writing for writers

lightofsveta:

I had a one night stand with my reflection last night. I fucked her real good. I laid belly-up, grinning at the ceiling fan for hours— as if my blood had curdled in the heat. It was reckless and irresponsible, probably a little indulgent as well, but I was drunk and am ever the hedonist. We used protection of course. After we were finished, I lit a cigarette, crushing the mentholated bubble between my fingers to add danger, and promptly passed out. I woke up ashamed to a stranger in my bed and soaked sheets. I turned to myself and asked for my name which I could not recall. Staring into eyes underlined either with exhaustion’s dark circles or weeping’s smeared mascara. She had crackling lips I didn’t recognize and skin made from newspaper clippings. My mind searched for her name again but it was long forgotten in the whispers of stepford wives and debonair used-car salesmen. I remembered only the grey eyes. Knowing I had seen her years ago under neon and strobe lights, pulsating in the corner. Possessed. Back then, I left her seizing towards the dead and never gave it a second thought. Disgusted with myself. Having no use for glassy eyes and pumped veins. Starting fresh, but who I’ve become is not very becoming. Now, times have changed, but I vainly check for a kicking in the nape of her neck in hopes of saving a reflection I no longer recognize as my own. Seeing no use in fixing the mistakes I know I’ll make again. 

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: ‘I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’

“Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow andeasy solutions—predigested books and ideas…marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short…and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be ‘different’…The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”

-Adrienne Rich

punch-in-the-face-poetry:

1.
The Victorians honored human hair
because it was the only trait of the body 
that remained after death. I shaved my legs
in your shower. I hid long strands of myself 
in your pillowcases. That is all that is left. 

2.
Thinking of someone else during sex 
is a cardinal sin punishable by nothing.  

3. 
The heart is wanting. The heart
is perpetually two-years-old. The heart
is bad at sharing. The heart is a hungry
gas tank. The heart is not a metaphor. 

4.
When the teacher asks you what grade
you think you deserve, you will always say B+.  

5. 
90% of Americans will vote from Obama
because the night before the election, he will 
slow dance with his wife and kiss her forehead
and we will want so badly to believe that 
they actually fucking love each other.

6.
Writing a list of ways I could be better
and writing a suicide note are the same thing. 

7. 
The heart lives in a packed elevator.
It doesn’t know what floor its waiting for
but it wants it wants it wants to get off.

8.
The Victorians believe when you write a poem
from an airplane that moment becomes suspended
in the sky forever, like a ornament in God’s mobile. 

So now you know: somewhere between Phoenix 
and Las Vegas, a thousand miles up, there you are
like a grocery list pinned to blue. 

(Source: sierrademulder)

sharingpoetry:

The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart
and still we are not touching, like things

in a poorly done still life
where the knife appears to be floating over the plate
which is itself hovering above the table somehow,

the entire arrangement of apple, pear, and wineglass
having forgotten the law of gravity,
refusing to be still,

as if the painter had caught them all
in a rare moment of slow flight
just before they drifted out of the room
through a window of perfectly realistic sunlight.

(submitted by ourlovewasfleeting)

secretedsins:

We are rational in so many respects; yet, innately illogical. We are contradictions manifested; each of us, a living, breathing, walking paradox lifted from the pages of a never-ending tragedy.

We want love. We want to be loved. We want to be seen for all that we are, and to be loved for it. We long for these things more than any others. But, we go to extreme lengths to conceal ourselves — our truest selves — that heart of us that we most wish to know is desired and cherished by another. We keep it shackled in the basement of ourselves behind massive oaken doors hung on hinges rusted shut. We fear exposing the core that comprises us to those we would have see it, and us, and love us.

We fight to feel; and to not feel anything at all. We desire because we must; because life without desire is not life at all. Yet, we battle to quell and sedate ourselves, struggling to avoid risk, and pain, desperately dodging hearache and loss as if those states were not integral components to loving, and to being loved.

We are comedies on a Shakespearian scale; yet, the joke passes unheeded over our respective and collective heads.

We are insane; but, there is no one sane to make the diagnosis.

messagestothemoon:

I don’t need a boy
To be in love.

I fall for the way
Winter kisses bare branches
Sending petals
Fluttering in its breath.

For the wrinkles and crinkles
That crease stale skin
When a smile
Spills to the eyes.

I fall for the wingspan of the sun
Seeping into every crevice of my sky,
Existing eternally
In a promise to return.

For the constant of a heart beat,
The protection of a rib cage,
The volume of a lung,
The beauty behind the broken.

I don’t need a boy,
To love.

I am in love
with the tilt and turn 
Of twenty-six scribbles
That come together,
To blow me away.