Bill presses his lips against
the hem in his grandmother’s
black slip. His head bows
beneath the barrel of the
shotgun his father
stands at the wrong end of.
Bay Area premonitions chase
the bloody chasm away.
Grandma’s hands tighten, sever
the umbilical seal.
Bill’s eyes widen.
The worst ones never heal. 

“Well, if my friend, Cohen, is to be believed, love is not a victory march.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a plea. It’s a cold and broken cry for something bigger than yourself. It’s all of the hope you can muster, and it’s still just a shudder. It’s a weakened reverberation of what we’d call God.”
“…”
“It’s the ever-spinning core, the be-all, end-all. The thing we’ll never touch.”
“But I’ll be damned if we don’t try.”

somequickthing:

when I was a girl
I misspoke
got called out on it
and my heart broke
like Grandma’s old vase
that we knocked over
and couldn’t replace

so that day the universe
all went still
just ‘cause God likes
to fuck with my head
when he has time to kill
speaking through Mom’s mouth
with stiff words like
“that’s not your name”

(‘cause I guess I’d thought
that their dad and mine
were one and the same)

and I swear up and down
that I’m fine with it now
but
wow
one day God’ll get his
when I strive to make him feel
as watery as I did that day
by breaking the news
that he’s not real

(Source: humblebumble)

We have things to share. Sometimes I wish to leave myself. Leave my body and all of its futility. I am too keen on exuberance to follow Hemingway’s example. Other times I think I’d like to live inside of my music collection. Rub my back against a bison. Run against the wind. Breathe. Breathe. My soul sings melismatic. My father left me trembling at his feet. I am shaky on the ground; I am useless on the Trapeze. Without enough ego to finance my ambitions, I would die if it provided excuse for imminent failure. But I am too keen on grandeur to follow Hemingway’s example.

(Source: humblebumble)

I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.

so much depends upon
a commercial envelope 
square flap
grey-green label and
letterhead

fifteen-lettered laud inside

The silver Swan, who living had no Note,
when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:
“Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!
“More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.

The tinny biting things just beneath the sheet get away with traces of blood. Lick their teeth and finish me off with sleep. I dream of novocain feats: crushing scorpion tails with venomous pincers. Dragging lifeless bodies through the five stages of winter: crush, swell, break, retreat, splinter. My dinner days are done up clawing at my skin for what I never find: Impervious arachnids shook from a doe’s ear to be with me. Climb over my foam mattress. I spit bloody words at disaffected nurses. Pine for my carcinogen and migraines. And 800 milligrams every four hours.

(Source: thegreatgracie)

tides:

sexponent:

digbicks:

Lindeberg Feller

(via imgTumble)

cordeliagable:

I keep dreaming.  My dog is dead. I am barefoot inside a public bathroom.  I am fucking a fat man, his girth slapping into me like a huge hairy tide.  I am crying.  I am not crying.  I am saying goodbye.  I am saying yes.  I am grieving over a dirty toilet bowl, running from the grease that lines an old grill, sweeping my hands over the cold metal of a revolver like the face of my lover.  I dream of my lover, a green chasm, all the notes inside an octave, his blue t-shirt.  I am dreaming of my naked legs, collecting the dawn as I step between puddles of yesterday’s errands, my vanity still organized around sharp corners and the promise of mahogany.  I am fingering the teeth of my piano, my hands are sticky, my hands are cold, my hands are on fire, my hands are chapped, they are reaching and fisted and turned away and grasped.  My hands are locked in his as he looks up at me, my hips jutting into him, like two paper clips joined by compulsion and the underlying way of things.  I am walking away, I am running away, I am hiding behind the door, white sneakers about to find me, my sweat crawling over me like a fisherman’s net.  I am caught—

awake.  I am heaving sleep from my chest, a bag of coals glowing and insufferable, as the stuff of dreams cures, swift and aching, down my face. 

(Source: arrests)