I am vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Sylvia Plath

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

As a boy I saw
As a man I understood
As a corpse I slept

Song of Avignon, Jonas Mekas

Today I realized that
I'm 40 and that immense emptiness surrounds me and my soul. I have come to this
and it is here that my life had led me to. I am in thick darkness, often
feeling like I'm sinking. I reach for air and I feel today that the only way out,
my only hope, is to submerge perhaps into this blackness completely, like into
a coma, not to run away from it, not to stare into it, but to embrace it and
thus go beyond it with or without perhaps. The pain is stronger than ever. I
have seen bits of lost paradises and I know that I will be hopelessly trying to
return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions if nothingness,
the further I am thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening
depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of
clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I am going,
but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting
always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and syntax
of the countries I’ve passed through, broken limbs of slaughtered houses,
geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and
sadness. I never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me. This
feeling of going nowhere, of being stuck, the feeling of Dante’s first strophe,
as if afraid of the next step, next stage. As long as I don’t sum up myself,
stay on the surface, I don’t have to move forward, I don’t have to make painful
and terrible decisions, choices, where to go and how. Because deeper there are
terrible decisions to make, terrible steps to make. It is at 40 that we die,
those who did not die at 20. It is at 40 that we betray ourselves, our bodies,
our souls, by either staying on the surface or by going further, but true
easiest decisions, throwing our souls back by thousands of
incarnations. But I have come close to the end now, it’s the question will I
make it or not. My life has become too painful and I keep asking myself, what
am I doing to get out of where I am? What am I doing with my life? It took me
long to realize that it’s love that distinguishes man from stones, trees, rain,
and that we can lose our love and that love grows through loving, yes, I have
been so completely lost, so truly lost. There were times I wanted to change the
world, I wanted to take a gun and shoot my way through Western Civilization.
Now I want to leave others alone, they have their terrible fates to go. Now I
want to shoot my own way through myself, into the thick night of myself. Thus I
change my course, my love going inwards, thus I am jumping into my own
darkness. There must be something, somehow, I feel, very soon, something that should give me some sign to
move one or another direction. I must be very open and watchful now, completely
open. I know its coming. I am walking like a somnambulist waiting for a secret
signal, ready to go one or another way, listening into this huge white silence
for the weakest sign or call. And I sit here alone and far from you and it is
night and I am reflecting on everything all around me and I am thinking of you.
I saw it in your eyes, in your love, you too are swinging towards the depths of
your own being in longer and longer circles. I saw happiness and pain in your
eyes and reflections of the paradises lost and regained and lost again, and the
terrible loneliness and happiness, yes, and I reflect upon this and I think
about you, like two lonely space pilots on outer cold space, as I sit here this
late-night alone and I think about all this and about you and for a brief
moment I don’t know for how long we meet somewhere between the words, dreams,
images, space between the words perhaps and I am happy. As I look into the cold
endless space passing without sound without speed a metal blue endless distance
between us, but I know you are there, I can feel your heartbeat, my love.

Keep this thread alive in my absence

I will. where you going?

Off the internet entirely. I hate where it’s going and need to stabilize myself before the world gets worse. I’ll check in every couple months or so tho.

do what you got to do. i'll be here waiting for you brother

Some from Les fleurs du mal, Baudelaire; og text in french

• A une passante

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,

Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse

Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet ;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,

Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,

La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit ! - Fugitive beauté

Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,

Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité ?

Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-être !

Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,

Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !

Roar breaths that inflame

Sing melodies that simmer

Walk paths that are strange

And shine light fore thou dimmer

omg people do not post in here lol

i be feeling like the little s*** i write is bad lol what do yall think. this came from a deep place.

u repeatedly indulged a phantom that you should've forgotten about when it died. it took you this long to realize why you thought it was still alive, and when you did, it died. and u freed yourself.

does this even count as a poem? lmao

Course it does brudda

And it's a pretty dope one at that

Poetry gets better when you are more confident in yourself. How you get more confident? That’s up to you

For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

• James Baldwin

a poem for these times @twinkletoez

Slam... poetry.
YELLING! Angry????
WAVING MY HANDS A LOT!
Specific point of view on things!
Cynthia! Cyn-thi-a!
Jesus died for our sin-thi-as!
Jesus cried, runaway bride.
Julia Roberts! Julia Rob-hurts????!
Cynthia! Mmmmmmmm,
Cynthia. You're dead.
You are dead, bop boop beep bop bop boop bop. You're dead.
That's for Cynthia... who's dead.

Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not indulge in works of the half talented
Do not live half a life
and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
Do not silence yourself to say something
And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst
Half a meal will not satiate your hunger
Half the way will get you no where
Half an idea will bear you no results
Your other half is not the one you love
It is you in another time yet in the same space
It is you when you are not
Half a life is a life you didn't live,
A word you have not said
A smile you postponed
A love you have not had
A friendship you did not know
To reach and not arrive
Work and not work
Attend only to be absent
What makes you a stranger to them closest to you
and they strangers to you
The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists to live a life
not half a life

-Khalil Gibran

man

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the w****s and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.

then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?