Connubial (excerpt) - Stephen Dunn
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I was calm, no one wants the kind of calm I was.
~Stephen Dunn
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Sweetness
BY STEPHEN DUNN
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care
where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.
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There’s a fine line between being protective of your inner peace and being a slave to paranoia
I don’t know where I stand when it comes to it.
I trust no one to love me, me who is fiercely delicate
Picturesquely so, one might say.
I trust no one, and I might as well love no one, no one but myself.
I have gaps in my memory from times when I only thought about not being here,
refusing to exist…
pseudodementia, a case of hysteria, what else can i call it ?
An episode of over analyzing the flaws of a society that thrive on any imbalanced power dynamic.
The clock is ticking…
Tick. Tick. Tick.
That’s my biological clock, or so i was told.
I prefer to think of it as a ticking time bomb…
It’ll explode one day and there will be another piece of my soul out in the world
Just like this one is out under the name of sarcasm.
I will love it unrealistically, maybe the way my mother loves me.
love it so much; enough to sacrifice my life.
And it’ll mean nothing, at least nothing more than what was expected
As a young girl i used to get reprimanded every time i was sincere about how I feel
I started to accumulate half chewed thoughts left them in my mouth overnight then swallowed.
Disgustingly rotten…
I felt less real as time went by, and so I learned spit those thoughts and sculpture them into more admirable statues
Then painted a raw authentic layer of what i think of myself as now all over them, just so they don’t look fake.
Ending up with a form of art that is an acquired taste…
But the thing is: i had all my life to adapt to it to myself, and all the feminine rage in me.
•Quotes: Stephen Dunn/ Fyodor Dostoevsky/ Kate Jacobs/Marina Tsvetaeva/ richard siken/richard siken/ Margaret Atwood/ Sylvia Plath/ an excerpt from "Elektra,' Sophocles (translated by Anne Carson)
•Original context: sinligh
•Art reference:
1. Art by Crawfurd damson 2. desperate lamentation by Roberta Coni. 3. Curled Up - Crawfurd Adamson. 4. Paintings by Brett Williams. 5. a fragment of ourselves returning v, 2018 by beatrice wanjiku. 6. Art by allison sprock. 7. Art by Michael Mao. 8. Dark Corridor by unknown artist, 1990s, from The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.
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"Didn't they know Frankenstein had abandoned / his creation, set him loose without guidance / or a name? Didn't they know what it feels like / to be lost, freaky, forever seeking who you are? "
Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!
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For a while I climbed the ladder,
not realizing I'd placed it
against the wrong house. The window
I tried to look into was a mirror.
I fell backward into the world.
— Stephen Dunn, from "Ars Poetica" in Lines of Defense: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company; January 6, 2014) (via Alive on All Channels)
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Happiness by Stephen Dunn
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McGruff the Crime Dog at Choctaw Stadium, Arlington (1998) - Stephen Dunn
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Paragon of Order by Owen Pallett from the album Island - Artwork by Eric Kostiuk Williams
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The Shame Place
After he did what he did, and was ashamed,
he went into himself
where shame makes its poor home
and lived there amid the excessive heat,
the Dead End signs.
Shame was his rent and he paid in shame
until it was spent and he returned
to his public body
which was waiting like a debtor
to apologize. He never felt so clean.
At work,
where it was expensive to be ashamed,
he wished everyone could visit
their shame place,
could live for a while without credit
or esteem. He felt sorry for everyone
unchanged.
But there was no hope for the shameless
with their profit charts and perfect reasons.
And what could he say
to the beaten who had lived too long
eating their hearts and words?
Their shame places
were hovels, all the energy shut off.
Soon he lied again, hurt someone, rekindled
what never burns to ash.
Once again his shame place opened and took
him in. It had carpets. A plush chair
covered the spot
where he had sat and writhed.
—Stephen Dunn, Local Time (1986)
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I look for those with hidden wings, and for scars that those who once had wings can’t hide.
~Stephen Dunn
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Poetry rec for you: Sweetness by Stephen Dunn.
Looked it up when you sent this. And YES. I love it.
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But often when you left the room
a few questions replaced you.
When you returned, they remained.
-
Stephen Dunn, The Insistence of Beauty: Poems
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"Often a sweetness comes / as if on loan, stays just long enough / to make sense of what it means to be alive, / then returns to its dark / source."
Read "Sadness" here | Read "Sweetness" here
Reblog for a larger sample size!
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