I grabbed the tea kettle too many times
this is how I learned not to touch things
— Anis Mojgani, Falling Lessons (excerpt)
I don’t remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don’t remember
if I’m here alone
or waiting for someone
— Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing (via meditationsonisolde)
I want to eat your sparrow, come
here. I want to lick your sparrow claws come
here. I want to cut your sorrows out
you’re hollowed out. Come here.
I want to suck your fingers off.
Come here.
I want to give you your history back.
Your fingers back. I want to tell you yes.
Come back. I want to show you my pressure,
my heavy, my opened and clothes, my under
and o’s. Come here. I want to finger
your bones back. I want to sew your bones back
I want to re-blood your history.
I want to undo you like a mystery
novel. Is this the kitchen? The table-saw?
Is this your memory? Your tree-dream? You’re declawed.
I want to give you your teeth back. Your teeth marks.
I want to spit back your teeth-pull. I want to unhinge your heart-jaws.
Come here. I want to sit you down on the bed and give you back
my years. Here. I breathed your name into the leaves.
Here. I breathed you back into the trees. Here. This is your tree-dream
this is your tree-house, this is a bedroom, this is a silver broom
this is a shallow dream. This is my tree-dirt, my bee shirt.
This is my honey-stalk and these are your climbing shoes.
Harmonica me to sleep again. Put your sparrow on my back skin.
it’s amazing how much of feminism is white middle-upper class women complaining that they can’t dominate/exploit others in the same way white men can
We forget we’re
mostly water
till the rain falls
and every atom
in our body
starts to go home
— Albert Huffstickler (via paperbackwords)
Before you speak ask yourself
is it kind,
is it necessary,
is it true,
does it improve upon the silence?
My kindness knows mermaids never ever miss their legs in the water ‘cause there are better ways to move through an ocean than kicking.
— Andrea Gibson, A Letter to the Playground Bully (via mylovelybeing)
My mouth wants the feel of the words inside of it…It doesn’t have a need or a desire to be spoken. But there’s a myriad of forms of art and creativity. Why didn’t art stop with the fresco? Why didn’t it stop with the marble? Why did people have to continue with the photographic image until it moved, why weren’t they happy with capturing a still image? Because some things have to be expressed in a certain way. It doesn’t make the photograph less than the motion picture.
— Anis Mojgani, on the written word vs. spoken word (via the-blonde-assassin)
I will never make a piñata of your heart, you will never have to lose yourself to win me over.
— Andrea Gibson (via absea)
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
— Wild Geese, Mary Oliver (via havisham)
This is the history of water; how it
drips across skin — faucets, floods, never forgetting
thousands of touches in a meniscus.
There is death and there is birth; how we
swam naked with our bodies sixty percent lake water, the small
islands of our skin surfacing, barely touching.
We’re standing bone-naked in the skeleton of our
shower, history pooling around my ankles:
our skin like oil in all this — all of this,
holding ourselves together by the wetness;
the dewdrops of foliage on our minds — our
mouths collecting sin and hope, faith and
rare miracles, four hundred wars cleaning the
dark hoops of my eyes.
Washing ourselves clean with
the dark bones of secrets, of loss, of famine and
fall and friends who became lovers by accident.
Water, repeating itself — as lather
rinse and repeat, magnolia perfumed bubbles collecting
like salt dunes, our feet pressing into the sand,
the tides cleaning but never
forgetting.
— “The History of Water,” Shinji Moon (via commovente)
