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theparisreview:

Skin with [Frank] O’Hara Poem, Jasper Johns, 1963

(via workman)

What I Said to Myself

motherground:

Choose the butterfly over the chrysalis.
Choose light, the ballroom, the well-lit restaurant.

You have for lifetimes strummed minor chords
on the coast of a dead sea. Think major, spindrift.

The sex between you and grief is becoming mechanical.

Despite your vestigial sentiments to the contrary,
a scab’s story is much greater than that of a scar.

Your cock is not an umbilical cord, it is your
heart’s mouthpiece. Choose sunrise, please.

It is time to do something that might cause
embarrassment. Let emptiness mother your child.

Put away the map, where we’re going won’t be on it.

There is nothing particularly inspiring about a death wish.

You have learned all there is to learn from the woman in black.

It is time to stop insulting ecstasy. Masochism
is an empty udder. What was is a cipher. Pick
the rose over the injured dove. Pick warm waters.

Attend a circus. Go for the comic. There is nothing
more mediocre than the association of dysfunction with genius.

Indulge in color. Believe me, there is not a problem.
Plumb bright places for new symbols.

Recommendation: study evergreens.
Find me. We have much to talk about.

— john amen

"And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass"

Ezra Pound (via pavorst)

(via booklover)

Bath 5

motherground:

If it’s one drink, it will be two. Wisteria tangling
around your wrists. Here is where you buried your

father. Here is where you buried your brother.
Here is where they will bury you, when the

time comes. No wonder you drink yourself down
toward the earth. Home is where the shovels lie.

Earth and earth and earth. Stones crowd your sleep.
Granite and salt, sand giving birth to

the fortress where even your lovers sigh. Silent
underfoot. You dream yourself toward them.

You are foxfire, you are phosphorescent. Your
mouth like whiskey. Your eyes like whiskey.

You baptize yourself in sorrow, again and again.
You baptize yourself with bourbon and brandy.

You swim downward, fast salmon, heedless, handsome,
death is in you, it has captured your ear. You have your

father’s jaw, your brother’s chin. When you were born
they bathed your small body with their fears.

Each scar they’d earned became manifest on your skin.
Their love aches like a badly set bone. When the river takes

you, it will be no new baptism. Just that same, ancient sacrifice.
Just that rush, that rushing, and then you are gone.

— jen silverman

(via thisinsatiableshadow)

Above the Lake

motherground:

In this season the world is composed
of absence: black, which is the color
of no-light, and white, which is the color
of blank. By world I mean this snow,
these woods, this bleak sky, this mute
roar, which is the afterlife of sound.
By absence I mean abstraction, this black
brook as diagonal gash, these slim
trees as lines, vertical, monotonous,
impossibly interchangeable. By abstraction
I mean meaning, I mean human longing,
I mean loneliness accreting as quiet
on quiet, as white on bluish white.

— stephen o’connor

(via motherground)

"One of the hazards of hanging around with writers is that they may write about you."

Tim Kreider, author of We Learn Nothing (via austinkleon)

(via austinkleon)

What I Said to Myself

motherground:

Choose the butterfly over the chrysalis.
Choose light, the ballroom, the well-lit restaurant.

You have for lifetimes strummed minor chords
on the coast of a dead sea. Think major, spindrift.

The sex between you and grief is becoming mechanical.

Despite your vestigial sentiments to the contrary,
a scab’s story is much greater than that of a scar.

Your cock is not an umbilical cord, it is your
heart’s mouthpiece. Choose sunrise, please.

It is time to do something that might cause
embarrassment. Let emptiness mother your child.

Put away the map, where we’re going won’t be on it.

There is nothing particularly inspiring about a death wish.

You have learned all there is to learn from the woman in black.

It is time to stop insulting ecstasy. Masochism
is an empty udder. What was is a cipher. Pick
the rose over the injured dove. Pick warm waters.

Attend a circus. Go for the comic. There is nothing
more mediocre than the association of dysfunction with genius.

Indulge in color. Believe me, there is not a problem.
Plumb bright places for new symbols.

Recommendation: study evergreens.
Find me. We have much to talk about.

— john amen

"Ripe conjugationer of water & sun,
your opening calls
even the birds to land.
& in Palestine,
where it is a crime to wave
the flag of Palestine in Palestine,
watermelon halves are raised
against Israeli troops
for the red, black, white, green
of Palestine."

Aracelis Girmay, Ode to the Watermelon (via theblacksupremacist)

(via fursasaida)

Paradox

motherground:

Immensity is within ourselves.
        —Bachelard
    
The heart
cannot be chewed down to wish.
It cannot talk to the ribs or pelvis—
those rock cradles of body
bound by their hard and honest suit
of machine.

The heart cannot speak at all without
metaphor; imagination is rumor
and breath colliding in its dark
avenues, seducing the meat from
its born muteness. The heart is more
than red and pulse, more, even,
than a cell’s want for soul.

So when

the heart takes a name and greets me
on the outside or calls me on the telephone,          
I realize I’m not dead yet,
that I can come back from
fading into the body’s
old routine of being alive:

that animal etiquette
when the heart is just a lonely muscle,
and language,

just a tongue not knowing, not even touching,
another tongue.

— melissa cundieff-pexa

Scream Fire

motherground:

Everywhere elevators struggle to open, everywhere someone watches
     unequivocally, undressing
with his eyes: suit jacket or jeans, small knife or pistol hidden in a pocket
     under ill-fitting and cheap
fabric, so the eyes of the watching imagine, justly, back at him. Everywhere
     doors open, and each

pneumatic slam skips the heart, each polished handle metal-inside-metal,
     and the walking goes:
saunter, speed, mission, inside buildings ghosts walk through,
     unendangered, trapped
in this place where it all happened: unsuspecting hit, heart seizing up
     in a corridor, windows shut

to soundlessness, or the man who’s had eyes on someone else, for years,
     amidst planning, following
her schedule, the patterns on each dress, and how she leaves sometimes
     from the fire escape
when she’s running late on Fridays. Scream fire. What we tell little girls
     and boys about trouble,

about being followed, about never taking anything if you don’t know
     the smooth touch
of their hand, the relative kindness in their voice, or when the hair hangs
     just over the eyes, eclipsing
the color, movement, how they can stare at you without your knowing.
     Scream fire, and someone,

love, will come running. They’ll wield a hose, a gun, trained fists, words
     to talk someone down,
and someone will rush the doors, blood pumping through their veins.
     In this world, you will
tell them, if you’re to be saved, you’ll be saved. There’s nothing
     that can stop the plans

God, in this life, has drawn for you. You tell them, every day, about
     all of this: the stories,
repetitive words to digest, devour, like blood-red paint on this palette
     that will define your life,
rules you’ll learn that can save you in any situation. As in: there is no man
     at the corner store

who watches you from his tinted windows, exhaust spreading
     from a muffler never fixed,
caustically billowing in the coldest winter anyone’s ever known.
     Scream fire. As in: the clerk
will come running after you, the last words he hears not words,
     but a muffled choking

he will remember all his life, after testimonies to the police, the pen’s ink
     scratched on the pad
because the officer did not have another working. He’ll remember
     the darkness with his hands
over his eyes, how he didn’t see anything but jeans, and a thick, slicked
     sheen of jet-black hair,

a license plate with numbers formed into incalculable equations
     of what-else-could-I-have-done.
Scream fire, love, and the world will come to rescue you no matter what.
     Scream fire, and you will
exit unscathed, fall in love, live out your days among us all, escape
     before you ever know the meaning

— keith montesano