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For Poetry

@littlehoneycandle

We’re just vibin
I use a little honey candle to get me in the mood to write, to feel some writing vibes. I’ll use this to get me to feel those poetry vibes.

over time the thing i have had more access to - through healing, maybe, or because i got out of that house, or because i was lucky, or because of those who taught me, or all of it - was this sense of a type of love that was all-encompassing and easy. nonromantic; it wasn't anything rose-colored but rather a world seen through honey.

it is this sense that i am in love with birds, and puddles, and how the nose of my dog moves. i am in love with my best friend's hands, and i am in love with your eyes, and i am in love with the little blades of wildflowers turning their heads towards the sun. today my mother told me one of my favorite flowers - lily of the valley - is endangered. i almost wept. i love them, i said.

when i was younger, and i said i am staying for the love, i thought love could only fit into a single birdwing. like a nesting doll; you could only find love somewhere balled up; hidden. you had to pry first, unlock. it would not absolve; only give you a moment's rest. somehow i thought - that was all.

oh but. this love, now. a love of how trains move, and how clouds scud the blue, and how when i asked does anyone have a bandaid i received offers from each person in the room. it is the love of a grey sunday and of mixing paint and of jazz music and seeing my neighbor sigh while he leashes his dog. this sense that it is all lovely and magical, that it is all romantic. the sense that i am in love with breakfast foods and i am in love with book nooks and i am in love with poetry and plants and how you braid your hair and how we shift our weight at the bus stop; and how each of these flood me, effortless and sleepy, like a memory of something i learned as a baby.

i think tomorrow for practice i will teach myself how to love the grey carpet of my ratty apartment; and how the fibers all hold hands with each other and snuggle into bed together, their forms all spooning. i think tonight i will love how my yoga mat leaves little imprints on my knees; a marathon of sticky kisses where the grooves all begged stay with me please. i think i will love the melon rind and i will love the ugly dark bruise.

while we're at it - although we are apart and have never met, i think right now, dear reader. i love you.

mom can you come get me things are getting bad again and i feel every insult like a sharp tooth and i feel my dreams rotting under my fingernails and i feel too much all the time or else i feel nothing at all and it doesn’t seem to matter if i drink and dance and party or if i stay at home curled up to study

mom are you sure when i was born i was a person and not just a vortex. always hungry. always swallowing. no matter how much goes in me i always end up empty.

hi mom it’s me again. it’s mother’s day and it’s been five years since i wrote this and i’m still sitting on the floor and still writing poetry but i’ve moved to a different city. you and i are making plans to go see the lilacs and i keep thinking about this one wednesday where i’d had a class talking about eulogies and it made me sad and sick so i called you to say i love you and i appreciate everything you’ve done for me & you were so worried by that. by the fact that i never tell you how much i love you. you got scared because you thought it meant something bad was happening.

i know it’s just how our family is. we never talk about this kind of thing. we show up for each other but never say it and i should say it more. i should tell you that i know you checked and when you saw that you’ve given birth to a vortex and not a child you still said: well this thing that is always lonely and hungry and sad and empty…. this is still mine.

rabbit mothers pull out the fur from their chest to line a warren and i keep thinking about how sometimes you talk about the ways you’re hungry too, how your teeth hurt with desire, how you gave up your fur to line our home and how we walked with our hands on the wall. i don’t even think it’s that you’re my mom i think it’s that you’re you, and that everyone needs a person like you in their life, or otherwise the whole thing catches on fire. and i think maybe you saw my bellybutton and you saw the ways i am you-but-younger and i remember one time we were in the kitchen and you closed your eyes and said your deepest regret was passing your depression on, that you’d never wanted any of us to feel something like this, a hollowness that carries no sound or echo

i wake up spitting out fur and i wake up kicking my feet and i am finding a timid kind of rabbit peace. good morning mom i’m going to come get you so we can walk in the sunshine and i am going to come get you so we can build a soft home in braided hair and i am going to come get you to tell you i am sorry for being ravenous and then we are both going to stretch our legs out on the grass and we are going to eat until all the little angry embers in our blood turn into diamonds and we are going to eat until the numbness feels like a half-remembered song and we are going to eat until we are both full to the brim so that when we turn our cheeks to the sky it feels like the happiness could slosh out if we move too quick. we will eat, and it will be tomorrow, and we will both make a point to clean out the rot from our hearts. after all, it’s spring.

been thinking a lot about anticipatory grief lately. i love you so much that i know losing you will devastate me. i haven't lost you yet but i already miss you. we still have time, but it won't be enough. i think about what i would say at your funeral, and say some of it to you now cause i need you to know how loved you are before you go. you will go where i cannot follow, but you will never really leave me. it won't make it hurt less but it is a part of healing somehow.

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

The legacies people leave behind in you.

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

How terrifying, how excruciatingly painful to acknowledge this. That I am a jigsaw puzzle of everyone I have briefly known and loved. I carry them on with me even if I don’t know it. How beautiful.

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jesterevermore

absolutely obsessed with these tags

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[image id: tags that say #going insane over this #people are cups who overflow again and again into other lifetimes #what do you mean you’re not immortal? /end id]

yes girl you are so [if i loved you less i might be able to talk about it more] [hands are unbearably beautiful] [i'll take care of you it's rotten work not to me not if it's you] [if you are intolerable let me be the one to tolerate you] [i could recognise him by touch alone] [i love you i want us both to eat well] [on purpose i love you on purpose] [whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same] [i am half agony half hope] [you have bewitched me body and soul and i love love love you] [he is half of my soul as the poets say] [i'm sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for but i'm so lonely] [i love you most ardently] [let me stay tender hearted despite despite despite] [someone has to leave first this is a very old story there is no other version of this story] [mostly i want to be kind] [tell me how all this and love too will ruin us] [you said i killed you haunt me then] [someone somewhere can you understand me a little love me a little] [i will love you as misfortune loves orphans as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong] [sorry about the blood in your mouth i wish it was mine] [who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me] can we kiss now

is there anything where the consumption takes longer than the production?

EVERYTHING MADE IS EATEN UP IN SO MUCH LESS TIME!!!! SPEND HOURS ON ART TO HAVE IT BE GLANCED UPON FOR MINUTES!!!! SPEND MONTHS ON A FILM TO HAVE IT GULPED UP IN THE TWO HOUR SLOT!!!! EVEN THE NOVEL, A MEDIUM WITH ONE OF THE LONGEST DIGESTIVE PERIODS, YOU SPEND YEARS AND ITS DEVOURED IN MONTHS OR WEEKS OR DAYS TO FEW. HOW CAN I MAKE ANYTHING THAT WILL STICK WITH YOU? HOW CAN I HAVE A REAL EFFECT ON YOUR GUT? YOU TAKE CREATION AND IT MERGES WITH YOU AND MAKES YOU A SMALL PART OF WHO YOU ARE AND BECOMES A CLUMP OF CELLS IN YOUR UPPER LEFT ARM BUT WHAT IF I WANT MORE? I SPEND MY TIME MAKING A MEAL TO BE TURNED INTO ENERGY AND LIFE FORCE BUT ITS USED UP FAR TOO QUICKLY. DOES THE TASTE EVEN LINGER WITH YOU? I AM POURING MOLTEN LEAD DOWN YOUR THROAT NOW, WILL MY CREATION SIT HEAVY IN YOUR STOMACH FOR AWHILE? I AM HIDING PARASITES IN MY PIES, WILL MY WORK STAY WITH YOU? EAT YOU FROM THE INSIDE? IVE SPENT MY LIFE ON THIS SINGLE BITTER PILL, THE LEAST YOU COULD DO IS SPEND YOURS CHOKING ON IT

“Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

vampireapologist-archive-deacti

One time I was cooking with a girl and we were both bilingual but we didn’t have a language in common so we were just sitting by the fire doing prep work quietly and I was peeling little garlic cloves to mince and she put her hand on my arm to stop me and demonstrated how you’re supposed to press on the clove with the flat side of your knife to break the shell off all at once to peel it and I was like oh! And I imitated her and she nodded in approval and we went back to quietly peeling and mincing the garlic and I don’t want to be hyperbolic but in that moment I was like wow I truly understand the universal thread of human love and connection inherent in our souls or whatever

theseus can get fucked

     “This, milord, is my family’s axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation … but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”        ―      Terry Pratchett,            The Fifth Elephant