A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control

A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

- Adrienne Rich

Song To The Siren

I am puzzled as the newborn child
I am troubled at the tide:
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Should I lie with death my bride?

- Tim Buckley

Some stories end

Because some stories end, but old stories go on, and you gotta dance if you want to stay ahead.

- Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

- Philip K. Dick

The Bend

Around the bend of a phrase
you return, it's dawn in a book, it's
a garden, one can
see everything, the dew, a moth
on a leaf and it's you
who rises suddenly amid the pages
and the book grows more lovely
because it's you
and you've not grown old, you walk
slowly to the door.

- Claude Esteban, translated by Joanie Mackowski

Unprecedented

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

- James Baldwin