#richard siken poem you will be alone always and then you will die | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

i-got-the-feels · 4 months

Text

Bad Buddy

@taeminie 1

This quote and them and the rooftop scene for "you will never be friends"!!! Big fucking brained Ali!!

@dengswei 1

Pat's face of love and adoration accompanying as to how he loves pran with his every atom and prans face of heartbreak because he looks at him with despair. Perfect lines for them.

@daymork 1

25-21 x Bad Buddy = me shaking screaming and crying. That too a fucking baek yijin quote. The day this doesn't make me insane (it will never happen)

@snimeat 1

Something about how pat pran balance each other no matter where they go, be it whether they are happy or sad. I think the essence of that is beautifully captured with the quote and pictures you chose gei

@pranpat 1 2 3

1 I don't even need to elaborate. The set fucking begins with "we lead two different lives, just like two lines that never cross"

2 Jay, I hope you know you chose violence by combining richard siken and rooftop scene together. I hope you know what you did.

3 "who will come into the kitchen and be hungry for me?" with that expression of pat. Followed by pran saying "I always wanted to cook for someone I like" I am so so so okay

@sunsetandthemoon 1

You beautifully summarized their whole journey and that is why this is here. It's one of the sets that will always make me emotional

Only Friends

@celestial-sapphicss 1

This song describes the soul of the show. This set captures it.

@alienwlw 1 2 3

1) The words!!! With the shots you chose!! Childhood ray in first set!! And happy smiling ray daring to hope for a future with sand!!

2) this set beautifully captures how ray let's himself be used by mew. Because he thinks that's the kind of love he deserves. That's how much love he deserves. Even though he knows he can have more with sand, that is why he selfishly tried stopping sand to move on.

3) delving deeper into Boston's motivations? Yesssss. His sexual escapades as a way to feel human connection? Give me more

@spicyvampire 1

"You're coming down with me hand in unlovable hand" pleaseee Boston does not know how to define love. And the definitions he has are in conflict with the society he lives in. That's why he is alone. That's why he is hurt. Even if he owned up to his mistakes.

@gunsatthaphan 1

The shot of gifs with the words?? Hues of healing with them holding hands in bathtub? Shadows of patience and hours accompanying sands heartbreak of "ray *was* my 25th hour scene? I have said enough

@smileytharn 1

This. Them holding hands. After the initial hesitation. After ray went to sand to apologise and show how much he means to him. Sand acknowledging that and opening up more to him about music - the thing that means most to him. Amazing zey!

@raypakorn 1

A set capturing Ray's Self-destructive nature perfectly not being on the list? Not today, buddy. Not today. Today, we cry at tanies amazing brain and talent in making this set

@sollucets 1

This song and them? Especially the time ray was "confused" over his feelings for sand. Heartbreak. Never thought a bop pop song can cause this much emotional damage. Amazing job love

@icouldhyperfixatehim 1

What I love about this edit is that captures Boston's journey so well. As a friend. Their friendships fallout and reconciliation, or no reconciliation with mew. As a lover, and being left behind because you both no longer have denial as an option and have to escape the fact that you guys are too different in defining love and hence cannot be together.

@sandrayy 1

Listen this quote goes well with sandrayy. Because if anyone understands the value of Ray's tears and will die rather than see ray cry is sand.

Kinnporsche

@dingyuxi 1

This poem is for them okay? "you are too good at violence and he is too good at forgiving" with scenes you chose will always devastate me

@kinnporsche 1

A big hug and chefs kiss to you because the scenes you chose? Episode 4, Episode 5 angst and Episode 7 ending? Yesssss. They burned for each other. Only when did they give in they found solace because they burned brighter together.

@kinnsporsche 1

The scenes you chose!! Kinn giving into his attraction to Porsche and calling him his sun. Him letting go Porsche as moon when he lets him go. And the scene where he tells Porsche how special he is as stars!!!

@alienwlw 1 2 3 4

1) "I let darkness eat the light" + Vegas standing in tears after kan left after inflicting his violence!!!!!

2) holy water scene with pete telling Vegas he is very hungry and needs to be taken care of?????? The big brained energy never ending with you my friend

3) Vegas being vulnerable openly!! The way you beautifully showed his journey to this point where he confesses his insecurities to pete!!! Insane!! Talented!!

4) pete coming to terms with this side of his? The side that craves violence. The side that craves to be dominated. Amazing

@magicaldreamfox1 1

The gif of pete leaving his job to show his support to Vegas. Even when he didn't know if Vegas would survive or not!!! Brilliant BRILLIANT.

@spicyvampire 1

I AM NOT ON MAIN FAMILY'S SIDE. I AM NOT ON MINOR FAMILY'S SIDE. I AM ON YOUR SIDE = TO TO HELL WITH YOU. galaxy brained. No notes. No words. No thoughts. Just AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

@khaotunqs 1

The coloring in the set made me loose it. Black and white with hints of pink? The talent?! Also the quote you chose? Attack on every direction my friend. Mercy please.

@guzhu-furen 1 2

1) a set that highlights a relationship between all the brothers? Ofc i cried. Next question.

2) the fact that even pete didn't know why he went. Until he forced to acknowledge it ofc. The quote is perfect perfect for the scene you have choosen

Between Us

@smittenskitten 1

A parallels of the "be brave for me" scene is made for me. I cry.

Last Twilight

@sandrayy 1 2

1) I have rambled about how the quote goes so well with them in tags and will do again. They both help each other find their purpose. Something they lost along the way by the course their life took. And this existential shit makes me emotional.

2) I love how simple the quote is yet because of the scenes chosen shows the initial flurry of nervousness and excitement when new to liking someone so well

@morkofday 1 2

1) The way they both met each other just days ago but already cherish each other. As individuals. Not as roles they play in each other's life. I cannot.

2) this!! you cannot tell me that when Mork held on to days chin and dismissed the job opportunity they both didn't have horny visions. You cannot. I think you showed their journey beautifully here.

Also love the oranges in both - i d k if its intentional but love that it goes with the shows name so well.

Love In The Air

@bird-inacage 1

The words just hit me whenever I see this set. Love, your writing is beautiful. The font you have used in the set amazing. The scenes you have chosen are perfect. Thank you for this.

@prapais 1

The softness and protectiveness prapai has towards sky. And how even if he isn't a violentan for nature, he wouldn't hesitate for sky. Uff.

Midnight Museum

@daymork 1

I love the composition of the images. Especially the second one. Showing his fate across universes before showing their conversation in third image? The sense of hope that I got after the feeling of futility?? Totally brings across the feelings i have towards the damn articraft.

@alexshenry 1

The coloring of purple and yellow is so fucking dreamy. And something about Kathadome and moon - a universal symbol of hope, of light in darkness??? Amazing my love Nuria

@hoppipolla 1

I am so sorry love. I adore your set because it brings out the universal truth. Time doesn't erase the pain. It's just that we learn to manage it better. Thanks to people around us. The same happened with Katha. I am so glad I found this set

My School President

@pharawee 1

Their friendship!! They will always be there for each other. Gun can be vulnerable with them without worry. Something he doesn't easily do probably cause he doesn't want to worry his mum. But all his friends encourage him to be open and vulnerable. They tell him he is okay and how just because he is strong he doesn't always have to be strong.

@chinzillas 1

Anna!! This edit is one of those forever emotional damage causing arts. It perfectly gets the slice of life, I am growing up. I aam happy but scared to grow up. I am leaving behind the me i currently know. Will I like how I grow to be? How much of it can I control? The anxiety, the home, the excitement, the dreams, the optimism, the hope and the fears we all have as young adults is so fucking beautifully felt in this edit.

Not me

@dimpledpran 1

I cannot believe I discovered this edit so late. The quote is so fucking accurate. And the scenes chosen? Especially for the second gif with tawi??? Big brained energy

@taeminie 1

The scenes you chose for how the kingdom lights shined and one day we will be remembered are PERFECT

@magicaldreamfox1 1

A black and white journey edit in interaction with their parents? Those parents who are people in power and that maintain the very system their kids are revolting against? Delicious

@morkofday 1

I am so glad I requested this set because your badassself delivered. The differences in their ideologies is shown so beautifully here. I cry.

Vice Versa

@ardentlytess 1

Whenever I see this edit, it makes me nostalgic. This is the edit I shall use when persuading my friends to watch vice versa. It captures their journey so beautifully.

@daymork 1

They fell in love with each other without knowing each other's faces. Survived travelling across universe. And had "thank you for being born so that I can love you" so no they aren't ever ending

Never Let Me Go

@shuyis 1

This quote and Palm??? Perfection. He didn't hate his mother for leaving him. Sure he was hurt ans confused but he gave her the benefit of doubt. And when he met her and heard her reason? He accepted her. He loved her. He grieved her loss. He didn't hate his father who left him when he was a boy to go a protect a boy his age. He was concerned for his father's safety and well being. Hell he didn't even hate the boy or boys family. Palm was kind in true sense of the word.

@jyuubin 1

Not tooting my horn but in one of my sets I made for nlmg I wrote a line. It was "if the choice between me and you, it's not a difficult choice at all. I'd always choose you" and I love how this set captured that. Palm didn't give up on him and Nueng even when Nueng became scared and did. He fought for them.

Moonlight Chicken

@maggiecheungs 1

This set inspired me to make my basic-ass set. Need I say more as to how much I adore this?

@jimmysea 1

Heart and li ming don't just see each other. They welcome each other. And the thing about welcoming someone is you understand everyone has their own time of coming to you. They gave each other the time required without rushing the other and the quote you chose just gets this across so well

@raypakorn 1

The damn quote. With Alan. And the scene you chose. "I am on business of loosing your interest". Yeah so okay I am.

@pharawee 1

The neon font just fits so well with the vibe of the show. Light in between darkness. Feeding people at night when people are most tired.

@taeminie 1

The quote goes so so so fucking well with heart and li ming. For heart, li ming is the first person to make accommodations for his need without showing him pity. His gratitude, amazement and love for li ming just come across so well.

The Eclipse

@youdontloveme-yet 1 2 3

The day I am not wrecked over by these 3 sets you made for eclipse is the day you can consider sun has risen from west. What were you thinking while making these? "chasing after echoes" for akk???? "there are only remnants left of you" for Ayan??????

@morkofday 1

The sense of home they give for each other. Akk can keep his fears of inadequacy at rest when with Ayan because Ayan accepts and cherishes him as he is. Ayan can take off his mask of strength off and show his grief and sadness because akk will be there to support him.

To Sir, With Love

@shyishsarawat 1

Listen for a low-heat soap opera? These dudes fucked a lot through their eyes. And when they touched? Yeah that was hotter than any kiss. And i think the quote perfectly captures the tension, devotion, adoration and love they share for each other

@tinnchan 1

Take me to church?????? With to sir with love??? Nads I wish I could say more but my brain just goes AHHHH THIS SONG IS THEM THEY ARE READY TO DIE FOR EACH OTHER THEY ARE EACH OTHER'S RELIGION THEY WORSHIP THEIR LOVE. THEIR RELATIONSHIP IS THEIR SHRINE.

Things to note

These include edits that I found in 2023.

These include edits that gave me the feels.

Thank you for your art. They make the experience of watching the show all the more fun. It helps in appreciating the characters. It helps me see them in new light.

Looking forward to see more of art from amazing artists on here.

To people I didn't tag - tumblr tagging limit sucks. Your art is beautiful simply because it's made. You made it with a feeling and that in itself is beautiful.

Also, the tag is #becauseigtf in case yall wanna tag me in future :)

#2023 wrap up #thank you artists

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mtvunplugged1996 · 1 year

Note

What's a poem that lives in your mind rent-free ever since you read it?

Sheesh, that's tough!! Probably that one bit of Litany Where Certain Things Are Crossed Out by Richard Siken. ‘You will be alone always and then you will die.’ :(((((((

Thank you for sending!! :)

#asks #miss valley

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metamorphesque · 3 years

Note

hi, thank you for you!

could you please recommend some of your favourite poems/poets? something powerful

Thank you, lovely 🌼

1. Ocean Vuong (honestly, all of his poems are heart-wrenching)

Headfirst

Stupid boy.

You can get lost in every book

but you’ll never forget yourself

the way god forgets

his hands.

Homewrecker

Because the year is a distance

we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how

we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning

into a tongue.

Because it's summer

you say thank you thank you thank you

because you haven’t learned the purpose

of forgive me because that’s what you say

when a stranger steps out of summer

& offers you another hour to live

Seventh circle of Earth

As if my finger, / tracing your collarbone / behind closed doors, / was

enough / to erase myself. To forget / we built this house knowing / it

won’t last. How / does anyone stop / regret / without cutting / off his

hands? /

On Earth we're briefly gorgeous

You, pushing your body into the river

only to be left with yourself—

stay.

To my father / to my future son

Use it to prove how the stars

were always what we knew

they were: the exit wounds

of every misfired word.

Notebook Fragments

God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard

drowning

her garden.

2. Richard Siken

Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light by Richard Siken

What can you know about a person? They shift

in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once. Add

a second light and you get a second darkness, it’s only

fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his

looking.

The Language of the Birds

A man had two birds in his head—not in his throat, not in his chest—and the birds would sing all day never stopping. The man thought to himself, One of these birds is not my bird. The birds agreed.

Logic

There's a dream in the

space between the hammer and the nail: the dream of

about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail will

take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever.

The field of rooms and halls

I put my sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. I called it Thursday. Today is Sunday. The town is empty.

Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors

It should be enough. To make something

beautiful should be enough. It isn’t. It should be

3. Charles Bukowski

Raw with love

little dark girl with kind eyes

you have no

knife. the knife is

mine and I won't use it

yet.

The Crunch

we forget the terror of one person

aching in one room

alone

unkissed

untouched

cut off

watering a plant alone

without a telephone that would never

ring

anyway.

Bluebird

we forget the terror of one person

aching in one room

alone

unkissed

untouched

cut off

watering a plant alone

without a telephone that would never

ring

anyway.

The Genius of the Crowd

but there is genius in their hatred

there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you

to kill anybody

not wanting solitude

not understanding solitude

they will attempt to destroy anything

that differs from their own

The Laughing Heart

Your life is your life

Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

Be on the watch.

There are ways out.

There is a light somewhere.

It may not be much light but

It beats the darkness.

4. Anne Carson

The Glass Essay

You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,

Where can I put it down?

Red Doc

To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked. In the grip of it, pleasure or pain doesn't matter.

5. Rainer Maria Rilke (but mainly in German)

Extinguish Thou My Eyes (Lösch mir die Augen aus)

Extinguish Thou my eyes:I still can see Thee, deprive my ears of sound:I still can hear Thee, and without feet I still can come to Thee, and without voice I still can call to Thee.

I find you (Ich finde dich)

I find you in all these things: all that is good in me and in my brothers, like a tiny seed you bask in the sun and in the vastness you greatly give of yourself

6. Joseph Brodsky (but mainly in Russian)

Don't leave the room, don't make a mistake ( Не выходи из комнаты, не совершай ошибку.)

Don’t leave your room, don’t commit that fateful mistake. Why risk the sun? Just settle back at home and smoke. Outside’s absurd, especially that whoop of joy, you’ve made it to the lavatory--now head back straight away!

A Song

It's evening, the sun is setting; boys shout and gulls are crying. What's the point of forgetting if it's followed by dying?

7. Marina Tsvetaeva (in Russian)

I am happy simply living

I am happy living simply: like a clock, or a calendar. Worldly pilgrim, thin, wise—as any creature.

Where does this tenderness come from?

Where does this tenderness come from? And what will I do with it? Young stranger, poet, wandering through town, you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.

8. Paul Verlaine

Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon cœur D'une langueur Monotone.

The long sobs Of violins Of autumn Wound my heart With a monotonous Languor.

9. Vahan Teryan (in Armenian)

My mother’s hands

My mother's hands were tapered slim like candles that might burst in flame. My mother's voice was like a balm soothing each pain, calling each name.

Carousel

In that far-off world the song I sang was one we all knew: "I love you but you don't love me." How banal and predictable. Now.

10. Paruyr Sevak (in Armenian)

Without words

I know what has changed, my dear, It’s always like that, When someone insane and crazy like me, Opens his heart without words To someone modest and shy like you…

When i was busy on Mars

When I was busy farming on Mars, Sitting dreamily in my small city room, My poor door suddenly underwent a formidable ordeal: You were knocking.

#poems #poetry #literature #book recs #classic literature

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soracities · 4 years

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Do you know any quotes relating love to religion? "Worship at your feet" kind of vibe, ya know?

— Hozier, “From Eden”

“I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.”

— John Keats, in a letter to Fanny Brawne

“What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary… I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

— Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“I’m a sorcerer, my love’s like incense…. / I’m a sorcerer, my love’s a fire, an altar, an ember. / I turn into smoke.”

— Adonis, “Transformations of the Lover”

“Thou art not luminousYet an altar of jewels,An altar of shimmering jewels,Would pale in the lightOf that darkness,Pale in the lightOf thy nightness.”

— Langston Hughes, “Poem (To the Black Beloved)”

“My church offers no absolutes / She tells me “Worship in the bedroom” / The only Heaven I’ll be sent to / Is when I’m alone with you.”

— Hozier, “Take Me to Church”

“Imagine yourself a sun pyramid draped in green vines. Let me climb your steps and worship the brilliant, blinding sky from above the treeline.

Tell me, what names have been whispered at your altar? What language would you like me to use when I whisper yours?”

— Kerry Banazek, “As an Experiment”

— Jeff Buckley, “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” (selected lines)

“I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell.To die upon the hand I love so well.”

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Forget Eden.We’re not going back.Adam and EveHad no regrets.“Good riddance,”She said.“So we were fed.He treated us like animals.Adam, I love you.”“I love you, too,”He said.“Nothing beats breadBaked with your sweat.”Forget Eden.We’re not going back.”

— Reesom Haile, “No Regrets”

“There, in the sulk of her bottom lip, I find myself talking about a heaven that only exists when she is looking at me.”

— Azra Tabassum, “Take Me to Church” ( @5000letters )

“I don’t know how to become one with you.If you’re heaven, then tell me.I will kneel to every god.If you’re hell, then tell me.I will fill the earth with sin.”

— Abdulla Pashew, “Union

“When I was kissin’ on my baby / And she’d put her love down, soft and sweet / In the low lamp light I was free / Heaven and Hell were words to me.”

— Hozier, “Work Song”

— William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

“It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you / Everything I do / I tell you all the time / Heaven is a place on Earth with you / Tell me all the things you wanna do…/ They say that the world was built for two.”

— Lana Del Rey, “Video Games”

“Tell her you feel most religious when she’s sitting naked in a chair.Tell her religion is all you need. “

— Kimberley Grey, “How to Keep the One You Love”

“Your kiss is honey and your touch scorches like fire, and I worship it.”

— Neil Gaiman, American Gods

— Hozier, “Take Me to Church”

“A cathedral, him pressing againstme, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believehis mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over melike stars.”

— Richard Siken, “Saying Your Names”

“They can hold against meNo sin except my love for youCome to meDon’t go away

Let the zealots thinkLoving is sinfulNever mindLet me burn in the hellfireOf that sin.”

— Mihri Hatun, “At One Glance”

— Hozier, “Sunlight”

#did u mean: hozier's entire discography?#anyway i hope this fits!#ask #anonymous #variations on desire #quotes about x #divine am i inside and out

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wraether · 3 years

Note

Is there a doc that you have for info abt ur deadbeat chars?

I had a doc awhile back which is probably still floating around the web (or at least still linked on my old blog) but some of the information is out of date & the designs are changed, so I’ll just list everything out for you under the cut! =D Sorry it’s a bit long, I tried to keep it short but there are 15 characters total. Refer to this post for their designs.

Agnes- 22, she/her, college dropout living with her parents. Would've majored in journalism. Dry and crass and a bit of a bitch, but she tries really hard to get along with others. Self centered despite her best efforts. Unhealthy coping mechanisms Queen. To sum her up in a few words: She's the personification of a Penelope Scott song.

Teddy- 21, she/her, living with her abusive father. Agnes's best friend since middle school. She comes off as sweet and friendly, but she holds grudges easily. Strong willed, defensive, and stubborn. Has a bad habit of putting other people's needs before her own.

Marius- he/him, 20, freelance illustrator. Anxious, reserved, shy, and well mannered. He's a bit of a coward, and he usually acts subservient to avoid conflict with others. Very squeamish. Loves his family. Tries to fade into the background.

Fang- he/him, 21, freelance programmer. Closed off and paranoid. Defensive and stubborn. Comes off as an asshole, but is an bit of a softy. Has trouble trusting others, but goes to great lengths to protect those close to him. Morally grey. Canon furry king.

Cheshire- he/they, 20, living with his father and on house arrest. He refuses to trust or rely on anyone, always keeping the people around him at arm's length. Snarky with anger issues and petulant to a fault. Has a very strict moral code, but is very aggressive. Smarter than they let on. Heart is three sizes too big. Wears an eye patch due to an injury sustained as a child, which left the eye partially blind and extremely sensitive to light.

Anton- he/him, 20, living with his abusive girlfriend. Tries to seem carefree, cool, and unaffected. Actually a nervous wreck. Horribly afraid of rejection. Socially awkward. Tries to hide his emotions but fails more often than not. Easily scared.

Willow- he/him, 22, working as a dishwasher. Seems sweet and awkward, if a bit unnerving. Relatively unassuming. Cannot handle eye contact. Constantly nervous and on edge. Plays nice and fakes agreeable. Two-faced. Prone to emotional outbursts. Very cynical world view. Social recluse trying to re-enter society. Believes nobody will ever love them. Walking Richard Siken poem. Coworkers with August.

Rowan- they/them, 18, senior in prep school. Gloomy and pessimistic. Likes to keep to themself, and is a bit of an asshole, mental illness aside. Quick to self depreciate. Formal, uptight, and depressed. Actually likes math. Harm & Contagion OCD. In desperate need of a friend.

Takuro- he/him, 25, unemployed tradesman. A very logical, level-headed person. Has trouble expressing emotions, but is very responsible and parental, doing his best to take care of the people around him. Empathy issues but trying. Oldest of four. Responsible. Would die for strangers. Certified electrician & mechanic, knows a thing or two about HVAC installation.

Candy- she/her, 23, streamer. Loud and bubbly. Tries to distract herself with humor and, as a result, can struggle to take things seriously. Wants to cheer everyone up. Kind and personable. Tends to overwork herself and shut down afterwards. Likes parties

Ophelia- she/her, 20, published author and hobbyist astronomer. Quiet, calm, and aloof. Analytical. Rarely emotes but, contrary to popular belief, feels a great deal. Very formal. Prefers to work alone. Agoraphobic hikikomori. Has trouble connecting with people but wants to help others. Has a tendency to get lost in her thoughts.

Sea- they/them, 19, attending college with their twin, Quinn. Dry, bitter, and dreary. Protective and self-sacrificial. Has an inferiority complex and abandonment issues. Likes to press the palms of their hands against concrete and drag them down, feeling the rough surface scrape them up. Super deadpan. Easily bored. Uncomfortably numb. Selectively mute.

Quinn- he/him, 19, attending college with his twin, Sea. Happy, upbeat, and optimistic. Impulsive and easily amused. Low-key a flirt. Makes friends easily, and loves meeting new people. Has a knack for getting in trouble. Dumb frat boy and absolute human puppy dog.

August- they/them, 23, working as a waiter but wishing to be a chef. Relaxed, easy going, and kind. Good at staying calm, but bad at accepting when things have gone wrong. Hard worker. Total softie. Has wholly bought into the bootstraps mentality. Empathetic and a good cook. Coworkers with Willow.

Isabella- she/her, 19, doll collector living in an apartment paid for by her parents. Sweet but a little dense. Easily confused, sheltered, and naive. Sensitive. A bit of a crybaby. Believes in the good of humanity. Ray of sunshine.

#anon #.txt

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your-ace-cousin-clover · 3 years

Note

ahhhh hi sorry for the LATE response, life's been kinda wild lately

anyway, i'm really glad you liked the poem & i don't mind you sharing it :)

(plus, a new prompt sounds nice)

(&btw, richard siken's new book is gonna be called "blue jupiters" (as far as i know copper canyon press will publish it))

also, happy you liked the recs! i found it cool how you said "the way god chooses to escape from his own reality through someone who does not believe enough in him to question him at first"! couldn't have put it better myself.

(sorry if this ask seems all over the place, i just have to get somewhere and i'm gonna be mad late - but i really want to finally send a response)

i enjoyed your recommendations a lot so let me elaborate real quick-

the problem with travel:

right off the bat, same.

traveling does always make me feel like i'm starting a new chapter and i should act accordingly.

love "kill the kid stuff, start to act my numbers" - the choice of words you use when writing is so important. (thats why i cant judge anyone who spends a long ass time on thesaurus! sometimes writing really does feel like looking through a lost & found or fishing the right word out of a goodwill bin! flipping through a magazine in search for the right word to cut out and stick on your collage!) imagine how substantially different the poem would sound if limon had written "start to act my age" instead of "start to act my numbers"

"[...] - we’re small

and flawed, but I want to be

who I am, going where

I’m going, all over again."

this^ part kills me in a good way

accident report in the tall, tall weeds:

"my ex got hit by a bus"

gets right to the point. kinda like a short story? an immediate jump into action

i might've said this before but i like it when poems tell stories (i mean i guess they all do, in a way, but i specifically mean the ones that have clear characters? if that makes sense)

"No tampering with the great universal brake wires."

ahhh yeah - when you feel like a thought can cause real life consequences

"When the plane went down in San Francisco,

I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes.

He memorizes the wrecked metal details,

the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes:

The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

How people go on, and how people don’t.

It was almost a year before I learned

that his brother was a pilot.

I can’t help it,

I love the way men love."

^ don't you love it when a poem beats your heart to a pulp?

"What I saw in the men who came before,

sometimes I don’t want to say this out loud,

was someone I could hold up to my ear

and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into,

and have it returned in the inky waves."

self recognition through the other! yeah! sometimes people are people and sometimes people are mirrors and i know this wasn't her point but aren't we all just saying "hey! this is how i feel! do you feel like that too?" and sometimes "language is complicated but i think you know exactly what i mean and i know what you mean too!" and "when our experience overlaps the cosmic alone-ness becomes bearable!"

shit i'd love to drop another rec but i REALLY have to go now! hope to hear from you soon

-cat

Well, lmao Cat now, I'm the one who's late in replying, but yeah, I've been really busy. Now, I've got a bit of a time to reply to your ask.

First of all, "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" by Tracy Smith is a really interesting poem especially centred around Bowie. I love how the poet makes Bowie into a mythical being, like a sort of a spirit rather than a mortal man.

"Not God, exactly. More like-

Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being"

I love how the poem takes in the spirit of Bowie as something that will keep living on -

"Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only

To be wanted back badly enough?

Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep

Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,"

It's just a beautiful way to think of the artist living on despite their death. They live through those they have touched with their art as well as their art themselves.

"In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky

Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands

Even if it burns."

And I just simply love these lines ^^^ . I love the poem touches up on reincarnation. It's interesting as it mentions how people are reincarnated a few times and then, they go to the beyond.

"And how many lives

Before take-off, before we find ourselves

Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?"

And finally, I love how the deification fo Bowie continues making him into a cryptid? That's the best way I can describe it honestly.

"When a man his size can meet

Your eyes for just a blip of time

And send a thought like SHINE

SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE

Straight to your mind. Bowie,

I want to believe you."

(I followed your style of picking up lines and talking about them - it's a pretty fun thing to do)

{Purple happens to be my fav colour so, yeah I annotated with purple}

And yeah, language is funky like that. Honestly, I love the fact that people swap art with each and it's like every though we're different, you go through the same emotions. No matter whatever niche emotion is, someone has already written about it! If they haven't, you can always write it!

This reminded of a favourite poem of mine (tw : homophobia and sort of death ? though) which reminds me of the awkwardness of telling people I'm queer / coming out to them. It's called Three A.M. by Jill McDonough.

Also, I've been reading some more stuff to rec them and to hear your thoughts on them. It's all food - themed because I really got into food poetry last week. And as I was talking to a lovely mutual about the intimacy of cooking food and feeding someone.

I'd highly rec the movie "Big Eden". It's a wonderful gay rom-com movie with no homophobia at all and a lot of intimate cooking and wanting to make sure that your crush is loved and taken care off.

But anyway -

Having a Coke with You by Frank O'Hara

Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

The Orange by Wendy Cope

For Grace, After A Party by Frank O'Hara

Eating Together by Li-Young Lee

And these two posts are where I got these poems from, so perhaps you could read the other ones in the list.

Food Poems 1

Food Poems 2

And also, you're into Succession! Yay!! Are you into Tomgreg? If you're not, that's chill. But, like more Tomgreg people the better. I'd love to hear your thoughts about the show too! :) And like I said before, I really enjoyed your Kendall edit! Did you get a chance to watch my Tomgreg edit? It's called Don't Blame Me, I put it on my Tumblr. (No pressure if you can't)

And I have to ask, because I forgot, what are your pronouns, Cat? I use she/they. I just wanted to ask what you want me to use while referring to you. And let me know if you wanna do another poetry writing swap again.

Anyway, that's it for now! Let me know what you think! I hope to hear from you soon :)

#Cat Anon #Succession #Poetry #Clover speaks #Food

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omgdexnursey · 3 years

Text

5 quotes that live in my head rent free that i have memorized (tagged by @ivecarvedawoodenheart syd ily)

sorry i have a bad memory so i only remembered parts of these and i did look all of them up 😳

1. You will be alone always and then you will die. — Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

2. Henry kisses his mouth over and over again and says quietly, “You are good.” — Casey McQuiston, Red White & Royal Blue

3. She was not a girl of ice and glass at all, but a girl of sunshine and stardust. — Marissa Meyer, Winter

4. He was on the ice once more, and somewhere he could hear the wolves howling. But this time, he knew they were welcoming him home. — Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

5. (there’s a poem i really like and if i could i would copy and paste the whole thing but it’d be so long so one of the lines is:) Can you listen to the words I’ve been aching to say, / that I go where the lights pull me / and you, my love, are the stars. — Tyler Knott Gregson, chasers of the light

im tagging: @omgpoindexter @constellationspdf @birkholtzlovebot @somethingnurseywoulddo @birlcholtz

#not omgcp #tag game

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theelliottsmiths · 4 years

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Amour reads like Richard Siken too, in a roundabout way.

You know, I think you're totally right. Going off reading the English translations and feeling the general vibes of the German, at least. I think a lot of it is the force of nature approach to love? It's dirty and painful and that's part of what makes it appealing, maybe. I am not super well versed in Siken's poetry and also am a dummy but they have the same kind of inevitability in their writing?

B says it really reminds him of the last chunk of the same poem

Which makes a lot of sense

I'd love to know how far out Till branches when it comes to poetry. He writes like he reads more widely than he implies?

I feel like he'd enjoy Siken and only half of that is because of lines like "You will be alone always and then you will die" and just actually the entire rest of Litany in which certain things are crossed out. The dragons and the deer and all that? Very him, something I think he'd connect with. I was going to add a screenshot chunk but I couldn't pick one so here is all of Detail of the Woods instead, which I could also see appealing to him

Really just a lot of his work. I would love to ask him because I also suspect he likes Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and is keeping it a secret/nobody has asked where I have seen.

#i would like to gift him the virginia state colony for epileptics and feebleminded by molly mccully brown i think hed find it interesting #me rambling #till lindemann #book things #i always pick thr applicant and wanting to die as examples and that is because they are good #b buzzing

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sclfmastery · 4 years

Text

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

have you ever read “Crush”, the collection of poems by Richard Siken? Some of the poems are so Thoschei, this is one of my faves:

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

Every morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. You want a better story. Who wouldn’t? A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.

Love on the water, love underwater, love, love

and so on. What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon. Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere. I can tell already you think I’m the dragon, that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon. I’m not the princess either. Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later. And the part where I push you flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks, shut up I’m getting to it. For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! What more do you want? I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re really there. Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live? Let me do it right for once, for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven. Inside your head you hear a phone ringing and when you open your eyes only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer. Inside your head the sound of glass, a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion. Hello darling, sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are

not

feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky prickled with small lights. I take it back. The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths. I take them back. Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards. Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle reconstructed. Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn’t deserve it. Inside your head you hear a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up in a stranger’s bathroom, standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away from the dirtiest thing you know. All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly darkness, suddenly only darkness. In the living room, in the broken yard, in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of unnatural light, my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts. I arrived in the city and you met me at the station, smiling in a way that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade, up the stairs of the building to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things, I looked out the window and said

This doesn’t look that much different from home,

because it didn’t, but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights. We walked through the house to the elevated train. All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful mechanical wind. We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too, smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud. Actually, you said

Love, for you,

is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you’re so great, you do it— here’s the pencil, make it work … If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing river water. Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it Jerusalem. We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought, so do it over, give me another version, a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over and over, another bowl of soup. The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time. Forget the dragon, leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness. Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly. I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don’t want to be the kind that says

the wrong way.

But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grains of sugar on the toast,

love love

or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry it’s such a lousy story. Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you. I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again, years later, in the chlorinated pool. I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have these luxuries. I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.

We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor …

When I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison. I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes. Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

- Richard Siken

#More love streaming out the wrong way #this is excruciating #whoever sent this knows them bette r tha n i have the gifts to articulate #sugar grains on the toast #clutching our bellies should be laughing not poison #the princess only sees herself in the mirror #okay i'm the dragon #the mechanical wind #crossed out #my god this is beautiful and awful)#thoschei #long post #submission

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auliasbookcorner · 2 years

Text

Review: Crush by Richard Siken

Book 3 of 2022

Start reading time: 23 January 2022

Finish reading time: 25 January 2022

Page Count: 62 pages

I stumbled upon some quotes of some of the poems in this book on Tumblr a few years ago when I was in my poetry phase, and it was the first time I discovered Richard Siken and this book. And i think, if i really want to look for it i can still probably find it on my studyblr, aulia-study.tumblr.com, because i remember reblogging it back then. Because those quotes really spoke to me and I added this book to my TBR since then, but i have never read it until now. And I think Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life might have something to do with it. While reading Hanya's book I found myself remembering those quotes multiple times. Hence, here we are.

I really love poems, and I have read some poetry books before but I have never made a review of one before. I have no idea if a poem is theoretically and structurally good or bad because I have never formally studied poetry, I just know that if a poem touches my heart, or if it moves me and I enjoy it, then it's a good poem for me. And the poems in this book, not only moved me, they came at me hard, you can even say they "crushed" me. Siken is a wizard with words. The book is so dark and violent and intense and painful and gay and sexy, and tender. I feel like i experienced some shits even though i'm just an average hetero introvert millennial with no dating life.

At first I thought I could finish reading it in a few hours in one sitting since it has only 62 pages, but it took me 2 full days to read this book. Because I kept getting stuck at some of the quotes, unable to move on, and so I let it sit with me, ride on the trains with me, and sleep with me until I was ready to move on. But I kept getting back to those parts. These last 2 days, I had "Little Beast" and "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" and "A Primer for the Small Weird Loves" and "Saying Your Names" and "Snow and Dirty Rain" on my mind 24/7.

There are some parts where I don't really understand what Siken is trying to tell in some of the poems, some parts are really abstract and confusing, and I felt like a stranger looking into a someone's house through a window, desperately curious to know the context of the drama going on inside. I figure it's because I'm an idiot and uncultured and not part of LGBTQ+. But overall, this book is amazing and I will definitely read more poetry books by Richard Siken.

SPOILER ALERT: I'll quote some of the poems from the book.

Here are my favourite poems and some quotes that moved me:

"Scheherazade"

"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it."

"Little Beast"

"His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker that before, scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt."

(Note: that one's giving me strong Jude St. Francis from A Little Life vibes)

"I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time."

"Seaside Improvisation"

"I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists."

"You wanted happiness, I can't blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you're not miserable."

"Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out"

"Every morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out You will be alone always and then you will die."

"And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death."

"You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back."

"Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it."

"Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you."

"Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you."

"Boot Theory"

"A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands."

"A Primer for the Small Weird Loves"

"You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn’t do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore."

"The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, see you as a piece of real estate, just another fallow field lying underneath him like a sacrifice."

"and you realize the one person in the world who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be, and you don't trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy."

"You do this, you do. You take the things you love and tear them apart or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours."

"Saying Your Names"

"I’m saying your name in the grocery store, I’m saying your name on the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal covered with frost, your name like a music that’s been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud, a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails in wind and the slap of waves on the hull of a boat that’s sinking to the sound of mermaids singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple profound sadness when it sounds so far away."

"Here is a map with a your name for a capital, here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh and it pits the world against us, we laugh, and we’ve got nothing left to lose, and our hearts turn red, and the river rises like a barn on fire."

"And angels, about twelve angels, angels knocking on your head right now, hello hello, a flash in the sky, would you like to meet him there, in Heaven? Imagine a room,a sudden glow. Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it. I just don’t want to die anymore."

"Planet of Love"

"Imagine this: You're pulling the car over. Somebody's waiting. You're going to die in your best friend's arms. And you play along because it's funny, because it's written down,you've memorized it, it's all you know."

"You keep saying I owe you, I owe… but you say the same thing every time. Let’s not talk about it, let’s just not talk. Not because I don’t believe it, not because I want it any different, but I’m always saving and you’re always owing and I’m tired of asking to settle the debt. Don’t bother. You never mean it anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed."

"I’m battling monsters, I’m pulling you out of the burning buildings and you say I’ll give you anything but you never come through."

"I know you want me to say it, Henry, it’s in the script, you want me to say Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted and worth dying for too... but I think I’d rather keep the bullet. It’s mine, see, I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s as good as anything. You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet was already there, like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time."

"Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand."

"Road Music"

"He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There's a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place—well then, game over."

"Sure, it's good to feel things, and if it hurts, we're doing it to ourselves, or so the saying goes, but there should be a different music here. There should be just one safe place in the world, I mean this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don't like the way the song goes."

"The Dislocated Room"

"We have not been given all the words necessary. We have not been given anything at all. We've been driving all night. We've been driving a long time. We want to stop. We can't."

"Snow and Dirty Rain"

"I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger.Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube?"

"The fields burned, the land destroyed, the lovers left broken in the brown dirt. And then it’s gone. Makes you sad. All your friends are gone. Goodbye Goodbye. No more tears. I would like to meet you all in Heaven."

"We have been very brave, we have wanted to know the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes. This dream going on with all of us in it. Penciling in the bighearted slob. Penciling in his outstretched arms."

"I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want. You said Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube…"

"We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back."

BOOK COVER DESIGN - ⭐⭐⭐

OVERALL BOOK RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

#Crush #book review

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actualnymph · 6 years

Note

Top five fave poems/quotes?

Oh, I can’t narrow it down to just five!!!!!! I’ll put a few of my faves under the cut!

“You play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.” -Richard Siken

“Everything would be so much easier if you had a docile, tongue-tied little Antigone living in the palace. But you are going to have to put me to death today, and you know it. And that’s what frightens you. GOD! IS THERE ANYTHING UGLIER THAN A FRIGHTENED MAN!” - Antigone

“PHAEDRA : You’re in pain. I adore you.” -Sarah Kane, “Phaedra’s Love”

“It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self-love deficit.” -Eartha Kitt

“I’m a girl with a wolf’s heart. I’m stepping out of sorrow. The house collapses. […] I’m a collaps- ing house. Come collect me. I’m stepping out of sorrow. Everything else is left howling.” -Dalton Day, from “Stepping Out of Sorrow,” published in Souvenir

“Are you accidental—Temporary? Does the moon sink in your skin; are the daffodils talking again?” -S.A. Khanum, from “Rome Falls,” Kingdoms in the Wild

“There is no greater power than that of the sun, the moon, and a woman who knows her worth.” - Nicole Lyons

“I already know the storm, and I am as troubled as the sea.” -Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Robert Bly, from “Sense of Something Coming,”

“I will gaze at the moon and cleanse my heart.” -Zeami

“That was her. PURE, LUCID, EVIL. I’d sleep all right with that on top of me.” -Bertolt Brecht, from Poems 1913-1956

“I am fearfully unstable. I pass from hot to cold in an instant, without any reason […]” -Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Leonard Woolf c. May 1931

“I never wanted a quiet, sensible sort of love. I wanted to be devoured.” -Beau Taplin, “The Devouring”

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I was with someone I loved, with you. I was cold, and the snow glistened. You know how the snow glistens at night when the moon shines. It was as though I was not on earth.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Complete Prose; “The Brothers Karamazov,”

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” -Haruki Murakami

“I fall asleep whispering “I am safer alone I am safer alone I am safer alone I am safer alone" […] Forgive me, memory is a rope around the neck.” -Clementine von Radics, from James

“You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.” -Nina Simone

“In the thunder and night time it is just me and god.” -Rebecca Tamás, from “Joan of Arc,” Savage

“MEDEA : Tell me, how does it feel with my teeth in your heart?” -Euripides, Medea

“ABIGAIL: A wild thing may say wild things.” -Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“If the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you? ..‘No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You will always be too much of something for someone: too big, too loud, too soft, too edgy. If you round out your edges, you lose your edge.” -Danielle LaPorte

“Her smile, I’m sure, burnt Rome to the ground.” -Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

#I hope that read more works Skskskskssk #but!!!!! I love all of those quotes/poems/whatever so much !!!!!!!!!!#thank you for asking!!!#long post #y

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iopanic · 3 years

Text

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out (RICHARD SIKEN)

Every morning the maple leaves.

Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts

from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big

and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party

and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48158/litany-in-which-certain-things-are-crossed-out

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sixshelves-blog · 7 years

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7: How to Be a Person in the World, by Heather Havrilesky — On Finding Advice for Myself

Dear Polly Sarah,

How do I take steps to feel less like this all the fucking time?

‘This’ is, essentially, the elements of my anxious brain trash: How can I be strong enough to deal with my own troubles and also help others? How do I handle jealousy and regret? How do I stop comparing my own worth to other people? How do I stop being so damn hard on myself all the time?

I think anxiety is something I might always live with to some degree. The ways I am sensitive and think about things too much is such a part of me, I would not be me without it. It feeds my empathy. It feeds my art and the ways I see the world. But I want living in this world to be easier on the day to day, and the ways that affects my overall progress through life.

There are things I want to do more of and better: write, read, exercise, organize, love, activate. And yet I go through periods where I spend a great deal of my time worrying about money, with the crippling deathlike grip of debt choking away my focus from anything else. Doing math in my head to make accounts balance against the things I want or need to do, and when they don’t balance, beating myself up over not being able to pay my bills or buy myself a simple thing I need or want.

I recently turned thirty. Older friends have told me that when they reached their thirties, they started caring less about things they obsessed over in their twenties. I want that to be true for me, even as I can feel my body disagreeing with me more than it used to, and I’m worrying about death even more than ever: my own, my family’s, everyone who is living in this backwards world. I feel like we’ve ended up in the wrong timeline. But I also feel like I need to get my shit together at a less irregular pace than I have strived before, because who knows how much time there is left?

How can I be a person in the world when this world is making less and less sense?

Anxiety 101

Dear A101,

You sound more like the room number than course number of a college class—you also sound like maybe you need to go back to therapy.

Listen, A101: I’m you, and you’re me. There isn’t a lot of advice I can give myself that I haven’t already given. But what would Heather Havrilesky say in an Ask Polly column? First, she’d definitely say you need therapy. Then I think she’d remind you of how young you are.

You’ve turned thirty. Thirty! If you’re lucky, that’ll end up being only a third of your life. There are women in your family who’ve lived well into their nineties, or even past one hundred. If you’re not lucky, then that’s all the more reason to wrangle your anxiety into something that you can live with for whatever amount of time you have left.

So what if there were things you would’ve liked to do in your twenties—some of those things probably weren’t going to be as great as you’d hoped anyway. And some of them you still have a chance to do in your thirties. You are capable of publishing more writing. You are capable of nurturing your body into better health. You are capable of getting yourself out of debt, or at least not gasping out from under it every fucking second of your days.

You are capable of being a person in the world. And part of being a person in the world is this: You have to cut yourself some slack. Don’t be so hard on yourself when you aren’t the perfect friend, or girlfriend, or daughter, or writer, or anything. None of us are. Literally no one can be good all the time. But does everyone walk around worrying, or lie in their beds crippled with shame, whenever they’re less than what they wanted to be? Gosh, I don’t think so, or else nothing would ever get done! And we’d all be unpleasant killjoys!

Write it down: I am enough. I am okay. I am stronger than I believe. Believe it.

What are you really worrying about, Anxiety 101? You’re worried about being alone. You’re worried that your boyfriend will leave you, your friends will leave you, your family will die, and you’ll still be a writer who doesn’t write every day and an anxious lonely person who has less than no money to live. You’re worried that you will leave them, that you will follow that escapist impulse in you to just leave when you’ve been hurt and deal with the regrets later. You’re worried that all of this will happen, and you’ll blame yourself for all of it. You couldn’t be smarter, you couldn’t be prettier, you couldn’t be more generous with your time or more in control of your finances. You just weren’t strong enough to stay. You weren’t enough even for yourself.

Step back and take a good listen to that anxious brain trash: Enough for what? Are the people you love good enough? Are you cruel enough to them to think in terms like that? I don’t have all the wisdom, and neither does Polly, but I think the part of my brain that tries to understand the world instead of dwelling on my anxious brain trash knows a thing or three:

You do not have to be good, wrote Mary Oliver.

The people who are happiest in this world—the most connected, beautiful, fulfilled creatures—they are not good all the time. They fuck up, and they keep moving. They forgive themselves.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you. Quit milling around the yard and come inside, wrote Richard Siken.

When was the last time you forgave yourself for anything? Who are the people you admire—are they good? Polly is a readily available example of this: You respect this woman’s work and courage and kind brutal honesty so fiercely, it inspires you weekly. But is it good? Is she enough? Those are not words that make sense outside of anxious brain trash. Hell, you’re a writer—reimagine some better language to frame and illuminate your life.

Do not let yourself be led by your own anxious brain trash.

Talk back to it. Speak more kindly to yourself. Practice empathy with yourself above all.

CHERISH YOURSELF, wrote Polly.

Fucking believe it. Fucking be alive, as my autocorrect says.

Let’s take an example: Are you a fucking idiot for not exercising on New Year’s Day and eating a bunch of bread and not finishing this blog post you’ve been trying to finish for weeks?

No. Actually, you slept until two in the afternoon because your body needed it, and it made you and the cat happy, his warm body curled against your stomach under the blanket. You took a walk, evolved a new Pokémon for your Pokédex, and cashed in on a gym that you were still in from the day before. You made bread from scratch with your own two capable hands, plus nourishing soup for you and your boyfriend, and you ate it together while watching The Fellowship of the Ring, because it’s comforting and familiar and makes you cry in a good way. You ate the rest of the bread and finished some good beer, and it made you feel good. You didn’t finish that piece of writing, but you put in a good couple hours of progress, and progress is not nothing. I’d even go so far as to say it is something. It was a good beginning to a new year and a new decade of your life.

You are not an idiot. You are taking baby steps, and baby steps are healthy and good. If babies were this cruel to themselves when they were taking actual baby steps, nobody would ever learn how to walk.

And do you want to know something else? I wrote most of this two months ago.

I’ve been too busy and too afraid to look at it again, so I’ve been thinking it’s incomplete. I've been thinking: What could I possibly write about for this post that would encompass everything Heather Havrilesky’s book evoked in me? I didn’t dare to think that I had maybe finished a new blog post for this book that I’ve felt like I didn’t know how to talk about. But I did! In a moment, I can call this complete and move on to the next book in my backlog of read-but-not-written-about books!

Two months ago feels like a lifetime ago already. Two months ago, not only did we still have a good man as president, but on a personal level, I had not yet: paid off one loan and two credit cards, started going to the gym and yoga a little more often, written two new poems, participated in three protests, gotten a minor concussion, or made some great new friends.

A101, we are capable of progress. How do you be a person in this nonsense world? Care for yourself and the people you love and the world around you. Accept that sometimes you might feel like strangers for awhile, and that's natural. Sometimes you won't know much at all.

But trust in the reality of good things to hold onto, whether it's baking fresh bread, holding your boyfriend’s hand, or making a stranger truly happy with your kindness. Trust in the joy of doing things, of doing something; that feeling of being capable and focused on making something out of nothing.

You are not the first person to experience existential death anxiety. How many fucking artists are there who've created art in the face of the fear of death? Under how much worse circumstances? I know this concussion accident shook you really hard, and you were afraid to even start writing again ever since then, because what if you couldn’t? But we’ve got this, honey. Keep going.

Polly wrote: Life is not about knowing. Life is about feeling your way through the dark. If you say, ‘This should be lighter by now,’ you’re shutting yourself off from your own happiness. So let there be darkness. Get down on your knees, and crawl through the dark. Crawl and say to yourself, 'Holy GOD, it’s dark, but just look at me crawl! I can crawl like a motherfucker.’

Remember when you were an idealistic kid who naively believed that by the time you were old, there would be no more war, we would make contact with alien life, cancer would be cured, and so many more mysteries and problems would be solved? You were ignorant to the complexity and ignorance and greed of the world back then. You believed in things that very likely will not come true (or at least not in your lifetime), but you had hope. Keep a bit of that—you need it now more than ever—but forgive yourself if sometimes you still believe a little too much, or not at all.

The world is letting us down, we are letting each other down, but if we are going to keep going forward, we cannot start by letting ourselves down. You're not dead yet, and neither is the world. Wake up in the morning, wash your face, and remember that you can't do everything, but you can do something. So go do a little bit of something every day. It might not be enough, but you will be taking the best damn baby steps you’ve taken since you first learned how to walk.

Polly Sarah

Previously Read: The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley

Next Up: Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg

#how to be a person in the world #ask polly #heather havrilesky #advice column #letters #self-acceptance #book post #books

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