aristotlemcdonald

[aristotlemcdonald]

Defining the Problem

I can’t forgive you. Even if I could, You wouldn’t pardon me for seeing through you. And yet I cannot cure myself of love For what I thought you were before I knew you.

#Wendy Cope

[aristotlemcdonald]

If Life Is As Short As Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already At My Feet

if I make it to heaven, I will ask for all of the small pleasures I could have had on earth. And I’m sure this will upset

the divine order. I am a simple man. I want, mostly, a year that will not kill me when it is over.

A hot stove and a wooden porch, bent under the weight of my people. I was born, and it only got worse

from there. In the dead chill of a doctor’s office, I am told what to cut back on and what to add more of.

None of this sounds like living. I sit in a running car under a bath of orange light and eat the fried chicken

that I promised my love I would stray from for the sake of my heart and its blood

labor. Still, there is something about the way a grease stain begins small and then tiptoes its way along

the fabric of my pants. Here, finally, a country worth living in. One that falls thick from whatever

it is we love so much that we can’t stop letting it kill us. If we must die, let it be inside here. If we must.

#Hanif Abdurraqib

[aristotlemcdonald]

Dedication

It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you. Gladly lower myself down alone with you into the enormous mouth that waits, beyond youth, beyond every instant of ecstasy, remember: before battle we would do each other’s makeup, comb each other’s                    hair out saying we are unconquerable, we are terrible and splendid— the mouth waiting, patiently waiting. And I will meet you there                    again beyond bleeding thorns, the endless dilation, the fire that alters                    nothing; I am there already past snowy clouds, balding moss, dim swarm of stars even we can step over, it is easier this time, I promise— I am already waiting in your personal heaven, here is my hand, I will help you across. I would gladly die with you still, although I never write   from this gray institution. See they are so busy trying to cure me, I’m condemned—sorry, I have been given the job of vacuuming the desert forever, well, no more than eight hours                    a day. And it’s really just about a thousand miles of cafeteria; a large one in any event. With its miniature plastic knives, its tuna salad and Saran-Wrapped genitalia will somebody                    please get me out of here, sorry. I am happy to say that every method, massive pharmaceuticals, art therapy and edifying films as well as others I would prefer not to mention—I mean, every single technique known to the mouth—sorry!—to our most kindly compassionate science is being employed to restore me to normal well-being and cheerful stability. I go on vacuuming toward a small diamond light burning off in the distance. Remember me. Do you remember me?    In the night’s windowless darkness when I am lying cold and numb and no one’s fiddling with the lock, or shining flashlights in my eyes, although I never write, secretly I long to die with you, does that count?

#Franz Wright

[aristotlemcdonald]

Your Night Is of Lilac

The night sits wherever you are. Your night is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow— a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller in your lilac night, I am he who was one day me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed the heart’s rank between two grades: neither the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night is the covenant of night, crawling in my body anesthetized like a fox’s sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night staring at itself safe and assured in its endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry on the whims of Imru’ el-Qyss and others, and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry moon in the remoteness of speech ...

#Mahmoud Darwish #Translated By Fady Joudah

[aristotlemcdonald]

A Palestinian boy, whose house was destroyed in the summer of 2014, lies on a tree in the Johar al-Deek neighbourhood in central Gaza City on May 7, 2015. (Mohammad Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

[aristotlemcdonald]

Before I Was a Gazan

I was a boy and my homework was missing, paper with numbers on it, stacked and lined, I was looking for my piece of paper, proud of this plus that, then multiplied, not remembering if I had left it on the table after showing to my uncle or the shelf after combing my hair but it was still somewhere and I was going to find it and turn it in, make my teacher happy, make her say my name to the whole class, before everything got subtracted in a minute even my uncle even my teacher even the best math student and his baby sister who couldn’t talk yet. And now I would do anything for a problem I could solve.

#naomi shihab nye

[aristotlemcdonald]

Forfeiting My Mystique

It is pretty to be sweet and full of pardon like a flower perfuming the hands that shred it, but all piety leads to a single point: the same paradise where dead lab rats go. If you live small you’ll be resurrected with the small, a whole planet of minor gods simpering in the weeds. I don’t know anyone who would kill anyone for me. As boys my brother and I would play love, me drawing stars on the soles of his feet, him tickling my back. Then we’d play harm, him cataloging my sins to the air, me throwing him into furniture. The algorithms for living have always been delicious and hollow, like a beetle husk in a spider’s paw. Hafez said fear is the cheapest room in a house, that we ought to live in better conditions. I would happily trade all my knowing for plusher carpet, higher ceilings. Some nights I force my brain to dream me Persian by listening to old home movies as I fall asleep. In the mornings I open my eyes and spoil the séance. Am I forfeiting my mystique? All bodies become sicker bodies. This is a kind of object permanence, a curse bent around our scalps resembling grace only at the tattered edges. It’s so unsettling to feel anything but good. I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows. Rockabye, now I lay me down, et cetera. The world is what accumulates —  the mouth full of meat, the earth full of meat. My grandfather taught his parrot the ninety-nine holy names of God. Al-Muzil: The Humiliator. Al-Waarith: The Heir. Once, after my grandfather had been dead for a year, I woke from a dream (I was a sultan guzzling flies from a crystal boot) with his walking cane deep in my mouth. I kept sucking until I fell back asleep. There are only two bones in the throat, and that’s if you count the clavicle. This seems unsafe, overdelicate, like I ought to ask for a third. As if anyone living would offer. Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies, said Blake, probably gardening in the nude. Today I’m trying to scowl more, mismatch my lingerie. Nobody seems bothered enough. Some saints spent their whole childhoods biting their teachers’ hands and sprinkling salt into spider- webs, only to be redeemed by a fluke shock of grace just before death. May I feather into such a swan soon. The Book of Things Not to Touch gets longer every day: on one page, the handsome puppy bred only for service. On the next, my mother’s face. It’s not even enough to keep my hands to myself —  there’s a whole chapter about the parts of me that could get me into trouble. In Farsi, we say jaya shomah khallee when a beloved is absent from our table — literally: your place is empty. I don’t know why I waste my time with the imprecision of saying anything else, like using a hacksaw to slice a strawberry when I have a razor in my pocket. To the extent I am necessary at all, I am necessary like a roadside deer —   a thing to drive past, to catch the white of, something to make a person pause, say, look, a deer.

#Kaveh Akbar

[aristotlemcdonald]

I don’t like heaviness […] It seems often to amount to complete self-absorption […] I think one can be cheerful AND profound! – or, how to be grim without groaning [...] It may amount to a kind of "good manners," I'm not sure. The good artist assumes a certain amount of sensitivity in his audience and doesn’t attempt to flay himself to get sympathy or understanding

Elizabeth Bishop, from a letter to Anne Stevenson, 8 January 1964

[aristotlemcdonald]

I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again

Those who live to have it and those who live to give it.

Of course there are those for whom both are true, but never in the same measure.

Those who have it to give are like cardinals in the snow. So easy and beautifully lit. Some are rabbits. Hard to see except for those who would prey upon them: all that softness and quaking and blood.

Those who want it cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons, any furred thing will do. So easy to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.

I wander out into the winter. I know what I am.

#Vievee Francis

[aristotlemcdonald]

[the darkness is spreading earlier and earlier]

the darkness is spreading earlier and earlier. I have stopped looking for myself in pictures. I ask my therapist: if I cannot see my hands how will anyone know to love me. he tells me that it is best to not speak of what happens at night. I do not speak in winter. I watch the news. I think about what picture they would use if I died. it is a miracle babies are born at all. I think a baby is what happens when you get tired of leaving notes on someone’s nightstand before they wake up. if men could carry babies we would watch childbirth on ESPN. we would place bets on it. the world is on fire again but I’m not alone this time. I just want to touch someone who thinks of me while their coffee cools. I just want to kiss a mouth that has grown my name inside. I just want to make good use of all this nighttime.  instead I make lists of everything outside that can kill me. the organic market next door is at the top. how much is too much to ask for nourishment. take what is left of my hands. give them back when the sun comes.

#HANIF WILLIS-ABDURRAQIB

[aristotlemcdonald]

The Loneliest Job in the World

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me? you are completely screwed, because the next question is How Much?

and then it is hundreds of hours later, and you are still hunched over your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough. This is the loneliest job in the world: to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself, and all around you, you can hear the sounds of people moving

in and out of love, pushing the turnstiles, putting their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked, which constantly changes. No one knows why.

#Tony Hoagland

[aristotlemcdonald]

Immortality

In Sleeping Beauty’s castle the clock strikes one hundred years and the girl in the tower returns to the world. So do the servants in the kitchen, who don’t even rub their eyes. The cook’s right hand, lifted an exact century ago, completes its downward arc to the kitchen boy’s left ear; the boy’s tensed vocal cords finally let go the trapped, enduring whimper, and the fly, arrested mid-plunge above the strawberry pie, fulfills its abiding mission and dives into the sweet, red glaze.

As a child I had a book with a picture of that scene. I was too young to notice how fear persists, and how the anger that causes fear persists, that its trajectory can’t be changed or broken, only interrupted. My attention was on the fly; that this slight body with its transparent wings and lifespan of one human day still craved its particular share of sweetness, a century later.

#Lisel Mueller

[aristotlemcdonald]

Before Your Came

Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns, the gold when we meet, the season ablaze, the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames, and the black when you cover the earth with the coal of dead fires. And the sky, the road, the glass of wine? The sky is a shirt wet with tears, the road a vein about to break, and the glass of wine a mirror in which the sky, the road, the world keep changing. Don’t leave now that you’re here— Stay. So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky, the road a road, and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine. Translated by Agha Shahid Ali.

#Faiz Ahmed Faiz

[aristotlemcdonald]

Done Playing Hard to Get

There’s more than one way to read that fist of hers. It might be a defensive gesture—like carrying on an entire conversation with your arms crossed— but it might mean something else completely. Maybe she’s got a tiny apple in there—keeping it warm so you can eat it later, baked in the oven of her body. Or maybe a single pearl found at the edge of some ballroom her parents dragged her to when she was ten.

Her dress itched her knees so she crawled in the shadows, stumbling upon this pale eye escaped from some rich woman’s neck. She grabbed it, kept it secret until now, until your face, your body, your special way of looking directly at her when you speak. And she’s about to reveal it to you if you’ll just calm down and reach out to take both of her hands in yours.

#Christopher Citro

[aristotlemcdonald]

Her

I had been told about her. How she would always, always. How she would never, never. I'd watched and listened but I still fell for her, how she always, always. How she never, never. In the small brave night, her lips, butterfly moments. I tried to catch her and she laughed a loud laugh that cracked me in two, but then I had been told about her, how she would always, always. How she would never, never We two listened to the wind. We two galloped a pace. We two, up and away, away, away. And now she's gone, like she said she would go. But then I had been told about her - how she would always, always.

#Jackie Kay

[aristotlemcdonald]

All You Who Sleep Tonight

All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right And emptiness above - Know that you aren't alone The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all their years.

#Vikram Seth

[aristotlemcdonald]

#Klangkarussell #sonnentanz #will heard