(via -cityoflove)
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”
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Vivra, Verra
Vivra, Verra
“I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love,
and how you gave me everything you had
and how I offered you what was left of me.”
— Charles Bukowski
(Source: andwhisper, via clavicola)
“
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
— “For Grace, After a Party,” Frank O’Hara
(Source: clavicola)
“
She said, I love you.
He said, Nothing.
(As if there were just one of each word
and the one who used it, used it up).
In the history of language
the first obscenity was silence.
— “The Primer,” Christina Davis
(Source: youwouldcrytoo, via clavicola)
“
It’s still winter,
and still I don’t know you
anymore, and you don’t know
me. But this morning I stand
in the kitchen with the illusion,
peeling a clementine. Each piece
snaps like the nickname for a girl,
the tinny bite it was
to be one once. Again I count
your daughters and find myself in the middle,
the waist of the hourglass,
endlessly passed through and passed through
but holding nothing, dismayed
by the grubby February sun
I was born under and the cheap pleasure
it gives the window. Yet I raise the shade
for it, and try not to feel it is wrong
to want spring, to be a season
further from you—not wrong to wish
for a hard rain, a hard wind
like one we sat out in together
or came in from together.
— “She Thinks of Him on Her Birthday,” Deborah Garrison
(Source: clavicola)
“
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon’s eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
now diagram the sentence
”— “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” Adrienne Rich
(Source: clavicola)
“We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,
That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.”
— Tracy K. Smith, excerpt from A Hunger So Honed
(Source: theoryoflostthings, via clavicola)
