Killdeer

aeide-thea:

You know how it pretends
to have a broken wing to
lure predators away from its
nest, how it staggers just out
of reach … if, at this moment,
you’re feeling metaphorical,
nest can be the whatever
inside us that we think needs
protection, the whatever that is
small & hasn’t yet found its
way. Like us it has lived so long
on scraps, on what others have
left behind, it thinks it could live
on air, on words, forever almost,
it thinks it would be better to let
the predator kill it than to turn
its back on that child again,
forgetting that one lives inside
the other.

—Nick Flynn

“Elegy for a Game,” Mary Ruefle

allyourprettywords:

Once I was on earth
and I liked it.
I got to look at my toes
underwater. They looked bigger
than they were in real life.
As anyone can tell by looking at it
sugar is meaningless.
You are not supposed to stay in the hot tub
longer than ten minutes.
After that it is meaningless.
Like white poinsettias.
I mean at Christmas.
Maybe Christmas is meaningless too
but we used to pretend it was not
and I liked that.
It’s pointless.
I don’t actually know what a football looks like.
I think they have something to do with babies.
The man is carrying a baby across a field.
He is trying to save it.
It’s hard.
Sometimes people die trying to do things.
That’s OK.
There are things more important
than life or death.
I miss holding my breath.

unspeakable monologue

aprilwitching:

And I guess I’m not okay. Well,
I guess I’ve never been
okay. You know how it goes:
there’ve been days and years of almost.
I could pretend when the sun was on me.
There was never a time when I didn’t see
the sucking wound in everything, but, well, it’s like
blood, you know, is a shimmering thing–
sometimes you forget what it’s supposed to mean?
I could forget the smell of rust beneath the mirrorshine.
Then I forgot to forget, and that
might just be the real problem?
Sometimes that’s what I think.
I think I always was a picker of scabs. I think I was born
when I figured out that closing my eyes
wouldn’t annihilate horror, so I might as well look.
The horror would still be there no matter what.
And the roof of the world lifted off and I saw the future.
How can I explain it?
The future was just this emptiness. I say empty. I mean
it wasn’t there. I mean it was a hole I fell into.
I mean it was a hole that fell into me, devoured my liver.
I mean it was a crocodile. But it was nothing like a crocodile.
I mean, eater of lives. Imagine teeth. Imagine your teeth
falling out like stars through swollen meat. Now stop imagining.
This metaphor is meaningless. And I’m gonna blink now.
And there will be darkness and then painful light.
And there will be the slow disintegration.

Account

aeide-thea:

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

—Czesław Miłosz, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky

“For Love” by Robert Creeley

for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all

that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.

If the moon did not …
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not

do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything

as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind’s
vague structure, vague to me
because it is my own.

Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask,
what have I made you into,

companion, good company,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in

some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place, an
echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you

also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to

say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.

I Will Make a Useful Manual for My Tasks and Hide It

sashayed:

I don’t owe anybody for the bad thoughts I think
or will think. It isn’t right, the access this gives me
to everything. A person with actual access has access
to knives but not necessarily ways to make more knives.
To make more of anything one must go a long way
across a great distance, past symbolic trees and lush
ideas of desert, fences, all the way to where the blades
just glint up out of the land and are more or less ripe
for the plucking. More or less was never an actual
question. When there’s more weather outside than
inside a building, the building’s windows spring
big glassy tears. I don’t see what good it does,
putting it this way. Ours is a history of a breathing
building letting people go to prove it breathes.
I’m at work in a building where I draw strange birds
to scale, where down the hall a man comes in every day
and remembers one day in December in his childhood
for a living until one day he doesn’t. Sometimes the sky
just opens up. Not everything’s allowed. Nobody,
for instance, cares very much for my singing voice
but I can spell daffodil however I want. I want to say
I see a great many possibilities for development around
the office, which I will call recognizing our potential,
which I will call daffodil, which is why you’ll keep me
for as long as you can, like a pleasant taste at the end
of a meal. This new thing our building’s about to be
about has many spellings I’ll travel distances for.

Laura Eve Engel

drunk sonnet 10 | daniel bailey

readpoems:

THE AIRPORT IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST
THE GROCERY STORE IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST
PETSMART IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST
THE THAI PLACE IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST

MY OWN BED IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST
INSIDE MY CAR IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST
ALL THESE STREETS, THIS CITY, THIS STATE
THIS COUNTRY IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST

IN FRONT OF THIS TV IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST
IN THIS BODY IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST
IN THIS AIR IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO EXIST

I’M THINKING ABOUT EVOLUTION AND THE WAY WE CHANGE
AND HOW LONG IT WILL BE BEFORE I HAVE A TAIL AGAIN
AND I CAN FORGET ALL THAT’S HAPPENED

Kevin Prufer, “In a Beautiful Country”

poem-locker:

A good way to fall in love
is to turn off the headlights
and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love
is to say they are only mints
and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.
Your hands are cold.
Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear
about how we live in a beautiful country.
Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war.
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you’ll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors
and the water basin. A good way to fall
is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink
to help you march forward.
The gold-haired girl says, Don’t worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time
full of love. You’re thinking about this too much.
Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

Hell | Sarah Manguso

readpoems:

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing’s slave.

Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.

The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.

There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.

The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.

I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long. I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive.

Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don’t know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,

and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,

and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

At Least | Raymond Carver

exceptindreams:

“At Least”
Raymond Carver

I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the Strait from every
seafaring country in the world—
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.