smart enough to wish i was more kind

You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns.

You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex.

You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink.
You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome. 

You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you.
You give me you.

You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black
coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill.
You give me 24-across.

You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings.

You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire.
You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys
with their feet on the chairs.
You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday.
You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it.

You give me D.H. Lawrence,
and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples.

You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City.
You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it.

You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret everyone is keeping.

You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt.
You give me pictures with yourself cut out.

You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize.

You give me yes. You give me no.

You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down.
You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm.
You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds.

You give me the careening of trains. You give me the scent of bruised mint.

You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair.

You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx.
You give me Echo.

You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves
and soft fists of peony.

You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment.
You give me seeming not to notice.

You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train.

You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed.
You give me grief, and how to grieve.

(via lifeinpoetry & passade)

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

fuckyeahmenfolk:

By Gabe Moses

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it’s highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she’s “had the surgery.”
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs
look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet it
Let her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she’d lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They’re just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It’s what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That’s the important part.
Don’t worry about the bodies.
They’ve got this.

Watch the video of Gabe performing this beautiful poem here. Video via Ask a Queer Chick on The Hairpin.

(via genderqueer)

To this Tink replied in these words, ‘you silly ass,’ and disappeared into the bathroom.  “She is quite a common fairy,” Peter explained apologetically, “she is called Tinker Bell because she mends the pots and kettles.”  —J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy

Tink. Tink.  Makes me sick, the lick
of their soft calls, this flighty work:

dust won’t take the dents 
from these pots, won’t unwarp the kettle. 

I want impact, the magic of my fists  
fixing metal through their brute launch.

Wish I’d had the luck to gulp a clock—
to have a life divided by firm ticking

from a heavy center.  Instead Tink, Tink
coming always from the outside, feather-

feeble, the brush of words from boys 
who’ll never want more than a mother.

Instead I’m steam—Goddamn—desire like waters
thinning to the ends of me and lifting                 

me unwilling from the earth 
each time I see him.             Peter,

pull me down. I want you 
but wish I did not need your hands

to do my dirt work, your heavy heat to solder 
or your pretty mouth to                 

tell me over, make me more     
than a sliver of a dead child’s laugh.

Kiss me kettle-hard: yank                     
my sorry ass from Never.   

Somewhere I’m skin without wings.
Somewhere my name means tough as light.

ᔥ Diode Poetry  ↬ Cass

I made heaps more than I have published here; Hugo’s was to me a writer with a talent for inventing succinct and true new platitudes. My jumble of notes are like a grab bag of writer’s advice. Pick and mix. 

How do I know what I think until I see what I’ve said.

You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.

[As Bill Kittredge, my colleague who teaches fiction writing, has pointed out:] if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self.

If you ain’t no place you can’t go nowhere.

With the strange town, you can assume all knowns are stable and you owe the details nothing emotionally.

When you are honest to your feelings, that triggering town chooses you.

All poets I know, and I know plenty of them, have an unusually strong moral sense, and that is why they can go into the cynical world of the imagination and not feel so threatened that they become impotent.

Never want to say anything so strongly that you give up the option of finding something better. If you have to say it, you will.

When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do.

Are words bits of glass? Buttons on a hangman’s vest? On a lover’s clothes?

I once believed Mallarmé’s statement that within him was that which would count the buttons on the hangman’s vest was a claim to cold-blooded objectivity. Now I believe it was acceptance of a world where the trivial and definite can vie for attention with the emotionally overwhelming.

With the accumulated losses of knowns, the imagination is faced with the problem of preserving the world through internalization, then keeping that world rigidly fixed long enough to create the unknowns in the poem.

I didn’t know how good the poem would be but it would be honest and I would like it because it wouldn’t be any tougher than the human heart needs to be.