this foreign ocean bathtub

"My mouth is a fire escape. The words coming out, don’t care that they are naked. There is something..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:39:00 +0800

““My mouth is a fire escape. The words coming out, don’t care that they are naked. There is something burning in there.””

- Andrea Gibson (via liy)

"I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo’s cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a..."

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:08:00 +0800

“I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
jar of octopus, cuckoo’s cry, 5-7-5,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping,
another 75 of what you think staring out
a window. I don’t care about the plot
although I suppose there will have to be one,
the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent
seas, danger of decommission in spite
of constant war, time in gulps and glitches
passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,
speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled
outracing the wolves on the steppes, the huge
glittering ball where all that matters
is a kiss at the end of a dark hall.
At dawn the officers ride back to the garrison,
one without a glove, the entire last chapter
about a necklace that couldn’t be worn
inherited by a great-niece
along with the love letters bound in silk.”

- “Changing Genres,” Dean Young (via commovente: madkao) … I love this poem. (via live-to-the-point-of-tears)

It’s been too long since I’ve read Dean Young. Time to break out First Course In Turbulence again.

(via shorterexcerpts)

Photo

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:24:28 +0800

Jim Morrison - An American Prayer (The poem).

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 12:08:09 +0800

Jim Morrison - An American Prayer (The poem).:

Alexy Morrison, youtube.com

Jim Morrison - An American Prayer

thepoohcorner: Having a Coke with You by Frank O’ Hara

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:44:28 +0800

thepoohcorner:

Having a Coke with You by Frank O’ Hara

tylerknott: Typewriter Series #178 by Tyler Knott Gregson

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 17:05:15 +0800

tylerknott:

Typewriter Series #178 by Tyler Knott Gregson

"Deep Trouble" (or pertaining to the subject of it)

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 02:26:00 +0800

“A soul” is what they tell their children, when asked to explain how the bad get to do what they want with the good and eat all candy and stay up late.

“…is like a deep well, or a second heart” that belongs to someone else, who wretches at the talons of young love in the jagged hours on the couch and decides to flee even as the last of the cinders smolder to a hiss. What to squeeze for admissions.

“Smudges obscure the surface,” as a patina of broken words, forsaken tenderness, betrayed intentions not unlike expecting the painting of a baby dressed in oil and feathers to take flight. Obscure the surface, not unlike the harbor town that never fades from storm to storm until at once the lighthouse quietly goes down during the shipment of the harvest bounty, and cannot be roused. Someone elusive holds the switch. The leak in this particular pail is lovingly sprung on one side so that one takes notice on the path to the final river, a row of posies is left.

“At the end of the day, your measure of clarity is taken. The soul that reveals her true color is allowed to pass the gates into eternal bliss.”

So the children are sent roaming, toothed with strips of paper for every remark, tasked with digging out the wick, promised or threatened with signet blessings so that the over- turned hand delivers each decree. They are sent digging for bones with rope, their palms after so much drawing from the deep waters eventually etched with telling lines, all the while a thirst goes unquenched and yet each one must secret a legend in their jacket pocket, a code of colors, depth chart, a test for the necessary parts per million fire to brimstone—terminating with a faint scent of how good good was supposed to be, ideally.

— Jeffrey Bennett via The Rumpus

Neue Berliner Räume features Robert Montgomery

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 22:01:00 +0800

Neue Berliner Räume features Robert Montgomery

The City In Which I Love You

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 04:19:00 +0800

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
andI mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you…

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain rining like teeth into the beggar’s tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you…

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest…

a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I’m vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I’d eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don’t see me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.

The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me

among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I’ll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I’ll achieve you.

but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated

by exhaustion and time’s appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind

jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.

In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,

and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street

beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse

lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he’d sit up any minute and laugh out loud:

that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.

And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are

my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don’t survive,
whose names I do not know;

they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you.

The rain stops, the moon
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.

If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it’s only because I’m famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.

And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer

would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.

You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.

Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.

At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.

Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.

Straight from my father’s wrath,
and long from my mother’s womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

— Li-Young Lee

Private Parts | Sarah Kay

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:46:18 +0800

keinezeit:

Private Parts
Sarah Kay

The first love of my life never saw me naked. There was always a parent coming home in a half hour, always a little brother in the next room, always too much body and not enough time for me to show him. Instead I gave him my shoulder, my elbow, a bend of my knee. I lent him my corners, my edges, the parts of me I could afford to offer, the parts I had long since given up trying to hide.

He never asked for more. He gave me back his eyelashes, the back of his neck, his palms, we held each piece we were given like it was a nectarine, could bruise if we weren’t careful. We collected them like we were trying to build an orchard. And the spaces he never saw, the ones my parents had labelled “private parts” even I was still small enough to fit all of myself and worries inside a bathtub, I made up for them by handing over all the private parts of me.

There was no secret I didn’t tell him, there was no moment I didn’t share. We didn’t grow up, we grew in, like ivy wrapping, molding each other into perfect yings and yangs. We kissed with mouths open, breathing his exhale into my inhale. We could’ve survived underwater or outer space, living only off the breath we traded. We spelled love G-I-V-E. I never wanted to hide my body from him, if I could have I would have given it all away with the rest of me. I did not know it was possible to save some things for myself.

Some nights I wake up knowing he’s anxious. He’s across the world in another woman’s arms and the years have spread us like dandelion seeds, sanding down the edges of our jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other. He drinks from the pitcher on the nightstand, checks the digital clock: it is 5 am. He tosses in sheets and tries to settle, I wait for him to sleep before tucking myself into elbows and knees, reaching for things I have long since given away.

“Ginsberg”, Julia Vinograd

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:18:00 +0800

No blame. Anyone who wrote Howl and Kaddish
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.
I just wish I hadn’t made this mistake with him.
It was during the Vietnam war
and he was giving a great protest reading
in Washington Square Park
and nobody wanted to leave.
So Ginsberg got the idea, “I’m going to shout
‘the war is over’ as loud as I can,” he said
“and all of you run over the city
in different directions
yelling the war is over, shout it in offices,
shops, everywhere and when enough people
believe the war is over
why, not even the politicians
will be able to keep it going.”
I thought it was a great idea at the time
a truly poetic idea.
So when Ginsberg yelled I ran down the street
and leaned in the doorway
of the sort of respectable down on its luck cafeteria
where librarians and minor clerks have lunch
and I yelled “the war is over.”
And a little old lady looked up
from her cottage cheese and fruit salad.
She was so ordinary she would have been invisible
except for the terrible light
filling her face as she whispered
“My son. My son is coming home.”
I got myself out of there and was sick in some bushes.
That was the first time I believed there was a war.

Julia Vinograd

the synæsthete’s love poem

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 01:21:10 +0800

rabbit-light:

Yesterday, blue tasted like licorice.
Even wind chimes caused dizziness;

an ache of paper lanterns rotting
from the acacias. Perhaps the L

in my name makes you sad,
evokes a film where a woman

waves from a train. Or how
this horizon wants to be a hymn.

If you listen, you can
hear the holes in the alphabet,
sounds lit by the lamps
of our bones. Perhaps

with this page I could fashion
a boat or a very convincing window.

A dress made entirely of vowels.

Kristy Bowen

Richard Siken

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 03:14:50 +0800

Richard Siken

Photo

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 03:52:39 +0800

-Richard Siken

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:40:36 +0800

-Richard Siken

The Flea

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:32:46 +0800

theherocomplex:

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck’d from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
‘Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,

Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

—

John Donne, “The Flea”.

Also known as the weirdest (and best) seduction poem ever.

Richard Brautigan — Love Poemteachingliteracy: by Midsummer

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:31:47 +0800

Richard Brautigan — Love Poem

teachingliteracy: by Midsummer

yimmyayo: John Keats’ original manuscript of “Ode to a...

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:17:11 +0800

yimmyayo:

John Keats’ original manuscript of “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)

Johnny Depp by Tim Burton

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:31:40 +0800

Johnny Depp by Tim Burton

Warsan Shire — For Women Who Are Difficult To Love You are a...

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:02:18 +0800

Warsan Shire — For Women Who Are Difficult To Love

You are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?

closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.