newtheoryoldlove

"I am writing a book on how to write a book so I can learn how to properly explain why you look better with the lights on. I listen to a song but it doesn’t mention your name so I stop listening to the song. Your heart is noise pop. White noise is ghosts missing the streamers that fall from your ears while you sing in the car. Vermont is not far if you are already in Vermont. My cat looks at me and then walks away. He is named either after a famous musician or a body of water. There are so many words I refuse to learn how to spell. Still, I spell check your thighs after I bend you over my desk. I spell check the inside of your left ear while you bite yourself on the kitchen table. Prostrate. Today I am writing in grunts, I am playing in fonts. My chest hair is size 44 Comic Sans. My eyebrows are whittled away before I leave the mall. I have sat under the same sun as you for 25 years. Sometimes I have walked under the same sun as you. Once, I played tennis under the same sun as you. Repetition sun. Staccato sun. Wrinkled sun. I tell your skin that covers your clavicle We’ve got at least 53 more years of holding hands on a bench under the same sun. The sequel to this poem is John Cusack holding a boombox over his head under barely any sun. Fact: I want to kiss your nose even when I’m not inside you."

—“Please move to Vermont and break my heart,” Gregory Sherl (via clavicola)

you said Is (XIII)

you said Is 
there anything which 
is dead or alive more beautiful 
than my body,to have in your fingers 
(trembling ever so little)? 
Looking into 
your eyes Nothing,i said,except the 
air of spring smelling of never and forever. 

….and through the lattice which moved as 
if a hand is touched by a 
hand(which 
moved as though 
fingers touch a girl’s 
breast, 
lightly) 

Do you believe in always,the wind 
said to the rain 
I am too busy with 
my flowers to believe,the rain answered 

—e.e. cummings  

Detestable

My tenth grade teacher defined diction. 
She said,
diction is a choice.
What she meant was, 
A linguist knows both the price and the value. 

You see, as it turns out,
the truth does not always sit right. 
One day we wrote truisms, 
And sometimes two words applied
like violation and rape, 
but some felt too strong and some felt too weak, 

So teacher put them on a balance 
to see how much they weighed;
She saw which ones made balances break, 
(Those are the ones that don’t sit quite right). 
She told us— 

There is a difference between true and certain, 
obliterated and broken, 
unfavorable and detestable,
and they are not interchangeable.  

So let me ask you, 
Have you ever woken up with a gun in your hand,  
with bullets you can’t remember buying? 

That night,
I ripped out the pages
and stuffed the rounds in a drawer,  
and unless I had a scale there’d be no more thesaurus, 
because unweighed words weren’t just unethical,
actually, they were detestable.  

lufituaeb

newtheoryoldlove:

sierrademulder:

Somewhere across town,
you are laying with a lover
who is pressing her fingerprints
into your back like wet cement.

I wonder if she looks like me, if you fell
for her features like rearranged furniture.
Are we palindrome women? She is beautiful,
I am unpronounceable.

She must be your favorite
place in Minneapolis. I am
a souvenir shop: where you go
to remember how much
people miss you
when you’re gone.

Mimetic

Have you ever touched, a stale clementine peel? 
   it tears like drywall, parched as plaster, 
Architects gave walls a clementine feel 
   (sans the vibrance they modeled them after), 

So architects are botanists with structural zeal 
and surgeons are architects for whom scalpels appeal 
   and walls are like peels are my tendons’ disaster,
because my heart was modeled after things that don’t heal. 

categoryerror:

Thank you, Adrienne Rich

(via awritersruminations)

burningmuse:

Staff note: I relate.

cado-per-ventus:

when will she learn to
stop holding emotions in-
that expressing the soul
is far from a sin?

when will she learn to
speak her mind-
that taking on differences
makes her one of a kind?

when will she lean to
hold her head high-
that being strong doesn’t
mean it’s a weakness to cry?

when will she learn to
just let go-…?
                              probably when her heart stops beating with woe.

(Source: todancewiththedevil)

The Importance of Nonexistence

Laozi and the Daodejing

Thirty spokes converge on a hub 
but it’s the emptiness 
that makes a wheel work 
pots are fashioned from clay 
but it’s the hollow 
that makes a pot work 
windows and doors are carved for a house 
but it’s the spaces 
that make a house work 
existence makes something useful 
but nonexistence makes it work

道德經 Daodejing, verse 11 (tr. Bill Porter)

Stomach Knots

Creature fear, creature fear
Eat me up just please, 
rabid animal I don’t let out
(public nuisance speech) 
burrows nest above my bladder, 
rabid Mind with teeth. 

Doctor’s orders: Don’t let feed,
just let it be and let it free, 
yet many fines, already—
Hence, verbal incontinence,
keep it caged, for all the piss,
embarrassment. 

Lungs will go, half a lobe
(while donor’s list gives no hope)
Those monster thoughts consume until
no fervent food is left— 
Eaten through my legs and chest, 
Have I had my fill of myself?  

Holi

I was born like glass-blown bubbles, 
Cold and clear and crude,
In mother’s hands began to fumble, 
Veins just barely blue— 

But then at three, we walked for miles, 
With father learned to pitch a tent, 
He spoke of trees that grew so wild, 
It’s how I learned what green had meant, 

And didi, remember, I bothered you so, 
But somehow you were soft and strong, 
Best role-model I could ever know, 
While dark and faded, you’d paint bright songs, 

Then somewhere, friends, stress got to us,
Blackened burnt, unnatural, confused, 
Our orange apples and yellow lettuce, 
My eyes stained purple but yours were bruised, 

But it got me here: I first saw your face, 
Glinting eyes and heartmade head,
Before you I had no heart to race, 
Until we met and my blood turned red—

I was born a colorless slate, 
Not one experience, gained or lent, 
So every person I meet’s a color
Every hue we trade, a friend.  

Happy Holi, guys

Love 20¢ The First Quarter Mile

All right. I may have lied to you and about you, and made a few
  pronouncements a bit too sweeping, perhaps, and possibly forgotten
  to tag the bases here or there,
And damned your extravagence, and maligned your tastes, and libeled
  your relatives, and slandered a few of your friends,

O.K.,

  Nevertheless, come back. 

Come home. I will agree to forget the statements that you issued so
   copiously to the neighbors and the press,
And you will forget that figment of your imagination, the blonde from 
   Detroit;
I will agree that your lady friend who lives above us is not crazy, bats,
   nutty as they come, but on the contrary rather bright,
And you will concede that poor old Steinberg is neither a drunk, nor
   a swindler, but simply a guy, on the eccentric side, trying to get along.
(Are you listening, you bitch, and have you got this straight?) 
Because I forgive you, yes, for everything.
I forgive you for being beautiful and generous and wise,
I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive, and pardon you, in short, 
   for being you. 

Because tonight you are in my hair and eyes,
And every street light that our taxi passes shows me you again, still you,
And because tonight all other nights are black, all other hours are cold
   and far away, and now, this minute, the stars are very near and bright. 

Come back. We will have a celebration to end all celebrations.
We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us, and a couple of
   boys from the office, and some other friends.
And Steinberg, who is off the wagon, and that insane woman who lives
   upstairs, and a few reporters, if anything should break.  

Kenneth Fearing

Physical Therapy

I know why it is that I trip:  
Sometimes I run more quickly
than callow legs keep up, 
restless tendons seething, 
heart gasping in confusion. 

The S.O.S. read “runners needed.” 
I yearned to reach that far-off gate 
where society keeled, drunk, 
and press my palms against its wound, 
kicking, crumbling mess, 
 
…if not for faulty legs. Pray, 
I’ll excise and treat my tumorous flaws, 
cauterize vile habits like the weeds they are,
yield, agile, instrument of purity,
Can I just please be different already? 

Mother told me not to get ahead of myself, 
but just to get myself ahead.  

Entitled

Hello trusted, trust-fund baby,
Lucid gentle ears and eyes,
Gentle for too short a time?
Clouded, what you’ll see in me,
twenty-some years past pressing
powder in your sternum— 
Will I still smell like home?
Will my poverty reek foreign? 

Just know, kid, we’ve set it out for you, 
with your taxless struggles taxing 
these cracked and flaking fingers— 
So don’t say it’s not a real job placing
pre-packaged plastics in your mouth;
I’ll want to look away when you bud
the blossoms of apathy. 

And one day you won’t recognize
the difference between
Right and rolling dice,
But trust me, trust-fund brother, 
I was promising, too,
until a lot of people like you
aborted my freedom and hope
when you cuffed my rights
in the name of a Pope, sir, 

You could have just as easily
been born in a dumpster, 
asking, “Why me?” instead of 
marking calendars with blood ink 
from eighteen karat pens, 

So trust me, trust fund deputy, 
don’t vote against my safety net,
you’ll get that car you want, I know,
but remember nanny’s cataracts—
They’re the same in all the rest of us 
with our underprivileged eyes. 

"

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more
than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks

to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I dropp a postcard in the mailbox and watch it

throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must be

part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.

Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.

I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,

as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,

back and forth, between our lips, under an oak tree
I had absolutely nothing to do with.

"

—“Absence,” Jeffrey McDaniel  (via ambivalent-progression)

(Source: clavicola, via ambivalent-progression)