For all my big mistakes.

Sonnetstuck: The Love Song of J. Eridan Ampora

in the depths the squidlings come an go
glubbin of glbgolyb down below

IN REAL LIFE I AM JUST MAKING THIS CONTINUOUS, KEENING NOISE OF PURE FLAPPYHANDED GLEE

The Untrustworthy Speaker - Louise Gluck

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.

I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that’s when I’m least to be trusted.

It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised
for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.
In the end, they’re wasted—

I never see myself,
standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand.
That’s why I can’t account
for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.

In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless,
we’re the cripples, the liars;
we’re the ones who should be factored out
in the interest of truth.

When I’m quiet,
that’s when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas
red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
to the older daughter, block her out:
when a living thing is hurt like that,
in its deepest workings,
all function is altered.

That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
is also a wound to the mind.

uber-alles:

Snowdrops by Louise Gluck

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know

what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

greydotmatters:

Diggin’ in the Crates and Perusing the Shelves]: The Shange / Lorde / Jordan Edition.

…i call myself exploring a new
used bookstore in the area today
and in doing so
i came across an orignal copy of the
”For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” Original Broadway Cast album.

*insert squeal here*

while i always look at the album section (if there is one) of used bookstores
i rarely find anything that i want.

But to find this -
especially when i am knee deep
in my studies of Ntozake and her work… *insert squeal here*.

I also was able to get my hands on:

June Jordan’s - “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union”
and “Civil Wars“

as well as Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches” .

all in all
i have to say… today has been a good ass day.

Antilamentation

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Dorianne Laux

(Source: bangstheory)

“
There’s a beach in San Diego where you can
drop your clothes like shed skin onto the black sand,

walk your tired, naked body into the open sea
and curl up under the froth, tumble like a rock

or stretch out and ride a wave as it curls over your head
like cut glass. You can float on your back and look

toward shore where the others are nothing but
fleshy gestures, more of the organism you were

born to and have broken from to test this salt
and solitude, this rushing silence beyond

the breaking waves, your heavy bones floating
between your faith in the human and the ruddy

horizon, that gate made of seaweed and pearls
opening under you, closing over you, asking for nothing

but your stillness, your breath, your small beating
heart, and when the great hinge rasps its welcome

you wake to hear them calling, look to see them
waving their tiny, sun-smitten arms. Blurred

by distance their formless forms merge and you
can hardly believe you are of them, your body

buoyant, set loose, relieved of its burdens,
its squalor and shame. And what brought you here

is what brings you back, not love or faith
but their fear and fragility, their voices cast out

against the deafening wind, splashing
toward you — so many — against the waves.
”

Come Back, Dorianne Laux (via holdonmagnolia)

So, my friend got her MFA in Poetry at UNC, and is Facebook friends with Dorianne Laux, who posted the “I’m On A Boat” vid to my friend’s Facebook profile. The world shrinks beneath me a little more every day.

In other news, I am still sick for the sea. God, there’s a beach in San Diego — I know, I know there is, and I want to be on it right now.

How Water Began to Play

Water wanted to live
It went to the sun it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back
They rotted it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back
It wanted to live
It went to the womb it met blood
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met knife
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met maggots and rottenness
It came weeping back it wanted to die

It went to time it went through the stone door
It came weeping back
It went searching through all space for nothingness
It came weeping back it wanted to die
Till it had no weeping left

It lay at the bottom of all things

Utterly worn out utterly clear

—Ted Hughes

The Triumph of Achilles
by Louise Glück

In the story of Patroclus,
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him;
they wore the same armor.

Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparent, though the legends
cannot be trusted –
their source is the survivor,
the one who was abandoned.

What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to his loss?

In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.

(Source: justintimberlakemakeanotheralbum)

“Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.”

Dorianne Laux, Antilamentation (via grammatolatry) (via antilamentation)

I haven’t been able to read poetry for weeks; this is the first one I finished without it seeming like my heart couldn’t handle it.

“
Waving hello versus waving goodbye
is an interpretative act. We could make it
directional: from left to right is hello,
right to left, goodbye. The buoy

clanged all night so my sleep
would know where to go. I could pray.
Tambourine myself to death.
Electroshock the worms. Wrap the maple
in tinfoil and decry the lightning
that splits it as misguided and deceived.
Nothing I do will bring you back. So this

is freedom: being ineffectual. Here
is where spiders set up shop
during the night, here is where a crow
decided to perch. Then it gets up
and perches over there, beside
where another crow perched last week.
It would be peaceful to be a sail

except during the storm.
During the storm, I would like to be
the storm. If you’re the storm,
there’s nothing frightening
about the storm except when it stops,
then you’re dead and the maps
are drowned. Within my heart

is another heart, within that heart,
a man at war writes home:
this is like digging a hole in the rain.
”