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For Shinji

I still don’t know exactly
what it means to be
beautiful,

but I imagine that Roald Dahl
got it close enough:

Crooked noses, criss-cross teeth—
happiness so loud and heavy
it rearranges the position
of bones, muscle.

But then there are people
who are quietly, softly beautiful,
like a summer rain,
and you want to stand beneath them 
and tilt your head back and
whip the clouds into shape
with your hands; collect
fistfuls of water and
drink until the bowl is empty.

And it’s lovely, the bowl,
deep and edged in 24k gold,
with a rose painted by a careful
hand on the side;

still warm from the kiln,
still smelling of sky.  

(A collaboration between myself and Cody Wilson)

The first time I realized I had fallen in love with you
was when you asked me if I knew how to play cat’s cradle
and I pulled out all my heartstrings for you. 

And I did know, I did — but imagine how i felt afterwards
when I collected all the threads that you had strewn across
the world, hung by the rafters of every place that you’d told me
you loved me. 

Like so.

Skin is a city that never sleeps and when you
look at me like that, every citizen pulls down their blinds
and blushes by the windowsill. And I know this because
when you asked me what color my blood was I never
thought to answer ‘a blushed red’ ‘till you cupped my cheek
for the first time. And the night before you left 
you laid me out on a bed of pine needles
and unraveled my skin, my heart, two lungs
and a pair of hands that I wanted to give to you
so that you could make something more beautiful
than what my flesh has to offer. 

The first time you told me you loved me
I only wanted to tell you that you had unraveled me, wholly.

You pulled a ribbon out of my hair, then, 
and pulled, kept pulling, a
line of string, a line
of me, 
and pulled my world through your needle’s eye
because I had wanted us to be 
something 
beautiful. 

————————————————————————————-

“Staying alive is hard, my premature love”,
I say into the open May, dusty though as my throat can be, I shake the bookcases off
and I shake the throne of sobbing rubies off that were the color of her hair
and
I cry myself, because it was red so, it set my house afire 
she trailed fire
ate sleep and drank the fire of men
the yelling, yearning skin of women
burning in place like dysnomia or igraphia or a nicotine fit 
she was an incomplete poem writing incomplete anthologies
while the Chinese were stronger, the Germans and Jews alike were stronger, the beggars and boozers and tramps were all stronger
because she was a child with a plan bleeding little on the outside,
even less inside,

but if the month is harsh and I take to drinking from the bar cups and plastic champagne celebrations and forget everything else
I do recall where you first told me you loved me, the scent you wore that smelled like diamonds if diamonds did indeed aromate at all
(it was on a dusky country road, your hair was brown then and you knew nothing of the explosive coalesces of obsession and your shorts were showin your vanilla thighs, your sweater green)
 I plucked you from a gaseous field of flowers and filaments, pulled out your extremities so you could walk on your own and grafted the strings behind your eyes with mine so I would know if you ever betrayed me.
I carried you inside, asked for a kiss, then broke you like a vase, finding your innards empty and ringing like copper wire but the space was a still happening and (a delight)  you pawed, devil-lashing, saying to my mind with your tongue, ” I want us to be something beautiful together”- darling, neither of knew then nor now what beautiful is.

“You never cease learning to love but you begin from the moment you’re born. I was five years old when I met the first boy that I thought I was going to marry. I was nine when I gave a boy a bracelet that I made out of colored string / he kissed me on top of a tool shed one summer evening with our knees bruised. We were playing home. He was home. Even then, I knew that I loved him. And fuck, you can be seventeen and wonderfully young and wonderfully naive and innocent and not yet scarred and fucked by the world and you can tell a boy that you love him and mean it more than you’ve meant anything in your entire life and your palms can shake and your voice can get caught in your throat but you can write it into his palms and when you look at him it exists. It exists. That love exists.”

—Shinji Moon when an anonymous person told her that, at 17, she couldn’t possibly know what love is.

“To love someone and to be in love with someone. Ah. There are countless things I love in this world. I love california plums and how peaches bleed like sunrises when you cut them just right. I love lighter burns on my thumb and how two people can fold so beautifully into each other when they think that no one’s looking. I love paint brushes and charcoal marks and messages left on my mirror in lipstick. I love people — I love everyone. I love the girls and boys in my life who I realize genuinely care about me, which I never thought possible until I first saw it in their eyes. I love how vulnerable we all are. How fragile and determined we all claim to be. I love my family because it’s taken me sixteen years to understand that they understand me more than I thought. I love bell boys and people who laugh with their entire bodies and crooked teeth and beautiful hands. But am I in love with any of these? Not so, not really. To be in love with someone is eons stronger than loving a person. I love everyone, but I’ve only ever been in love with one. To be in love is to be in an altered state of being. In love, not to love. You sink into it. In. You fall into love and you’re engulfed. Your limbs are stuck in quick sand and you’re melting into the ground. Your tendons and sinews tangle into the roots of someone else’s spine. You melt in love. You fall in love. You trip and land face first into it and scrape your knees across bitter gravel along the way. To love is simple and easy. I love motorcycles and I love almonds and I love people who look at you like they’ve known you all your life, but being in love is treacherous. It’s difficult. It’s the most terrible and beautiful thing you know. To be in love is to understand that there’s something in this world more wonderful than yourself — something so beautiful that you want it to consume you.”

—Clavicola

FAVORITE BLOGS OF 2011

apriki, plasmatio, littleorange-, clavicola, distances, orientaltiger, africans, -supercell, dearscience, marrypotter, ethaney, and paradoxicalsentiments

“I believe that sometimes two souls can get so intertwined that it’s difficult to differentiate one from the other. For some, it’s only fate that they found someone to melt into, for someone to melt into them. A mutual melting. A fondue love, a melted love. This whole idea of soul mates, it’s a beautiful concept, isn’t it? I can’t count the number of times I’ve lusted after it longingly. A soulmate, someone so in tune with my being that words became superfluous and all that you needed was to be. Just be. Just being. I believe soul mates do exist. There must be a single soul among six billion people in this world who would love me wholly and completely. There must be someone out there who I could slip into like a second skin. There must be, right?”

—Clavicola

“I keep telling myself that it’s okay to miss someone so much that you can’t speak to them for months because you’re afraid of what hearing their voice will do to you.”

—clavicola

what are your favourite poetry blogs? :-)

i really don’t follow as many poetry blogs as i’d like, though, so if you have any suggestions let me know!

I’ve come to find this blogging community very comforting, inspiring and exciting. I’m constantly bombarded with new ideas, art, writing and of course personalities. Some of you I’ve talked to, and others not, but these listed below are all special human beings. So to pay my respects (in a sense) to this place that has treated me so well, I’d like to record the people and blogs that make this place so great.

Thank you, all, for doing what you do here. 

“Nasconderò il mio viso nell'incavo della tua clavicola e da lì non uscirò mai più.”

—mochuisle2

“The first time I realized I had fallen in love with you was when you asked me if I knew how to play cat’s cradle and I pulled out all my heartstrings for you. And I did know, I did — but imagine how i felt afterwards when I collected all the threads that you had strewn across the world, hung by the rafters of every place that you’d told me you loved me. Like so. Skin is a city that never sleeps and when you look at me like that, every citizen pulls down their blinds and blushes by the windowsill. And I know this because when you asked me what color my blood was I never thought to answer ‘a blushed red’ ‘till you cupped my cheek for the first time. And the night before you left you laid me out on a bed of pine needles and unraveled my skin, my heart, two lungs and a pair of hands that I wanted to give to you so that you could make something more beautiful than what my flesh has to offer. The first time you told me you loved me I only wanted to tell you that you had unraveled me, wholly. You pulled a ribbon out of my hair, then, and pulled, kept pulling, a line of string, a line of me, and pulled my world through your needle’s eye because I had wanted us to be something beautiful. ”

— Vlorin
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