“

Each time I’m asked to tell about myself, I find myself starting the same way: “My name is Kelsey and I’m nineteen..”
but what I’d really like to say is:
“My name means island of the ships but once
I found a translation that said I’m a burning shipwreck-
not a burning ship but a ship that has caught fire
after the wreckage and well, I’d say that’s more fitting.”

I’ve learned that people don’t have time for about me’s.
They need two things: a name and an indication you’re someone special.

The doctors, they want facts not details.
“I broke my leg when I was three, it’s a funny story actually-“
The right or the left?
Conversation over.

The teachers, they want interests, hobbies.
You’re sad, yes, but what do you like to do?

The adults are a spew of questions.
What school do you go to? What classes are you taking?
What do you plan on becoming? Got a boyfriend?
No, stop.

People my own age are the worst.
“I’m planning on an English degree with a concentration in creative writing.”
Yeah, aren’t we all. So how many times have you, you know,
done it?

I’m pulled apart, my interests travelling highway 2
my goals at a stop light at traffic hour,
my medical history on a billboard for the world to see.
But what about me?

Where’s the chance to say,
“I hang on to fistfuls of poetry like loose change in my pockets,
and I keep waiting for the day that the world turns upside down
so I can swim with the stars.
I’m not afraid of darkness, it’s a loneliness I can empathize with it.
It’s the blackholes like cigarette burns inside of me that get troublesome.
I walk through graveyards and read the dashes between years,
each a story I’ll never know. Sometimes I create my own.”

No wonder none of us know who we are anymore.

”

— Kelsey Danielle, “I Was Told to Write an About Me and This is What Happened” (via pale-afternoon)

(via gorillaocean)

blankslate:

i tried to write about your eyes
but i ran out of cliches

i tried to say you plainly
but there wasn’t enough truth

whoever invented this language
didn’t anticipate you

(via 4vic)

“Pretend that I’ve forgotten who I am
and it’s your job to remind me: say my name
and tell me all about my body, what it wants
and what you’ll make it do. Pretend we’re sick,
describe the symptoms: our wild slam-
ming hearts, our fever-flush, our violet veins
throbbing. Pretend I’m blind, and tell me what
you see. Pretend it’s possible to think

after you speak, that body can trump brain
which can trump body, translating the words
into impulses, firing from nerve
to twinkling nerve. Pretend we’ve found the way
to heal, between things and names, the divide:
you be the signifier. I’ll be signified.”

— Ali Shapiro, Dirty Talk II.

“Don’t worry about your body.
It isn’t as small as it once was,
But honestly, the world needs more of you.
You look in the mirror
like you’ve done something wrong,
But you look perfect.
Anyone who says otherwise is telling a lie
to make you feel weak.
And you know better.
You’ve survived every single day,
for as long as you’ve been alive.
You could spit fire if you wanted.”

— For My Mother When She Doesn’t Feel Beautiful  (via acynicalcunt)

(Source: clementinevonradics, via acynicalcunt-deactivated2013041)

fluttering-slips:

Skin to skin messaging

please let it always end this way:
staying up late,
both of us soft and warm,
writing words on each other’s backs
with our fingers
like a lazy southern drawl.
and me with puckered brow,
trying hard to concentrate
on semantics
and failing miserably each time,
because you with small grin
obliterate everything else
with each tiny delicate stroke.

 

Christine Bernardo

(via skotchbook)

five—a—day:

Last night I thought I kissed
the loneliness from out your belly button.
I thought I did, but later you sat up,
all bones and restless hands, and told me 
there is a knot in your body that I cannot undo.

I never know what to say to these things.
“It’s okay.” “Come back to bed.”
“Please don’t go away again.”

Sometimes you are gone for days at a time
and it is all I can do not to call the police,
file a missing person’s report, even though
you are right there, still sleeping next to me
in bed. But your eyes are like an empty house
in winter: lights left on to scare away intruders.

Except in this case I am the intruder and you
are already locked up so tight that no one
could possibly jimmy their way in.

Last night I thought I gave you a reason
not to be so sad when I held your body like
a high note and we both trembled from the effort.

Some people, though, are sad against all reason,
all sensibility, all love. I know better now.
I know what to say to the things you admit to me
in the dark, all bones and restless hands. 

“It’s okay.” “You can stay in bed.”
“Please come back to me again.”

greater-reality:

Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes
you cannot even breathe deeply, and
the night sky is no home, and
you have cried yourself to sleep enough times
that you are down to your last two percent, but

nothing is infinite,
not even loss.

You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day
you are going to find yourself again.  

(Source: finnualabutler, via skotchbook)

“

i no longer need you to fuck me as hard
as i hate myself.

make love to me
like you know i am better than the worst thing i ever did.
go slow.
i’m new to this
but i have seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping.
i have realized

that the moon did not have to be full for us to love it.
we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it.

”

— we were emergencies/buddy wakefield (via deweydell)

(Source: ymehcuotrac, via deweydell)

“You were last seen walking through a field of pianos. No. A museum of mouths. In the kitchen of a bustling restaurant, cracking eggs and releasing doves. No. Eating glow worms and waltzing past my bedroom. Last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal back, clutching electrical cables as reins. You were wearing a dress made out of envelopes and stamps, this was how you travelled. I was the mannequin in the storefront window you could have sworn moved. The library card in the book you were reading until that dog trotted up and licked your face. The cookie with two fortunes. The one jamming herself through the paper shredder, afraid to talk to you. The beggar. Hat outstretched bumming for more minutes. The phone number on the bathroom stall with no agenda other than a good time. The good time is a picnic on water, or a movie theatre that only plays your childhood home videos and no one hushes when you talk through them. When you play my videos I throw milk duds at the screen during the scenes I watch myself letting you go — lost to the other side of an elevator — your face switching to someone else’s with the swish of a geisha’s fan. My father could have been a travelling salesman. I could have been born on any doorstep. There are 2,469,501 cities in this world, and a lot of doorsteps. Meet me on the boardwalk. I’ll be sure to wear my eyes. Do not forget your face. I could never.”

— “new york craigslist > personals > missed connections” (via revalviers)

(Source: commovente, via h0gwartsahistory)

“We spoke all night in tongues,
in fingertips, in teeth.”

—

(via bodhisattva-belladonna)

(Source: gammasandgerunds, via ladylinencloset)

yiddeoni:

1. Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm.

2. Wear chapstick when kissing the bomb.

3. Pretend you don’t know English.

4. Pretend you never met her.

5. Offer the bomb to the wolves. Offer the wolves to the zombies.

6. Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection.

7. Don’t inhale.

8. Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive hemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come.

9. Use a rusty knife to cut through most of the noose in a strategic place so that it breaks when your weight is on it.

10. Practice desperate pleas for attention, louder calls for help. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: May Day, Aidez-Moi, Ayúdeme.

11. Don’t kiss trainwrecks. Don’t kiss knives. Don’t kiss.

12. Pretend you made up the zombies, and only superheroes exist.

13. Pretend there is no kryptonite.

14. Pretend there was no love so sweet that you would have died for it, pretend that it does not belong to someone else now, pretend like your heart depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck — you watched the train go by and felt the air brush your face and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can fly. You are a superhero. And there is no kryptonite.

15. Forget her name.

(Source: hellmonks, via hotpielookedlikehotpie)

“

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of “Old Battersea Bridge.”
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say “I never want to be without you,”
somewhere else I am saying
“I never want to be without you again.” And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

”

— “Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally, a Love Poem,” Bob Hicok  (via acynicalcunt)

(Source: commovente, via acynicalcunt-deactivated2013041)

zwanenzang:

if i laid my forehead against your neck

and asked you to be my chorus,

would you lace your sounds with mine

until we had nothing left to say?

(via vaporheart)