(no subject)

We make our lives with our own hands, love, and what springs up out of them is ours to claim.

This is like wrestling, for real. My brain feels like it's occupied by two huge slippery sweaty straining men who bump into things all the time. It's a background process, so it's slowing the rest of things down.

Two poems, then I'll give this a rest for a bit. I guess I don't just post when I'm lonely, but also when I've no appropriate audience to speak to, or when formulating thoughts for anyone in particular feels like it would distort them (though that's the point, to get perspectives).

Self-Improvement
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.
( Read more... )

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.
Tony Hoagland

Villanelle at Sundown( Read more... )

Two things.

1) The words vision quest, as used by greensinger in a response to one of my posts, have stuck with me for a couple of days now.

2) I got two nice, lovely, portable ceramic drums. So in love. They are the best things. They sound like bells ringing to play. Like my big ceramic one, they are the left-handed part of a djembe set, fair trade from ten thousand villages.

3) This is not my thing. Bob's family stuff is rollercoastery and hard. I don't want to disclose specifics, because it's not mine to do so, but pray for health and longevity around there, please. I also need to be there for him from time to time, so understanding if I need to cancel stuff would be appreciated.

Via algae_al_fresco