May 2011
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As The Poems Go, Charles Bukowski
as the poems go into the thousands you realize that you’ve created very little. (via lprecords)
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He gave me a bouquet of blushing leaves. By autumn, everything I love decays until I set fire to it in the yard. I warm empty hands by it.
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Drinking a coffee from Tanzania called Clouds of August. When I shut my eyes the sky is in ribbons of gold and white crema.
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Trying to figure out how to get a Trojan Horse I’ve built into North Korea. The body of the horse is filled with LIGHT.
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WatchJustin Vernon of Bon Iver covers Bonnie Raitt’s Classic “I Can’t Make You Love Me” on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (23/5/11). He is also interviewed by Jimmy here.
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Half the sky was your payment. I siphoned off clouds under the table. Somewhere there is a beach and a wave and not even god is walking beside me. Why’d you think he’d carry you? Your moods waver between a storm in a teacup, a chemical fire in a meth lab and a wild dog cleaning the bones of a missing person. Don’t get so hung up on the moon, no one’s leaving anyone for you.
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“They wore homemade dresses and huaraches cobbled up out of leather scraps and...”
– Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (via sketchyjoe)
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“My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an...”
– Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (via cloveflowers)
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"A cut-glass limb"
If the rapture came knocking I’d let him in. The end signs were all there. I was a stigmata bleeding on the sheets, that’s how his girlfriend found out. I concealed a list inside a prayer wheel of all the ways I have loved him, while I continued to spin. I have loved him from across the lines in a Tracy Chapman song, behind the wall. Love is rolling from a burning car. Love is fingers...
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Pakistanically Yours.
jawsmusictheme:
This is Pakistan. I am a Pakistani. Of the female gender. It is all happening all the time. It is happening in Pakistan; it is happening to Pakistan. I’m only twisting my hands standing in the unbearable heat trying to hurl some comically simple truths at people who are passing by.
We have families and we have pets. We play around, eat ice cream, study. We don’t have lemonade...
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Drift, Brenda Shaughnessy
I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me. All the cities are like you anyway. Windows darken when I get close enough to see. Any place we want to stay’s polluted, the good spots taken already by those who ruin them. And restaurants we’d never find. We’d rut a ditch by a river in nights so long they must be cut by the many pairs of wrong-handled scissors maybe god owns and doesn’t share. I...
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The End of the Conflict, or the Miracle of the...
She is from here, he is not: on the evening they fell in love, only the analog clocks stood still (some irregularity in the cycle of the moon; the not-so-tasty body of Christ; the rain that falls but doesn’t hurry in any language; maybe it’s better that I don’t try to explain how this is possible). They can go fuck themselves, she said, they can go fuck themselves, he answered. (They can go...
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Take Care, Soldier by Yitzhak Laor
Don’t die, soldier, hold the radiophone, don your helmet, your flak jacket, surround the village with a trench of crocodiles, starve it out if need be, eat Mama’s treats, shoot sharp, keep your rifle clean, take care of the armored Jeep, the bulldozer, the land, one day it will be yours, little David, sweetling, don’t die, please. Keep watch for Goliath the peasant, he’s trying to sell his...
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Ménage à tar. The violent tremble at my maw. Loved and feathered into slick. Your black wings fly into my mouth like the rapture backwards.
"How We Are Hungry", Dave Eggers
God: I own you like I own the caves. The Ocean: Not a chance. No comparison. God: I made you. I could tame you. The Ocean: At one time, maybe. But not now. God: I will come to you, freeze you, break you. The Ocean: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me. (via leprintemps)
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A Wedding at Cana, Lebanon, 2007 by Tom Sleigh
He said, “It is terrible what happens.” And “So, Mr. Tom, do not forget me”—an old-fashioned ring, pop tunes, salsa! salsa! the techno-version of Beethoven’s Fifth, Fairouz singing how love has arrived, that’s what he heard after they dropped the bombs, his ambulance crawling through smoke while cellphones going off here here here kept ringing— how...
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Why is the Color of Snow? by Brenda Shaughnessy
Let’s ask a poet with no way of knowing. Someone who can give us an answer, another duplicity to help double the world. What kind of poetry is all question, anyway? Each question leads to an iceburn, a snownova, a single bed spinning in space. Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions. What is snow? What isn’t? Do you see how it is for me. Melt yourself to make yourself more clear for...
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Me in Paradise, Brenda Shaughnessy
Oh, to be ready for it, unfucked, ever-fucked. To have only one critical eye that never divides a flaw from its lesson. To play without shame. To be a woman who feels only the pleasure of being used and who reanimates the user’s anguished release in a land for the future to relish, to buy new tights for, to parade in fishboats. To scare up hope without fear of hope, not holding the hole, I...
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I don’t think we should keep this revolution between just us.
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“I play all my country and western music backwards — your lover returns, your dog...”
– Linda Smith (via lprecords)
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Deny me this flutter. Pull the curtains around me at sundown and turn back to her. Light the homes of the loved, I will creep through it.
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I would listen to you read from The Book of The Dead all night. Sometimes when you sleep I see the little boy you were - and I just want a glimpse of your face at the end.
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How To Speak Poetry, Leonard Cohen from Death of...
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7 moments of revolution
1. Self-immolation. Freedom spreads like fire. Burn the names of martyrs into the lawns of your governments. Each day is a revolution of the planets.
2. Taking up arms that hold you in the night. Clicking bullets against your heels. Piercing a statue of a dictator in the heart with an arrow.
3. Sleepless dictators in their palaces watching Home Shopping Network marathons and buying water...
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Hope is dying here. The lucky country, blood flecked words spit on to newspaper headlines. There are black ink fingerprints all over my body, the white curve of my hip is now a dark road. I’m a page turner, my fingers rip desperately forward. Still we turn back. and back. The underwriters of shameful history rush to print.
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[listen mother, he punched the air: I am not your...
a stabat mater
listen mother, he punched the air: I am not your son dying the day fades and the starlings roost: a body’s a husk a nest of goodbye his wrist colorless and soft was not a stick of chewing gum how tell? well a plastic bracelet with his name for one. & no mint his eyes distinguishable from oysters how? only when pried open she at times felt the needle going in. ...
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Other Barbarians Will Come, Mahmoud Darwish
Other barbarians will come. The emperor’s wife will be abducted. Drums will beat loudly. Drums will beat so that horses will leap over human bodies from the Aegean Sea to the Dardanelles. So why should we be concerned? What do our wives have to do with horse racing? The emperor’s wife will be abducted. Drums will beat loudly and other barbarians will come. Barbarians will fill the...
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Tricky - Hakim
I am haunted by this song, some...
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Blood, Naomi Shihab Nye
“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” my father would say. And he’d prove it, cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter stared. In the spring our palms peeled like snakes. True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. I changed these to fit the occasion. Years before, a girl knocked, wanted to see the Arab. I said we didn’t have...
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Blood, C. Dale Young
Someone has already pulled a knife across my chest, and the rope has already gripped our wrists drawing blood. I am naked, and I cannot be sure if you are as well. In the room, the men come and go, yelling blood bath, half-blood, blood-bitch. We never hear the word trueblood. In my dreams I am dying all the time. We are bound and gagged, blindfolded, but still I know you must be the one ...
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Red clouds smeared like bloodstains across the sky. The tell is the white of my wrist and the vein I wouldn’t let him tap.
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The Winnie Blues: a kind of cheap and nasty depression that leaves you with a cough, but no poetry.
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Her perfume filled the whole subway as we walked through it. Flowers formed in the air like lilies on water, and burned.
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