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"Samurai Song"

saturnrising:

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

Robert Pinsky

(Source: writersalmanac.publicradio.org)

That crazed girl improvising her music. / Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, / Her soul in division from itself / Climbing, falling, She knew not where, / Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, / Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare / A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing / Heroically lost, heroically found. / No matter what disaster occurred / She stood in desperate music wound, / Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph / Where the bales and the baskets lay / No common intelligible sound / But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea.
W.B. Yeats (via fleurishes)

(via clavicola)

Somewhere in everyone’s head something points toward home,
a dashboard’s floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn’t matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you’ve risen or fallen to.

What the bubble always points to,
whether we notice it or not, is home.
It may be true that if you move fast
everything fades away, that given time
and noise enough, every memory goes
into the blackness, and if new ones come-

small, mole-like memories that come
to live in the furry dark-they, too,
curl up and die. But Carol goes
to high school now. John works at home
what days he can to spend some time
with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.

Ellen won’t eat her breakfast.
Your sister was going to come
but didn’t have the time.
Some mornings at one or two
or three I want you home
a lot, but then it goes.

It all goes.
Hold on fast
to thoughts of home
when they come.
They’re going to
less with time.

Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.

Forgive me that. One time it wasn’t fast.
A myth goes that when the years come
then you will, too. Me, I’ll still be home.
Miller Williams, The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina

(via grammatolatry)

Graham Foust, “Commercial”

gammasandgerunds:

Are you touched like a drum

or in a corner
cutting dust

Are you cranked across
the sky

Are you you there

—Necessary Stranger; Flood Editions, 2007 

Each man has a quiet

timeimmemorial:

FROM Deaf Republic: 14

BY ILYA KAMINSKY

Each man has a quiet that revolves

 around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing
hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka

and toast the gray wall. I say we were
never silent. We read each other’s lips and said

one word four times. And laughed four times
in loving repetition. We read each other’s lips to uncover

the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka
Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’s tobacco hair.

And whoever listens to me: being

there, and not being, lost and found

and lost again: Thank you for the feather on my tongue,
thank you for our argument that ends,

thank you for my deafness,

Lord, such fire
from a match you never lit.

There are diseases worse

timeimmemorial:

There are diseases worse, yes, than diseases,
Aches that don’t ache even in one’s soul
And yet, that are more aching than the others.
There are dreamed anguishes that are more real
Than the ones life brings us, there are sensations
Felt only by imagining
Which are more ours than our life is.
There’s so often a thing which, not existing,
Does exist, exists lingeringly
And lingeringly is ours and us…..
Above the cloudy green of the broad river
The white circumflexes of the gulls…..
Above the soul the useless fluttering-
What never was, nor could be, and is everything.

Give me some more wine, because life is nothing.

Fernando Pessoa ( 19.11.35)

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don’t
want them, so I take them back
and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists. The yard is dark,
the tomatoes are next to the whitewashed wall,
the book on the table is about Spain,
the windows are painted shut.
Tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns
of snow and I stare at you like I’m looking through a window,
counting birds.
You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that,
and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy
but tell me
you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.
You do the math, you expect the trouble.
The seaside town. The electric fence.
Draw a circle with a piece of chalk. Imagine standing in a constant cone
of light. Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless.
A stone on the path means the tea’s not ready,
a stone in the hand means somebody’s angry, the stone inside you still
hasn’t hit bottom.
“Seaside Improvisation” by Richard Siken (via somme)

(via clavicola)

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?


- Mark Strand, No Words Can Describe It

Pluto to Persephone, Daniel Williams

bonnietsunami:

I know what it is you
want from me
but you see
I cannot give it
I am hell
and hell
is a nice place to visit
but when you want to leave
you want to leave

when you speak to me
you converse with darkness
hold my hand
old bones rattle
when you kiss me
imagine kissing the skull of a saint
mouldering in a cave
large balloon of spirit
flown      imagine taste of white bone
reposed in darkness

sweet bursts of pomegranate
on your tongue
seeds bitter
with promises they have made

the longer you wait for me
the more the world suffers

AS she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it, until her
teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: “If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
tea in the garden …” I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.
Hysteria, T.S. Eliot (via dialogues)