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elisaenglish · 5 days

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“But love, first learnèd in a lady’s eyes, Lives not alone immurèd in the brain, But, with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every power, And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices. It adds a precious seeing to the eye: A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind. A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound, When the suspicious head of theft is stopped. Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible Than are the tender horns of cockled snails. Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste. For valour, is not Love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair. And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods Make heaven drowsy with the harmony. Never durst poet touch a pen to write Until his ink were temp’red with Love’s sighs; O, then his lines would ravish savage ears And plant in tyrants mild humility. From women's eyes this doctrine I derive. They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain, and nourish all the world; Else none at all in aught proves excellent.”

-William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost-

A warm drift surrounds the ocular oasis of this bed, comprised of you and I, barely now disclosed. Sacrosanct, we are a thing of ages...

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elisaenglish · 6 days

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-Hermann Hesse, Demian-

One time, all mine—and I’m fairly sure she’s both...

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elisaenglish · 7 days

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The Erotics of Restraint

“I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.”

-Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell-

Juxtaposition might suggest that ours is a love in contraflow to forevering, a stark inflection of the norm, expert in going nowhere. Suppressionist thinking holds a certain line, you could surmise. But conflating a life of stillness with a life of stasis doesn’t account for the vitality of motion inside.

Admittedly, it’s a quiet phenomenon. An ordinance of self-control, even. However, not a synonym for absence by any stretch. The dual narrative has an essential premise, after all; and to presuppose that externalisation is the only means by which we may do this dance is to overlook the standard by which the artist comes to art—or the cohesion found therein. Run-on sentences do possess a kind of charm. One to which I’m rather partial.

But what of him? Or you, I suppose, in apostrophised form?

There’s my name, for one. That “romance of stones” which dallies close to epiphanic truth. Revealed, I am but clothed in thoughts. No vampire’s call, though I am in the veins. And I don’t fear, don’t feel anything aghast—there’s no betrayal in the pulse. As Anaïs Nin asserts in Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes:

“I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervour of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.”

This is the wild ride of heart and intimation. This is the dark that exists, and knows. My mise-en-page. My prose passion stripped to its own syllabic thrust. It’s that beat again, recurring.

Haunted? Scarred? Done and done. Destruction? Death? You think I haven’t wrecked myself, corralled a resurrection? Or as Nin writes, “There are worlds deeper down, each time we sink and are destroyed, there are deeper worlds beneath which we only reach by dying.”

And by living, wanting. Simultaneity rolls on through. We’re somewhere between beautiful and damned. The eyes reach. Lips. Exemplified, I think, when Sierra DeMulder writes in her own poetic storm:

“When the apocalypse comes and all the windows are shattered and the car tyres have melted into the pavement, once all the schools and hospitals and skyscrapers have folded in on themselves and the last street lamp has wilted like a starving flower,

I will still want to fuck you.”

Still—and always. Psychological means spice up the how. Everything’s on fire—and no, I’m not afraid. Because I would, I’d care. See, italics spill a promise; ignite a million neurons while I’m intertext, composed. Conversely aching. All rebuilt. To pull you in. To simply say, “When the apocalypse does come, I will.”

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elisaenglish · 9 days

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Not a lost generation. Not on my watch. Not ever...

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elisaenglish · 12 days

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Languid Are the Drunk to Bloom Alive

I flower, like wine gone sticky in a hothouse summer—for you...

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elisaenglish · 14 days

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I’ve read your treatise on impractical demonology, and I find it anti-myself...

#writing #love #women #feminism #meaning #all eternal things #self love in a time of...#a murmur of fire #truth be told #inside of me #woman strong #i declare #what it is to burn #this is how it goes #elisa english #elisaenglish

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elisaenglish · 15 days

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-Edvard Munch, Separation (1896)-

#art #stands on its own #patterns of distraction #all eternal things #love in a time of...#la douleur exquise #feeling a moment #rich tapestries #visuals #elisa english #elisaenglish

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elisaenglish · 15 days

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A Lesson in Foundational Bibliotics

Lungs unbound, expression knows my core essentials bookend into yours. This spark of conscience, for my breath subsumed, into wild abundance read as always to illuminate—our type so tender-true and thought in kind.

#writing #love #truth #symbiosis #meaning #all eternal things #love in a time of...#somewhere warm #inside of me #beauty's where you find it #essential thinking #light me up #the trick is to keep breathing #you and me always #this is how it goes #probably should've been a poem #elisa english #elisaenglish

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elisaenglish · 17 days

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Of fervent prayers that lover me, graced by tender arches of your mouth...

#writing #love #desire #thought #meaning #all eternal things #love in a time of...#a murmur of fire #passion play #stripped and bare #inside of me #underneath it all #always on my mind #the goddess in the question #i miss you #this is how it goes #elisa english #elisaenglish

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elisaenglish · 18 days

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Romy Schneider photographed in Paris, 1970.

#photography #life #love #art #meaning #patterns of distraction #all eternal things #love in a time of...#feeling a moment #feminine aesthetics #beauty's where you find it #step back in time #rich tapestries #visuals #elisa english #elisaenglish

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elisaenglish · 18 days

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“I do want to create art beyond rage. Rage is a place to begin, but not end. I’m not as wise as my work, but I know if I take the writing deep enough, something larger and greater than myself will flash forth and illuminate me, heal me. I do want to devour my demons—despair, grief, shame, fear—and use them to nourish my art. Otherwise they’ll devour me.”

-Sandra Cisneros, I Can Live Sola and I Love to Work-

The only kind of sub this text will love—and God, she screams of beauty...

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elisaenglish · 19 days

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Curled into the heat of you in the violet-gold of dawn, love catches fire, a match struck of pure desire—and we burn with every metaphor of flesh and soul consumed...

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elisaenglish · 20 days

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-John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott (1888)-

#art #stands on its own #patterns of distraction #all eternal things #love in a time of...#feminine aesthetics #beauty's where you find it #rich tapestries #visuals #elisa english #elisaenglish

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elisaenglish · 20 days

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A Game of Twenty Questions On the Fly

The rules are there are no rules. If you answer in monosyllables, you’re going down—and not in the way I’ve dreamed. It’s you, me. But mostly me. Because like a wise woman said: It’s a monologue, bitch. The comma’s entirely optional...

How is it that life begins with the letter y? And no, it’s not Spanish. Literalism’s the death of us, after all. Oh, what’s that you say? Points? Don’t you know everything’s permitted? And speaking of, can you count to the wily sum of us without diverging on the vocal side of when you’re meant to stop?

It’s like undressing. How do you define one naked? And if I’m flush, I’m quite distracting. Don’t you really love... my brain? They claim flirtation’s waning if you go the way of screens and frames—so does that make this train an art? Carriage of a spontaneous arc (when I’m mostly in the plotted part of this graveyard not for sale)?

Should I relent? I think that spells the end. Or am I mistaken? Should we be friends? What about the bounty between my dovetailed heart? My legs? Do the answers come and come? You can’t say yes without a plan to prove it. Then again, is not the choosing our sweet fuck you deep to death?

And in what vein do you prefer to read it? Do you need my lips to bloom? Elucidate and let it loose? Or are you just content to stare?

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elisaenglish · 21 days

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Forever deep will I endart mine eye, for looking liking you...

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elisaenglish · 21 days

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Michelle Pfeiffer being interviewed for Batman Returns (1992).

#batman returns #michelle pfeiffer #selina kyle #what did curiosity do #the woman behind the cat #patterns of distraction #all eternal things #love in a time of...#feeling a moment #step back in time #hand me my leather #elisa english #elisaenglish

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elisaenglish · 22 days

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“Change had come—but I did not yet grasp how wrenching that change would be.”

-Margaret Atwood, The Testaments-

It’s been the hardest eight months. So much so that I’m hesitant to say that it’s okay now—or that I am. There is much of uncertainty in that which we cannot control. But she reminds me, nothing matters quite so much as love. And not even death, not even hurt can shake it.

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