Filling Space
May. 31st, 2022 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormDeep dive this afternoon. Music and poem on poem. I'm looking for myself again. I'm bringing myself back here, to my body, to this container of joy and pain. I'm invoking my self. I'm feeling my self. Sometimes we only know we're there because we hurt? And I'm landing, cautiously, into this shockingly loud pulse and grind of flesh. My heart is beating. My stomach is-- that must be hunger? Ow. My lungs are stretchy, a breath in pushes itself out again instead of holding. The body can be so loud.
Love isn't here to be hoarded. It's a gift. It's always a gift, granted for a time and then passing on. I've been granted more than my share, always cobbled together in shapes few outsiders recognise. Always attenuated somehow. Always, in the end, so true to the person giving it. I always consider it an honour to be given something shaped from the giver, not squished into the expectations and templates we freight these things with. Tonight I've been left gifts: blessings on my garden, compliments on my corn, pictures of cats and of plants starting to grow, the lifeline of idle talk and checking in. They're left the way I leave gifts, dropped and run away, with the exception of Nicholas who seems to have taken the role of support crew these last days. I need support crew.
I have so many words. I've been writing about love here for twenty years. The last two years only have six posts tagged "love" that aren't really about the landscape, about plants, or about details of relationships, that are instead considering and probing and weighing and celebrating my heart where it overlaps with humans. I used to spend so much time on it. It's harder here, crumbs from afar really have been my only overlap with people.
I'm not here on this earth to not love people. Let's keep this focus for awhile. I suspect there will be things to say. First, though:
The Ubiquity Of The Need For Love
I leave the number and a short
message on every green Volvo
in town
Is anything wrong?
I miss you.
574-7423
The phone rings constantly.
One says, Are you bald?
Another, How tall are you in
your stocking feet?
Most just reply, Nothing's wrong.
I miss you, too.
Come quick.
Ronald Koertge
Lecturing My Body
Here's the deal: You
take care of me,
I'll take care of you.
The body's a car
Whatever's-not-the-car,
that's the driver.
Or the car's an animal,
the driver a zookeeper.
The animal's a ditch,
the zookeeper a wheelbarrow.
A wheelbarrow bringing
tobacco, whiskey
& even love because,
well, just because.
By Jefferson Carter
Three Of Cups
at some point it becomes true that all stories
are love stories. all making, love making.
I didn't make this rule. but it binds me
all the same. I wish there were a law
against condescending against love. against
the economy of fear that says your joy
means less joy for me as if love
were pie, or money, or fossil fuel
dug or pumped from the earth, gone
when it's gone. it's just not true. the heart
with its gift for magnificent expansion
is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar
cringing in its wallet. when you say darling,
the world lights up at its edges. when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow –
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes. I take this crush
to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy
until the bending's its own pleasure. I will memorize
photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce
to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance,
and dance – there's a perfection only the impossible kiss
possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked
in the dark of a room to which you will never
return. anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
and all we know of the gods.
Marty McConnell
The Place We Don't Name
The place we don’t name has become the default,
which is backwards.
I say
I want to fuck your mouth, or
I want to fuck your ass,
or
if that isn’t where I want slide in, I say
I want to fuck you -
making you the place where your biology defies your identity,
where your biology denies your identity
an idea so far from right that wrong doesn’t even seem to cover it.
The you of you is your brain, your heart,
but I can’t lick your frontal lobe,
can’t choke myself on your brain stem until I get it all the way down my throat,
can’t suck your cerebral cortex until it engorges, then explodes.
The you of you is your brain, your heart,
but I can't sink my seeking cock into the chambers of your heart;
coax your veins slowly down over my fist;
stroke your xyphoid process until it tingles.
Instead.
Instead I touch the furrow of your body with my hands
and the furrow of your brain with my words at the same time,
in the same way,
pushing my message into the wetness – roughly, intuitively, precisely,
wanting to integrate the experiences,
using all my skill to make you crave their penetration over and over,
fucking you,
holding you,
whispering to you,
naming you
and hoping that the language we’ve left behind can hitch a ride
to where we’ve ended up.
S. Bear Bergman
humanity i love you
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
ee cummings
Love isn't here to be hoarded. It's a gift. It's always a gift, granted for a time and then passing on. I've been granted more than my share, always cobbled together in shapes few outsiders recognise. Always attenuated somehow. Always, in the end, so true to the person giving it. I always consider it an honour to be given something shaped from the giver, not squished into the expectations and templates we freight these things with. Tonight I've been left gifts: blessings on my garden, compliments on my corn, pictures of cats and of plants starting to grow, the lifeline of idle talk and checking in. They're left the way I leave gifts, dropped and run away, with the exception of Nicholas who seems to have taken the role of support crew these last days. I need support crew.
I have so many words. I've been writing about love here for twenty years. The last two years only have six posts tagged "love" that aren't really about the landscape, about plants, or about details of relationships, that are instead considering and probing and weighing and celebrating my heart where it overlaps with humans. I used to spend so much time on it. It's harder here, crumbs from afar really have been my only overlap with people.
I'm not here on this earth to not love people. Let's keep this focus for awhile. I suspect there will be things to say. First, though:
The Ubiquity Of The Need For Love
I leave the number and a short
message on every green Volvo
in town
Is anything wrong?
I miss you.
574-7423
The phone rings constantly.
One says, Are you bald?
Another, How tall are you in
your stocking feet?
Most just reply, Nothing's wrong.
I miss you, too.
Come quick.
Ronald Koertge
Lecturing My Body
Here's the deal: You
take care of me,
I'll take care of you.
The body's a car
Whatever's-not-the-car,
that's the driver.
Or the car's an animal,
the driver a zookeeper.
The animal's a ditch,
the zookeeper a wheelbarrow.
A wheelbarrow bringing
tobacco, whiskey
& even love because,
well, just because.
By Jefferson Carter
Three Of Cups
at some point it becomes true that all stories
are love stories. all making, love making.
I didn't make this rule. but it binds me
all the same. I wish there were a law
against condescending against love. against
the economy of fear that says your joy
means less joy for me as if love
were pie, or money, or fossil fuel
dug or pumped from the earth, gone
when it's gone. it's just not true. the heart
with its gift for magnificent expansion
is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar
cringing in its wallet. when you say darling,
the world lights up at its edges. when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow –
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes. I take this crush
to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy
until the bending's its own pleasure. I will memorize
photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce
to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance,
and dance – there's a perfection only the impossible kiss
possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked
in the dark of a room to which you will never
return. anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
and all we know of the gods.
Marty McConnell
The Place We Don't Name
The place we don’t name has become the default,
which is backwards.
I say
I want to fuck your mouth, or
I want to fuck your ass,
or
if that isn’t where I want slide in, I say
I want to fuck you -
making you the place where your biology defies your identity,
where your biology denies your identity
an idea so far from right that wrong doesn’t even seem to cover it.
The you of you is your brain, your heart,
but I can’t lick your frontal lobe,
can’t choke myself on your brain stem until I get it all the way down my throat,
can’t suck your cerebral cortex until it engorges, then explodes.
The you of you is your brain, your heart,
but I can't sink my seeking cock into the chambers of your heart;
coax your veins slowly down over my fist;
stroke your xyphoid process until it tingles.
Instead.
Instead I touch the furrow of your body with my hands
and the furrow of your brain with my words at the same time,
in the same way,
pushing my message into the wetness – roughly, intuitively, precisely,
wanting to integrate the experiences,
using all my skill to make you crave their penetration over and over,
fucking you,
holding you,
whispering to you,
naming you
and hoping that the language we’ve left behind can hitch a ride
to where we’ve ended up.
S. Bear Bergman
humanity i love you
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
ee cummings
