hypnotistcollectors

[hypnotistcollectors]

Did It Ever Occur to You That Maybe You’re Falling in Love?

We buried the problem. We planted a tree over the problem. We regretted our actions toward the problem. We declined to comment on the problem. We carved a memorial to the problem, dedicated it. Forgot our handkerchief. We removed all “unnatural” ingredients, handcrafted a locally-grown tincture for the problem. But nobody bought it. We freshly-laundered, bleached, deodorized the problem. We built a wall around the problem, tagged it with pictures of children, birds in trees. We renamed the problem, and denounced those who used the old name. We wrote a law for the problem, but it died in committee. We drove the problem out with loud noises from homemade 
instruments. We marched, leafleted, sang hymns, linked arms with the problem, got dragged to jail, got spat on by the problem and let out. We elected an official who Finally Gets the problem. We raised an army to corral and question the problem. They went door to door but could never ID. We made www.problem.com so You Can Find Out About the 
problem, and www.problem.org so You Can Help. We created 1-800-Problem, so you could Report On the problem, and 1-900-Problem so you could Be the Only Daddy That Really Turns That problem On. We drove the wheels offa that problem. We rocked the shit out of that problem. We amplified the problem, turned it on up, and blew it out. We drank to forget the problem. We inhaled the problem, exhaled the problem, crushed its ember under our shoe. We put a title on the problem, took out all the articles, conjunctions, and verbs. Called it “Exprmntl Prblm.” We shot the problem, and put it out of its misery. We swallowed daily pills for the problem, followed a problem fast, drank problem tea. We read daily problem horoscopes. Had our problem palms read by a seer. We prayed. Burned problem incense. Formed a problem task force. Got a problem degree. Got on the problem tenure track. Got a problem retirement plan. We gutted and renovated the problem. We joined the Neighborhood Problem Development Corp. We listened and communicated with the problem, only to find out that it had gone for the day. We mutually empowered the problem. We kissed and stroked the problem, we fucked the problem all night. Woke up to an empty bed. We watched carefully for the problem, but our flashlight died. We had dreams of the problem. In which we could no longer 
recognize ourselves. We reformed. We transformed. Turned over a new leaf. Turned a corner, found ourselves near a scent that somehow reminded us of the problem, In ways we could never Put into words. That Little I-can’t-explain-it That makes it hard to think. That Rings like a siren inside.

(-Ailish Hopper)

#poems poetry hopper ailish hopper denial love longing

[hypnotistcollectors]

“A new obsession. How to get out”

A new obsession. How to get out of cold, metallic waters alive. Every night for a week I dream of my car ending up in a body of water. If I’m not driving, someone else is. Bob, the neighbor. My new paranoia. I Google how to escape a car filling with water. I watch videos on YouTube. I memorize the steps of what to do if this happens. First, you take your seat belt off. Late at night, I read pages and pages on the internet. What if the car lands in the water flipped over? Remember to stay calm. If you panic, you will die. News story about a woman who drives her minivan into the ocean on purpose. Horrified beachgoers run toward the water. The two kids are strapped in the back seat. One of the kids is screaming “No, mommy” — What about the sunroof? What if you land in the water and your car has a sunroof? My new car has a sunroof. You have to let the car fill with water so that pressure is equalized on both sides. This is elementary physics. If you don’t do this, it’s impossible to open the doors. This is the scary part. You have to hold your breath. None of the YouTube videos say anything about what to do if you have kids strapped in car seats in the car. I look up what the dreams mean. Water in dreams signifies turbulent emotions. If you are in your car and there is a flash flood, you should get out immediately. Even six inches of water can sweep your car away. Sweep it to where? Maybe the forest? I get nervous driving by the Gulf of Mexico. My friend Dyan got into an accident there and she said that if the car had flipped on the other side of the road, her whole family would have ended up in the water. I don’t like water. I don’t want to touch it. It scares me. I know all life was born of water. Today the government proposed to sell off all public lands. That before anything existed there were rocks and then water. I know that water is beautiful and mysterious. But why does it sweep people away? I want to push down the rising seas. I look at a map of cities that will be underwater by 2100, 2200 —  Jacksonville, New Orleans, Amsterdam. I want to push them down with my bare hands.

(-Sandra Simonds)

#poetry poems simonds sandra simonds panic worry anxiety

[hypnotistcollectors]

Painted Turtle

Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence. Why aren’t I your wife? You swerved around a turtle sunning itself. I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass. We were late for dinner. One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said. Claws in tar. You turned the car around. Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace, crushed roman dome, the surprise of red blood. I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm. I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt. The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know. Driving that road next winter, you remembered that place in the road. Your turtle. During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes. It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.

(-Gretchen Marquette)

#poems #poetry #gretchen marquette #marquette #loss #sadness #longing #disappointment

[hypnotistcollectors]

Growing a Bear

Growing a bear — a midnight occupation, the need for which you perhaps first realized when you saw the wrong kind of shadow under your chin — a convex when you expected concave, so now it’s clear you’re getting older. Your wife was in the shower and you wanted to step inside and soap her up like you did in college when she said “I’ll shower with you, but I’m leaving my underwear on,” and you enjoyed her in every way you could enjoy a person with soap. You didn’t join your wife in the shower. She’s gotten funny about letting you see her shave her legs or wash herself anywhere. You think she read it somewhere —  that letting your husband see you pluck anything, trim anything, apply medicine to anything, will make him feel like he’s furniture. It’s exactly on cold nights like these that the basement is not as forbidding as it should be, despite the fact that you have to put gloves on in what is part of  your own home. Downstairs, a large bathtub, kept, for some reason, after remodeling. It is there that your bear will be grown, by you, though you have no idea how. Probably wishing is most of it; fertilizer, chunks of raw stew meat, handfuls of  blackberries, two metal rakes, and a thick rug make up the rest. Then water. You get an e-mail from a friend late at night saying he can’t sleep. You write back “I hope you feel sleepy soon” and think how childish the word “sleepy” is. And you’re a man, older than most of  the people you see on television. You haven’t even considered how your wife will feel when you have finished growing your bear. You could write a letter to her tonight, explaining how your life was just so lacking in bear: “Janet, it’s nothing you’ve done —  clearly you have no possible way of supplying me with a bear or any of the activities I might be able to enjoy after acquiring the bear.” It might just be best to keep the two worlds separate. Janet clearly prefers things to be comfortable and unchallenging. Janet soaps herself up. Janet puts herself to bed, and you just happen to be next to her. You go on your weekly bike ride with Mark and tell him that you’ve been growing a bear. An eighteen-wheeler flies by and he doesn’t seem to hear you —  plus he’s focused on the hill. You think about how not all friends know what each other sounds like when struggling and breathing heavy. Past the age of college athletics, most friends don’t even know what each others’ bodies look like, flushed, tired, showering, cold.

(-Hannah Gamble)

#poems #poetry #regrets #loss

[hypnotistcollectors]

Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Agree with You (2)

—After Catullus

My house disgusted me, so I slept in a tent.

My tent disgusted me, so I slept in the grass. The grass disgusted me, so I slept in my body, which I strung like a hammock from two ropes. My body disgusted me, so I carved myself out of it. My use of knives disgusted me because it was an act of violence. My weakness disgusted me because “Hannah” means “hammer.” The meaning of my name disgusted me because I’d rather be known as beautiful. My vanity disgusted me because I am a scholar. My scholarship disgusted me because knowledge is empty. My emptiness disgusted me because I wanted to be whole. My wholeness would have disgusted me because to be whole is to be smug. Still, I tried to understand wholeness as the inclusiveness of all activities: I walked out into the yard, trying to vomit and drink milk simultaneously. I tried to sleep while smoking a cigar. I have enough regrets to crack all the plumbing. I’m whole only in that I’ve built my person from every thought I’ve ever loved.

(-Hannah Gamble)

#poems #poetry #hannah gamble #gamble #confusion #oof

[hypnotistcollectors]

The God Who Loves You

It must be troubling for the god who loves you   To ponder how much happier you’d be today   Had you been able to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings   Driving home from the office, content with your week— Three fine houses sold to deserving families— Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened   Had you gone to your second choice for college,   Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted   Whose ardent opinions on painting and music   Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.   A life thirty points above the life you’re living   On any scale of satisfaction. And every point   A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.   You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments   So she can save her empathy for the children.   And would you want this god to compare your wife   With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?   It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation   You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight   Than the conversation you’re used to. And think how this loving god would feel   Knowing that the man next in line for your wife   Would have pleased her more than you ever will   Even on your best days, when you really try.   Can you sleep at night believing a god like that Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives   You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is And what could have been will remain alive for him   Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill   Running out in the snow for the morning paper, Losing eleven years that the god who loves you   Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene   Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him   No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend   No closer than the actual friend you made at college, The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight   And write him about the life you can talk about   With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,   Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen. (-Carl Dennis)

#poem #poetry #carl dennis #dennis #oof #regrets #disappointment

[hypnotistcollectors]

Diminuendo

Everything was clear, and nothing much    the better for it. They agreed it was a matter of caring,

and each felt the dull courage that comes from    caring less. They weren't going to bring up Avalon,

that shore town where they first met,    or doing ninety in the country with the top down:

these were among the unreachables; emblems    of how they felt once, about each other and a few

lambent afternoons. They leaned back    in their chairs at the café, neither fully present

nor gone, his mind cut loose    from his heart like a dinghy in cold, still water.

And she felt the weight of caring    had been lifted from her. She felt she would soon know

a freedom some of her friends knew,    unmoored, a hundred options in the bittersweet dark.

It was late August. Neither blamed anything    on how the soul idles in that relentless hum of days.

Everything's true, they agreed, smiling;    if something didn't happen, it certainly would in time.

A black fly landed in her hair, and he    swept it away. A sudden breeze uplifted their napkins,

but that was all there was of action    It was time to go; one of them, soon, would say so. (-Stephen Dunn)

#stephen dunn #poetry #dunn #poems #apathy #caring

[hypnotistcollectors]

Paradise

How attractive trouble feels in paradise. The place next door where pain is an option begins to whisper. You want the leopard to replace the swan, the great horned owl to nudge a songbird out of a tree. The case for suffering is always overrated by those whose health is good, whose houses are calm. But today you understand why some people pierce more than their ears, why the leisure class has a history of eating itself from the inside. And, now, a wish to stir the stilled air with a serrated knife, dip into the blackberry jam, then lick that knife publicly clean, hoping someone will notice and care. From the beginning, hasn't it been the same: the need to woo a stranger so you'll not be mutinous alone, to lie down knowingly among the nettles and the thorns?  (-Stephen Dunn)

#stephen dunn #dunn #poetry #poems

[hypnotistcollectors]

MY LIFE WAS THE SIZE OF MY LIFE

My life was the size of my life. Its rooms were room-sized, its soul was the size of a soul. In its background, mitochondria hummed, above it sun, clouds, snow, the transit of stars and planets. It rode elevators, bullet trains, various airplanes, a donkey. It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose. It ate, it slept, it opened and closed its hands, its windows. Others, I know, had lives larger. Others, I know, had lives shorter. The depth of lives, too, is different. There were times my life and I made jokes together. There were times we made bread. Once, I grew moody and distant. I told my life I would like some time, I would like to try seeing others. In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned. I was hungry, then, and my life, my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep our hands off our clothes on our tongues from (-Jane Hirshfield)

#Jane Hirshfield #hirshfield #poems #poetry #self

[hypnotistcollectors]

ON FRIENDSHIP

If a friend calls out to you late at night from beneath your window Never send him on his way. And if you’ve sent him away and still Insist on rigid rules, regain your composure after a moment And run to the window and shout his name: “Come, Merhav! Come back! I’ve got some corn cooking! Come eat something.” And he’ll placidly retrace his steps and gladly accept The key you toss down from your window, Will come upstairs to the first floor and will be impressed By the large pictures on the walls. He’ll sit and wait for you to slip into a clean shirt and you’ll put on The movie in the kid’s room and your baby daughter Will rush to the kitchen and come back with a red pepper for him. He’ll decline the warm corn and say he’s already had dinner. In the meantime your husband will chat with him about Tai Chi And pour him a glass of cold sweet pineapple juice. You’ll return to the living room And go out to the balcony and light a cigarette and sip A cold beer. You don’t yet realize That this is a sublime moment in your life. One of the most sublime you’ll ever know. (-Hagit Grossman) (Translated, from the Hebrew, by Benjamin Balint.)

#hagit grossman #grossman #friendship #poems #poetry

[hypnotistcollectors]

DAMAGED VILLANELLE

To get rid of the sound of his voice you take off your ears but then they grow back.

You try a sharper blade, two hours hunched over the whetstone, and, rid of the sound of his voice,

for a day you hear nothing until they grow back.

You are not happy. In birdsong you just hear I’m hungry or Fuck me, everything threaded with the sound of his voice

you core out your eardrums to escape and you do for a while until they grow back.

Little flesh tom-toms announcing the night-march from within the ridged whorls of your ears which to get rid of the sound of his voice

you burn off this time with a blowtorch. They grow back

sooner than your hair does. Smoother, this time, too, and in skids the sound of his voice.

We should note now, though, that it matters less what he said than when (and where and how and why).

That whatever it was was always at night and though morning would reliably come

and snap night off like a light or a finger extended night would always grow back.

Different, more attentive maybe, or gentle and whiny with rain, but there, in the doorjamb, back. (-Conor Bracken)

#conor bracken #bracken #Poems #poetry #sadness #forgetting

[hypnotistcollectors]

THE PARTY TO WHICH YOU ARE NOT INVITED

You walk in, your clothes dark and strangely appropriate, an arrogance about you as if you had a ramrod for a spine. You feel posture-perfect.

When you speak, women move away. You smile, and men see tombstones. They think they know who you are, that they could throw you out

as they could one man. But today you are every man who has been omitted from any list: how quickly they see they would have no chance.

You pour yourself a drink, as if ready to become one of them. Under your skin, nerve endings, loose wires, almost perceivable. Something

somewhere is burning. You tell them you’ve dreamed of moments like this, to be in their lovely house, to have everyone’s attention. You ask

of the children, are they napping? You extend your hand to the host, who won’t take it, reminds you you were not invited, never will be.

You have things in your pockets for everybody. House gifts. Soon you’ll give them out. If only they could understand

how you could be ruined by kindness, how much you could love them if they knew how to stop you. (-Stephen Dunn)

#stephen dunn #Dunn #poetry #Poems #loneliness

[hypnotistcollectors]

One Love Story, Eight Takes

  Where you are tender, you speak your plural.                                    Roland Barthes                                               1 One version of the story is I wish you back— that I used each evening evening out what all day spent wrinkling. I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine you could see my ovaries through it. This is how I thought I would seduce you. This is how frantic I hollowed out.                                                   2 Another way of telling it is to hire some kind of gnarled and symbolic troll to make a tape recording. Of plastic beads coming unglued from a child’s jewelry box. This might be an important sound, like serotonin or mighty mitochondria, so your body hears about how you stole the ring made from a glittery opiate and the locket that held candy.                                                    3 It’s only fair that I present yet another side, as insidious as it is, because two sides hold up nothing but each other. A tentacled skepticism, a suspended contempt, such fancies and toxins form a third wall. A mean way to end and I never dreamed we meant it.                                                    4 Another way of putting it is like slathering jam on a scrape. Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick? Which is the worst! So much technology and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it. I mean there’s no relief unless. So I’m coming, all this excitement, to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play. It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain.                                                    5 In some cultures the story told is slightly different— in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed that the most personally attractive fish have eyes only on one side and repel each other like magnets. The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage. Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has those five pink moving suckerpads that allow endless permutations so no solid memory, no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid.                                                    6 The story exists even when there are no witnesses, kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete, and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident. This little tale tries so hard to be humorous, wants so badly to win affection and to lodge. Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved.                                                    7 Three million Richards can’t be wrong. So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which, in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously. They think one may start a tale off whingy and wretched in a regular voice. But when one strikes out whimsically, as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you, as if this story is happening to nobody it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody. The Richards believe you cannot privately jettison into the sky, just for fun. You must stack stories from the foundation up. From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it. Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule, not a hang glide. This is real life. So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built. Because no one unbuilds meticulously and meticulosity is what allows hearing. Three million Richards make one point. I hear it in order to make others. Mistake.                                                    8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I’ve invented so much and prevented more. But, I’d like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn’t love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.

(- Brenda Shaughnessy)

#poems #poetry #Brenda Shaughnessy #shaughnessy #love #regrets #nostalgia

[hypnotistcollectors]

You Love, You Wonder

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked- out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth. You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see. You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut. How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud, you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all. But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her. You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down. You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.

(-Brenda Shaughnessy)

#poems #poetry #Brenda Shaughnessy #shaughnessy #oof #love #infatuation

[hypnotistcollectors]

After  Love

Afterward, the compromise. Bodies resume their boundaries. These legs, for instance, mine. Your arms take you back in. Spoons of our fingers, lips admit their ownership. The bedding yawns, a door blows aimlessly ajar and overhead, a plane singsongs coming down. Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the self lay lightly down, and slept. (-Maxine Kumin)

#poetry #poems #maxine kumin #kumin #love #sex #guarded

[hypnotistcollectors]

Duck/Rabbit

            We remember the rabbit when we see the duck, but we cannot experience both at the same time. —E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion What do you remember? When I looked at his streaky glasses, I wanted to leave him. And before that? He stole those cherries for me at midnight. We were walking in the rain and I loved him. And before that? I saw him coming toward me that time at the picnic, edgy, foreign. But you loved him? He sat in his room with the shades drawn, brooding. But you loved him? He gave me a photo of himself at sixteen, diving from the pier. It was summer. His arms outstretched. And before that? His mother was combing his soft curls with her fingers and crying. Crying. Is that what he said? He put on the straw hat and raced me to the barn. What did he tell you? Here's the dried rose, brown as tobacco. Here's the letter that I tore and pasted. The book of blank pages with the velvet cover. But do you still love him? When I rub the nap backwards, the colors lift, bristle. What do you mean? Sometimes, when I'm all alone, I find myself stroking it. (-Chana Bloch)

#poetry #poems #chana bloch #bloch #nostalgia #love #regret #oof

[hypnotistcollectors]

The Promise

Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower. Stay, I said to the spider, who fled. Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself. Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble. Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence. Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.

(- Jane Hirshfield)

#poetry #poems #jane hirshfield #hirshfield #love #abandonment