Commonplace Bee
June 2013
3 posts
Holy, Holy Whomever
From the start, I carried you
in my pocket and not in my heart. I want to forget that
my body is borrowed from dirt.
And heaven is no higher than my own library.
I realize I’m dreaming again but it’s real: the lights
are getting weirder like a disco ball. I cut out
my heart with a dollar bill. Some unseen force pushes us
like carts across the supermarket parking lot.
I know what the steam rising from my tea means,
and the mingling plumes from two chimneys:
the body ruins everything. The stars are stuck in dark.
The moon becomes an inky green. In some dreams
you paint a self-portrait with your wings.
And the most beautiful thing you do is disappear
each time an hour turns into a year.
I’m looking for a god that comes like a rod
of lightning or a sudden airhorn,
a bee sting, anything other than the usual
bones beneath our scars.C. Dylan Bassett
May 2013
4 posts
Emergency Postcard to J.F.
All these birds wake me up just like always though the me that they sing to is new everyday & relieved to find out a body doesn’t have to do everything. I’m trying to believe it. I’ve only ever wanted a reason to slow down, an angle to navigate that made me feel worth it. Yesterday, I drove the wrong way from you; soon I’ll jump back & try the sequence again — you & me lost together & looking for landmarks that tell you what’s right: dragonfly light, summer bees exhausted in the window, that wherever we are is okay.
—Nate
“You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a Great War going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.”
—Junot Diaz - This Is How You Lose Her (via isabelindawashere)
“You hold an absence
at your center,
as if it were a life.”
-Richard Brostoff, from “Grief” —(via ahuntersheart)
at your center,
as if it were a life.”
-Richard Brostoff, from “Grief” —(via ahuntersheart)
April 2013
5 posts
Royal Heart
You will never be let down by anyone
more than you will be let down
by the one you love most in the world
it’s how gravity works
it’s why they call it “falling”
it’s why the truth is harder to tell
every year
you have more to lose
but you can choose to bury your past
in the garden
beside the tulips
water it
until it’s so alive
it lets go
and you belong to yourself
again
When you belong to yourself again
Remember forgiveness
is not a tidy grave
It is a ready loyal knight kneeling before your royal heart
Call in your royal heart
Tell it bravery cannot be measured by a lack of fear
It takes guts to tremble
It takes so much tremble to love
Every first date is a fucking earth quake
Sweetheart, on our first date
I showed off all my therapy
I flaunted the couch
Where I finally sweat out my history
Pulled out the photo album from the last time I wore a lie to the school dance
I smiled and said “that was never my style
Look how fixed I am
Look how there’s no more drywall on my fist
Look at the stilts I’ve carved for my short temper
Look how my wrist is not something I have to hide” I said
Well I was hiding it
The telephone pole still down from the storm
By our third date I had fixed the line
I said listen,
I have a hard time
I mean I cry as often as most people pee and I don’t shut the door behind me
I’ll be up in your face screaming “SEATTLE IS TOO RAINY SEATTLE IS TOO RAINY
I’M NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO LIVE HERE.”
I sobbed on our fourth date
I can’t live here
In my body, I mean
I can’t live in my body all the time it feels too much
So if I ever feel far away know I am not gone
I am just underneath my grief
Adjusting the dial on my radio face so I can take this life with all
of it’s love and all of it’s loss
See I already know that you are the place where I am finally going to
sing without any static meaning
I’m never gonna wait
that extra twenty minutes
to text you back,
and I’m never gonna play
hard to get
when I know your life
has been hard enough already.
When we all know everyone’s life
has been hard enough already
it’s hard to watch
the game we make of love,
like everyone’s playing checkers
with their scars,
saying checkmate
whenever they get out
without a broken heart.
Just to be clear
I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
I intend to leave this life
so shattered
there’s gonna have to be
a thousand separate heavens
for all of my separate parts
And none of those parts are going to be wearing the romance from the
overpriced vintage rack
That is to say I am not going to get a single speed bike if I can’t
make it up the hill
I know exactly how many gears I’m going to need to love you well
And none of them look hip at the hot coffee shop
They all have God saying “good job you’re finally not full of bullshit”
You finally met someone who’s going to flatten your knee caps into
skipping stones
Baby, throw me
Throw me as far as I can go
I don’t want to leave this life without ever having come home
And I want to come home to you
I can figure out the rainAndrea Gibson
Thanks to exceptindreams.
i like my body when it is with your - e. e. cummings
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
March 2013
7 posts
Simplicity - Jorge Luis Borges
It opens, the gate to the garden
with the docility of a page
that frequent devotion questions
and inside, my gaze
has no need to fix on objects
that already exist, exact, in memory.
I know the customs and souls
and that dialect of allusions
that every human gathering goes weaving.
I’ve no need to speak
nor claim false privilege;
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness.
This is to reach the highest thing,
that Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like stones and trees.
Smoke
“If you were smoke,” he said, “you’d be the smoke
that rages from a forest fire, close
and wild and dangerous.” Here ends the quote,
but not the source of it, and me morose
because I’ve always tried to be the smoke
that billows gentle in the temple, joss
or sandalwood, the incense that’s the yoke
to help us get to god. For me, the clos-
est feeling to religion is the smoke
my body gives off when it gets too close
to someone else. And right back to the joke:
I torch the temple by mistake, confess
my smoking gun is still my one desire
for one who’ll feed the flames and love my fire.
Moira Egan
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“The scars healed over into poems.”
—6-Word Story #36 (via writingsforwinter)
