuck out of my
Life, speaking very Literally i want You quite gone, i don’t need to write poems for You’s any
Longer. i want to write for myself, to pull myself forearms flat, elbows-dragging commando
style from Point A (wish i didn’t Like You but that’s Life) to Point B, invisible progress, Little,
baby steps west and then north, until—what?—i can Look myself in the eye and say, “we’re out.”
in the library,
getting high out of our minds.
inhaling page after page,
lines.
we never thought
twice about it.
summer sunned nappy bead
of sweat
on the napes of our
winter-born necks.
danced nude-brown souled
through endless aisles
we laughed stories for
miles.
couldn’t get enough.
of those smooth covers,
doorways to more ways
stained pages, bindings
rough.
we would kick it
in the
library. we would bathe in
every
story.
we never thought
twice about it"
-story breath by salisa grant
“Do you like me?”
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
I did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
-Anne Sexton (via beautyisanillusion)
Don’t “search” for yourself
on anything that glows in the dark.
Don’t let your beauty
be something anyone can turn off.
Don’t edit your ugly out of your bio.
Let your light come from the fire.
Let your pain be the spark,
but not the timber.
Remember, you didn’t come here
to write your heart out.
You came to write it in."
-Andrea Gibson (via commovente)
i'm alix. i live in minnesota. what up.
