[pony]

do share!

i just found this:

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell
by Marty McConnell

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses.
you make him call before
he visits. you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

[!@#$%!]

i just found out that josé emilio pacheco died last month. which is fucked. i have his books in boxes. god dammit.



Los elementos de la noche

Bajo el mínimo imperio que el verno ha roído
se derrumban los días, la fe, las previsiones.
En el último valle la destrucción se sacia
en ciudades vencidas que la ceniza afrenta.

La lluvia extingue
el bosque iluminado por el relámpago.
La noche deja su veneno.
Las palabras se rompen contra el aire.

Nada se restituye, nada otorga
el verdor a los campos calcinados.

Ni el agua en su destierro
sucederá a la fuente
ni los huesos del águila
volverán por sus alas.

[pony]

Michelle K. destroys me
it's 4 a.m. in the morning and I am crying in bed

http://michellekpoems.tumblr.com

[pony]

I keep drowning you
in my whiskey bottles
and finding you
at the bottom
when I am too tired
and too weak
to fight it.
Michelle K., The Worst Kind of Hangover.

!!!!

[!@#$%!]

oh, kekes, speaking of whiskey-- here's one by one of my favorite gringos, alan dugan. i love the fucker. he dead now.

---

Love Song: I and Thou
BY ALAN DUGAN

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh I spat rage’s nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it. I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can’t do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

[pony]

as long as i am your favorite gringa... ;-)

no, but that poem is beautiful. thank you!

[!@#$%!]

ha ha ha-- but you're not a gringa!

as for gringas proper, i really like emily dickinson and her mad dashes. i also studied with the one who wrote this, who is pretty good: it is very long for the page so i'm not sure it will copypaste well. but here it goes:

Kalaloch
BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

The bleached wood massed in bone piles,
we pulled it from dark beach and built
fire in a fenced clearing.
The posts’ blunt stubs sank down,
they circled and were roofed by milled
lumber dragged at one time to the coast.
We slept there.

Each morning the minus tide—
weeds flowed it like hair swimming.
The starfish gripped rock, pastel,
rough. Fish bones lay in sun.

Each noon the milk fog sank
from cloud cover, came in
our clothes and held them
tighter on us. Sea stacks
stood and disappeared.
They came back when the sun
scrubbed out the inlet.

We went down to piles to get
mussels, I made my shirt
a bowl of mussel stones, carted
them to our grate where they smoked apart.
I pulled the mussel lip bodies out,
chewed their squeak.
We went up the path for fresh water, berries.
Hardly speaking, thinking.

During low tide we crossed
to the island, climbed
its wet summit. The redfoots
and pelicans dropped for fish.
Oclets so silent fell
toward water with linked feet.

Jacynthe said little.
Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia,
Michigan, and knew beauty in saying nothing.
She told me about her mother
who would come at them with bread knives then
stop herself, her face emptied.

I told her about me,
never lied. At night
at times the moon floated.
We sat with arms tight
watching flames spit, snap.
On stone and sand picking up
wood shaped like a body, like a gull.

I ran barefoot not only
on beach but harsh gravels
up through the woods.
I shit easy, covered my dropping.
Some nights, no fires, we watched
sea pucker and get stabbed
by the beacon
circling on Tatoosh.


2

I stripped and spread
on the sea lip, stretched
to the slap of the foam
and the vast red dulce.
Jacynthe gripped the earth
in her fists, opened—
the boil of the tide
shuffled into her.

The beach revolved,
headlands behind us
put their pines in the sun.
Gulls turned a strong sky.
Their pained wings held,
they bit water quick, lifted.
Their looping eyes continually
measure the distance from us,
bare women who do not touch.

Rocks drowsed, holes
filled with suds from a distance.
A deep laugh bounced in my flesh
and sprayed her.


3

Flies crawled us,
Jacynthe crawled.
With her palms she
spread my calves, she
moved my heels from each other.
A woman’s mouth is
not different, sand moved
wild beneath me, her long
hair wiped my legs, with women
there is sucking, the water
slops our bodies. We come
clean, our clits beat like
twins to the loons rising up.

We are awake.
Snails sprinkle our gulps.
Fish die in our grips, there is
sand in the anus of dancing.
Tatoosh Island
hardens in the distance.
We see its empty stones
sticking out of the sea again.
Jacynthe holds tinder
under fire to cook the night’s wood.

If we had men I would make
milk in me simply. She is
quiet. I like that you
cover your teeth.

[pony]

“One day, whether you
are 14,
28
or 65

you will stumble upon
someone who will start
a fire in you that cannot die.


However, the saddest,
most awful truth
you will ever come to find––

is they are not always
with whom we spend our lives.”
— Beau Taplin, "The Awful Truth"

[!@#$%!]

^^ 'pologies ma'am, srsly, but this one i don't like. it's not just that the language is meh and the prosody outright terrible (even free verse needs good prosody), but that its thesis is patently false. that is like something a teenager would say. and the only teenage poet i really take seriously is rimbaud. his brilliance was fucking supernatural.

Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient. Un soir, j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. — Et je l'ai trouvée amère. — Et je l'ai injuriée.
Je me suis armé contre la justice.
Je me suis enfui. Ô sorcières, ô misère, ô haine, c'est à vous que mon trésor a été confié !
Je parvins à faire s'évanouir dans mon esprit toute l'espérance humaine. Sur toute joie pour l'étrangler j'ai fait le bond sourd de la bête féroce.
J'ai appelé les bourreaux pour, en périssant, mordre la crosse de leurs fusils. J'ai appelé les fléaux, pour m'étouffer avec le sable, le sang. Le malheur a été mon dieu. Je me suis allongé dans la boue. Je me suis séché à l'air du crime. Et j'ai joué de bons tours à la folie.
Et le printemps m'a apporté l'affreux rire de l'idiot.
Or, tout dernièrement m'étant trouvé sur le point de faire le dernier couac ! j'ai songé à rechercher la clef du festin ancien, où je reprendrais peut-être appétit.
La charité est cette clef. — Cette inspiration prouve que j'ai rêvé !
"Tu resteras hyène, etc...," se récrie le démon qui me couronna de si aimables pavots. "Gagne la mort avec tous tes appétits, et ton égoïsme et tous les péchés capitaux."
Ah ! j'en ai trop pris : — Mais, cher Satan, je vous en conjure, une prunelle moins irritée ! et en attendant les quelques petites lâchetés en retard, vous qui aimez dans l'écrivain l'absence des facultés descriptives ou instructives, je vous détache ces quelques hideux feuillets de mon carnet de damné.


----

ps- zelda actually translated that into inglés. true story! i haven't read her version i think.

[pony]

at heart i am a teenager 8) sad teen stuff is exactly my cup of tee

let me get out my french dictionary tomorrow and read that THANG!

[!@#$%!]

that's a season in hell. reads great in translation. you probably have one!

--

more tomorrow on the teenage stuff. but the rum interferes.

[floatingslowly]

If you want real poetry, feel free to search any of my posts in regards to my Intergalactic Rap Battle with Rob Instantgator.

[pony]

It's a song, but still beautiful. And maybe she released it as a poem before, I don't know, have to get some of her books!

Dead Little Bodies (Written by Lydia Tomkiw, Music by Don Hedeker = Algebra Suicide)

How right you are dear Paul,
that we hear of famous people's deaths while on vacation.

Perhaps it's so their funerals are not too crowded,
with their loyal fans being out of town and all.
Those celebrities are pretty clever.

I've heard that someone's born every 8 second,
so I presume that someone dies every 8 seconds just to keep things even.

It makes me feel shortchanged when I read the obituary page,
someone's holding back information.

It also prompts me to flip through the telephone directory on sleepless nights saying
over, and over, and over again - Yep. You're all going, every last one of you.

Wow, Heaven must be a big place.

I don't know too many dead people,
but folks tell me I'm young.

When my grandfather died he was laid out in the Bubb funeral home,
and I was secretly glad Mr. Bubb didn't change his name to something more romantic,
when he went into business.

I just wish it was less memorable.

My highschool locker partner Ned worked part-time for a mortician.
Imagine dressing dead people, straightenening their ties and fluffing up their hair so you can afford to take a girl out to the movies on Saturday night.

Well that's love.
That's, adolescent desperation.
I would have been honored to have Ned take me to the movies and let him buy me popcorn.

Instead, I went out with a boy who died.
The hardest part was knowing that his body didn't just disappear on the bed the moment he left.

I think that's what keeps me off of suicide,
the idea that there's something left for someone else to clean up.

How rude and inconsiderate.
It's a pain to take out the weekly trash, let alone figure out what to do with over a hundred pounds of flesh that's about to go bad.

The even worse, in India, where there's a religious cult which believes you shouldn't desecrate any of the elements with the dead.
They can't be buried, or burned, they can't be cast out to sea.
So they're taken to the top of the tower of silence where they become the vulture's problem.

How's that for passin' the buck.

No. When I go, I want to go clean.
Convienient, leaving no mess.
As if I vaporized while taking a shower.
As if I moved to Antarctica leaving, no forwarding address.

[pony]

 

!@#$%!, got this cause of the poem you posted.
planning on reading it on my train ride to copenhagen next month

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pony

 

!@#$%!, got this cause of the poem you posted.
planning on reading it on my train ride to copenhagen next month

BEAUTIFUL. i hope you enjoy him.

i'll see about digging out my books and posting you other good samples.

[pony]

“Yesterday, I spent 60 dollars on groceries,
took the bus home,
carried both bags with two good arms back to my studio apartment
and cooked myself dinner.
You and I may have different definitions of a good day.
This week, I paid my rent and my credit card bill,
worked 60 hours between my two jobs,
only saw the sun on my cigarette breaks
and slept like a rock.
Flossed in the morning,
locked my door,
and remembered to buy eggs.
My mother is proud of me.
It is not the kind of pride she brags about at the golf course.
She doesn’t combat topics like, ”My daughter got into Yale”
with, “Oh yeah, my daughter remembered to buy eggs”
But she is proud.
See, she remembers what came before this.
The weeks where I forgot how to use my muscles,
how I would stay as silent as a thick fog for weeks.
She thought each phone call from an unknown number was the notice of my suicide.
These were the bad days.
My life was a gift that I wanted to return.
My head was a house of leaking faucets and burnt-out lightbulbs.
Depression, is a good lover.
So attentive; has this innate way of making everything about you.
And it is easy to forget that your bedroom is not the world,
That the dark shadows your pain casts is not mood-lighting.
It is easier to stay in this abusive relationship than fix the problems it has created.
Today, I slept in until 10,
cleaned every dish I own,
fought with the bank,
took care of paperwork.
You and I might have different definitions of adulthood.
I don’t work for salary, I didn’t graduate from college,
but I don’t speak for others anymore,
and I don’t regret anything I can’t genuinely apologize for.
And my mother is proud of me.
I burned down a house of depression,
I painted over murals of greyscale,
and it was hard to rewrite my life into one I wanted to live
But today, I want to live.
I didn’t salivate over sharp knives,
or envy the boy who tossed himself off the Brooklyn bridge.
I just cleaned my bathroom,
did the laundry,
called my brother.
Told him, “it was a good day.”
— Kait Rokowski (A Good Day)